Last week I was at the 5th International Conference on Japan Game Studies, Replaying Japan 2017. You can see my conference notes here. The conference was held in the Strong Museum of Play which has a terrific video game collection and exhibit. (I vote for holding all conferences in museums!)
This year I kept notes about the Digital Humanities 2017 conference at McGill. See DH 2017 Conference Report. My conference report also covers the New Scholars Symposium that took place before.
The NSS is supported by CHCI and centerNet. KIAS provided administrative support and the ACH provided coffee and snacks on the day of. We were lucky to have so many groups supporting the NSS which in turn supports new scholars to come to the conference and to articulate their issues in an unconference format.
DH 2017 itself was a rich feast of ideas. There was too much going on to summarize in a paragraph, but here are two highlights:
The participants of the New Scholars Symposium identified the following as topics to watch and think about:
Alice and Bob is a web site and paper by Quinn DuPont and Alana Cattapan that nicely tells the history of the famous virtual couple used to explain cryptology.
While Alice, Bob, and their extended family were originally used to explain how public key cryptography works, they have since become widely used across other science and engineering domains. Their influence continues to grow outside of academia as well: Alice and Bob are now a part of geek lore, and subject to narratives and visual depictions that combine pedagogy with in-jokes, often reflecting of the sexist and heteronormative environments in which they were born and continue to be used. More than just the world’s most famous cryptographic couple, Alice and Bob have become an archetype of digital exchange, and a lens through which to view broader digital culture.
The web site provides a timeline going back to 1978. The history is then explained more fully in the full paper (PDF). They end by talking about the gendered history of cryptography. They mention other examples where images of women serve as standard test images like the image of Lena from Playboy.
The design of the site nicely shows how a paper can be remediated as an interactive web site. It isn’t that fancy, but you can navigate the timeline and follow links to get a sense of this “couple”.
Thanks to Sarah I was led to a nice custom set of visualizations by Salahub and Oldford of Secretary Clinton’s Email (Source: Wikileaks). The visualizations are discussed in a paper titled Interactive Filter and Display of Hillary Clinton’s Emails: A Cautionary Tale of Metadata. Here is how the article concludes.
Finally, this is a cautionary tale. The collection and storage of metadata from any individual in our society should be of concern to all of us. While it is possible to discern patterns from several sources, it is also far too easy to construct a false narrative, particularly one that fits an already held point of view. As analysts, we fall prey to our cognitive biases. Interactive filter and display of metadata from a large corpus of communications add another tool to an already powerful analytic arsenal. As with any other powerful tool it needs to be used with caution.
Their cautionary tale touches on the value of metadata. After the Snowden revelations government officials like Dianne Feinstein have tried to reassure us that mining metadata shouldn’t be a concern because it isn’t content. Research like this shows what can be inferred from metadata.
I’ve been playing with DataCamp‘s Python lessons and they are quite good. Python is taught in the context of data analysis rather than the turtle drawing of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. They have a nice mix of video tutorials and then exercises where you get a tripartite screen (see above.) You have an explanation and instructions on the left, a short script to fill in on the upper-right and interactive python shell where you can try stuff below.
The Internet Archive’s new software emulator will take you back to 1984.
From Twitter again (channelled from Justin Trudeau) is a story in the Atlantic about the Internet Archive’s early Macintosh emulator, What It’s Like to Use an Original Macintosh in 2017. The emulator comes with a curated set of apps and games, including Dark Castle, which I remember my mother liking. (I was more fond of Déjà Vu.) Here is what MacPaint 2.0 looked like back then.
I’m amazed they can emulate the Mac OS in JavaScript. I’m also amazed at the community of people coming together to share old Mac software, manuals, and books with the IA.
Each of our lectures will explore one specific facet of bullshit. For each week, a set of required readings are assigned. For some weeks, supplementary readings are also provided for those who wish to delve deeper.
On Twitter I came across this terrific syllabus: Calling Bullshit: Syllabus. The syllabus is learned, full of useful links, clear and funny. I wish I could write a syllabus like this. For example, here are some of the learning objectives:
What could be more important an objective in the humanities?
It’s not robot overlords. It’s economic inequality and a new global order.
Kai-Fu Lee has written a short and smart speculation on the effects of AI, The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence . To summarize his argument:
Continue reading The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence – The New York Times
Teaching machines to understand – and summarize – text is an article from the The Conversation about the use of machine learning in text summarization. The example they give is how machines could summarize software licenses in ways that would make them more meaningful to us. While these seems a potentially useful application I can’t help wondering why we don’t expect the licensors to summarize their licenses in ways that we can read. Or, barring that, why not make cartoon versions of the agreements like Terms and Conditions.
The issues raised by the use of computers in summarizing texts are many:
Last week I was at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences attending the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities 2017 conference. (See the program here.) It was a brilliant conference organized by the folk at Ryerson. I loved being back in downtown Toronto. The closing keynote by Tracy Fullerton on Finer Fruits: A game as participatory text was fascinating. You can see my conference notes here.
Stéfan Sinclair and I were awarded the Outstanding Achievement Award for our work on Voyant and Hermeneutica. I was also involved in some of the presentations: