This week (July 4th, 2011) I’m instructing at the From Metadata to Linked Data Summer School at Trinity College, Dublin. I’m teaching a half-day hands-on workshop on Voyeur. You can see my workshop script here. I am trying a new version of our workshop script which will include worksheets.
I’m writing my notes at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/FromMetadataToLinkedData – these are not a conference report so much as reflections on stuff I’m learning.
I’ve was slowly reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows when I came across this passage,
By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content an disrupts our concentration. (p. 91)
As often happens when reading, questions disrupted my concentration. I couldn’t help thinking that Carr’s gaze was limited by the screen. How many distractions are there beyond the book and screen. I grabbed my iPhone and took a panoramic shot of the visual space from where I sat on the living room couch. Rooms are the problem – they are filled with multimedia and interactive distractions starting with the couch (which invites me to put down the book and snooze.) Here is my annotated “multimedia” space (click to enlarge):
Reading I came across a reference to an influential early article in the Rolling Stone of 7 December, 1972, titled SPACEWAR – Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. The article is by Stewart Brand and it describes Spacewar and the culture around it:
Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.
Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That’s the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)
The article goes on to describe the Hackers involved in playing and developing games as “A mobile new-found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor.” It talks about ARPA, Xerox PARC, Alan Kay’s work and Pam Hart and Resource One. You can feel Brand inventing a compute counterculture by describing it as being. See Chapter 4 of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture,
In “Spacewar,” Brand brought together two visions of personal computing and linked them in terms set by the New Communalist technological vision. The user-friendly, time-sharing vision of Xerox PARC and the politically empowering, information-community vision of Resource One were two sides of the same coin, Brand implied. Both groups, he suggested, were high-tech versions of the Merry Pranksters, and the computer itself was a new LSD. Drawing on the rhetorical tactics of cybernetics, Brand offered up Xerox PARC, Resource One, and the Merry Pranksters as prototypical elites for the techno-social future. He allowed each to claim some of the cultural legitimacy of the others: in his feature, Resource One appeared to be not a fringe group of ex-hippies but a central player in a new computer movement. Xerox PARC, while still a child of the military-industrial complex, took on the cool of the Pranksters. And the Pranksters and Brand himself, six years after the Trips Festival, demonstrated that they had survived the Summer of Love and should still be regarded as harbingers of social change.
…
Even before minicomputers had become widely available, Stewart Brand had helped both their designers and their future users imagine them as “personal” technologies.
Game Studies, an online journal about computer games has just published the dialogue I wrote and performed with Kevin Kee, see The Leisure of Serious Games: A Dialogue. The dialogue started as a scripted performance for Immersive Worlds in 2009 and we then edited it into something to be submitted. The journal found it hard to review as it isn’t really an article, but then dialogue has always been at the edge of things.
The folk at Illinois have put together a database of conference abstracts from past years of what is now called the Digital Humanities conference. See Digital Humanities Abstracts: Search Form. At the moment they only have 5 years of abstracts (1998 to 2005), but more will be added.
I’m at Digital Humanities 2011: Big Tent Digital Humanities at Stanford University. I was involved in two workshops before the conference on Visualization for Literary History and Text Analysis with Voyeur. (You can see the script to the Voyeur one at DH2011 Voyeur Tools.) I’m also involved in a paper on “Computing in Canada: A History of the Incunabular Years” presented by Victoria Smith and a panel on The Interface to the Collection organized by the INKE Interface Design team. One gratifying thing to see is the visibility of the University of Alberta in the DH 2011 Visualizations set up by the conference organizers. If you zoom in to the different visualizations you will see the number of participants from U of A.
From Twitter I learned about James Smithies
Academic Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). These are images for setting up cloud services on Amazon. The two that he now provides are for Omeka and Open Journal Systems. They are not for the technically challenged, but they could be a way for a digital humanities center/project to be set up in the cloud for those who don’t have good university server support. The day may come when you don’t need university infrastructure, but can set up your own. For that matter, this blog is on my private site which gives me a bunch of tools (like WordPress and a wiki) for about $7 a month.
As part of the CHCI annual conference at the Toronto Jackman Humanities Institute they scheduled a special day with centerNet titled “Humanities (dot) Net”. The program is on 2011 Annual Meeting « Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (scroll down). The event is a bringing together of these two associations of centres connected to the humanities, one digital and one “traditional.” Of course there is nothing traditional to the CHCI centers. Some of the things that link us include:
Humanities (dot) net as an event brings together leaders in both types of centres to learn about each other and to reflect together on the agenda of the humanities.
At the Immersive Worlds conference they have a half-day dedicated to the Ontario Augmented Reality Network. This network is based in Toronto, Niagara and London (Ontario.) They have academic partners, commercial partners and government.
Robert MacDougall from Western gave the first talk about augmented reality games. He argued that history is the original transmedia narrative. You have books, movies, statues, plaques and so on. The historical plaque or statue is an old fashioned form of augmented reality annotation. They “superimpose information on reality” the way QR tags can.
Tecumseh Lies Here (PDF) is an augmented reality game that plays with history that MacDougall is developing. The game will be run this summer (which is why parts of the article linked are blacked out.) Lies here is a game for the conference launched from QR tags that show different versions of plaques that tell different versions of local history.
Now I have to get up an play.
At Interacting with Immersive Worlds J. P. Dyson gave a great talk about “Immersion In and Out of Virtual Worlds.” He is the Director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) in Rochester which is associated with the Natioal Museum of Play and the National Toy Hall of Fame.
He mentioned how some of the toys inducted into the Hall of Fame include the Cardboard Box and Stick.
The ICHEG has some 27,000+ artifacts including video games, game system hardware, arcade games (in cabinets) and papers from people like Ralph H. Baer and Will Wright’s. They have an interesting interpretative framework online titled, Concentric Circles: A Lens for Exploring the History of Electronic Games (see bottom of page for link to PDF).
Dyson’s talk traced a history from toy soldiers (H. G. Wells and “Floor Play”) to Dungeons and Dragons to text adventure games. He talked about Romanticism and changes is our ideas about childhood and play. He talked about the new (for Victorians) places for play like the nurseries and gardents, the availability of toys, and the leisure time for play or other foms of immersion (like reading novels.) I’m convinced we need to pay a lot more time to the history of toys and children’s play in order to understand computer games.
