Dennis Cooper has created an interesting novel of looping animated gifs called Zac’s Haunted House (A Novel). The novel is published by Kiddiepunk. I’m not sure why he deliberately calls it a novel when it has so little language, though one can think of the animated gifs as some sort of linked visual language. Perhaps animated gifs are becoming the visual equivalent of words with which we can compose.
I found this courtesy of 3QuarksDaily.
CBC Spark with Nora Young had a segment on Why empathy is the next big thing in video games. The category seems to map onto “persuasive games” or “art games.” Some of the games mentioned:
Ian Bogost talks on the segment and makes the argument that in empathy games one feels a different type of empathy than in narrative media. When you make the choices you have something at stake. He also made a point about empathy with systems that I didn’t quite get. He talked about systems oriented game design where you get exposed to a different system or environment and learn about it through playing. The idea is that by playing someone running a fast food chain you learn about the system of fast food. You learn to empathize with the fast food mogul in order to understand the constraints those systems are under.
Reading a paper by Lev Manovich I came across a reference to the web site WorldWideWebSize.com which graphs the size of the World Wide Web. The web site searches Google and Bing daily for different words from a corpus and then uses the total results to estimate the size of the web.
When you know, for example, that the word ‘the’ is present in 67,61% of all documents within the corpus, you can extrapolate the total size of the engine’s index by the document count it reports for ‘the’. If Google says that it found ‘the’ in 14.100.000.000 webpages, an estimated size of the Google’s total index would be 23.633.010.000.
In the screen grab above you can see that the estimated size can change dramatically over time. Hard to tell why.
Text Hewitt spoke today on “The Perils and Prospects of Digital Scholarship in the 21st Century Canada: Tri-Agency Research Data Initiative” at our Research Data Management week. Some of the things he talked about follow.
Canada is not leading on data stewardship. We need to catch up so that we can take advantage of what the world has to offer and we need to offer what Canada has to the world. Data management capacity is increasingly linked to Canada’s international competitiveness.
We used to do a literature review when starting a project. Now we also look for data sets that we can use so we aren’t re-searching to create useful data.
Last week we held our third Around the World Conference on the subject of “Big Data”. We had some fabulous panels from countries including Ireland, Canada, Israel, Nigeria, Japan, China, Australia, USA, Belgium, Italy, and Brazil.
The Around the World Conference streams speakers and panels from around the world out to everyone on the net. We also edit and archive the video clips. This model allows for a sustainable conversation across continents that doesn’t involve flying people around. It allows a lot people who wouldn’t usually be included to speak. We also find there are technical hiccups, but that happens in on-site conferences too.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been at two interesting conferences and took research notes.
The Let’s Play Archive is a charming collection of play-throughs of games. Some use screenshots and text, others link to video with voiceovers. Useful for understanding historical games.
An important book for anyone doing the history of computing is From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog by Martin Campbell-Kelly. This book more or less invents the field of software history by outlining the important phases, sectors and sources. Other histories have focused on individual companies, heros, or periods; Campbell-Kelly tries to survey the history (at least up to 1995) and define what needs to be considered and what we don’t know. In particular he tries to correct the consumer view that the history of software is about Microsoft. To that end he spends a lot of time on mainframe software and the sorts of services like IBM CICS (Customer Information Control System) that allows ATMs and other systems to reliably communicate transactions.
Martin Campbell-Kelly in the first chapter outlines three phases to the history of software that also correspond to sectors of the industry:
You can read an interesting exchange about the book here that reviews the book, criticizes it and gives Campbell-Kelly a chance to respond.
Bibliographic reference: Campbell-Kelly, M. (2003). From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: a History of the Software Industry. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Just finished a gem of a game called Gone Home: A Story Exploration Video Game. The game is simple. You are the older daughter returned to an empty home after a year in Europe. You wander around the house finding notes and other clues as to where your family is. In the process you uncover the stories of your parents, your sister and a dead uncle. The ending had me in tears – proof for me that a game can evoke emotions.
The empty and mysterious mood reminds me of other games that use that mood like Dear Esther and even Myst.
The Intercept has published the TSA’s behaviour checklist for spotting terrorists as part of two stories. See, Exclusive: TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists. The Spot Referral Report includes all sorts of behaviours like “Arrives late for flight …”. The idea of the report is that behaviours are assigned points and if someone gets more than a certain number of points the suspect is referred to a Law Enforcement Officer (LEO). The checklist is part of a SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) Referral Report that is filled out when someone is “spotted” by the TSA. A second story from the Intercept claims that Exclusive: TSA ‘Behavior Detection’ Program Targeting Undocumented Immigrants, Not Terrorists.