Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Stan pointed me to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research which has a number of fine articles.

  • “Cityspace, Cyberspace, and the Spatiology of Information” by Michael L. Benedikt is a reprint of a classic paper where he argues that,

    If we wish to reach deeply into the “nature” of “space itself” then, I believe we must allow into it, as it were, a substance of some sort: not the æther of nineteenth-century science perhaps, but a registering, tracing, questioning, remembering substance, spread as thinly as we can imagine, but present nonetheless, and definitive of here versus there because of how it pools, how it vibrates, how it scatters difference, différance. (p. 2)

    That substance is information. As he puts it later, “ultimately, the space in information and the information in space are one.” (p. 15)

  • “Toward a Definition of ‘Virtual Worlds'” by Mark W Bell is a short “Think Piece” defining “virtual worlds” as “A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” (p. 2)

These two pieces make an interesting contrast since Benedikt focuses on space and Bell manages to define virtual worlds without any reference to space. Benedikt calls for architects to engage in the design of virtual spaces while Bell focuses on the network of avatars – or the people within the space (and persistent time.)

Ever since the Gartner press release saying that “80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A “Second Life” in the Virtual World by the End of 2011″ there has been a renewed interest in virtual worlds. My sense is that the 1990s interest in virtual reality was overblown and ultimately wrong in that people predicted we would be manipulating information inside virtual worlds with VR interfaces, data-gloves, headsets and so on. What has emerged instead is the proliferation of massive multiplayer online environments from games like World of Warcraft to social/creative spaces like Second Life. The headsets and torture apparatus of Lawnmower Man are gone, thank you!

Image of Book CoverSo … what is next? I’ve just finished Halting State by Charles Stross which is a near-future detective story set in Edinburgh where players can move their avatars from game to game in the Zone (something actually proposed by Linden Labs and IBM – see Lohr Free the Avatars – this reference is from the Messinger, Stroulia and Lyons article “A Typology of Virtual Worlds” in the JCWR.) What is more interesting is the way Stross imagines the overlay of virtual and real worlds. Everyone, including cops, wear glasses that provide augmented reality views on the world they walk through, including the ability to see people in their in-game avatar representation while, for example, at a trade fair. Stross does a imaginative job or weaving the virtual into everyday life. (If you like this book you should also read Accelerando – a great accelerating run through the artificial life as it leaves meat behind.)

State of the World Conference

I’m at the State of the World: Information Infrastructure Construction and Dissemination for Humanities and Social Science Research conference at the University of Alberta. This conference was organized primarily to reflect on the Canadian Century Research Initiative which has been developing “a set of interrelated databases centered on data from the 1911, 1921, 1931, 1941 and 1951 Canadian censuses.” Peter Baskerville, the organizer, yesterday took us through how one can use census data to make inferences about a young girl in Edmonton in 1911. Some of the interesting ideas:

  • For many Canadians census data is the only record of their lives. Census data provides a unique picture into the everyday lives of people who otherwise do not show up in publications and the historical record.
  • Data, like census data, is significantly enhanced with connected to contextual information from insurance maps to newspaper stories.
  • There is an amazing variety of commercial and non-commercial data from opinion polls to buying data. The issue of data is not just about censuses – we need to find way to gather and preserve the variety of data now being generated by cell phone companies, political organizations, megastores and so on.
  • Confidentiality is a major issue. We need to find a balance between research access and not harming people.
  • Sustainability of digital data/texts. As scholarly digital work and applications are created, how can they be preserved.

Dan Larocque from Open Text spoke on “Private/Public Ventures in the Digital World: Open Text and the Canada Project”. The mission of the Canada Project is to “To advance Canadians’ awareness of and access to accumulated knowledge through mass digitization of Canada’s published heritage.” The project is to put all Canadiana online and to create a user experience that allows all Canadians to use the content from genealogist to children interested in a historic hockey game. Dan also talked about the Stratford Institute which is a collaboration between the town of Stratford, Waterloo University, Open Text, and the province to create a digital media focused campus.

I spoke at this conference on “Cyberinfrastructure: Mashing Texts and Tools in TAPoR”.

CRKN and Cyberinfrastructure

Last week I presented on “Cyberinfrastructure: Reflections from TAPoR to Tools at the Canadian Research Knowledge Network Annual General Meeting 2008 (they have a PDF of the slides.) I was part of a panel on cyberinfrastructure that included an interesting presentation by Walter Stewart of CANARIE who made the point that the big issue is people. While many still don’t have access to the technical infrastructure that would facilitate their research, the big challenge is professional staff/collegial support for digital research. If one looks at the life span of a typical project one can see where people are needed:

  • Conception: when colleagues in the humanities are imagining a project that might have a digital component they need good advice.
  • Application: if they go forward with a grant application they need help articulating the digital component so that it is clear and technically accurate.
  • Modeling: if they get a grant they need help training the students who do the work, they need help making the technical decisions that affect downstream research, and they need help managing the implementation. Most colleagues don’t have the experience needed to bring a digital project to completion within budget and on time.
  • Virtualization: most digital humanities projects go out to the web and projects need help delivering them to the web and virtualizing the service so that it can be maintained as a stable machine. Typically a project will get funding to pay for the programming needed, but not for ongoing maintenance. We have found that one way to stabilize a project so it doesn’t need constant updating is to create a virtual server with all the layers of applications (lets say a certain version of Ruby and MySQL) frozen so that updating something on the server doesn’t break the service. This takes professional server support that is ongoing so these projects can be migrated from machine to machine over time.
  • Maintenance: even virtualized projects need occaisional maintenance if bugs are found or if new data needs to be added. If the programming was done by a graduate student who has long since gone, as is usually the case with grant funded projects, then the cost of maintenance can be exorbitant. The solution is not to use only professional programmers as work on projects is one of the best forms of apprenticeship in the digital humanities for graduate students. What we need is permanent programming staff who oversee digital projects, guiding the graduate students, and making sure that code is documented so it can be maintained. These project manager level programmers then provide the long term knowledge so that a new student could be hired to fix something and guided around the project.

