Creating A Newsgame – Bin Laden Raid

Gamasutra has a nice article about creating a newsgame, Creating A Newsgame – Bin Laden Raid. Gonzalo Frasca of September 12th fame coined the work “newsgame” for a game that responds to current events. This Gamasutra article describes how Jeremy Alessi quickly created Raid on Osama bin Laden Compound where you can replay the raid.

I can’t say its a particularly gripping game, nor does it feel accurate, but there is something disconcerting about playing a recreation of such a raid. Does it give a better context for the event? I’m not sure, but I do think the idea of games responding to events is worth pursuing. Time to read Ian Bogost’s book Newsgames.

Check out the comments.

SDH-SEMI 2011 Conference Report

I just got back from Congress 2011 where I attended and presented at the SDH-SEMI conference. See my SDH-SEMI 2011 Conference Report. Chad Gaffield, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, attended a session. At the end he asked us what difference the digital makes. What he meant by the question was how the digital has changed the humanities (if at all.) As he makes the case for the humanities in general and fields like humanities computing, he needs help articulating (briefly in an “elevator speech”) the innovation and transformative effects of the digital on scholarship. One could debate whether the digital is really transformative or more a magnifying effect, but politically he has a chance to influence the federal government’s Digital Economy Strategy and show the relevance of the humanities to the digital economy. We need to help him make the case for the value of the arts and humanities in such a strategy.

Here are some of the points that I gathered from the discussion for my conference report:

  • Scale: The digital has made possible research on a different scale of evidence, collaboration and public engagement. We have collections of thousands of digital of books that can be searched, we can collaborate across time zones using conferencing tools, and we can engage the public through the web.
  • Formalized Methods: The digital allows us to formalize research methods and implement them on computers. Concording was one of the first research tasks that was automated; now we can imagine new methods. It is also the case that the act of formalizing methods for implementation teaches us about the limits of methods and triggers discussion of what can be formalized.
  • Careers: Integrating digital humanities training into the humanities has given students a broader range of career opportunities. Students with significant training in digital methods can contribute a unique combination of critical thinking and technical experience to the projects they choose.
  • Interdisciplinarity: The digital humanities brings together different disciplines in order to complete projects. Digital humanists typically work together with librarians, information scientists, interface designers, and computer scientists. This is in addition to the breadth of humanities disciplines that meet in the commons of the digital humanities.
  • Creative and Communicative Practice: The digital humanities is often distinguished by the creation of digital scholarly works. It thus combines the traditional excellence of the humanities in critical approaches with practice based research around creating communicative objects.
  • Playful: The digital humanities is increasingly looking at games and fabrication as forms of digital practice. These can be the site for playful research that both engages play as a subject but also recognizes playful practices in serious research.
  • Community Engagement: The web allows us to break down barriers to public engagement in scholarship. It allows us to share research resources of interest to people directly with them. Crowdsourcing projects can bring the interested public into collaborations that generate new research. Such public engagement allows us to make clear how the humanities is really about what matters to people – their histories, stories, and culture.

Institute of Making

Thanks to @karikraus I came across the Institute of Making. They have a materials library that sounds fascinating (and they take good pictures of it.) I am also struck by how the Institute is a “club”.

The Institute of Making is a multidisciplinary research club for makers, and those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of building, synthentic skin to spacecraft, soup to clothes, furniture to cities. (About page)

This Institute strikes me as a model for what we are doing with the Interactives group and our Dorkbot.

BBC – Domesday Reloaded

Thanks to Paul I came across the BBC Domesday Reloaded. The original Domesday Book was commissioned in 1085 by William the Conqueror.In 1986 the BBC published a Laser-Disk based Domesday Project that gathered articles, amateur photographs and other materials. The Laser-Disk Project only ran on a properly configured BBC computer which was hard to find in Canada. I actually played with the system (and the Domesday Project) when I was working at the University of Toronto Computing Services. It was a phenomenal example at the time of computer-based multimedia even though it was limited to a particular play-back system.

