Category: Media and News

AHRC ICT Methods Network: Final Report

I just came across the AHRC ICT Methods Network Final Report edited by Lorna Hughes. It is one of the most thorough final reports of its kind and nicely designed. There is a bitter-sweet conclusion to the report by Susan Hockey and Seamus Ross as the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) seems to have had its funding cut and therefore cannot renew the Methods Network (or support the Oxford Text Archive either.) As the home page of the AHDS says, “From April 2008 the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) will no longer be funded to provide a national service.” The conclusion by Susan and Seamus states unequivocally that,

In conclusion, the activities of the Methods Network demonstrated not only that ICT methods and tools are central to humanities scholarship, but also that there was ‘a very long way to go before ICT in humanities and arts research finds its rightful and needed places’. The investment in ICT in the arts and humanities needs to be much greater and it needs to reflect better the particularities and needs of individual communities. Researchers who do not have access to the most current technological methods and tools will not be able to keep
pace with the trends in scholarship. There is a real need for support and infrastructure for distributed research. (page 74)

Interestingly they propose a “flexible co-ordinated network of centres of excellence as the best way forwards”. (Page 74) I also liked the report because it kindly mentions TAPoR,

The group looked at how collaborations are fostered and supported, how partnerships are brokered in the first instance, and how this work is rewarded and evaluated by the different communities. Geoffrey Rockwell, Project Director of what is almost certainly the largest collaborative humanities software development project in the world, the TAPoR (http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal) project in Canada, shared his experiences of how the development of a collaborative and inter-institutional set of tools for text analysis was managed within the project. TAPoR was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and succeeded in its overall goals in providing general purpose text analysis tools. The TAPoR site reports that its tools were run over 5000 times in November 2007. TAPoR provides strong evidence that networked collaborative tool development can succeed. (Page 63)

TheStar.com | Federal Election | Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics

Alex Sévingy drew my attention to an article by Linda Diebel for the Toronto Star, Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics (Sept. 12, 2008) that argues that Green leader Elizabeth May owes here inclusion in the upcoming debates to rapid voter reaction over the Internet.

Suddenly, in a very public way, ordinary citizens were empowered through their blogs, vlogs (videos) and online comment to the mainstream media, and they got what they wanted.

Alex himself is quoted in the article suggesting that it was Stephane Dion who broke the impasse.

“For the first time in Canadian election history, a grassroots activism influenced a leader to take a stand against the others,” he said. “As a result, the traditional media regulators had to concede that the populist approach was right.”

Adds Sévigny: “An authority figure opened the door. But, in my view, this is one of the last times the blogosphere needs validation of someone in authority.”

Given how short Canadian elections are one wonders if the speed of the Internet is the only way for voters to participate in the process, rather than just the vote.

New York Times: The Lessons From the Kindles Success

Well, I was wrong. I thought the Kindle, like other attempts at e-books would be a failure. According a New York Times story by Saul Hansell (Aug. 12, 2008), The Lessons From the Kindles Success argues that while the market of readers may be small, there seem to be a enough readers who read a lot and want the convenience of loading it up on a device. I suspect the ease of use is also a feature.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

TAPoRware and the Digital Humanities Quarterly

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The latest version of the Digital Humanities Quarterly is out and they have done something neat. They have included some of the TAPoRware tools in the bar at the top of articles like Wendell’s reflections, Something Called Digital Humanities.

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This is someone anyone can do. We provide instructions on the code to put in your HTML on the TAPoRware Add Tools Demo page. There are different models. You will also find code on the documentation pages for individual tools on the TADA Documentation Pages.

Kriegspiel: Debord Game

Image from Game

The New Yorker (May 5, 2008, pages 25-6) has a nice short story “War Games” in Talk of the Town about a computer game Kriegspiel based on a game that Guy Debord designed in 1977. The game, “Le Jeu De La Guerre” was published first in a limited edition with metal pieces and then in 1987 it was mass produced. The game has a board of 25 X 20 squares and each side has basic military pieces that can be played according to rules designed to simulate war. The computer implementation, which can be downloaded for free, is by Radical Software Group (RSG) which is associated with NYU.

The New Yorker story talks about how the estate of Debord has been sending cease-and-desist letters to the RSG folk, which is ironic since debord objected to copyright. Debord is author of The Society of Spectacle.

Farewell McMaster

Picture of Andrew and Geoffrey

With regrets I’m leaving McMaster and going to the University of Alberta. McMaster threw a wonderful farewell party on Monday. Dean Crosta spoke, Andrew Mactavish gave a moving speech, Liss Platt talked, Stéfan Sinclair played Alberta tunes and I was presented with a plaque that will go up on the wall of Togo Salmon Hall where previous digital humanities people at Mac have been recognized. See a small photo set of pictures taken by Stéfan here on Flickr.

Dialogue РPublished by SSHRC/Publi̩ par le CRSH

Having written a book on dialogue, (Defining Dialogue) I’m always intrigued when others call for dialogue or name some initiative dialogue.

Well, SSHRC has just published the second issue of its online e-newsletter, Dialogue and I’m going to rise to the bait.

Here goes. What is interesting about things named “dialogue” is that they are usually so named because “dialogue” is supposed to be good. In fact, it may be the last good left in an intellectual climate where there are no certainties or grounds to stand on. All that is left is some form of interaction, and dialogue is the good form of interaction (as opposed to gossiping, bickering, or fighting.)

