Face the Facts Ontario is a page in the COU site with links to PDF reports. In particular there is a good one, Advancing Ontario’s Future Through Advanced Degrees (2003) on the need to double graduate enrollments. I suspect the recommendations and data in this report influenced the Rae Report on the need for more places for graduate students.
The report has a nice short history of Ontario graduate education – the first MAs were given in 1845 by King’s College and the first PhD in 1900. There is a wealth of data and interpretation in the report.
Continue reading Council of Ontario Universities: Graduate Enrollment
Paul Gravett: Manga
Manga by Paul Gavett is a large format illustrated introduction to manga – Japanese comics. The two characters in Man-ga can be translated “irresponsible pictures”, but has come to mean a particular Japanese form of comics often consumed in thick books full of serialized stories. Gavett does a good job of surveying the history of manga from Osamu Tezuka to the nouvelle manga “movement” of Boilet. (See the previous blog entry on Nouvelle Manga Digitale.)
Gravett occaisionally tries too hard to present a view that manga is not just “tits’n tentacles” or sexist eye-candy for boys. He is best when documenting manga for girls (think Sailor Moon) and the cultural context of manga in Japan. (Think about how hard it is to translate comics into English when the order of the panels is right-to-left.) The real value of the book are the illustrations that give you a feel for the variety and graphic inventiveness of Japanese manga. I can see how manga, an enourmous almost entirely domestic business, is a vast reservoir of plots, visual ideas, and characters for animation (which does translate easier), games, toys and cards. One could argue that the Japanese incredible everyday consumption of manga buttresses other industries so that they can compete internationally. We don’t see the manga, but we see the animations, the kids toys, and the computer games.
Continue reading Paul Gravett: Manga
Nouvelle Manga Digitale: Yellowbacks
Yellowbacks.1 by FREDBOOT.COM Fred Boot is a digital Shockwave manga. It adapts the enigmatic adult comic to an interactive short that is not an animation. It is one in a series of nouvelle manga digitale and is based on the work of a Kan Takahama.
See Boilet’s Nouvelle Manga Manifesto for some of the background on the Nouvelle Manga.
3 Classic Anime
I’ve been dipping into Japanese manga and anime culture. Japanese science fiction animated movies like Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Metropolis (2001) have a visual grammar that has influenced computer game design and cyberpunk movies like the Matrix. They also have a willingness to tackle interesting philosophical issues like the nature of the soul or “ghost” in a cybernetic world (Ghost in the Shell).
In effect, boys anime and manga, like the fumetti I read as a kid in Italy (see uBC – Enciclopedia), combine smart speculative fiction plots with soft porn and tech-heavy violence. This mix can be seen in the Fraco-Belgian adult Bande DessinÈe like Moebius.
Whether we approve of this mix, and, of course, we don’t, there is an energy to boy culture and it is the source for much of the style of online culture.
Continue reading 3 Classic Anime
Making the case for arts and culture
Update: The link below is broken, but here is a link to their new Arts Promotion Kit. Lots of good links in there.
The Canada Council for the Arts has a neat little site that provides an Advocacy resource kit. It for Canada as it has mostly Canadian facts and quotes. Nobody like to do advocacy – it makes us feel dirty, especially if we are trying to advocate for noble enterprises like churches, universities or arts. That said, we can learn from the health sector. Through ongoing advocacy they have been able to effectively make the case for funding of health care (and health research). If we believe in what we do why should we be ashamed to tell people?
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Art Institute Online: BSc in Game Art & Design
The Art Institute of Pittsburgh is offering a online Bachelor of Science in Game Art and Design Program. See also Online Bachelor Degree in Computer animation – The Art Institute Online. Strange to have a Bacherlor of Science in Art and Design. Why not a Bachelor of Art? Why the Science?
DigiPlay: Experience and Consequence of Technologies of Leisure
DigiPlay is a UK network around technologies of leisure like computer games that has been running seminars.
CRIC has recently been awarded funding by the ESRC to organise a series of six seminars on technologies of leisure and create a virtual network of UK and international researchers in his area.
The seminar model they are using to bring people together has some interesting themes like “Leisure Constraints, Entitlement and Access to Technologies of Leisure.”
Software, Tools and Lists for Text Analysis
Software, Tools, Lists, Resources is a good list of resources for computational linguistics. It has a nice list of lists like stop words/function words.
I should check the functionality of these tools against TAPoR.
This came from StÈfan Sinclair.
Successful Mid-sized Cities
My wife just attended a talk by Pierre Fillion where he argued that successful mid-sized cities have:
- Proximity to a university
- Cultural attractions and historical buildings
- Pleasant pedestrian walkways
- Retail space (but not a mall)
He argued that parking and malls are not helpful. A downtown should be different from surburbs or no one will bother going downtown. See Archives: Journal of the American Planning Association for his article on “The Successful Few: Healthy Downtowns of Small Metropolitan Regions”.
Continue reading Successful Mid-sized Cities
Framework study: New media in Canada
The Women in Film and Television – Toronto commissioned an interesting study from EKOS Research Associates, Frame Work: Employment in Canadian Screen-Based Media – A National Profile. The Executive Summary is available in PDF format for download.
The Executive Summary looks at the Screen based industries from Film to New Media. It pays special attendtion to diversity issues and has a nice summary of where new media jobs are expected.
As technology advances, so does the need for a skilled workforce. Today, the screen-based media industries face the critical challenge of ensuring our workforce is trained to exploit new digital technologies on the one hand, and the increased need for creative/sophisticated business and financial skills on the other. (p. 14)