New Variorum Shakespeare

To Tag or Not to Tag [May. 26, 2004] by Patrick O’Kelly is a story in O’Reilly’s XML.com site about “The New Variorum Shakespeare and XML”. Not only is it interesting that an XML site would publish a long article about Shakespeare and the TEI, but the author has taken the time to provide some of the complex history. Julia Flanders and Judith Altreuter, both of whom have been doing great work at the Women Writers Project and MLA respectively, are quoted.
There often seem to be landmark works that get digitized (over and over) to test new models. Michelangelo’s David is one of those. Every new 3D system scans David to show off the technology with a iconic statue. Likewise Shakespeare is a landmark text to transform and then compare to previous versions. The Variorum is not the only XML edition of Shakespeare, but it may set a standard for how critical editions are done. As Cliff Lynch said at COCH/COSH this weekend, in the next decades we will digitize everything of importance in the canon. We will need examples to compare what we do to, and we will need an army of humanists to do it appropriately.

Past, Present and Future at McMaster

This July I step down as Assistant to the Dean for Computing at McMaster. It has been 10 years. When I arrived the computers were not networked, we had no web server, and no servers. Now the Humanities Computing Centre, now Humanities Media and Computing, runs 15 or more servers, has far too many web services and everything is networked.
At an Open House we celebrated Sam Cioran, who in the 1980s started the Centre moving us from language labs to multimedia computing. This July my colleague Andrew Mactavish takes over. If there is one thing that seems to work it is sustained attention – directing something for long enough to build a network, make mistakes, and correct them. I will miss directing the Centre.
McMaster Daily – NEW! Posted on May 31: Humanities celebrates past, present and future of multimedia

Blackberry Politics

BlackBerry fuels nasty campaign brush fire is a front page story in today’s Globe and Mail (Campbell Clark, Steven Chase, and Jane Taber, Friday, May 28, 2004, Page A1). This is the second time this meme has surfaced in the Globe – it was embedded in an earlier story by Taber (see below) so I can’t help thinking the Globe was planning this technology angle and waiting for an event hook to get it onto the front page.
That said, it is interesting that BlackBerrys have surfaced as the new technology to watch and that they have become mainstream news. This may be due to the fact the RIM is a Canadian company. It could be that we have a critical mass of people doing instant e-mail. It could be that we are beginning to think of the cultural effects of instant messaging and portable Internet enabled technologies. Elections make great turning points with which to date and explain change.

So powerful is the use of digital technology in the election that single comments can spread like wildfire along broadband lines and satellite signals, from war rooms in Ottawa to campaign buses rolling along distant highways in the Maritimes.The wireless war of 2004 erupted Wednesday night when the NDP Leader went, as political operatives like to say, off message.

Remember Carter and how his election win of 1984 was reported to have been helped by the use of e-mail. Likewise we saw
Howard Dean get attention this year for his web enabled campaign. Technology news and elections make interesting combinations.
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Manovich and Interactivity

On Totalitarian Interactivity is an essay by Lev Manovich that talks about interactivity and interruption.

For the West, interactivity is a perfect vehicle for the ideas of democracy and equality. For the East, it is another form of manipulation, in which the artist uses advanced technology to impose his / her totalitarian will on the people. (On modern artist as a totalitarian ruler see the works of Boris Groys.) Western media artists usually take technology absolutely seriously and despair when it does not work. Post-communist artists, on the other hand, recognize that the nature of technology is that it does not work, will always breakdown, will never work as it is supposed to…

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Computer games, media and interactivity

Computer games, media and interactivity by Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen and Jonas Heide Smith is an English translation of a part of their book that appears in the Game Research site.

The beginning is really good raising the question Aarseth asks as to whether interactivity is meaningful any longer. The paper then wanders off into various hot topics like violence and gender. I’m not sure of the coherence, but this is an excerpt.

Wilson: Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactivity

The Aesthetics and Practice of Designing Interactive Computer Events is an online paper by Stephen Wilson that has a nice tour through disciplines discussing interactivity from psychology to anthropology. Wilson tackles interactivity by considering what is non-interactive like a photograph, movie, or book. The difference between interactive and non-interactive has to do with the aesthetic use of choice. Interactive works structure choice into the art. Non-interactive works can be interacted with – but that lies outside the work or author’s control. The other difference is the timing and pace of interactive works. In interactive works timing can be used and they are not linear (typically.)
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