Erector Set – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I just finished Bruce Watson’s book on A. C. Gilbert, the invetor of the Erector Set titled The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made. The book doesn’t quite work as either biography or as social history, but it ends by asking why the Erector sets and other construction toys from Gilbert Toys failed in the late 60s. Watson suggests three changes:

  • From Edison to Einstein. The first shift was a shift in paradigm from science being about invention (with Edison as the hero) to science being about theory (with Einstein as paradigm.)
  • After the A-Bomb. The second shift was the change in how we perceive science after the Atom Bomb. Science was no longer a unquestioned good. Watson suggests that Frankenstein’s Monster (the film with Boris Karloff) also contributed to a changing in attitude towards science.
  • The Cool. The final nail was the emergence of teen culture in the 60s – a culture concerned with the cool. Kids who constructed things with Erector sets were seen not as boys, but as nerds.

Toys like Erector, which in its time was very successful, aimed to appeal to boys. They avoided presenting themselves as “educational” as that would be the kiss of death. Instead they were for tinkering and playing engineer. They appealed to parents as a solution to the “boy problem” of energetic boys getting into trouble (something we solve with drugs today.) With time, playing with Erector sets making bridges ceased to appeal to boys as a manly thing to do. It ceased to be cool and boys began to be seen less as a problem than as a market for which entertainment could be designed. Why solve the boy problem when you could feed the cool boys with rock and roll, television and movies. Toys are now sold in conjunction with TV shows (cartoons or other).

Watson ends the book by pointing out that the videogame industry now sells much more than the toy industry – especially the educational toy industry. Videogames are this generation’s boy toys. What will be next? I can’t help wonder if there is a return to construction with all the interest in Arduino’s, fabrication, and robotics.

Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad – The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail today had a story in the Focus section titled, Why it’s okay to wage joystick jihad (Poplak, Richard, Aug. 27, 2010). The story looks at the controversy raised by the forthcoming Medal of Honor game that takes place in Afghanistan and which allows players to play a Taliban fighter. The story quotes MacKay (our minister of defense),

“The men and women of the Canadian Forces, our allies, aid workers and innocent Afghans are being shot at, and sometimes killed, by the Taliban. This is reality,” Mr. MacKay’s statement said. “I find it wrong to have anyone, children in particular, playing the role of the Taliban. I’m sure most Canadians are uncomfortable and angry about this.”

Poplak dismisses (in my mind too quickly) the argument that there is danger in imitating disreputable characters.

Speaking from the position of a frequent playground ersatz robber, I can confirm that role-playing doesn’t necessarily imply empathy and attachment. There is, after all, no appreciable evidence suggesting that children who play Indians are likely to grow up as advocates for Indians’ rights.

The argument from imitation is not that in playing Indians we would sympthize with them; it is that in repeatedly playing and practicing certain activities we would become conditioned by the activities.

What I like about the story is how it engages and quickly surveys the relationship between games and war. Games can be about all sorts of things, but an extraordinary number of them are about war and fighting. Why is it war that we want to play?

Hoppala! Augments

Lucio introduced me to a cool authoring environment from Layar called Hoppala!. Hoppala! Augmentation lets you author a Layar game on a map on the web. You can attach icons, media and text to the mapped points. We are using this as part of an authoring environment for PicoSafari (soon to be called fAR-Play). PicoSafari is a augmented reality game platform that humanities computing and computing science students created. It has been extended so that we can create adventures with questions you have to answer before you can see the next location. Our goal is to make it easy for people to author games and Hoppala! looks like a great tool.

WEME: Witches in Early Modern England

I’m at the Methods Commons workshop and Kirsten Uszkalo presented the WEME project (Witches in Early Modern England.) She showed (for the first time) the Throwing Bones interface which allows one to search the database and survey results as small decks of cards. Each deck has a different set of cards depending on the features of the hit. (See an example below.) You can use these sets to explore the hits. Very neat!

Three sets of cards

Towards a Methods Commons

Well my vacation is over and I’m facilitating a retreat on text methods across disciplines. (See Towards a Methods Commons.) With support from the ITST program at SSHRC we brought together 15 linguists, philosophers, historians, and literary scholars to discuss methods in a structured way. The goal is to sketch a commons that gathers “recipes” that show people how to do research things with electronic texts. Stay tuned for a draft web site in about 6 months.

