Category: Conference

Instant History conference

This weekend I gave a talk at a lovely one day conference on Instant History, The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies. My conference notes are here. The conference was organized by Paul Eggert, among others. Steve Jones, Ted Underwood and Laura Mandell also talked.

I gave the first talk on “Tremendous Labour: Busa’s Methods” – a paper coming from the work Stéfan Sinclair and I are doing. I talked about the reconstruction of Busa’s Index project. I claimed that Busa and Tasman made two crucial innovations. The first was figuring out how to represent data on punched cards so that it could be processed (the data structures). The second was figuring out how to use the punched card machines at hand to tokenize unstructured text. I walked through what we know about their actual methods and talked about our attempts to replicate them:

I was lucky to have two great respondents (Kyle Roberts and Schlomo Argamon) who both pointed out important contextual issues to consider, as in:

  • We need to pay attention to the Jesuit and spiritual dimensions of Busa’s work.
  • We need to think about the dialectic of those critical of computing and those optimistic about it.

CWRC/CSEC: The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) today launched its Collaboratory. The Collaboratory is a distributed editing environment that allows projects to edit scholarly electronic texts (using CWRC Writer), manage editorial workflows, and publish collections. There are also links to other tools like CWRC Catalogue and Voyant (that I am involved in.) There is an impressive set of projects already featured in CWRC, but it is open to new projects and designed to help them.

Susan Brown deserves a lot of credit for imagining this, writing the CFI (and other) proposals, leading the development and now managing the release. I hope it gets used as it is a fabulous layer of infrastructure designed by scholars for scholars.

One important component in CWRC is CWRC-Writer, an in-browser XML editor that can be hooked into content management systems like the CWRC back-end. It allows for stand-off markup and connects to entity databases for tagging entities in standardized ways.

GamesCon 2016

The Church of Games
The Church of Games

After Replaying Japan 2016 a bunch of us took the train to Cologne to go to gamescon 2016, Europe’s biggest videogame convention. A selection of my GamesCon 2016 photos are on Flickr.

The convention was depressing. Long line ups for overhyped commercial titles. Music too loud. Too many hucksters getting us cheering for crap. The creative side of gaming seemed to be overwhelmed by the commercialization. A church of gaming indeed.

The best area was the retrogaming area which a great mix of systems you could play and exhibits. The indie game area also had some brilliant games including Awkward Ellie, where you play an awkward elephant at a tea party. There was also a one-d game called Line Wobbler where you controlled a dot travelling up a LED strip. Playful fun in one dimension.

Replaying Japan 2016

29021966955_ff2cccc999_z
Posing with Namco designers Masanobu Endō (Xevious), Toru Iwatani (Pac-Man), me, Junko Ozawa (music for Tower of Druaga), and Yoshihiro Kishimoto (R.B.I. Baseball) at Replaying Japan 2016

 

Last week I was at Replaying Japan 2016 which was held in Leipzig and organized by Martin Roth and Martin Picard of the jGames Research Initiative at University of Leipzig. You can see my Replaying Japan 2016 Conference Report here. The conference is the fifth such conference that I have helped organize to look at Japanese and Asian videogame culture. We had terrific keynotes from Namco game and game music designers from the 1980s including Iwatani (Pac-Man) and Junko Ozawa (music for many Namco arcade and videogames). We also had a terrific talk about the history of localization from Minako O’Hagan.

The conference continued a tradition of bringing Western and Japanese game studies researchers together in a friendly environment. The quality of papers was really quite high and the conversation even better. The time has come to develop a community of research.

Digital Humanities 2016 in Kraków

The week of the 11th tot he 16th of July was Digital Humanities 2016 in Kraków. This conference was, in my opinion, the best organized DH conference I have attended (and I have attended most of them since the first joint ACH-ALLC conference in Toronto in 1989.) Jan Rybicki and Maciej Eder deserve credit for a lovely conference.

My conference notes are on philosophi.ca so I won’t go into a lot of detail here. Some of the themes worth noting include:

  • Diversity. There was a lot of discussion and sessions dedicated to diversity of different sorts. Real differences were aired that I think most people felt was good.
  • Pedagogy. Perhaps it is what I attended, but it seemed that there was a new energy around pedagogical discussions. I was impressed by the creative approaches and also by the large-scale projects like Dariah-EU working group on Training and Education.
  • Web Historiography. There were a number of talks/panels that drew on the web as evidence. I was pleased to see a discussion of the need to think historiographically about the web. What is archived? What is missing?
  • Posters. There was a great set of posters. Here is a link to photos I took of a selection.

Some of the events and papers I was involved in include:

  • New Scholars Symposium which was supported by CHCI and centerNet. I co-organized this with Rachel Hendry.
  • Innovations in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Local, National, and International Training. I was part of a one day mini-conference on training and gave a short presentation on Visualization at the final panel on Publication Approaches Supporting DH Pedagogy.
  • CWRC & Voyant Tools: Text Repository Meets Text Analysis. I was one of three instructors on a workshop on CWRC and Voyant.
  • Curating Just-In-Time Datasets from the Web. I gave a paper on a project that is scraping Twitter that was coauthored with Todd Suomela and Ryan Chartier.
  • The Trace of Theory: Extracting Subsets from Large Collections. I introduced and gave one of the short papers on a panel of work we did as part of the Text Mining the Novel project with the HathiTrust Research Center.
  • Web Historiography – A New Challenge for Digital Humanities? I gave a short presentation on the Ethics of Scraping Twitter.

