Is it Pokemon or Big Data ? is a simple game where you are presented with a name and you have to guess if it is a big data company or a Pokemon creature. My thanks to Jane for this.
Month: November 2015
Beginnings of e-commerce
As we spend lots of money on Black Friday there are a few stories looking a the start of internet e-commerce. There is New York Times article from 1994 Attention Shoppers: Internet is Open that suggests NetMarket was the first. A short video You’ll Never Guess What The First Thing Ever Sold On The Internet Was mentions some pot sales organized on the Arpanet.
NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday
NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday. A first step.
The Storage Engine from the Computer History Museum
The Storage Engine is a timeline of computer storage from the Computer History Museum. It is easy to navigate and goes back to Pliny and various analogue storage systems. The items are well documented with multiple images, contemporary documents, and current information. Lots of good historical information here.
The Computer History Museum seems to be doing a number of these technology history sites including one called The Silicon Engine with a timeline of semiconductors in computers.
Canadian video game industry catching up to TV & film production
The CBC has a story on how the Canadian video game industry catching up to TV & film production. The story is based on the annual report of the Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC). You can download the PDF from here. Some of the interesting facts from the report include:
- The video game industry employs 20,400 people (up 24% from 2013) with an average salary of $71,300.
- The currecnt skills most lacking in the talent pool include programming, artist and animation, data analysis, and game design.
- Quebec has 29.4% of the companies or 10,850 full-time employees (53% of all direct employment).
- Revenues from console games are down and mobile games are up.
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.
Digital Humanties Conference 2015 on YouTube
The folks at the University of Western Sydney have now put up the keynote talks from DH 2015. See Digital Humanties Conference 2015 – YouTube.
I particularly recommend the two Keynotes by Jeffrey Schnapp and Genevieve Bell. You can see my conference notes here.
I was part of the panel on Building Communities and Networks in the Humanities.
Literary Analysis and the Wolfram Language
Lately I’ve been trying Wolfram Mathematica more an more for analytics. I was introduced to Mathematica by Bill Turkel and Ian Graham who have done some impressive stuff with it. Bill Turkel has now created a open access, open content, and open source textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica. The text is a Mathematica notebook itself so, if you have Mathematica you can actually use the text to do analytics on the spot.
Wolfram has also posted an interesting blog entry on Literary Analysis and the Wolfram Language: Jumping Down a Reading Rabbit Hole. They show how you can generate word clouds and sentiment analysis graphs easily.
While I am still learning Mathematica, some of the features that make it attractive include:
- It uses a “literate programming” model where you write notebooks meant to be read by humans with embedded code rather than writing code with awkward comments embedded.
- It has a lot of convenient Web, Language, and Visualization functions that let you do things we want to do in the digital humanities.
- You can call on Wolfram Alpha in a notebook to get real world knowledge like capital cities or maps or language information.