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Store, manage, and preserve digital collections with Vault, a flexible and customizable digital repository and preservation solution designed for libraries, heritage and arts organizations, publishers, researchers, and individuals.

Just heard about the Archive-IT Vault. For a one-time fee you can deposit materials to archive. The key is that you pay a “one-time price per gigabyte/terabyte for data deposited in the system, with no additional annual storage fees or data egress costs.” This way you don’t have to continue paying or lose your archive.

One wonders how long the Vault will last. Given that it builds on the Internet Archive‘s experience and infrastructure, it is probably a good bet that it will last some time.

I’m reminded of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know which is partly about what we might be able to know about the present in a post-ecological disaster future. All sorts of digital records have been preserved and can be searched by AI, but historians still don’t know what happened to a key document.

Learn more about the research and work of Geoffrey Rockwell, one of the latest Fellows to join Amii’s team of world-class researchers. Geoffrey is a professor in both Media Tech Studies and in the philosophy department at the University of Alberta.

The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) has put up a video interview with me and Alona Fyshe designed to introduce new Fellows (like me.) Dr. Fyshe is one of the Fellows who works on machine learning and natural language processing. The interview is at Meet the Fellows: Geoffrey Rockwell.

Mr. Musk, who had asked Twitter users about whether to bring back the former president to the service, said, “The people have spoken.”

Just discovered that Elon Musk Reinstates Trump’s Twitter Account. I think it is time to go then. I’m archiving my twitter site and leaving.

For those that care I’m now at @geoffreyrockwell@masto.ai though I haven’t gotten the hang of Mastodon yet. Must take some time to read and watch.

Yesterday was International Transgender Day of Visibility. This is a day in the calendar when we celebrate the living members of the community. The mayor of Calgary, Nenshi declared this back in 2013, as did the then mayor of Edmonton, Mandel.

There is also the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The TDOR was started in memory of Rita Hester who was killed in 1998. 

Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is an annual observance on November 20 that honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.

ROCKWELL, Peter Barstow Sculptor, Scholar and Teacher, dies at 83 Died peacefully on February 6, 2020 in Danvers, MA.

My father passed away last Thursday, Feb. 6th. I’ve been gathering information and writing a short and longer obituary. I’ve also been going through my father’s email writing people he was in touch with. In a strange way I feel I am rolling up his life.

My sister posted an obituary in the Boston Globe: PETER ROCKWELL Obituary – Boston, MA | Boston Globe. Interestingly the Globe ran their own short article Peter Rockwell, a sculptor and a son of Norman Rockwell, dies at 83.

What is touching are all the heartfelt condolences coming in from students, friends and colleagues that enjoyed his company and work.

We’re certainly on to something when we say the brain is a computer – even if we don’t yet know what exactly we’re on to

Kevin Lande has written a fine essay for Aeon titled, Your brain probably is a computer, whatever that means. The essay starts with the apparent contradiction that “We have clear reasons to think that it’s literally true that the brain is a computer, yet we don’t have any clear understanding of what this means.”

We know of many cases where the brain clearly computes things, like where a sound is coming from, but we don’t know what sort of computer the brain is, or if it is only a computer. For that matter we don’t know a lot about what computation is either.

Food for thought.

The last few days I have been in Nottingham, land of Robin Hood, at Replaying Japan 2018 (PDF) conference in the National Videogame Arcade. You can see my conference notes on Replaying Japan 2018 here. The quality of the papers was excellent. The community is gelling and the research is getting more and more interesting. Some highlights:

• The theme was music and we had a number of excellent papers on Japanese game music. We now have a Replaying Japan journal, thanks to Ritsumeikan. I’m the English editor so stay tuned for a CFP.
• As per tradition, Keiji Amano and I gave a paper on pachinko. This time we talked about the line between gambling and gaming.
• The keynotes were fabulous. The first was Masaya Matsuura who developed PaRappa the Rapper and other music games. He reflected philosophically about music, play and sound. The second was David Wise who has composed music for games including Nintendo’s Donkey Kong Country series.

It struck a number of us that the community is becoming sufficiently developed that it may be time to form an association in order to properly involve people. Until now it has been loosely organized by a network of us. It may be time to formalize.

Last week I was at the conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI 2018) at the University of Virginia. I kept conference notes here. Before the conference proper, we had a day for the Public Engagement network. We heard about Humanities Festivals like the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. Another neat example is the Dwell in Other Futures festival held in St. Louis.

We also heard about graduate education and community engagement. One example was the Humanities Without Walls summer workshop at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Finally we talked about the need for ways of assessing public engagement work. How can academics get credit for public engagement? Is is scholarship?

 

Four decades ago, Tomohiro Nishikado created the title that became shorthand for video games themselves. He recalls how he wanted to tap into players’ competitive instincts

The Guardian has a story on Space Invaders at 40: ‘I tried soldiers, but shooting people was frowned upon’. Space Invaders is now four decades old having been released by Taito in 1978.

Space Invaders was created by Tomohiro Nishikado, who I met when he the opening keynote for Replaying Japan 2014. He brought some of his notebooks and showed the images he drew of aliens and how he bitmapped them.

Coincidentally I also just got in the mail and started reading, the book by Florent Gorges on Nishikado, Space Invaders: Comment Tomohiro Nishikado a donné naissance au jeu vidéo japonais! (in French) The book has lots of illustrations but the print is small and hard to read. Like other books by Gorges, it is good on the history, but not that critical.

On Humanist there was an announcement from the Hagley Museum and Library that they had put up a 1969 Sperry-UNIVAC short film An Introduction to Digital Computers. The 22 minute short is a dated, but interesting introduction to how a digital computer works. The short was sponsored by Sperry-UNIVAC which had its origins in the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation founded by Eckert and Mauchly of ENIAC fame.

The museum is in Delaware at the site of E.I. du Pont gunpowder works from 1802. The Hagley library is dedicated to American enterprise and has archival material from Sperry-UNIVAC:

Hagley’s library furthers the study of business and technology in America. The collections include individuals’ papers and companies’ records ranging from eighteenth-century merchants to modern telecommunications and illustrate the impact of the business system on society.