Digital Scrapbooks

Diriks Family Scrapbooks is a Norwegian digitization project that has tries to preserve some of the scrapbook feel in the interface to the collection. While the site is in Norwegian, and hence I am not sure what the text says, the interface is interesting and, of course, scrapbooks are a less-practiced domestic art that has features we now find in blogs. Does it make sense when digitizing the scrapbook to keep the two-page spread interface? Are scrapbooks and chapbooks similar to blogs? This came from a Humanist post by Espen Ore.
Continue reading Digital Scrapbooks

Women in Computer Science

Undergraduate Women in Computer Science: Experience, Motivation and Culture is a report on a study of women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon. While it is only a preliminary report it strikes me as balanced and interesting. Their initial findings include some reflections on what got men and women into CS – a number of male students talked about the computer as a toy or game that they got caught up playing with in an undirected way. Female students, by contrast commented on what they wanted to do with computing.
Continue reading Women in Computer Science

Silly Sound Sculpture

Celebrating the Olympics with sound art. Athens Olympics Inspire Artist’s Computer-Based Sculptures is a fawning and rather silly article from the Associated Press about a Greek sculptress who has created, in celebration of the Olympics, art based on digitally visualized sounds. (See SonArt Olympics for the web site on the travelling exhibit.) Whatever your opinion of the art, there is a strange confusion to the layers of representation – sculpture that draws on graphical representations of digitized (sampled and quantized) words connected to Greek and Olympic themes!!!!
Continue reading Silly Sound Sculpture

I’m Back

Dear readers, I’m back from vacation. In order to entertain you, I personally visited a number of sites of interest around new media and communications technology in Eastern Canada. The beaches of PEI had nothing to do with the research expedition!

Post-Post: Stamp Communication and Rex Murphy

Rex Murphy (surely one of the best ironic columnists around) has a column in The Globe and Mail on Ouellet’s stamp is cancelled which starts with the inscription on the Central Post Office building in New York which we all know the start of: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” What is interesting is that this is an adaptation of Herodotus and Rex reminds us that communications technologies often present themselves as heroic and honourable when they are launched. Surface mail today seems outdated and far from the heroic braving of the elements.
Continue reading Post-Post: Stamp Communication and Rex Murphy

Xaira

[oucs] Xaira is a project at Oxford adapting the SARA XML search engine for general XML retrieval. This is a great idea – SARA early on had a lot of the functionality we are all looking for, but was limited to the BNC. Now the Oxford folks are getting support to adapt it and make it available.

Net-enabled games: In Memoriam

LibÈration :†In Memoriam au-del‡ du virtuel is a review/comment by Bruno Icher in Liberation.fr about the game In Memoriam from Lexis NumÈrique. The review is of a game that includes fictional news in LibÈration – Recherche (you have to search for “Jack Lorski” to get these stories.)
Let me scribe the circle: a newspaper review of a game that relies partly on fictional news placed on the same real newspaper Web site – news of a game of news. Bruno is aware of the questions this raises, here are the questions he asks of this ludic circularity,

Il y a presque deux ans, Eric Viennot a souhaitÈ impliquer liberation.fr dans cette aventure. Si nous avons acceptÈ, c’est qu’on avait envie de jouer. Un faux site Web est-il possible ? Que croire de ce que l’on peut y lire, Ècouter, voir ? Voil‡ pourquoi quatre pages du site de LibÈration font partie intÈgrante d’In Memoriam.

I think “faux Web site”, even in English, describes such a phenomenon, and yes it’s possible if we can tell the difference. What Bruno doesn’t ask about is the advertising on the faux and real pages – are they for real? Is this a way for news sites to draw eyeballs to sell ads? Is it unethical for a news site to do this? Can we agree on a disclaimer that doesn’t ruin the game?
For an English review of the English version of the game with the title In Memoriam see, “Missing: Since January” a strange slightly spooky journey by Neil Davidson, Canadian Press, July 20, 2004.
The game, which I haven’t played in either French or English version, has apparently been a hit in Europe. It is a successful working out of an experiment that Electronic Arts failed at with Majestic which was terminated in 2001. See Can PC gamers handle innovation – Dec. 19, 2001 by Chris Morris in CNN Money.
Engines that can manage such chat/mail/faux Web games could have research/education applications. Suppose a course was designed as such a complex treasure hunt.