The problem with this is that the models we have inherited for dialogue in the humanities, from Plato to Heidegger, are not quite so comfortable. This is seen especially in Plato where usually one of the interlocutors leaves unenlightened and irritated with Socrates. Dialogue is rarely good for those in it. The dialogues of Plato are aggressive, they portray posturing and misunderstanding, and they are designed to be interesting to those listening in, not the interlocutors.

So … what sort of dialogue then is SSHRC’s newsletter? Is it a scrappy Socratic tussle in front of us? No, it is a gracious praising of researchers who got grants! Is it SSHRC the gadfly engaging people who claim to know something so as to show them (and us) that they (and we) know nothing? No, SSHRC wouldn’t dare. Is it SSHRC engaging us with questions that force us to think about what we know. No, there is only a call for comments, which is about as interactive as asking what I did for my summer vacation.

In short, SSHRC has published another Dialogue that is innocent of the history or theories of dialogue. What Dialogue really is for SSHRC is public relations or advertising. Perhaps it is what Socrates taught in Aristophanes’ Clouds? Why shouldn’t SSHRC be honest and call it something like “Braggadocio“?

To be fair ,there is a sense in which what Dialogue does is document the activities of the humanities and social sciences. These activities have been called a conversation by Michael Oakeshott; in that sense Dialogue is not a dialogue with us or with anyone, but a record of great moments in the Canadian academic conversation.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an enquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. (Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, p. 11)

If you are interested I have a copy of my thesis about dialogue, from which the book evolved, here in PDFs of the chapters. Read it and you too can get cranky when people propose dialogue.

The potted expert on CHCH

Image off video

I’ve just used up 5 of my 15 minutes of fame as a local computer games expert in Hamilton. CHCH, our local television channel has a segment on Grand Theft Auto IV yesterday and they interviewed me and Jacob. (See the video here.)

They should have interviewed Andrew Mactavish, but he is on leave and I’m teaching his games course. My sense from following the news is that the story is not playing out in the mainstream the way I expected – the mainstream news are more intrigued by GTA 4 and its reception in the gaming community. Of course, as Andrew pointed out in a conversation, Rockstar could have hidden some provocative parts to be discovered which will stir things up.

I note that the interview with me was taken in the Lyons Instructional Media Centre‘s game viewing room. How many libraries have one of those?

Grand Theft Auto IV: Panic Magnet or Cultural Criticism

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Well, Grand Theft Auto IV is on sale today and the news is predicting it “will break sales records.” More importantly the media are warming up for a juicy story about game violence while the gaming news is ready for the moral panic of the mainstream media. Take Kotaku:

One might also suspect that, when the game is finally release (sic), opportunistic, fear mongering elected officials, clueless mainstream media and glory seeking attorneys may find extra content not listed, including Virtual Rape, Cop Killing, Overt Racism, Gerbil Abuse, Being On Someone’s Lawn and Buggery. We’re looking forward to a fun ride.

I think the gaming community expects that GTA IV is going to be a magnet for media stories about violence and videogames. Remember that hard core gamers have been following GTA 4 for a while and thinking about its reception while the audience of the mainstream news (if there is such a thing left) are just waking up to it as the stories go mainstream. Rockstar may even have placed some content designed to spark controversy since nothing sells games like controversy, even when the game is rated Mature. In the case of gaming, the media have little credibility compared to the narrow gaming channels that gamers read, but gamers love to have their opinions of n00bs confirmed when the mainstream seems to parachute in the day before a game is released or when some kid goes postal. Thus we end up with two solitudes that feed off misunderstanding each other: parents who can panic after reading that they should and gamers frustrated that they aren’t understood when they knew they wouldn’t be. That’s the essence of commedia – the fun of watching groups creatively misunderstand each other in public. GTA IV promises to be another chapter in a comedy of misunderstanding that goes back to Socrates complaining about the poets teaching youth to practice disreputable characters (and Aristophanes making fun of him doing so.) I note that Rockstar has made a brilliant first move on the Information page of the web site for the game by stealing some cultural criticism high-ground:

What does the American Dream mean today?

For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past.

For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity.

As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t.

Think about it – a Scottish game development company making a game that claims to critique the emptiness of the American dream in order to make lots of money the American way. But seriously, some interesting aspects of the story are:

  • How do companies manage blockbuster games? GTA 4 was delayed (possibly to avoid other big releases like Halo 3) and now seems to have been well timed (and built up) to take off. Given how much it cost to develop GTA 4, the launch probably has to be carefully staged to be perceived as the next “fastest-selling” so that they make a profit. How do they stage blockbusters? Should we care about them?
  • How do blockbuster games intersect with other forms of entertainment “properties”? Will GTA 4 really affect movie going among young men by taking them off the streets and out of the theatres (and into the gaming room) for a few weeks? Will it have a measurable effect on sales of other types of entertainment as some speculate?
  • A related question is how they manage the tie-in with Amazon for music? I think games like GTA 4 have real potential to sell other merchandise – especially music, given the way radio stations entertain in the game. They apparently have some deal for selling tunes through the game in the US. Will it have an effect on Amazon’s music sales?
  • How effective is the game engine (Euphoria) that they are using? GTA 4 is one of the first major games to use Euphoria – will it make a difference players respond to?

Old Bailey Online

Image from Web Page
The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.

Bravo to the team that developed it!