Media and News – Page 23

TAPoRware and the Digital Humanities Quarterly

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The latest version of the Digital Humanities Quarterly is out and they have done something neat. They have included some of the TAPoRware tools in the bar at the top of articles like Wendell’s reflections, Something Called Digital Humanities.

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This is someone anyone can do. We provide instructions on the code to put in your HTML on the TAPoRware Add Tools Demo page. There are different models. You will also find code on the documentation pages for individual tools on the TADA Documentation Pages.

Kriegspiel: Debord Game

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The New Yorker (May 5, 2008, pages 25-6) has a nice short story “War Games” in Talk of the Town about a computer game Kriegspiel based on a game that Guy Debord designed in 1977. The game, “Le Jeu De La Guerre” was published first in a limited edition with metal pieces and then in 1987 it was mass produced. The game has a board of 25 X 20 squares and each side has basic military pieces that can be played according to rules designed to simulate war. The computer implementation, which can be downloaded for free, is by Radical Software Group (RSG) which is associated with NYU.

The New Yorker story talks about how the estate of Debord has been sending cease-and-desist letters to the RSG folk, which is ironic since debord objected to copyright. Debord is author of The Society of Spectacle.

Farewell McMaster

Picture of Andrew and Geoffrey

With regrets I’m leaving McMaster and going to the University of Alberta. McMaster threw a wonderful farewell party on Monday. Dean Crosta spoke, Andrew Mactavish gave a moving speech, Liss Platt talked, StÃ©fan Sinclair played Alberta tunes and I was presented with a plaque that will go up on the wall of Togo Salmon Hall where previous digital humanities people at Mac have been recognized. See a small photo set of pictures taken by StÃ©fan here on Flickr.

Dialogue – Published by SSHRC/PubliÃ© par le CRSH

Having written a book on dialogue, (Defining Dialogue) I’m always intrigued when others call for dialogue or name some initiative dialogue.

Well, SSHRC has just published the second issue of its online e-newsletter, Dialogue and I’m going to rise to the bait.

Here goes. What is interesting about things named “dialogue” is that they are usually so named because “dialogue” is supposed to be good. In fact, it may be the last good left in an intellectual climate where there are no certainties or grounds to stand on. All that is left is some form of interaction, and dialogue is the good form of interaction (as opposed to gossiping, bickering, or fighting.)

The problem with this is that the models we have inherited for dialogue in the humanities, from Plato to Heidegger, are not quite so comfortable. This is seen especially in Plato where usually one of the interlocutors leaves unenlightened and irritated with Socrates. Dialogue is rarely good for those in it. The dialogues of Plato are aggressive, they portray posturing and misunderstanding, and they are designed to be interesting to those listening in, not the interlocutors.

So … what sort of dialogue then is SSHRC’s newsletter? Is it a scrappy Socratic tussle in front of us? No, it is a gracious praising of researchers who got grants! Is it SSHRC the gadfly engaging people who claim to know something so as to show them (and us) that they (and we) know nothing? No, SSHRC wouldn’t dare. Is it SSHRC engaging us with questions that force us to think about what we know. No, there is only a call for comments, which is about as interactive as asking what I did for my summer vacation.

In short, SSHRC has published another Dialogue that is innocent of the history or theories of dialogue. What Dialogue really is for SSHRC is public relations or advertising. Perhaps it is what Socrates taught in Aristophanes’ Clouds? Why shouldn’t SSHRC be honest and call it something like “Braggadocio“?

To be fair ,there is a sense in which what Dialogue does is document the activities of the humanities and social sciences. These activities have been called a conversation by Michael Oakeshott; in that sense Dialogue is not a dialogue with us or with anyone, but a record of great moments in the Canadian academic conversation.

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an enquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. (Oakeshott, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, p. 11)

If you are interested I have a copy of my thesis about dialogue, from which the book evolved, here in PDFs of the chapters. Read it and you too can get cranky when people propose dialogue.

The potted expert on CHCH

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I’ve just used up 5 of my 15 minutes of fame as a local computer games expert in Hamilton. CHCH, our local television channel has a segment on Grand Theft Auto IV yesterday and they interviewed me and Jacob. (See the video here.)

