I came across a story that Kane Kramer, and English inventor, invented the digital audio player and patented it in 1979 though he lost the patent. Here is an interview with the Guardian.
No. I like the iPod, but it feels a bit unfair to have to buy one. I could show you my drawings from 1979-82 and there is an iPod – same size, shape. It feels like mine.
Kane apparently testified for Apple when they were being sued by others.
The World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.
A student of mine from last year, Jacob, who was one of the two who did the innovative Half-Life Havoc project, has started a gaming blog and company, Pushing Play. His company is developing game conference,
The Pushing Play Conference is all about bringing hardcore, casual, midcore gamers together, as well as Ludologists, game designers, and even non-gamers. By bringing these people together and giving them a forum to interact we can get a better understanding of the gaming community as a whole, rather than supporting the over-used image of gamers strictly being teenage boys.
Newsknitter is a project that gathers news from RSS feeds and then generates a visualization that can then be knitted into a sweater. Check out the images of sweaters knitted. This project has been exhibited at Ars Electronica and is the work of two PhD candidates at Kunstuniversität Linz. At first the idea of machine knitted sweaters of text visualization sounds like a conceptual art work with no future, but as I think about it, the idea of just-in-time information being visualized and used to generate stable material objects like a sweater sounds timely. All sorts of objects could have their designs generated on the spot and on demand from information off the net. Why should data be only visualized and not materialized?
Once I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.
Thanks to Erika for this.
The blog, Google Blogoscoped has a scan of Scott McCloud’s comic book to explain the new Google Browser called Chrome, see Google on Google Chrome – comic book or Google’s version. It is interesting that Google used the comic book format to explain what is special about Chrome (see Scott’s FAQ), but Chrome itself, and how it is being presented, is also important. A few random thoughts:
I’ve put up two sets of photos on Flickr. Montreal 2008 is 17 photos taken in Montreal during the Just for Laughs festival. Check out the pose of Professor Rockwell. Pukaskwa is a set taken in Pukaskwa National Park, one of the most beautiful parks to hike, even if the mosquitoes are terrible. Below is picture of the Moose we saw wading out.
I got an announcement about a A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid (WCG) being hosted by IBM. The WCG is a volunteer grid that uses the BOINC platform and is “powered” by IBM. These volunteer projects fascinate me – they are not our father’s computing where the danger was computers getting smarter than us and taking over and the paradigm was AI. Now the symbiosis of humans and computing is on a social scale – grids of processors and teams of people. Here is what the WCG says about their project:
World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.
What sorts of humanities problems could we run on a grid like this? Do humanities projects “benefit humanity” or is medicine (curing cancer) the last human research left? My instinct tells me we could do internet mining for concepts where we gather, clean and analyze large numbers of documents on concepts like “dialogue”. Perhaps someone wants to submit a proposal with me.
There is a nice collection of essays on CH Working Papers on Reassembling the Disassembled Book. These are some of the papers that were presented under that theme at the Society for Digital Humanities meeting in 2007 in Saskatchewan which I blogged before. One paper I was pleased to read because it went by too quickly at the conference is Richard Cunningham’s Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing. This paper describes and theorizes a one day experiment Richard and others tried in taking apart an early modern book, scanning it, and reassembling as a electronic book. I love these “what can you do in a day experiments.”
Bad enough we had all agreed, before gathering in Victoria, to disassemble one book; in the end we discovered we would need to dismantle two books to achieve our representational goals. This need to use (or perhaps more appropriately abuse) two books rather than one was a direct result of the planning we undertook prior to entering the ETCL. We began with the basic idea of digitizing an early modern book and defining the project so that it could be completed in a single day. The opportunity for this project came in the form of a selection of early modern books that had been rescued from the discount bins of a couple of London’s antiquarian book stores. (Richard Cunningham, Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing)
There are links in the paper to a number of videos and images, including a long video that shows them cutting the pages. Not unlike my Text in the Machine series of photos, but for a far more important purpose.
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.