Theoreti.ca – Page 129 – Research notes taken on subjects around multimedia, electronic texts, and computer games.

DAEDALUS PROJECT: MMORPG Research, Cyberculture, MMORPG Psychology

A student in my Computers and Culture class drew our attention to the DAEDALUS PROJECT which is led by Nick Yee at PARC. The Daedalus Project is a blog about MMORG research with longish entries written like short articles that are gathered into issues. There is also The Daedalus Gateway that organizes the articles in a more thematic fashion.

The articles are fascinating. The graph immediately above was taken from a study on Game Choices that looks at what sorts of characters players choose.

Many of the articles on The Daedalus Project are based on voluntary surveys (see his methodology). It is impressive that Yee is getting between 2000 and 4000 respondents and there is something to be learned by how he returns results, informs people of the survey and so on. I feel that The Daedalus Project represents some sort of new paradigm that crosses method, publication, and outreach.

Rebooting Computing Manifesto

On the subject of manifestos, one of my students pointed me to a project Peter Denning is leading that has a Rebooting Computing Manifesto. The project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (of the USA) and is aimed at trying to reinvigorate computer science in the face of dramatic drops in enrollment.

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

I like how this is articulated as a challenge. I also like the can-do approach of gathering and coming up with ideas.

A Digital Humanities Manifesto

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has come up with a A Digital Humanities Manifesto which is worth reading. It starts with,

Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.

I am reminded of the Victoria Manifesto that a bunch of us put together at the University of Victoria. Manifestos are a particular type of document that can be used to convey a call for change.

Digging Into Data: New International Program

The NEH has announced a new program with SSHRC called Digging Into Data. The program is innovative in a number of ways. It is addresses the challenges of large data collections and their analysis. It is also international in that it brings together the granting councils from three countries. Here is what the program says,

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference. Our hope is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field.

This feels like a turning point in the digital humanities. Until now we have had smaller grant programs like the ITST program in Canada. This program is on a larger scale, both in terms of funding available and in terms of the challenge.

The SSHRC announcement is here.

Project Bamboo

I attended Workshop 3 of Project Bamboo in Tucson Arizona this week. I think I’m beginning to understand it, though understanding what Bamboo is was one of the favorite subjects of conversation of the meeting (so I’m conscious that . There is a deliberate ambiguity to the project since they are trying to listen to the community in order to become what we want rather than what we suspect. Some of my takeaway thoughts:

It is being structured as a consortium. Thus the long term sustainability model is that universities (and possibly associations and individuals) will contribute resources into the consortium and get back services for their faculty. This seems the right way to get to a level of broad support.
One thing Bamboo will do is develop shared services that participating universities can use to deliver research support.
One of the challenges is figuring out how to listen to the community. The stories are the mechanism being used for this. Scholars are contributing stories of what they do and what they want to do. In some cases the stories are being contributed by people who talk to faculty.
Recipes (like those we developed for TAPoR) will be a key way to connect stories to the shared services. A recipe is a way of abstracting from a lot of stories something that can be used to identify the tools and content needed by researchers to do useful work.
Bamboo probably won’t build tools, but they will build and run services with which others can build tools. Bamboo may be the project that runs SEASR as a service for the rest of us, for example. We can then build tools with SEASR for our research projects.
Bamboo is talking about running the shared services in a cloud. I’m not sure what that means yet.

Cornell Web Lab: Large scale web research

The Cornell Web Lab is an interesting example of a high performance computing project in the humanities and social sciences. As they say,

The Web Laboratory is a joint project of Cornell University and the Internet Archive to provide data and computing tools for research about the Web and the information on the Web.

In a paper on the project, A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive, William Arms and colleagues point out that the data challenge of the social sciences (and humanities) is that the data is poorly structured and there is a lot of it. The Internet Archive is a case in point; as of 2006 they had 5 to 6 petabytes of data of web pages. While it is amazing that we have such archives in computer (and human) readable form, it is hard to do anything with that much. The Web Lab approach is to provide HPC basic services for extracting subsets of the whole that can then be used by other tools.

Flamenco: Faceted browsing

FLAMENCO stands for FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations and is an open source faceted browser framework. It is developed in Python and uses Lucene and MySQL to give developers a framework to develop browsing interfaces for collections. There are some nice demos, from which the image above was taken (it is from the Nobel Prize Winners demo and I chose to see only women winners.)

We experimented with a faceted browser for the second generation of the McMaster Museum of Art Online Roman Coin Collection. The model works well with smaller and visual collections, but with items that are harder to represent in small representations we need to think about visual cues. How, for example, might we represent a web page as a small icon in a visual browser so that you can recognize it? Stan Ruecker has been working on interesting models.

Beyond Analogue: Current Research in Humanities Computing

Beyond Analogue: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing is a conference being organized by the Humanities Computing graduate students at the University of Alberta on February 13th. Daniel O’Donnell from U of Lethbridge and Paul Youngman of U of North Carolina-Charlotte will be the keynote speakers. If you are grad student you might want to submit a proposal for a poster or paper. Either way you are welcome to attend the full day conference if in Edmonton that day.

Pliny: Welcome

Pliny, the annotation and note management tool by John Bradley at King’s College London just got a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

The Mellon Awards honour not-for-profit organisations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities, as well as cultural-heritage not-for-profit activities.

Pliny is free and you can try it out on the Mac or PC. John has thought a lot about how tools fit in the research process of humanists.