Conference Report on DH-JAC2011

I am at the 2nd International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures, DH-JAC 2011.  I am writing a live conference report here on philosophi.ca. Yesterday I presented a response to Mitsuyuki Inaba’s survey of the work of the Web Technologies group (PDF) of the Global COE Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures.

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INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond

Today I was at the INKE Birds Of a Feather conference here in Kyoto. I wrote a conference report at, INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond. It was a great day with lots of discussion thanks to the BOF format where papers were distributed beforehand so we could only talk for 5 minutes.

Culture and Computing 2011: Conference Report

I have put up my conference report on the Culture and Computing 2011 conference held here in Kyoto.

The conference brought together three communities of research and practice, media arts, language technologies, and the digital humanities. They also had a full complement of traditional arts demonstrations and an exhibit space with companies and artists side by side. I like this combination as it avoids the purely academic. Language technologies are an important business and media artists engage their public differently than academics do. We can learn from both.

I went mostly to the digital humanities papers. As Seth Denbo pointed out in his paper (the last of the digital humanities stream), very few of the digital humanities papers dealt with text. In the West we privilege text, especially in the humanities where we not only study texts, but we share our research through texts. In Japan text is less important as a form of cultural transmission and therefore digital humanists are working with other forms of culture from calligraphy to Kabuki.

Digging Into Data, Day 2: Making Tools and Using Them

I just discovered (thanks to the Digging Into Data site) that the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog has a nice story on the Digging Into Data Challenge Conference (2011) that talks about the Criminal Intent project I am on. See Digging Into Data, Day 2: Making Tools and Using Them. The article nicely summarizes Steve Ramsay who was our respondent to the effect that,

Mr. Ramsay’s talk celebrated how this kind of Big Data work can enhance rather than diminish the humanities’ traditional engagement with human experience. “The Old Bailey, like the Naked City, has eight million stories. Accessing those stories involves understanding trial length, numbers of instances of poisoning, and rates of bigamy,” he said in his response. “But being stories, they find their more salient expression in the weightier motifs of the human condition: justice, revenge, dishonor, loss, trial. This is what the humanities are about. This is the only reason for an historian to fire up Mathematica or for a student trained in French literature to get into Java.”

The article is by Jennifer Howard and was published June 12, 2011. This nicely contrasts with the Nature article on the event that focused on the culturnomics keynote by Erez Lieberman-Aiden & JB Michel from Harvard rather than the serious work of digging into data. You can see my earlier post on this conference (with a link to my conference report) here.

Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities

I’m at Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities at Stanford University. I was involved in two workshops before the conference on Visualization for Literary History and Text Analysis with Voyeur. (You can see the script to the Voyeur one at DH2011 Voyeur Tools.) I’m also involved in a paper on “Computing in Canada: A History of the Incunabular Years” presented by Victoria Smith and a panel on The Interface to the Collection organized by the INKE Interface Design team. One gratifying thing to see is the visibility of the University of Alberta in the DH 2011 Visualizations set up by the conference organizers. If you zoom in to the different visualizations you will see the number of participants from U of A.

Humanities (dot) Net

As part of the CHCI annual conference at the Toronto Jackman Humanities Institute they scheduled a special day with centerNet titled “Humanities (dot) Net”. The program is on 2011 Annual Meeting « Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (scroll down). The event is a bringing together of these two associations of centres connected to the humanities, one digital and one “traditional.” Of course there is nothing traditional to the CHCI centers. Some of the things that link us include:

  • Interdisciplinarity. Of course, interdisciplinarity happens at all levels and in all sorts of organizations, including departments, but generally it is centers/institutes that develop structures for encouraging interdisciplinarity.
  • Collaboration. Both types of centres structure forms of collaboration. I think the CHCI centres tend to be more conservative, often also supporting “lone” scholars, but we both try to imagine ways of bringing the right people together for research and learning.
  • Legitimization and Leadership. Both types of centres can serve to legitimize activities that are not always recognized. They lead by recognizing new interdisciplinary configurations through fellowships, project support, workshops and so on.
  • Experimenting with Futures. Both types of centers can be sites of experimentation with new types of courses, new collaborations, and new research practices. Experiments emerge out of reflection which is why these centers are a site for thinking through where the humanities are going.

Humanities (dot) net as an event brings together leaders in both types of centres to learn about each other and to reflect together on the agenda of the humanities.

Dyson and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games

At Interacting with Immersive Worlds J. P. Dyson gave a great talk about “Immersion In and Out of Virtual Worlds.” He is the Director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) in Rochester which is associated with the Natioal Museum of Play and the National Toy Hall of Fame.

He mentioned how some of the toys inducted into the Hall of Fame include the Cardboard Box and Stick.

The ICHEG has some 27,000+ artifacts including video games, game system hardware, arcade games (in cabinets) and papers from people like Ralph H. Baer and Will Wright’s. They have an interesting interpretative framework online titled, Concentric Circles: A Lens for Exploring the History of Electronic Games (see bottom of page for link to PDF).

Dyson’s talk traced a history from toy soldiers (H. G. Wells and “Floor Play”) to Dungeons and Dragons to text adventure games. He talked about Romanticism and changes is our ideas about childhood and play. He talked about the new (for Victorians) places for play like the nurseries and gardents, the availability of toys, and the leisure time for play or other foms of immersion (like reading novels.) I’m convinced we need to pay a lot more time to the history of toys and children’s play in order to understand computer games.