Dan Zen sent me links to two neat sites put together from the work of his students in the Interactive Multimedia program. The first is a series of tutorials for Flash, Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Flash Tutorials. The second is a Flash work that gathers screen shots and short reviews of other neat Flash sites. See FlashDeck – Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Cool Flash Sites.
Vectors: Online journal for digital media
Ray Siemens pointed out to me a new journal Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular being launched by Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication.
In addition to creating a venue for academic research and modes of expression that go well beyond traditional text to incorporate still and moving images, sound, and interactivity, Vectors seeks to significantly redefine the parameters of scholarly publication.
The subtitle for the journal seems a strange … what is a “dynamic vernacular”? Do they mean the journal will be “interactive” in an everyday fashion?
I am excited to see a journal the recognizes the importance of publishing multimedia works, but that raises the interesting question of how they hope to mount and preserve complex interactive works. Perhaps they won’t bother trying to preserve new media work they publish and will instead focus on using the medium.
Continue reading Vectors: Online journal for digital media
Jo: Skinning Blog
TAPoR Skinning Research is a blog by a student who is doing a cool project on skinning for TAPoR. It is an example of open research and how blogging ideas can weave in people.
XML Scripting of World of Warcraft Interface
Kids are now modding the interface of WOW (World of Warcarft by Blizzard). Blizzard doesn’t support such mods, but has made it possible. See their tutorial, Tutorials – The Unofficial WoW UI Site. According to the tutorial, “The interface of World of Warcraft is built from XML files which describe the look and layout, and lua files which contain scripting functionality.”
My son tells me that it is hard to draw the line between a mod that makes it easier to play, and a hack that gives you information or an advantage you shouldn’t have.
Truth in World of Warcraft
| Allied Weapons Of Truth Aura of Truth Avatars of Truth Champions of Truth Chaotic Truth Citadel of Truth Dawn of Truth Defenders of Truth DemiGodsOfTruth Followers of Truth Forgotten Truth Glaive of Truth |
Heros of Truth And Might Illusion of Truth Keepers of Truth Perversion Of Truth Prevailing Truth Prophets of Truth Rangers of Truth Savage Truth SavageTruth Saviors of Truth Seekers of Truth Sentinels of Truth |
Sovereignty of Truth The Brutal Truth The Convictors of Truth The Guardians of Truth The Savage Truth The Seekers Of Truth TornTruth Truth Divine Truth and Justice Truth and Law Truth or Consequences |
So who says gamers are not interested in the truth? This list from Thottbot World of Warcraft (a Google for WOW) is of guilds with “truth” in their name. I rather like “Truth or Consequences”.
SSHRC Knowledge Project: Trip Report
Lynn Hughes and I spent three days at the Knowledge Project, an event put together by the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. Wednesday was devoted to reporting back about the Transformation (more in another post.)
Thursday was an all day poster session (or, as Marc Renaud called it, a trade-show) for Strategic Research Clusters, MCRIs, CURAs, and INEs – in other words many of the large SSHRC-funded projects were there. Lynn and I are PIs on iMatter or Interactive Matter, a Strategic Cluster on digital media creation and interpretation in the arts and humanities.
What is interesting is that SSHRC, despite having impressive handouts for the “Knowledge Project”, does not have a web site for it.
Gigapxl Camera
The Gigapxl Project shooting super high-resolution images (approaching 4000 megapixels) of landscapes. See the story in Wired News: Photographer Seeks Resolution. If I understand the project, they are not using a digital camera, rather a film-plate camera and then scanning the images.
Thanks to Craig McNaughton for this.
ni9e: Grafitti Analysis
Geoffrey Tressider sent me a link to ni9e, a site by two designers with a number of text visualization and design projects including a “Graffiti Analysis” project where they track the gestures of creating grafitti and then use the gestures to create new works. An interesting take on visualizing text – here they visualize the graphic gestures.
Check out how they paint with letters in “typo graphic illus tration” and similar projects.
Digital Medievalist
Digitalmedievalist.org is a new site for medievalists working with new media. It has news, a wiki, forums and a journal that will be coming on stream soon. Daniel O’Donnell at Lethbridge is one of the people behind it. I particularly like the clean design of the site. Daniel tells me they have not had luck getting people to edit wiki pages which doesn’t bode well for academic wikis.
Digital Badges
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of wearable digital badges that could be programmed with messages. There are some affordable packages like the MessageTag or Mtag. The question (before I buy one) is … just what would I program it to display?
A related, but more sophisticated, product is nTAG which is essentially a small screen others can read off your chest. It has RFID and infrared so nTAGs can communicate with each other (“Hi, I like vanilla ice cream too!”) or with a central server. The nTAG web site is coy about privacy and costs. I think they rent you the service and don’t sell the technology, which is a pity, as it would be interesting to imagine some playful uses. For a story about nTAG, see Breaking the Ice 2.0.