Now the Project has been remediated for the web by the BBC as Domesday Reloaded. You can search the content and the places. They have crowdsourcing features to let people add an updated article about a place. Some of the content seems to be inaccessible from outside the UK.

Inside Higher Ed: Major Decisions

Inside Higher Ed is reporting on another study looking at earning potential and choice of major. This one is from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and comes to similar depressing conclusions about the earning potential of humanities and arts degrees.

Some of the results are to be expected. Science, engineering, and business majors tend to be better-off financially than majors in liberal arts and humanities, education, and counseling. In addition to a wide discrepancy among average salaries, the study finds that the most popular majors have not been the ones leading to high-paying jobs, that female and minority students have tended to cluster in low-paying fields, and that graduate degrees have been essentially required for some undergraduate majors if those students were to find good jobs.

One interesting point they make is that many arts/humanities degrees lead to careers where there isn’t a lot of mobility. If you get an engineering degree you often end up in management later in your career while those who become teachers don’t have the same opportunities. At the same time, the report mentions how the breadth and communication skills of the humanities are still valued:

Surveys routinely find that employers want their employees to have a deep knowledge of their topic but a broad range of skills, and some worry that undergraduate programs too chock-full of math and science courses are producing individuals who can’t handle managerial responsibilities.

I wonder if we will shift to a model where the arts and humanities become increasingly service disciplines that provide breadth to the majority of majors in business, science, and engineering.

Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review

Ivan sent me a link to a very smart review of the iPad game Infinity Blade. See Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review. The review starts with:

Infinity Blade is a game about interation, about retreading old ground, about the small changes that surface across endless repetitions.

In the game, every time you die you come back as your son, but with slightly more experience and better powers. The review has a “Begin Bloodline X” at the bottom. Clicking on it replaces some of the words in the review with another review. Small changes are animated and the process then repeats. The review is a meditation on the game as life where you “live the same life a little bit better, a little bit smarter, a little bit longer than the time before.”

Very smart. Better than the game.

Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

There is hope in the battle against spam. The New York Times is reporting on a study that has identified a weak point in the spam chain. See Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com.
The study by Kirill Levchenko and colleagues is titled, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (PDF of unpublished manuscript). They followed up on a lot of spam ads and bought thousands of dollars of stuff (like Viagra.) They then analyzed the chain of servers and services that make spam a viable business. The weak point is the credit card processing, because this is a business and some money has to be gathered at some point to finance it. There are a small number of banks that process the credit card transactions, and these banks may be vulnerable to political pressure.

Finally, we have used this data to provide a normative analysis of spam intervention approaches and to offer evidence that the payment tier is by far the most concentrated and valuable asset in the spam ecosystem, and one for which there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries. (p. 15)

Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales

So, ebooks are finally taking off! The Guardian reports that Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales . This doesn’t mean that the value of print sales has been surpassed, but it is still indicative that ebooks are here to stay.

Now, can we redesign the book for the ereader? The current crop of ebook readers are page turners that don’t use the medium. Instead the medium has been made to work like the book and perhaps that is right, but I would still like to see something more interesting. Here are some ideas:

  • e-audio-books – ebooks that come with either voice synthesis or synchronized audio so that you can listen or read them.
  • An API for reading apps so that you could buy apps that work with all your ebooks. The apps might allow you to search across books or visualize books. There might be apps that quiz you with random quotes or help you pull linked data out of a book.
  • A standardized way of citing passages in an ebook.

Defining the Digital Humanities April 6, 2011

Sean pointed me to a YouTube video from Columbia in which Dan Cohen starts the talk by talking about our Day of Digital Humanities. See Research Without Borders: Defining the Digital Humanities April 6, 2011. Dan talks about definitions for the digital humanities and talks about what they do at their Center for History and New Media.

Dan talks about how he doesn’t think there is anything like “armchair digital humanities”. He argues that you learn about technologies like blogging and twitter by doing.