What does a Professor do All Day, Anyway? is a short essay by Ed Ayers at the University of Virginia. It needs to be updated to a multimedia version.
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Birth of the Pixel
Core77 Articles: Pixelvision is an article on the history of the pixel. I got the link from Matt K’s blog.
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The Frontier and the Internet
The CyberFrontier and America at the Turn of the 21st Century is an article on First Monday that deals with the adaptation of Turner’s ideas about the “frontier” as important to American identity to the Internet. It is interesting how the myth of the frontier played out in ideology for the net.
Terra Nova, Game Blog
Terra Nova is a blog by multiple authors on MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds and other “realms of emergent collective reality”. The authors discuss things like how “Avatars Become Storefronts” – how markets emerge slowly, but irresistably, for/in games for exchanging things.
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RIAA and P2P Music
In an article by Fred von Lohmann, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the issue of all the RIAA suits against individuals who are file swapping is discussed. Lohmann, inRIAA’s college lawsuits a wrong answer | CNET News.com, argues that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 makes people guilty until proven innocent because organizations can get subpoenas automatically by “merely making allegations of infringement.” (In other words, the federal court issues them automatically without review of a judge or a lawsuit being filed.) Universities are responding to these subpoenas that they don’t know who is responsible for the IP address, since they are assigned dynamically. Thus universities can’t help the RIAA – one wonders if universities are setting up their systems so they cannot know who used the offending IP address to frustrate the RIAA.
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Skins
Ruth Nichols has written a M.Sc. thesis on skins, “A study into the Useful Application of Skins for Information Filtering” (Computer and Software, McMaster University, 2003). She has brought out an interesting area of user interface design and theory that is connected with the work done on Mods in the gaming community – namely Skins.
She writes that “The original idea of skins was developed by Winamp, an MP3 player build by a small company Nullsoft. Winamp was first released in 1997.” (p. 20) Winamp was officialy released in 1998 and was bought by AOL in 1999. Skinning was added in 1998.
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Lucky Wander Boy
LUCKY WANDER BOY is a novel about a character obsessed with computer games. Like “Run Lola Run” (the movie) the structure of the novel has game-like features as does the plot. The narrator moves through levels. There are a number of “replay” chapters at the end that play out different endings.
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Affordances and Prospects
Stan Ruecker today successfully defended a thesis on theorizing rich propospect affordances for interpretively-tagged text collections. Two things that are very interesting about the thesis are:
1. He traces the literature on affordances (that show up without a lot of background in UI discussions like Norman) to JJ Gibson and environmental psychology.
2. He proposes prospects (visualizations that have a meaningful representation of all items in a collection) as useful way to interface with medium sized text collections like Orlando.
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Beyond Productivity, IT and Creativity
Summary and Recommendations | Beyond Productivity is a report by National Academy of Sciences that looks at the importance of fostering creativity and information technology. The report looks at how creativity emerges and the need to support play.
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Text Toy Language 2
The grammar of TBC (Text by Code) should have:
– Primitives: Paths, Glyphs, Characters, Words, Strings, and Element
– Methods: To get text, parse it into primitives, manipulate it, place it, render it, and make it move.
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