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
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 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.
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:
CGSA:
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!
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:
This week I am participating in the 6th Around the World Conference organized by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study. This e-conference (electronic conference) is on Sustainable Research and we have a panel on a different topic every day of the week. (If you miss a panel, check out our YouTube channel.) Today we had a fabulous panel on Art and/in the Anthropocene that was led by Natalie Loveless and Jesse Beier. You can see some thoughts on the e-conference under the Twitter hastag #ATW2018, which we share with the American Trombone Workshop.
Manifest Attention
One of the problems with e-conferences is that they are local for everyone which means that everyone tunes in and out depending on what they have scheduled rather than devoting the time. When you fly to a conference you can’t be expected to leave the conference for a meeting, but when a conference is local or online we tend to not pay attention as we would when afar.
This has to change if we are to wean ourselves of flying any time we want to pay attention to a conference. We have to learn to be deliberate about allocating time to an e-conference. We have to manifest attention.
One of the researchers in the GamerGate Reactions team has created a fabulous set of recommendations for team members doing dangerous research. See Security_Recommendations_2018_v2.0. This document brings together in one place a lot of information and links on how to secure your identity and research. The researcher put this together in support of a panel that I am chairing this afternoon on Risky Research that is part of a day of panels/workshops following the Edward Snowden talk yesterday evening. (You can see my blog entry on Snowden’s talk here.) The key topics covered include:
Today the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) hosted a panel discussion on More Conferencing, Less Carbon. The discussion took place on site and online on your YouTube channel.
At this panel discussion Trevor Chow-Fraser of the Office of Sustainability announced the release of Moving Ideas Without Moving People a toolkit on running e-conferences at the University of Alberta. This toolkit was co-authored by Trevor Chow-Fraser, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier and was based on the KIAS experience organizing our Around the World e-conferences.
What is at stake is the greening of research. We need to try and adapt different forms of video conferencing and live streaming to our conference/workshop needs in research. We need to depend less on F2F (face-to-face) conferences where everyone flies in. We need to confront the carbon costs of flights and how habituated we are to flying for research.
Lynne Siemens and Ray Siemens gave the final keynote of the On the Benefits of Failure conference. Their talk was titled “Training Ground for Success? Perspectives on Failure in Several Contexts.”
Last week I presented a keynote at the Digital Cultures, Big Data and Society conference. (You can seem my conference notes at Digital Cultures Big Data And Society.) The talk I gave was titled “Thinking-Through Big Data in the Humanities” in which I argued that the humanities have the history, skills and responsibility to engage with the topic of big data: