Category: Conference

The Body in Question(s)


Isabelle Van Grimde gave the opening talk at Dyscorpia on her work, including projects like The Body in Question(s). In another project Les Gestes, she collaborated with the McGill IDMIL lab who developed digital musical instruments for the dancers to wear and dance/play.

Van Grimde’s company Corps Secrets has the challenge of creating dances that can travel which means that the technologies/instruments have to . They use intergenerational casts (the elderly or children.) They are now working with sensors more than instruments so the dancers are free of equipment.

The Unpredictability of Gameplay: Mark R. Johnson: Bloomsbury Academic

The Unpredictability of Gameplay explores the many forms of unpredictability in games and proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and categorizing non-deterministic game mechanics.

Today we celebrated the publication by Bloomsbury of Mark R. Johnson’s The Unpredictability of Gameplay.Johnson proposes a typology of unpredictability:

  • Randomness (initial conditions of the game)
  • Chance (during play)
  • Luck (in/ability for player to affect final outcome)
  • Instability (outside the game)

Mark’s book nicely connects gaming and gambling. It helps us understand the way microgames in larger videogames can become a form of gambling. He looks at loot boxes where players are encouraged to spend small amounts of money over and over to get virtual goods inside a larger game. In Japan Kompu Gacha (or complete gacha) was eventually discouraged by the government because too many people were effectively gambling in their attempts to collect complete sets of virtual goods by paying over and over to open loot boxes. Compu gacha and other forms of loot boxes in videogames are a way for developers to monetize a game, but they also create metagae contexts that are, in effect, gambling. What is interesting, is that people don’t think of videogames as sites for gambling. One wants to say that this is another  (micro) form of casino capitalism.

Letting neural networks be weird

Halloween Costume Names Generated by a Weird AI

Jingwei, a bright digital humanities student working as a research assistant, has been playing with generative AI approaches from aiweirdness.com – Letting neural networks be weird. Janelle Shane has made neural networks funny by using the to generate things like New My Little Ponies. Jingwei scraped titles of digital humanities conferences from various conference sites and trained and generated new titles just waiting to be proposed as papers:

  • The Catalogue of the Cultural Heritage Parts

  • Automatic European Pathworks and Indexte Corpus and Mullisian Descriptions

  • Minimal Intellectual tools and Actorical Normiels: The Case study of the Digital Humanities Classics

  • Automatic European Periodical Mexico: The Case of the Digital Hour

  • TEIviv Industics – Representation dans le perfect textbook

  • Conceptions of the Digital Homer Centre

  • Preserving Critical Computational App thinking in DH Languages

  • DH Potential Works: US Work Film Translation Science

  • Translation Text Mining and GiS 2.0

  • DH Facilitating the RIATI of the Digital Scholar

  • Shape Comparing Data Creating and Scholarly Edition

  • DH Federation of the Digital Humanities: The Network in the Halleni building and Web Study of Digital Humanities in the Hid-Cloudy

  • The First Web Study of Build: A “Digitie-Game as the Moreliency of the Digital Humanities: The Case study of the Digital Hour: The Scale Text Story Minimalism: the Case of Public Australian Recognition Translation and Puradopase

  • The Computational Text of Contemporary Corpora

  • The Social Network of Linguosation in Data Washingtone

  • Designing formation of Data visualization

  • The Computational Text of Context: The Case of the World War and Athngr across Theory

  • The Film Translation Text Center: The Context of the Cultural Hermental Peripherents

  • The Social Infrastructure  PPA: Artificial Data In a Digital Harl to Mexquise (1950-1936)

  • EMO Artificial Contributions of the Hauth Past Works of Warla Management Infriction

  • DAARRhK Platform for Data

  • Automatic Digital Harlocator and Scholar

  • Complex Networks of Computational Corpus

  • IMPArative Mining Trail with DH Portal

  • Pursour Auchese of the Social Flowchart of European Nation

  • The Stefanopology: The Digital Humanities

Russian Policy and the War in Ukraine’s Donbas – Options for the Future and Canadian Responses

Today I am attending a conference on Russian Policy and the War in Ukraine’s Donbas – Options for the Future and Canadian Responses. The Kule Institute for Advanced Study is a co-sponsor of the conference as is the Defence Engagement Program of the Department of National Defence. The conference is looking closely at what happened in Donbas how different sides have presented the conflict which has been woven into memorialization of WWW II and before. I was struck by how Russian propaganda continues to delegitimize Ukrainian independence by painting Ukrainian nationalism as an extension of the fascism they fought in WWW II. History is being used and reused on both sides.

Update: We have now put up a video archive of the talks of the conference. Enjoy!

