The World of Dante is a totally renovated site from the University of Virginia (IATH) on Dante. It has some neat features. They use an image by Domenico di Michelino of Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy as a visual introduction to the site. You roll over the parts of the image and get an introduction to the project. The project also has a lot of media, including music that was commissioned to connect to references in the text to music. I heard some of this music at the New Horizons conference. This is a gem of a project even if sometimes paging the texts is slow – I’m told that it has to do with caching – just be patient.
Month: September 2008
Pushing Play
A student of mine from last year, Jacob, who was one of the two who did the innovative Half-Life Havoc project, has started a gaming blog and company, Pushing Play. His company is developing game conference,
The Pushing Play Conference is all about bringing hardcore, casual, midcore gamers together, as well as Ludologists, game designers, and even non-gamers. By bringing these people together and giving them a forum to interact we can get a better understanding of the gaming community as a whole, rather than supporting the over-used image of gamers strictly being teenage boys.
Newsknitter: Knitted Visualization
Newsknitter is a project that gathers news from RSS feeds and then generates a visualization that can then be knitted into a sweater. Check out the images of sweaters knitted. This project has been exhibited at Ars Electronica and is the work of two PhD candidates at Kunstuniversität Linz. At first the idea of machine knitted sweaters of text visualization sounds like a conceptual art work with no future, but as I think about it, the idea of just-in-time information being visualized and used to generate stable material objects like a sweater sounds timely. All sorts of objects could have their designs generated on the spot and on demand from information off the net. Why should data be only visualized and not materialized?
Appropriation Art: 51st State Comic
Once I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.
Thanks to Erika for this.
Comic Book on Google Chrome
The blog, Google Blogoscoped has a scan of Scott McCloud’s comic book to explain the new Google Browser called Chrome, see Google on Google Chrome – comic book or Google’s version. It is interesting that Google used the comic book format to explain what is special about Chrome (see Scott’s FAQ), but Chrome itself, and how it is being presented, is also important. A few random thoughts:
- The comic presents Chrome as designed for running applications. This strikes me as an Andreessen move where you alert Microsoft to the fact that you want to make a browser that replaces the OS thereby making Windows unnecessary and Microsoft poorer. Maybe Google will fare better than Netscape.
- Google is simplifying the interface to the browser. It will be interesting to see if their tab-oriented interface will work. Perhaps the comic book is to explain to people who like snazzy interfaces why a simple browser is better even if you can’t see the improvements in features.
- I like their idea of the OMNIBOX – a location box and Google search box with autocompletion all in one. Google is really pushing the idea of a single field into which you can type anything and you get some sort of intelligent response. Will we eventually get an AI box of sorts that tries to respond to natural language (or, to be more exact, the emergent Googlese that we all learn to type using Googles Omnibox.) Is this the route to the natural language interface of pre-GUI days when we though typing text was the way to interact with the computer? Is this the return of the command line?