Category: Blogs and Blogging Culture

Patrik Svensson

Image of HUMlab logoPatrik Svensson Director of HUMlab, Ume?• University, is giving a talk tomorrow here at McMaster.

In this seminar I will start out from a general discussion of the visual in the humanities and in the digital humanities, and a critique of traditional ‘humanities computing’ which tends to be predominantely textual. I will base my further investigation on several projects from different areas including art history, history, antrophology and linguistics. Key points of discussion include the materiality of interfaces, added values, innovation strategies, and the role of the visualization. Among relevant technologies are geographical information systems, multi-spectral analysis and virtual worlds. Digital culture also gives us highly visual study objects such as computer games, social software and electronic literature, and these will be considered. The final part of the talk deals with physical lab and studio spaces for the digital humanities. How is the visual articulated in such collaborative work spaces? It will be suggested that the humanities may benefit from working with many, individual screens in collaborative settings rather than immersive environments such as CAVEs. HUMlab at Ume?• University will be used a case study and I will describe a planned (and funded!) expansion of the lab which will add thirteen new screens to the studio space.

From the descriptions of the HUMlab it sounds like a creative space – they have paid attention to creating a space where people can meet across the humanities and IT disciplines.

Montreal attack and video games

Another horrible shooting at a school and once again there is a reported connection to a mix of blogs, goth culture and videogames. The Globe and Mail has a story about how the Blog of accused killer reveals dark character (Scott Deveau). The blog, which is still (as of posting) accessible, now has 233 comments on the last entry posted an hour before Kimveer went.

As for the videogame connection, Montreal gunman called himself ‘angel of death’ is the title of a CBC story that quotes the blog,

“Work sucks ‚Ķ School sucks ‚Ķ Life sucks ‚Ķ What else can I say?” he wrote. “Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime.”

The Globe and Mail article quotes more from the blog on the subject of videogames,

Among other things, he says his likes were: “First Person Shooters” and “Super Psycho Maniacs roaming the streets.” He also says he likes his knife, guns, and “Crushing My Enemies Skulls.”

Among his favourite video games are several first-person shooting games, including Super Columbine Massacre RPG, which has players mimic the infamous high school killings in Columbine, Colo., the morning of April 20, 1999, through the eyes of the teenage killers. The shootings at Dawson College on Wednesday are a chilling echo of those events.

Mr. Gill also lists Postal as another of his favourite games. The purpose of that game is to get through as much of the game as possible without going berserk and gunning people down, or, failing that, to avoid getting caught and being thrown in jail.

He also complained that Postal 2 was “too childish.”

‚Äúi want them to make a game so realistic, that it looks and feels like it’s actually happening,‚Äù he wrote in his blog.

Setting aside the question of who would create a game like “Super Columbine Massacre RPG”, I find it hard to believe that videogames didn’t let Kimveer model his violent fantasies.

Now I’m going to go back to the 233 comments on that last post. A snapshot of reactions from anger to concerns about how goth culture will be portrayed.

McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future

McMaster University Libraries: Transforming our Future is a blog by a Transformation Team of librarians at McMaster (the university I teach at) around the (long overdue) transformation of our library. It’s great to see organizations like our library opening up their thinking to their clients. Open administration – where groups negotiating change expose their thinking to their stakeholders – is a trend that should be encouraged.

It’s interesting that both the Transformation Team and the Chief Librarian Jeff Trzeciak’s blog are on wordpress.com rather than on McMaster servers.

XFN – XHTML Friends Network

XFN – XHTML Friends Network is a way to tag relationships. Here is an example:

<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...

The attribute “rel” uses a set of simple keywords to describe the relationship between the author of the page linking from to the person represented by the page (blog or home page) linking to. Interestingly, XFN was designed to only allow positive or neutral relationships.

What can you do with XFN? Well … in principle it will allow the graphing of relationships between people representative sites. rubhub.com is an XFN lookup engine to which you can add your page and then, once it has crawled your site you can see the relationships linking out or in.

I discovered this playing with Word Press which has incorporated it into its links/blogroll feature.

Lanier: Digital Maoism

Edge has an essay by VR visionary Jaron Lanier called Digital Maoism about how wikis and other forms of social networking are just replacing one elite with a collective.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

Thanks to Mark for pointing this out.

Academic Blogging

The Chronicle of Higher Education has two online stories related to scholars who blog. The first by Ivan Tribble (a pseudonym), Bloggers Need Not Apply (July 8, 2005) asks “What is it with job seekers who also write blogs?” It goes on to suggest that, “More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.”

The other by David Glenn from the issue of June 6, 2003, is titled, Scholars Who Blog. It starts with the question “Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?” Glenn goes on describe actual cases of scholars who blog and provides a case study of one that took off. Glenn is more sympathetic:

Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.’s.

I would add that blogging can also be a way of connecting to unanticipated other researchers and a way of opening/sharing the process.

Kottke: the first professional blogger

According to the Jason Wikipedia article, Jason Kottke of kottke.org was the first to try to make a living from blogging through a PBS-like micropatrons approach where he had a 3 week “fund drive” which raised enough for him to blog for a year.

After a year he reflected on the experience in Oh, what a year. felixsalmon was not impressed.

This story, which was big news at the time, is old now, I know. Thanks to Matt for alerting me to it (back when it was news.)