Month: January 2014

Conference Report: Digital Infrastructure Summit 2014

I have just finished participating in and writing up a conference report on the Digital Infrastructure Summit 2014 in Ottawa. This summit brought some 140 people together from across Canada and across the stakeholders to discuss how to develop leading digital infrastructure in Canada. This was organized by the Digital Infrastructure Leadership Council. For this Summit the Council (working with Janet Halliwell and colleagues) developed a fabulous set of reference materials that paint a picture of the state of digital infrastructure in Canada.

You can see my longer conference report for details, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Infrastructure has been redefined, largely because of SSRHC’s leadership, as big and long data. This redefinition from infrastructure as tubes to focus on research data for new knowledge has all sorts of interesting effects. In brings libraries in, among other things.
  • Chad Gaffield (President of SSRHC) made the point that there is a paradigm shift taking place across many disciplines as we deal with the digital in research. As we create more and more research evidence in digital form it is vital that we build the infrastructure that can preserve and make useful this evidence over the long term.
  • We have a peculiarly Canadian problem that most of the stakeholders are more than willing to contribute to any coalition, but no one is jumping in to lead. Everyone is too polite. No one wants a new body, but no existing body seems to want to take the lead.
  • There is a lot of infrastructure already in place, but they are often not bundled as services that researchers understand. Much could be made of the infrastructure in place if there were a training layer and “concierge” layer that connects to researchers.

Silly Gamification: Code Kwondo

I just came across this silly gamification, the Microsoft Developer Movement – Code Kwondo. The idea is that developers get points (and belts) if they learn Windows Phone and Windows 8 programming techniques. This competition is only available to residents of Canada and it includes challenges. I can’t tell if this is simple way of getting Canadian developers creating apps for Windows or if it is patronizing to developers. The imagery is reminiscent of Bruce Lee with nunchuks or Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Either way they are playing with the Old Martial Arts Master trope. The title “Code Kwando” sounds like someone replaced the “Tae” in “Tae Kwan Do” with “Code” to get “Code Kwan Do.” My understanding of the Korean is that Kwan means “fist” and Do means “art” or “path of”. Thus we have a project that is the Path of Fist Code or Code Fist Art. Not sure they put a lot of thought into this, or perhaps they did.

7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser

Ars Technica has a nice collection of 7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser. It is impressive how earlier operating systems are being emulated in Javascript and these emulations are much more accessible because they run in the browser. I had fun trying an emulation of a Mac Plus running Mac OS 7 (see above). I wonder if we could load the HyperCard version of Perseus in it.

Speaking of in-browser emulators, there are also NES and SuperNES emulators. They have a number of games available for these Flash Emulators that you can play in-browser.

The Coming MOOC Copyright Problem And Its Impact on Students and Universities

From Eleni, a short article on coming issues around copyright at MOOCs, The Coming MOOC Copyright Problem And Its Impact on Students and Universities. These issues are not really new. Anyone working on distance education in the 80s and 90s had to face these issues, especially if you were a faculty member creating content. Our University IP approach to copyright has languished as it is not considered as important as patentable IP. University IP boards tend to deal with the types of IP that make money for the university and not those that are usually assigned to faculty. The problem comes when a university invests significant funds in developing a MOOC or Blended Learning course. A university wants to be sure the copyright issues are solved before investment. A university wants some clarity as to who, of a large team of faculty, graduate students, videographers, graphic designers and programmers, really owns anything. A University want to be able to offer the course even if members of the team move on (which faculty do a lot.) The approach I am pushing at U of Alberta is non-exclusive rights so that anyone in the team (including the University) can do what they want with the materials. A prof can take the materials to another university if they leave and rebuild a similar course. All that is expected is that people and institutions are given credit.

Data Visualization: Looking back, going forward

D-Lib Magazine has a Featured Digital Collection in this issue. See the right-hand column of the Table of Contents for January/February 2014. The featured collection is DataVis.ca, a terrific site about visualization that has been organized by Michael Friendly at York University. The site is nicely organized and pays attention to the history of visualization. (The image above is the “first (known) statistical graph – from 1644 by Michael Florent van Langren.)

I’m not only impressed by the DataVis.ca site, but also that D-Lib is featuring sites, something I didn’t notice before. This is a nice way to recognize work (web archives) that are difficult to formally review.

In the Name of Love

From the Jacobin, an article critical of the “Do What You Love” (DWYL) mantra, In the Name of Love. As the MLA wraps up, there have been a lot of articles about adjunct labour in the academy. Graduate students and recent PhDs take on part-time piece work (sessional positions) just to keep alive the dream of a tenure track job. DWYL advice hides the large scale changes that call for political action, not rugged individualism. Who benefits if we all think we are doing what we love? Who is not doing what they love so some of us can?

No girls allowed

I’ve been meaning to blog about a nice feature in Polygon, No girls allowed. The essay starts by talking about gendered toys (and toy store aisles) and then moves on to why there isn’t the same gendering in games, but worse:

As for the boys section — there isn’t one. Everything else is for boys.

If the selection at the average retailer is anything to go by, girls don’t play video games. If cultural stereotypes are anything to go by, video games are for males. They’re the makers, the buyers and the players.

It has been fashionable to point to statistics that suggest “forty-five percent of all game players are women.” (Entertainment Software Association Industry Facts) Such facts, however, apply to all games, but not necessarily to retail games which are marketed more to males. The essay therefore looks at marketing and the vicious cycle of designing for a market (young men) that then reinforces beliefs about the market (it is best to target young men.)

According to Roeser, it makes sense from a marketing perspective for the video game industry to have pursued a male audience, which is exactly what it did starting in the early ’90s.