In short I think we can begin to articulate a baseline of cyberinfrastructure and support needed at research-intensive universities to support a culture of digital humanities projects:

  • Servers: Research-intensive universities (RIU) need to run flexible servers capable of hosting the development and deliver of projects. These need to flexible in the sense that service models that limit service to specific applications (we only support PHP) almost always fail to evolve at the speed of projects leading projects to spin-off their own servers outside the support umbrella.
  • Labs: RIUs tend to see a proliferation of labs “owned” by particular projects. Given how most of us and our students have laptops we no longer need labs specifically for work. Instead labs are becoming places for access to specialized tools (large format scanners, special software, and visualization displays) and places for social research. Labs, in my experience, are becoming places where people work together whether meeting over an interface or testing a project. I would argue that labs should be “socialized” and brought together so that projects share space so they can learn from each other. That said, labs are still needed.
  • Project Managers and Technical Staff: Most important, following the outline of how knowledgable people are needed I would argue that RIUs need to have a mix of technical staff with project management experience to guide projects through from conception to long-term stability. Such staff can be in the library, faculty or computing center, but they should be coordinated. These staff do not replace the grant funded people brought on to work on projects, but they provide the advice to get the grant and oversight to manage contract staff.

YouTube – TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues

Ray Siemens and friends have put up a TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues on YouTube as “socio-cultural representation” of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to counter the various videos of Tei, a popular Korean signer. There is a blog on the widget hosted by the ETCL at Victoria which explains the origins and authorship of the video.

Night Danger: Dictionary of Words in the Wild over 3500

Moose Danger Sign

The Dictionary of Words in the Wild has now over 3,500 images and over 4,500 words. Willard McCarty delivered a paper at the University of Western Sydney reflecting on the Dictionary, “Stepping off the edge of the world or into it: The Dictionary of Words in the Wild as research?” Willard is the star contributor, but I’m catching up with pictures taken on the move across Canada including the moose danger sign above which is seen frequently on the Trans-Canada in parts of Ontario and Manitoba.

Urban Dictionary

I just came across this Urban Dictionary where people provide definitions for new urban words and then vote the definitions up or down (with commentary). The social site allows people to upload images that capture the word; for example, the first definition of “scene” has 332 images. These are not images of the word but images evocative of the word. What is interesting is that further down on each page is an embedded visual Google ad (as in a small image rather than text ad.) The ad is pulled based on the word so you get a different type of image of the word. For “scene” there was this linked animated GIF for a dating service where you can “Find out who is waiting for you at the Goth Scene”:

Image of Ad

Of course the book is being mined by the editor for a Urban Dictionary book compiled by Aaron Peckham. When you read the Terms of Service you will find the following:

When you post Content on the Website, you agree to grant the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicenseable, non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, sell, publicly display, publicly perform and make derivative works of your Content on the Website, on services affiliated with the Website and elsewhere (including but not limited to print, video, audio or computer media), regardless of the form of media used or of whether such media or services now exist or are developed in the future. By posting Content to the Website, you hereby represent and warrant that you have the right to post that Content and to grant the foregoing rights to the Company.

Theses Canada: What you (a graduate student) should know

Being on the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research council my attention was drawn to the issue of what happens to theses. In my day you bound a bunch of copies and one went off to Libraries and Archives Canada where it was indexed, but could not be read online. Since 1997 it looks like they have been digitizing the theses working with contractors. Now they ask graduate students to sign a non-exclusive license that gives LAC remarkable rights. See the page for graduate students, What you should know – at the bottom is the link to the PDF of the license they have to sign which includes the following language:

[I] hereby grant a non-exclusive, for the full term of copyright protection, royalty free license to Library and Archives Canada:

(a) to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell my thesis (the title of which is set forth above) worldwide, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats;

(b) to authorize, sub-license, sub-contract or procure any of the acts mentioned in paragraph (a).

I find this language too broad. I can understand why Theses Canada wants these rights in order to be able to run a genuinely useful service that makes Canadian research accessible, but this license is just too broad, especially when enforced by universities that require all graduate students to sign it. There is provision on the Theses Canada site for graduates delaying submission (if they want to register patents, for example) and I’m guessing that most universities would respect a student’s wish to not sign the license.

There is a separate issue around copyright. Part of the License includes this:

If third-party copyrighted material was included in my thesis, I have obtained written copyright permission from the copyright owners to do the acts mentioned in paragraph (a) above for the full term of copyright protection.

I wonder if the accessibility of theses online and the terms of the License might change the willingness of other copyright owners to grant permissions to graduate students.