Google: Our commitment to the digital humanities

Google has announced the first projects they are funding to use Google Books and have announced a commitment to the digital humanities of nearly a million dollars. See Official Google Blog: Our commitment to the digital humanities.

we’d like to see the field blossom and take advantage of resources such as Google Books that are becoming increasingly available. We’re pleased to announce that Google has committed nearly a million dollars to support digital humanities research over the next two years.

DH 2010 conference

I’m at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, England. The conference is taking place at King’s College London. I’m on two panel and giving a paper (with others):

Some of the themes that are coming up at the conference are:

  • Inclusion. At the ACH AGM we had a conversation about how to explain the field and things like posters to people new to it. Elsewhere we discussed who is included or not. This year there was a THATcamp before DH which was, by all accounts, inclusive and lively. (While I didn’t participate, I’m judging the Developers Challenge.
  • Graduate Consortium. The idea of creating some sort of graduate consortium where graduate students could meet and organize activities is coming up in different contexts.
  • Historicizing the Field. I’m seeing more and more reflections on the history of computing in the humanities. Of particular note is the archive of conference abstracts being put together by John Unsworth and others. I see this as an example of how the field is trying to document itself to its own standards.
  • Embroidered Digital Commons. There were some neat projects run in parallel with DH. I participated in the Embroidered Digital Commons, an artwork faciltiated by Ele Carpenter as part of the Open Source Embroidery project. I love these participatory projects.

Jobs. The ACH ran a neat Jobs-Slam at its Annual General Meeting. Jobs are becoming an issue as the field expands and people see humanities computing as a source of alternative para-academic careers. I was surprised how many jobs were promoted at the AGM.

On the subject of jobs, Stéfan Sinclair shared two places where jobs are being posted that were new to me:

Arts & Humanities Net: http://www.arts-humanities.net/jobs

HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/forums/announcements-and-opportunities/fellowship-and-employment-opportunities

centerNet 2010

I have spent yesterday and today at the centerNet 2010 summit as I am on the steering committee. See my conference report at, philosophi.ca : Center Net 2010. An interesting question we are struggling with is what centerNet’s mission should be and how it is different from other organizations in ADHO. We are trying to also figure out how centerNet can do things without become a heavy centralized organization (which may be ironic since we all have centres at our universities with all the baggage and virtues of centers.) My view is that centerNet should do very little itself – instead its philosophy should be to empower and support centers or collaborations to do things for the rest of us. We should, in effect, centersource things in the sense of crowdsourcing by centres.

Jenkins: It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution

I came across this older article by Tom Jenkins from Globe and Mail that makes the case for investment in digital content. The article, It’s time for Canada’s digital revolution (Monday, March 2, 2009), is by Tom Jenkins, executive chairman and chief strategy officer of Waterloo’s Open Text Corp. He is also on the SSHRC council.

The Obama administration has made IT infrastructure and digital content a top and multibillion-dollar priority. The European Union has just launched a massive expansion in European digital content as part of its digital commercialization strategy. With only 1 per cent of Canada's content on the Web, we are falling behind the rest of the world as other countries pull ahead in the race to put their information online. Canada must keep pace in the fast-moving digital revolution. …

Library and Archives Canada, with strong support from the private and university sectors, has a plan to digitize Canadian content and is ready with the digital equivalent of a shovel-ready knowledge infrastructure project. It is time to implement. To succeed, we have to move quickly to take advantage of our strengths and opportunities.

This is the first public mention I’ve seen of an initiative to digitize Canadian content on a large scale. There has been discussion that OpenText (which got started with the New OED project) would support such a project. Let’s do it!

Globe: Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’

Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’ (Omar El Akkad, Focus Seciton, F4). The online version of the story, unlike the print version, includes a screen shot of the Conjecturator that Patrick Juola is leading.

The article quotes me extensively from an interview after the Mind the Gap workshop. The article focuses on the Digging into Data projects in Canada including the With Criminal Intent project. At least one quote attributed to me, however, must be from someone in the classics Digging project.