Two days ago, on November 29th, 2011, I attended a symposium at Tokyo University on “The Establishment of a Knowledge Infrastructure for the Next Generation and the Mission of Digital Humanities.” This was organized by Masahiro Shimoda and had, among others, John Unsworth as a keynote speaker. I posted my conference notes on philosophi.ca.
Test of Voyant Tools
We have a new version of what used to be called “Voyeur”. It is now called Voyant Tools and has a new logo designed by Milena. Here is a test of embedding a panel. It is a Word Trend of Theoreti.ca with the word “games”.
Uzumasa Sengoku Festival
- Entrance to the Park
On November 26th I visited the Toei Kyoto Studio Park for the Uzumasa Sengoku Festival. I’ve posted my photographs here. The Toei Park is cinema theme park with sets that are still used along with all sorts of activities for visitors like a Ninja show. It is a bit of tourist trap, but that is part of its charm for those who want to be photographed in “authentic” settings as you will see. The Uzumasa Sengoku Festival is a two-day festival dedicated to Japanese Warring Period transmedia (manga, anime and games) which made is a perfect venue to study the interplay between media and/for fans. For the festival there was a pavillion dedicated to gaming where local game companies had booths, there were special events and some of the houses in the “historic” Kyoto setting were used by companies to promote new products about popular warring period anime and related media. Above all the cosplay (costume play) fans came out in droves to pose for pictures in the recreated streets of old Kyoto.
Continue reading Uzumasa Sengoku Festival
Conference Report on DH-JAC2011
I am at the 2nd International Symposium on Digital Humanities for Japanese Arts and Cultures, DH-JAC 2011. I am writing a live conference report here on philosophi.ca. Yesterday I presented a response to Mitsuyuki Inaba’s survey of the work of the Web Technologies group (PDF) of the Global COE Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures.
INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond
Today I was at the INKE Birds Of a Feather conference here in Kyoto. I wrote a conference report at, INKE Research Foundations For Understanding Books And Reading In A Digital Age Text And Beyond. It was a great day with lots of discussion thanks to the BOF format where papers were distributed beforehand so we could only talk for 5 minutes.
Motion Capture and Noh
On November 10th I was invited by Dr. Kozaburo Hachimura to watch as his graduate students capture the motion of a master Noh performer. The motion capture was run in a special lab that was specifically built for this. They have a floor that was built to Noh theatre standards and we had to take our slippers off to protect the wood. There is a rig on the ceiling with the motion capture cameras and a sound booth in the back. When not in use for motion capture the room is used for seminars and meetings.
Antconc – Concordance tool on PC/Mac
Thanks to John, I learned about a gem of a concordance tool for the Mac, PC and Linux called Antconc. It runs on your computer and you can download the tool from the author’s site, Laurence Anthony’s Software. If it is stable it could be a great tool to introduce students to text analysis. Looking at the screenshots it has some nice features for finding n-grams and can handle a set of texts.
How videogames will change the world
The University of Alberta Faculty of Arts has written a nice little story/interview about our Humanities Computing graduate students working on computer games called, Student View: How videogames will change the world.
Isotope – Magical Layouts
Stan pointed me to “an exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts” called Isotope. It allows you to have a layout of items (images of web sites or blocks of information) that can be rearranged with nice animations.
How a chain of tea shops kickstarted the computer age
The Telegraph has a nice story about how How a chain of tea shops kickstarted the computer age (Christopher Williams, Nov. 10, 2011.) The story is about the 60th anniversary of the LEO which could be considered the first business computer. LEO was developed by the catering company J Lyons and Co which operated tea shops.
We came across an article in the Globe and Mail from Sept. 16, 1955, “Britain Leads in Office Automation” that talks about Ferranti and Leo. The article mentions that they and others “have not experienced much, if any, labour antagonism.” Automation putting people out of work was a major issue in those early years.
The Telegraph story sent me to a YouTube video of a BBC broadcast on the LEO that goes into fascinating detail about how it is “programmed” in hardware. They go from design to hardware as this is not a general purpose system that can be programmed in software.