Congress 2016 (CSDH and CGSA)

As I get ready to fly back to Germany I’m finishing my conference notes on Congress 2016 (CSDH and CGSA). Calgary was nice and not to hot for Congress and we were welcomed by a malware attack on Congress that meant that many employees couldn’t use their machines. Nevertheless the conference seemed very well organized and the campus lovely.

My conference notes cover mostly the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, but also DHSI at Congress, where I presented CWRC for Susan Brown, and the last day of the Canadian Game Studies Association. Here are some general reflections.

  • I am impressed by how the CGSA is growing and how vital it is. It has as many attendees as CSDH, but younger and enthusiastic attendees rather than tired. Much of the credit goes to the long term leadership of people like Jen Jensen.
  • CSDH has some terrific keynotes this year starting with Ian Milligan, then Tara McPherson, and finally Diane Jakacki.
  • It was great to see people coming up from the USA as CSDH/SCHN gets a reputation for being a welcoming conference in North America.
  • Stéfan Sinclair and I had a book launch for Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities at which Chad Gaffield said a few words. It was gratifying that so many friends came out for this.

At the CSDH AGM we passed a motion to adopt Guidelines on Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Google Doc). The Guidelines discuss the value of digital work and provide guidelines for evaluation:

Programs of research, which are by nature exploratory, may require faculty members to take up modes of research that depart from methods they have previously used, therefore the form the resulting scholarship takes should not prejudice its evaluation. Original works in new media forms, whether digital or other, should be evaluated as scholarship following best practices if so presented. Likewise, researchers should be encouraged to experiment with new forms when disseminating knowledge, confident that their experiments will be fairly evaluated.

The Guidelines have a final section on Documented Deposit:

Digital media have not only expanded the forms that research can take, but research practices are also changing in the face of digital distribution and open access publishing. In particular we are being called on to preserve research data and to share new knowledge openly. Universities that have the infrastructure should encourage faculty to deposit not only digital works, but also curated datasets and preprint versions of papers/monographs with documentation in an open access form. These can be deposited with an embargo in digital archives as part of good practice around research dissemination and preservation. The deposit of work, including online published work, even if it is available elsewhere, ensures the long-term preservation by ensuring that there are copies in more than one place. Further, libraries can then ensure that the work is not only preserved, but is discoverable in the long term as publications come and go.

 

ReFig 2015

I’ve just left the ReFig 2015 workshop. I kept my workshop notes at Re-Figuring Innovation in Games (ReFig) 2015. Important research with an awesome team that I hope to follow. Last night we were treated to a conversation with Anita Sarkeesian that was fascinating. She has had more of an effect and probably done more good research in preparing the videos than most of the rest of us. There are lessons to be learned about how to address a broader audience, how to have an impact, and how to stay focused on social justice.

philosophi.ca : Digital Humanities Concepts 2015

TU Darmstadt MA LLC Structure

Just left a most delightful conference on Key ideas and concepts of Digital Humanities in Darmstadt, Germany. My conference notes are on philosophi.ca : Digital Humanities Concepts 2015. The conference brought together an extraordinary set of speakers who were influential in the field when I entered it. Susan Hockey, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Nancy Ide, George Landow, Wilhelm Ott and the list goes on. I would be hard pressed to imagine a conference I have been at better able to reflect on the history and ideas of humanities computing. The organizers Andrea Rapp, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Sabine Bartsch and Michael Bender deserve much more praise than I was able to lavish on them.

Among all the great papers I will mention:

  • Michael Sperberg-McQueen gave a very smart and well argued paper on descriptive markup arguing against its dismissal as enforcing hierarchies.
  • Marco Passarotti talked about the Index Thomisticus (which he directs) and the Busa Archive. He brought some documents including some Gantt charts and early letters. I am definitely going to visit him and the archive in Milan.
  • Fotis Jannidis gave a great paper on topic modelling and its temptations. He has very interesting stuff to say about how the method has been adopted by humanists.
  • Julia Flanders gave a paper on “Looking for Gender in the History of DH” that when published will, I predict, become mandatory reading. She gives us a way forward after what happened at DH 2015. It was a truly wise and humble talk that could go a long way to providing an inclusive way forward.
  • Nancy Ide gave a great overview of the separate trajectories taken by DH and Corpus Linguistics.
  • Peter Robinson gave a call for open editions and walked us through what that might mean.

Given the speakers, there was a lot of reflection on the history of humanities computing and disciplinarity, though enframed by a German context. TU Darmstadt has an MA in Linguistic and Literary Computing (see image of the structure of the degree above) and is now developing an undergrad degree.