ALLC/ACH 2004, Nerbonne Plenary

The last day of the ALLC_ACH-2004 in Gothenberg and there is too much to blog.
The Opening Plenary was by John Nerbonne on “The Data Deluge: Developments and Delights”. He argued that “The challenge of Humanities Computing is to futher Humanities scholarship by confronting lots of data scientifically.” He gave examples of questions in linguistics (dialectology) that his team had been able to “answer” through computing methods and large data sets.
I wonder if that approach from questions will work in other fields in the humanities.

An advantage of the focus on large data sets is the renewed engagement it enables with traditional humanities questions. We are even *now* answering older questions with new methods.
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StreetPrint at COCH-COSH

Two weekends ago I went to Winipeg for the COCH-COSH 2004 conference. One of the most interesting presentations was delivered by an ex-student of mine, Erika Smith and it was about some of the projects of Streetprint.org. The leads of the project, Gary Kelly and Patricia Demers asked Erika and others to create a presentation where they didn’t speak – it played.
This created a strange situation where we were watching a sophisticated PowerPoint (actually KeyNote) presentation with two people at the front staring at their screen and making sure the audio was right. As Ray Siemens pointed out, it was a bit disconcerting at first, but well enough done to work.
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Light Messaging

From the Silicon Valley Biz Ink and the Globe and Mail comes a story about the new Nokia 3220 Camera Phone: Light Fever, a phone that has LEDs that you can use to write on the air by waving the phone back and forth. You can also tilt the phone to get a joystick effect for certain games.
Is Light Messaging a gimmick or could it become a way of displaying information without large screens? Could this technique be used for other situations?

EverQuest or EverCrack

Wired News has a peice on The Quest to End Game Addiction. It is mostly anecdotal, but mentions two Yahoo groups of EQ widows, one of which apparently has more than 1000 members.
The most touching part is a link to a confession by a 17 year-old Ontario boy on how he suffered from computer game addiction. (See Re: Computer Game Addiction.) Could this be a spoof?
Is game “addiction” a significant problem? Could it be a reflection of a gap between those who play and those who don’t – non-players convinced that there must be something wrong with the player.

The Walrus: Game Theories

In the current The Walrus there is a good (cover) article, “Game Theories“, by Clive Thompson. The article starts withy Edward Castranova’s online papers on online game economies and moves from there cover some of the emerging economic phenomena. The closing question is whether players really have ownership rights to their virtual property and what would happen if a game closed down rendering that property worthless (as may be happening to There.) Would/will people sue for lost income/value or do the game companies own it all, despite the underground economies that have emerged?
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PhiloLogic

PhiloLogic – The ARTFL Project XML/SGML Full-Text System is now available for download. PhiloLogic is an extremely fast large corpus search engine that was developed by Mark Olsen and company at Chicago for the ARTFL collection of French lit from the revolution to the 1900s. The original textbase was one of the first (if not the first) large scale diachronic literary full-text databases. PhiloLogic has proven its worth over the years.
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Spring 2004 Convocation

IMG_5000.JPG.200.jpg Tuesday I went to the 2004 convocation where Daniel Lanois was honoured along with our third cohort of Multimedia students. Convocations are an emotional event for me – after all the marking and lecturing I can give the students a hug and feel joy for them. These rituals are not meaningless, they orient us to what has been achieved and allow us to be our best for a moment – to congratulate students rather than critique their work.
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Armchair Arcade

Armchair Arcade! is an online journal and discussion forum on classic gaming. They are onto their third issue. I like the retro look to the issue “covers”. The articles so far seem mostly written by the site’s authors – they need to widen the pool of authors. What is not clear is how submissions are reviewed which may discourage academics (not that academics, with our strange rituals of promotion, are good writers for such venues.) They model themselves more on a magazine than a journal.
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