The Arcade Flyer Archive

A great resource for game studies is The Arcade Flyer Archive. The archive includes high resolution scans of flyers for video games, arcade games and pinball machines. For example here is the flyer for the original arcade game Donkey Kong when Mario was still a carpenter.

EVERYONE’S GOING APE OVER DONKEY KONG!

“HELP! HELP!” cries the beautiful maiden as she is dragged up a labyrinth of structural beams by the ominous Donkey Kong. “SNORT. SNORT.” Foreboding music warns of the eventual doom that awaits the poor girl, lest she somehow be miraculously rescued. “But, wait! Fear not, fair maiden. Little Mario, the carpenter, is in hot pursuit of you this very moment.”

It would be interesting to do text analysis on the text or image analysis on the page images.

Japanese tea ceremony


I was recently invited to Ritsumeikan‘s student tea ceremony circle. I watched the students timing each other as they performed the ritualized movements and was then shown how to prepare matcha, which is made from a powdered green tea that is stirred into the hot water with a bamboo whisk. The tea ceremony is a tradition that is focused outwards towards the other that you serve. As such it complements the Zen practice of meditation that is focused inwards on calming the mind.

Following Donal Keene’s comparison of Pachinko to Zen meditation (Zazen) I am tempted to see in the tea ceremony signs of Japanese game culture. In the tea ceremony you can see a passion or obsession similar to that of otaku fans. The picture above shows the tools (Haioshi) a member of the circle was using to sculpt the ash (Hai) in a brazier (Furo) which would be used to heat the water for tea at an upcoming ceremony. The ash in the brazier would be difficult to see, but it still gets the attention of a Zen garden. Likewise the ritualized movement of the ceremony suggests rythm games popular in Japan, though the idea in the tea ceremony is to move slowly and gracefully. The beautiful small tea rooms are small worlds where everything can be set right. And, unlike meditation, the tea ceremony is shared, collaborative play.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the tea ceremony is a form of play in Huizinga’s sense of an activity set apart from the world with its particular magic space, utensils, and movements.

Every story has a beginning

Every story has a beginning is the text of a keynote by Tim Sheratt that nicely weaves individual stories together as an example of what we can do with information technology. I highly recommend it; he quotes Steve Ramsay and Tim Hitchcock to the effect that what is important are the stories of individuals like those he paints through the digital archives he has access to. He sets this humanistic view of how we can use the technology against the Culturomics approach which is trying to turn history and its archives into grist for cultural science. Sheratt calls the culturomic vision “barren” and I tend to agree. He ends by asking,

But who defines the problems?

His answer is Linked Data which “gives us a way to present an alternative to Google’s version of the world. We can argue back against the search engines, defining our own criteria for relevance, and building our own discovery networks.” (And his talk has a link for those who want to view the triples…) I would say that we can also build tools like Voyant (formerly Voyeur, which he uses) to help us begin to tell the stories.

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory Launch

 

I am at the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) launch. CWRC is building a collaborative editing environment that will allow editorial projects to manage the editing of electronic scholarly editions. Among other things CWRC is developing an online XML editor, a editorial workflow management tools, and integrated repository.

The keynote speakers for the event include Shawna Lemay and Aritha Van Herk.

Vintage computers and technology in Toronto

From Sean and Boing Boing I got to Vintage computers and technology in Toronto. Derek Flack went into the Toronto Public Library’s archives and scanned some of the photographs they have of vintage computers. Some of the pictures are of control systems that are not really computers, but none-the-less, they are cool. This complements the research we are doing going through the Globe and Mail looking at what was being written about computers in the 50s to 70s.

Compute/Calcul Canada Works with Humanities

Compute/Calcul Canada has partnered with Super Micro to offer a High-Performance Computing platform for humanities researchers. Super Micro has kindly donated a HPC system that Compute Canada will make available with support to humanists. To get access you have to apply through the National Resource Allocation process. It isn’t clear what you do as a humanist.

Continue reading Compute/Calcul Canada Works with Humanities

Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language

Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language is an interesting story about a study by Kloumann and colleagues on Positivity of the English Language. They used Mechanical Turk to get people to assess whether the high frequency words used in Twitter, Books, the New York Times and Music Lyrics were positive. Their study showed that overwhelmingly English is a positive language. Thanks to Stan for this.