Gibson Aleph: Agrippa

William Gibson aleph – essential information collection is a site dedicated to the work of William Gibson. They have images and the text of the poem Agrippa (1992) that was issued on a floppy that was coded to erase itself as you read. The floppy was in encased in art by Dennis Ashbrough that was supposed to likewise fade. The book/disk was published in 1992 by Kevin Begos Publishing, New York. This link came from Matt Kirschenbaum.

[Update] See also The Agrippa Files, a web site dedicated to preserving information about electronic poem.

Games Research

The next challenge in the humanities is thinking about computer games. One way to do this is to start developing games as research. To do that we need open source game engines. Steve Ramsay sent me the link to Crystal Space 3D and an article about it at LinuxDevCenter.com: Crystal Space: 3D for Free. I’m not sure how, but my sense is that we are going to have to start weaving text tools into these game engines.

Culture Tracking

Alexa is now tracking sites. On their home page they tell you what sites have jumped and they have a “Traffic Watch” feature in their Related Info for: pages that graphs “reach”. A neat feature is that you can compare any of the sites they track.
A couple of years ago I gave a paper on tracking culture by graphing web hits. We (Skip Poehlman, Michael Picheca and I) built a system that could track keywords and store results from daily searches. One could then graph any two against each other and so on. I see now that Alexa now has this feature and has been tracking some cultural comparisons like “Liberal Talk Radio”. Will they generalize this? Will they let us track our stuff?

How the Wayback Machine Works

The Internet Archive is an amazing database of old web sites. James Chartrand pointed me to an interview with the director of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle from January 21, 2002, titled How the Wayback Machine Works. The interview is by Richard Koman and still interesting, especially for those of us interested in text spiders and archives. I was intrigued by Kahle’s claim that the IA is the largest database in the world, “It’s larger than Walmart’s, American Express’, the IRS. It’s the largest database ever built.”

See my previous post on Ghost Sites and the Internet Archive.

Michigan: Digital Conversion (Scanning) Services

I was asked recently about how to scan large amounts of old newspapers. These two links came from Humanist and provide a good survey of what a professional library digitization units do.
The University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service has a site on their Digital Conversion Services.

The University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, has a Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative which offers Imaging Advice.
Both these links came from Kevin Hawkins on Humanist.

Arizona State: Arts, Media and Engineering

Arts, Media and Engineering is an interdisciplinary focus that crosses a series of departments from Engineering to Theatre. It is hard to tell if it is a real intersection or a naming exericise. There don’t seem to be any new programs, just “concentrations” in existing ones. There do, however, seem to be shared spaces built to bring them together.

The goal of the Arts, Media and Engineering Program is transdisciplinary research and education in the integrated development of media technologies and content with a focus on experiential media.

This was from Andrew Mactavish.

Global and Civil Learning

Here is an interview by a McMaster student with my new colleague Henry Giroux that puts well the challenge we face in teaching civic and moral responsibility. (DV) Rahmani: Interview with Henry Giroux.

McMaster is capable of attaining the highest quality of excellence in the traditional sense, but I think it is also providing a new model of excellence, one that measures a university in terms of how it addresses the needs of civic society on both a national and global level. There is a certain worldliness about McMaster, a sense of being in the world, being attentive to the civic quality of a larger global public sphere. This means, in part, taking seriously what it means to educate students to be critically engaged, civic citizens of the world.

JFK Reloaded Game

Glasgow based company Traffic launches JFK assassination game according to this story from USA Today. (“Company launches JFK assassination game”, 11/23/2004)
The game JFK Reloaded sounds like a mini-game where you are Oswald trying to shoot JFK three times. Traffic claims this is to interest people in history, Ted Kennedy’s spokesman calls it “despicable”. Would there be such a fuss if it was a book being released? It is the first-person character of games that bothers us – the idea of kids practicing doing despicable acts – which is what Plato was bothered about in the Republic when he banned the poets.

CANARIE and Video Conferencing

I’m at the CANARIE Advanced Networks Workshop 2004 today after wrapping up at The Face of Text. I gave a talk about TAPoR – the token humanist at this conference. Most of the talks in my session are about video conferencing over the net and telepresence.
My sense is that “access grids” for shared network meetings are close to being usable. The ViDe Videoconferencing Cookbook was suggested a good starting point if you want to try a virtual meeting.