They should have interviewed Andrew Mactavish, but he is on leave and I’m teaching his games course. My sense from following the news is that the story is not playing out in the mainstream the way I expected – the mainstream news are more intrigued by GTA 4 and its reception in the gaming community. Of course, as Andrew pointed out in a conversation, Rockstar could have hidden some provocative parts to be discovered which will stir things up.

I note that the interview with me was taken in the Lyons Instructional Media Centre‘s game viewing room. How many libraries have one of those?

Grand Theft Auto IV: Panic Magnet or Cultural Criticism

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Well, Grand Theft Auto IV is on sale today and the news is predicting it “will break sales records.” More importantly the media are warming up for a juicy story about game violence while the gaming news is ready for the moral panic of the mainstream media. Take Kotaku:

One might also suspect that, when the game is finally release (sic), opportunistic, fear mongering elected officials, clueless mainstream media and glory seeking attorneys may find extra content not listed, including Virtual Rape, Cop Killing, Overt Racism, Gerbil Abuse, Being On Someone’s Lawn and Buggery. We’re looking forward to a fun ride.

I think the gaming community expects that GTA IV is going to be a magnet for media stories about violence and videogames. Remember that hard core gamers have been following GTA 4 for a while and thinking about its reception while the audience of the mainstream news (if there is such a thing left) are just waking up to it as the stories go mainstream. Rockstar may even have placed some content designed to spark controversy since nothing sells games like controversy, even when the game is rated Mature. In the case of gaming, the media have little credibility compared to the narrow gaming channels that gamers read, but gamers love to have their opinions of n00bs confirmed when the mainstream seems to parachute in the day before a game is released or when some kid goes postal. Thus we end up with two solitudes that feed off misunderstanding each other: parents who can panic after reading that they should and gamers frustrated that they aren’t understood when they knew they wouldn’t be. That’s the essence of commedia – the fun of watching groups creatively misunderstand each other in public. GTA IV promises to be another chapter in a comedy of misunderstanding that goes back to Socrates complaining about the poets teaching youth to practice disreputable characters (and Aristophanes making fun of him doing so.) I note that Rockstar has made a brilliant first move on the Information page of the web site for the game by stealing some cultural criticism high-ground:

What does the American Dream mean today?

For Niko Bellic, fresh off the boat from Europe, it is the hope he can escape his past.

For his cousin, Roman, it is the vision that together they can find fortune in Liberty City, gateway to the land of opportunity.

As they slip into debt and are dragged into a criminal underworld by a series of shysters, thieves and sociopaths, they discover that the reality is very different from the dream in a city that worships money and status, and is heaven for those who have them and a living nightmare for those who don’t.

Think about it – a Scottish game development company making a game that claims to critique the emptiness of the American dream in order to make lots of money the American way. But seriously, some interesting aspects of the story are:

How do companies manage blockbuster games? GTA 4 was delayed (possibly to avoid other big releases like Halo 3) and now seems to have been well timed (and built up) to take off. Given how much it cost to develop GTA 4, the launch probably has to be carefully staged to be perceived as the next “fastest-selling” so that they make a profit. How do they stage blockbusters? Should we care about them?
How do blockbuster games intersect with other forms of entertainment “properties”? Will GTA 4 really affect movie going among young men by taking them off the streets and out of the theatres (and into the gaming room) for a few weeks? Will it have a measurable effect on sales of other types of entertainment as some speculate?
A related question is how they manage the tie-in with Amazon for music? I think games like GTA 4 have real potential to sell other merchandise – especially music, given the way radio stations entertain in the game. They apparently have some deal for selling tunes through the game in the US. Will it have an effect on Amazon’s music sales?
How effective is the game engine (Euphoria) that they are using? GTA 4 is one of the first major games to use Euphoria – will it make a difference players respond to?

Old Bailey Online

The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.

Bravo to the team that developed it!