Tracey Lien then looks back at the history of game marketing and notes how it is only recently that there has been such market segmentation. Lien writes about early women developers like Carol Shaw who worked for Atari and how they weren’t designing for a particular gender.

Things changed in the mid 1980s after the Atari crash. Nintendo saved the industry by reintroducing games as toys which were then marketed as toys. Nintendo started gathering demographic information and discovered that more boys were playing which then fed into segmentation.

In the 1990s, the messaging of video game advertisements takes a different turn. Television commercials for the Game Boy feature only young boys and teenagers. The ad for the Game Boy Color has a boy zapping what appears to be a knight with a finger laser. Atari filmed a bizarre series of infomercials that shows a man how much his life will improve if he upgrades to the Jaguar console. With each “improvement,” he has more and more attractive women fawning over him. There is nothing in any of the ads that indicate that the consoles and games are for anyone other than young men.

The marketing segmentation became a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that ignored all the games popular with women like Myst and the Sims. The marketing and media present the male oriented games as the important or real games and the others as exceptions. Perhaps Grand Theft Auto is the exception and Farmville is the norm. Perhaps retail console games are just a fraction of game culture.

This essay strikes me as a great entry into talking about gender and games for a course. I also like the web design with the images that alternate from one side to the other.

On a related note, see the Let Toys Be Toys (for Girls and Boys) advocacy web site.

 

 

How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

Alexis C. Madrigal has a fine article in The Atlantic on How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood (Jan. 2, 2014). The article moves from an interesting problem about Netflix’s micro-genres, to text analysis of results of a scrape, to reverse engineering the Netflix algorithm, to creating a genre generator (at the top of the article) and then to an interview with the Netflix VP of Product who was responsible for the tagging system. It is a lovely example of thinking through something and using technology when needed. The text analysis isn’t the point, it is a tool to use in understanding the 76,897 micro-genres uncovered. (Think about it … Netflix has over 70,000 genres of movies and TV shows, some with no actual movies or shows as examples of the micro-genre.)

Madrigal goes on to talk about the procedure Netflix uses to create genres and use them in recommending shows. It turns out to be a combination of content analysis (actual humans watching a movie/show and ranking it in various ways) and automatic methods that combine tags. This combination of human and machine methods is also the process Madrigal describes for his own pursuit of Netflix genres. It is another sense of humanities computing – those procedures that involve both human and algorithmic interventions.

The post ends with an anomaly that illustrates the hybridity of procedure. It turns out the most named actor is Raymond Burr of Perry Mason. Netflix has a larger number of altgenres with Raymond Burr than anyone else. Why would he rank so high in micro-genres? Madrigal tries a theory as to why this is that is refuted by the VP Yellin, but Yellin can’t explain the anomaly either. As Madrigal points out, in Perry Mason shows the mystery is always resolved by the end, but in the case of the mystery of Raymond Burr in genre, there is no revealing bit of evidence that helps us understand how he rose in the ranks.

On the other hand, no one — not even Yellin — is quite sure why there are so many altgenres that feature Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale. It’s inexplicable with human logic. It’s just something that happened.

I tried on a bunch of different names for the Perry Mason thing: ghost, gremlin, not-quite-a-bug. What do you call the something-in-the-code-and-data which led to the existence of these microgenres?

The vexing, remarkable conclusion is that when companies combine human intelligence and machine intelligence, some things happen that we cannot understand.

“Let me get philosophical for a minute. In a human world, life is made interesting by serendipity,” Yellin told me. “The more complexity you add to a machine world, you’re adding serendipity that you couldn’t imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature.”

Perhaps this serendipity is what is original in the hybrid procedures involving human practices and algorithms? For some these anomalies are the false positives that disrupt big data’s certainty, for others they are the other insight that emerges from the mixing of human and computer processes. As Madrigal concludes:

Perry Mason episodes were famous for the reveal, the pivotal moment in a trial when Mason would reveal the crucial piece of evidence that makes it all makes sense and wins the day.

Now, reality gets coded into data for the machines, and then decoded back into descriptions for humans. Along the way, humans ability to understand what’s happening gets thinned out. When we go looking for answers and causes, we rarely find that aha! evidence or have the Perry Mason moment. Because it all doesn’t actually make sense.

Netflix may have solved the mystery of what to watch next, but that generated its own smaller mysteries.

And sometimes we call that a bug and sometimes we call it a feature.

We need to talk about TED by Benjamin Bratton

The Guardian has reprinted the trasnscript of Benjamin Bratton’s We need to talk about TED talk that is critical of TED. He looks at each of the three terms in T.E.D. (Technology, Entertainment, Design) and here is paraphrase of some of his points:

  • TED talks conceptualize the future, but tend to oversimplify it.
  • TED wants to be about imagining the future, but it tends to promote placebo politics and technology.
  • We are told that change is accelerating, but while that may be true of technology, it isn’t true of politics and culture.
  • TED talks have too much faith in technology. Another futurism is possible.
  • Capitalism is presented as being about rocket ships and nanomedicine. It is actually about Walmart jobs, McMansions and government spying.

He ends by talking about design. He argues that it shouldn’t be about innovation, but about innoculation. Design is presented in TED as the heroic solving a puzzles that will magically fix everything. Instead he argues for design as slogging through the hard stuff – understanding the politics and cultural issues.

He ends by summarizing why he feels TED is not just a distraction, but harmful. He believes TED misdirects our attention by charming us with the entertaining simple solutions while avoiding the messy, chaotic, complex issues that can’t be solved by technology.

I sometimes wonder if Humanities Computing didn’t serve a similar purpose in the humanities. Is it a form of comic (technological) relief from the brutal truths we confront in the humanities … especially the suspicion that we make no difference when we do confront racism, sexism, surveillance, politics and technohype. Why not relax and play a bit with the other?