Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference

I’m at the Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference at Brock University. I gave a paper on Computer Games and Canada’s Digital Economy. The paper is based on work we did with a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant on the subject (See the PDF of full report). Sean Gouglas led the team. I helped with the interviews of professionals in 3 cities (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.) Two research assistants, Shannon Lucky and Joyce Yu did a careful content analysis of the interviews which was the focus of the Brock paper. The full report includes other sections on independent game development, serious games, and a survey of programmes across Canada.

Inside Facebook: Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling

According to Inside Facebook available data shows Facebook user numbers possibly flattening in early-adopter countries like the Canada, UK and the US. This article follows on an article Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide that got a fair amount of press attention. What is going on? In the article about available data they say,

there do appear to be some overriding trends here. Canada, the United Kingdom and a few other early adopting countries have alternately shown gains and losses starting in 2010. Up until then, growth had generally been much steadier.

I doubt this means that Facebook is about disappear. It is still growing world wide. They may just be hitting a saturation point – something you would expect. We might ask if or how Facebook will change once its user base is not expanding. Are they dependent on a perception of growth and will they suffer once Facebook is no longer the hot growing thing? Will users migrate their social networking to the next big thing?

I would add a general reflection which is that there are now more social media sites than I can keep up with. There isn’t enough time to blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on. We now have choose that social media that suit our changing lives and where our friends are. My academic friends have migrated to Twitter (while I’m still stuck blogging.) Facebook is what my mother likes. The trick is to not feel one has to keep up with it all.

Digging Into Data Conference

I’m now at the Digging Into Data Challenge Conference. This conference brings together investigators from the first round of the Digging Into Data Challenge. Thursday morning we had a meeting with the folks from CLIR who are evaluating the program. See my Conference Notes. The major issues I see are:

  • Gender representation is an issue. The Challenge and in the digital humanities in general we need to work harder to involve women researchers, especially as leaders. We run the risk of DH being seen as the last bastion of old me in the humanities.
  • Representation by new scholars is also an issue. The Challenge should bring together the graduate students and the new faculty – they need to be encouraged to meet up and they need the validation of attention from the research councils.
  • Supporting international research. One of the innovations of Digging is that it has one review process that crossed national boundaries. If your project was approved all the national partners got funded. We should see this model generalized beyond the digital humanities.
  • Encouraging research mashups. Another benefit of Digging is that it encouraged established projects to interoperation. The project I’m on (Datamining with Criminal Intent) built interoperability between the Old Bailey project, Zotero and Voyeur.
  • Encouraging ambitious projects. Digging encouraged ambitious and “blue-sky” proposals that experimented with large datasets.

We had a wide-ranging conversation about the challenge of the digital humanities in general. Many of the usual issues came up. Can the Digging Into Data Challenge be a visible advocate for some of the changes we have been grousing about for years.

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.