Watch Andy Warhol “Paint” On A Commodore Computer: Gothamist

Eric Hayot at the Novel Worlds conference showed a slide with an image of Debbie Harry of Blondie painted on the Amiga by Andy Warhol. There is a video of Warhol painting on the Amiga at the premiere of the Commodore Amiga.

This is discussed in a documentary The Invisible Photograph: Part 2 (Trapped). The documentary also talks about recovering other images from Warhol’s original Amiga that was preserved by the The Andy Warhol Museum.

Technologizer has a nice retrospective on the Amiga, Amiga: 25 Years Later. I remember when it came out in 1985. I had a Mac by then, but was intrigued by the colour Amiga and the video work people were doing with it.

Nakamura: Transmedia Storytelling within the Media Mix system in Japanese Pop Culture

Today I had the honour to introduce Professor Aki Nakamura from Ritsumeikan University who talked about Transmedia Storytelling within the Media Mix system in Japanese Pop Culture at the JSAC 2018 conference in Edmonton.

He began by introducing us to transmedia storytelling. He talked about how transmedia franchises can extend the fictional world through space and time.
Continue reading Nakamura: Transmedia Storytelling within the Media Mix system in Japanese Pop Culture

Home – DIGRA 2018 Conference

Last week I was at the DIGRA 2018 Conference in Turin, Italy. The conference was well organized and the quality of papers was high. As always, I kept conference notes here.

I was struck how game studies is less and less about games. Of course, games are the subject of research, but game studies is less about the appreciation of games and more and more about what we can learn about other things through games. Games, like literature, have become a lens for looking at other things making the field richer and better aligned with other fields like media studies or literary criticism.

Next year the conference will be held in Japan and linked up with Replaying Japan. I look forward to the encounter between these different game studies cultures.

Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City

Digital Humanities 2018 is coming to a close. This conference was the first in the Global South and had two women keynotes. It was an example of a conference that really supported multilingualism. For the keynotes they had simultaneous translation. They had a mix of English and Spanish talks and many who spoke in one language had slides in the other.

As I often do, I kept conference notes here. These hardly capture the richness of a conference with parallel sessions.

CSDH and CGSA 2018

This year we had busy CSDH and CGSA meetings at Congress 2018 in Regina. My conference notes are here. Some of the papers I was involved in include:

CSDH-SCHN:

  • “Code Notebooks: New Tools for Digital Humanists” was presented by Kynan Ly and made the case for notebook-style programming in the digital humanities.
  • “Absorbing DiRT: Tool Discovery in the Digital Age” was presented by Kaitlyn Grant. The paper made the case for tool discovery registries and explained the merger of DiRT and TAPoR.
  • “Splendid Isolation: Big Data, Correspondence Analysis and Visualization in France” was presented by me. The paper talked about FRANTEXT and correspondence analysis in France in the 1970s and 1980s. I made the case that the French were doing big data and text mining long before we were in the Anglophone world.
  • “TATR: Using Content Analysis to Study Twitter Data” was a poster presented by Kynan Ly, Robert Budac, Jason Bradshaw and Anthony Owino. It showed IPython notebooks for analyzing Twitter data.
  • “Climate Change and Academia – Joint Panel with ESAC” was a panel I was on that focused on alternatives to flying for academics.

CGSA:

  • “Archiving an Untold History” was presented by Greg Whistance-Smith. He talked about our project to archive John Szczepaniak’s collection of interviews with Japanese game designers.
  • “Using Salience to Study Twitter Corpora” was presented by Robert Budac who talked about different algorithms for finding salient words in a Twitter corpus.
  • “Political Mobilization in the GG Community” was presented by ZP who talked about a study of a Twitter corpus that looked at the politics of the community.

Also, a PhD student I’m supervising, Sonja Sapach, won the CSDH-SCHN (Canadian Society for Digital Humanities) Ian Lancashire Award for Graduate Student Promise at CSDHSCHN18 at Congress. The Award “recognizes an outstanding presentation at our annual conference of original research in DH by a graduate student.” She won the award for a paper on “Tagging my Tears and Fears: Text-Mining the Autoethnography.” She is completing an interdisciplinary PhD in Sociology and Digital Humanities. Bravo Sonja!

Re-Imagining Education In An Automating World conference at George Brown

On May 25th I had a chance to attend a gem of a conference organized the Philosophy of Education (POE) committee at George Brown. They organized a conference with different modalities from conversations to formal talks to group work. The topic was Re-Imagining Education in An Automating World (see my conference notes here) and this conference is a seed for a larger one next year.

I gave a talk on Digital Citizenship at the end of the day where I tried to convince people that:

  • Data analytics are now a matter of citizenship (we all need to understand how we are being manipulated).
  • We therefore need to teach data literacy in the arts and humanities, so that
  • Students are prepared to contribute to and critique the ways analytics are used deployed.
  • This can be done by integrating data and analytical components in any course using field-appropriate data.