Spectator: Mass e-vites can prompt gatecrashing

Well, I’m in the news today. I was interviewed for a story in the Spectator, Mass e-vites can prompt gatecrashing which is about how word of parties circulates quickly on the web leading sometimes to uninvited (and violent) guests. Or it is about how Facebook is dangerous. I have blogged before about Facing Facebook (and privacy), but what strikes me now about Facebook is how it offers an alternative to e-mail. The argument goes like this:

Email was developed when the internet (Arpanet actually) was a trusted circle. The net was flat and only people like you and answerable to you were on it.
Email doesn’t work on an internet that is broad, global, and open. Spam is just one symptom of the problem of scale.
What we need is a messaging system that lets us control who can write us; a system that priviledges the local (in the sense that people in my university have easier access); and a system that lets me use different types of messaging for different purposes (from short announcements to photos to private messages.)

Sounds like Facebook, doesn’t it? Which is why my children seem to use Facebook for communication and email for file transfer (as in moving a copy of a paper to print out to the lab at school.) Unfortunately I can’t move off email the way Donald Knuth did – it is now woven into the work practices of the university. I’m also not comfortable with a commercial organization like Facebook or Google having all my messaging. But I can start moving to private social networks for certain purposes. To that end I set up a private network for my extended family on Ning where we can keep track of birthdays, family photos, and information.

How about an open source project to develop a distributed social network messaging environment that could interface with email, that could be run by individual units, and that could offer control over types and sources of messages?

New Yorker: The News Business: Out of Print

The New Yorker has a depressing story The News Business: Out of Print about the collapse of the newspaper business.

trends in circulation and advertisingâ€“â€“the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertisingâ€“â€“have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

All this and in 10 days the Newseum will open in Washington. The Newseum site has a section of Today’s Front Pages where you can see, for example, Canadian front pages (if you burrow down by region). Perhaps we can watch newspapers disappear from this site – a time-lapse on news until there is one paper left (and what will that be?)
As a regular paper reader I have mixed feelings about the business or loss of it. I love to hate the Globe and Mail, which like many papers is becoming a collection of columns rather than a “news” paper, but I love to hate it in hand in the morning with a coffee. I also love Google News as a source of news and through the New Yorker essay, just discovered the Huffington Post. Google News, however, is built on the smart aggregation of news from real newspapers (as in places that pay people to write news.) How will aggregations work when there is nothing new (outside blog posts) being written? Will we end up with a few multinational news engines like Reuters and lots of opinions like mine? Will I have to get a Kindle to read in bed in the morning? (At least it would save going out in the cold to get the paper.)

Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of â€œlightâ€ that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Deweyâ€™s tradition may not wish to see answered.

Cybersyn: Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism

In New York for my last f2f meeting of the MLA Committee on Information Technology I got a New York Times with an intriguing article about a Chilean management system, Cybersyn, titled Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende’s economy by applying cybernetic concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test his ideas.

He wanted to use the telex communications system – a network of teletypewriters – to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Cybersyn was apparently semi-functional before the coup that overthrew Allende’s government and it was used to help manage around the small-business and truckers strike in 1972. I don’t think the Opsroom pictured above was ever fully operational, but visualization screens were important even if at the time they were hand-drawn slides that were projected rather than computer generated visualizations (see http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/project_cybersyn on the chairs of the Opsroom.) Beer and the Chileans wanted Cybersyn to help them implement an alternative socialist economy that was managed in real time rather than “free” and chaotic or planned in the heavy handed way of most socialist economies of the time.

Rooting around, I found a good article about Cybersyn and the English visionary designer Stafford Beer from 2003 in the Guardian by Andy Beckett, Santiago Dreaming. It turns out that Beer gave the Massey Lectures in 1971 and they have been reprinted by Anansi as Designing Freedom. He also moved part-time to Toronto in the 80s where his last partner, Dr. Allenna Leonard of Metaphorum still resides. He died in 2002.

Another interesting thread is Fernando Flores who was the political lead of Cybersyn and the person that recruited Beer for the project. After the coup, Flores went to the US and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science collaborating with Terry Winograd, and being influenced by Maturana, also Chilean. That’s right – the Flores of Understanding Computers and Cognition. He is now back in Chile as a senator and supports various projects there.

The common thread is that Beer, Flores and Maturana all seem interested in viable systems in different spheres. They were applying cybernetics.