Category: Conference

Replaying Japan 2014

Last week we organized Replaying Japan 2014 here in Edmoton. This was the second international conference on Japanese game studies and the third event we co-organized with the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (in Japanese with English pamphlet).

The opening keynote was by Tomohiro Nishikado, the designer of Space Invaders – the 1978 game that launched specialty arcades in Japan. He talked about the design process and showed his notebooks which he had brought. Here you can see the page on his notebook with the sketches of the aliens and then the bitmap versions. I kept my conference notes on his talk and others here.

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The conference was a huge success with over 100 attendees from 6 countries and over 20 universities. We had people from industry, academia and government too. We had a significant number of Japanese speakers despite English being the language of the conference. After the conference we met to plan for next year’s conference in Kyoto. See you there!

This conference was supported by the Japan Foundation, the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence, the Prince Takamado Centre, the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, CIRCA, and the University of Alberta.

DH 2014, Dagstuhl, and Exploiting Text

Over the last month I’ve been to a number of conferences that I have been writing conference notes on.

  • At the beginning of July I was at DH 2014 in Lausanne Switzerland where I gave a workshop with Stéfan Sinclair on Your Very Own Voyant, participated in some panels and gave a paper (also with Stéfan).
  • I was at a Dagstuhl around data science and digital humanities at the end of July. We had a fascinating conversation. I ended up in a workshop on the ethics of big data which is going to become yet something else I wish I had the time to study properly.
  • At the beginning of August I went to a workshop at Waterloo that was in honour of Frank Wm. Tompa, Exploiting Text. This workshop had speakers, including myself, who spoke to issues that Tompa was interested in from dictionaries to algorithms for text retrieval. I was often lost in the algorithm talks but it was fascinating to listen to a different view of text.

CSDH-SCHN 2014 Conference

I have posted my CSDH-SCHN 2014 conference notes now that the conference is over. I will probably put up some notes on CGSA 2014 also in there tomorrow. We had great participation this year. You can see the conference programme here. One thing that went well is the Digital Demonstration session which was like a poster session, but with demos of neat tools and digital projects. Some themes:

  • Visualization and text mining
  • Topic modelling and mallet (see theme immediately above)
  • This moment in digital humanities in Canada
  • Studying the history of our disciplines
  • Connecting with the other humanities disciplines and organizations like Compute Canada

Around the World Conference

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Today we are running the Around the World Conference from the University of Alberta. This year’s topic is privacy and surveillance in the digital age. The Kule Institute for Advanced Study is hosting this online conference. Here are some of my opening comments,

I would like to welcome you to our second Around the World Conference. This year’s conference is on Privacy and Surveillance in the Digital Age.

The ATW conference was the idea of the Founding Director of KIAS, Jerry Varsava. The idea is to support a truly international discussion around a topic that concerns us all around the world.

This year we have speakers from 11 countries including Nigeria, Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Germany, Brazil, the US, and of course Canada.

This ATW conference is an experiment. It is an experiment because it is difficult to coordinate the technology across so many countries and institutions. It is an experiment in finding ways to move ideas without moving bodies. It is an experiment in global discussion.

Can You DIG It? 2014

The Humanities Computing Student Association is putting on a neat conference, Can You DIG It? 2014. The conference will take place on March 14th at the University of Alberta. There will be panels and workshops on:

  • Digging Mobile Media: Topics in Emerging Tech
  • Digging New Lines: Topics in Digital Mapping
  • Digital Representation: Women in Video Games
  • Hearing the Digital: Topics in Sound Art & Music

Find out more and register here.

Digital Environmental Humanities

This weekend I was at a neat workshop on Digital Environmental Humanities organized by Stephanie Posthumous at McGill University. You can see my workshop notes here, Digital Environmental Humanities Network. I was struck at the importance of research and activism from the humanities on the issue of the environment. Too often issues are framed as scientific or policy (social scientific). The humanities bring a historical, philosophical, ethical, and critical perspective that is needed.
The workshop brought together folks working in environmental humanities and others (like me) in the digital humanities to see if we could articulate a common research agenda. I was struck by similarities in the evolution of these two applied fields – including the tensions around interdisciplinarity. By the end I could see a useful collaboration to develop a suite of outreach venues for environmental humanities including:

  • An environment for curators to pull together “issues” that include different media. This would have some of the features of the Journal of Digital Humanities, but not necessarily be a journal.
  • One of the types of “issues” gathered could be e-books with media components suitable for teaching about the environment and culture.
  • Another type of “issue” could be documentation from an arts intervention.
  • Many of these issues and interventions could be designed from the beginning to have a hybrid existence. For example, documentation from an arts performance could be gathered in the curatorial environment and later edited into a catalogue for print publication.
  • A related idea would be a NINES-like federated repository for finding, reviewing, and curating digital interventions.
  • Crowdsourcing or citizen science type interface to bring other publics into the discussion.
  • Online conferences to minimize the impact of our research on the environment. The idea would be to look at the impact of our research itself and try to find alternative ways of connecting while also asking about how we think about the impact of research on the environment.

Multipoint Touch Variorum

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Luciano Frizzera has put the video up that he showed at Digital Humanities 2013 in our INKE panel. His video shows his multi-point touch variorum edition prototypes. He has been prototyping how we could use gestures on large screens, especially tables. He has interesting ideas about how people can discuss something on different sides of a table.