Digital Humanities Courses in Second Life

Via Esther Grassian at UCLA Libraries, an announcement of an interesting collaboration between UCLA and the Digital Library Federation in the area of digital humanities:

We are happy to announce that during this academic year, 9 Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities taking place at UCLA in real life (RL), will be “broadcast” via live feed into DLF’s Second Life (SL) island, Entropia.

The RL participants will also see the SL audience, projected on a screen in the Seminar room at UCLA. Anyone interested is welcome to attend at UCLA or in Second Life.

The following Second Life URL will teleport you to Entropia, though you must have a Second Life account in order to log on: SLurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Entropia/110/117/21/

Please note that the times listed below are U.S. Pacific Time. See further details in the message below, from Todd Presner, Germanic Languages, UCLA, or in the attached flyer.
Best,
Esther Grassian (UCLA) & Deni Wicklund (Stanford)
From: Presner, Todd [mailto:presner@humnet.ucla.edu]
Sent: Tue 9/23/2008 11:30 AM

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to invite you to participate in the 2008-09 Mellon seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA.  This year’s seminar is co-organized by Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Laboratory, and Mellon Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities, UCLA) and Todd Presner (Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, UCLA).  The monthly seminars are open to graduate students, faculty, and the general public.  Participants outside of UCLA can also join us at Entropia in Second Life.

“What is(n’t) Digital Humanities?”

Through dialogues with expert guest interlocutors and practitioners from various fields, seminar participants will examine, historicize, and critique the emergent field of “digital humanities.” Bringing together insights from media, game, literary and cultural studies, we will attempt to take stock of humanistic inquiry at the start of the 21st century.

Topics:
Web 2.0
Virtual worlds
Ubiquitous computing
Geo-temporal navigation
Participatory media
Digital narratives
Open source knowledge
Collaborative authorship
Experiential design
The classroom as laboratory

Seminar guests include:
Johanna Drucker
Michael Schanks
Lev Manovich
Diane Favro
Franco Moretti
Tara McPherson
Peter Lunenfeld

Graduate students may take the seminar for 2 units of course credit per quarter (COMP LIT 597), but enrollment is not required for participation. For more information, visit http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/ <http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/>  or join the UCLA Digital Humanities Facebook Group.

Seminars meet in Humanities Building 193/199 from 2-5 pm on the following dates:

Fall Quarter: October 8th, November 5th, December 1st
Winter Quarter: January 5th, February 2nd, March 2nd
Spring Quarter: April 6th, May 4th, June 1st

Topics for each session will be posted on-line once they have been finalized.
Please feel free to forward this email and the attached flyer to anyone who you think may be interested in the seminar.

Many thanks,

Todd Presner

—— End of Forwarded Message

Project Partner RSS feeds is installed

After some fighting with other ways to do it, it seems that the clearest and most compact way to do this is also the easiest. For now I will just putting the headlines of other blogs on the sidebar. You’ll notice on the right of this blog are the 5 most recent headlines from Henry Lowood’s “How They Got Game” blog.

With this solution, other blogs would be shown above or below “How They Got Game” also with the 5 most recent headlines. There isn’t much I can change. I can add headings and some descriptive text about the blog, alter the number of headlines, and toggle the display of the post dates and authors.

If you have any suggestion for features let me know, I can look into doing that. Also if you want your blog added just email your blog URL to me at olendorf@illinois.edu. You will also need to make sure your blog is set up with an RSS feed.

Project Partner Blogs

Henry Lowood’s Blog

Bernhard Drax in our collections - Thu, 15 Oct 2009

Bernhard Drax is best-known for his impressive work as a documentary machinima-maker and investigative reporter in Second Life (where he is known primarily as Draxtor Despres). �In fact, he has multiple lives in the entertainment industry, making music and working in a variety of media.
�
Now he has achieved a first, with the featured presentations in both the Machinima Archive and the Archiving Virtual Worlds Collection. � His machinima piece is "I'm Too Busy to Date Your Avatar!," made in collaboration with Second Life "talkshow Goddess" Pooky Amsterdam and the German house/electronica producer Samuel's Dream. �It is a machinima response to the trailer for the third season of The Guild," "Do you wanna date my avatar."�
�
In the Archiving Virtual Worlds Collection, "Gone Gitmo" chronicles the development of Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantanamo Bay in Second Life. �This project is a collaboration of Peggy Weil and Nonny de la Pena. �Gone Gitmo�was a European "Every Human Has Rights" finalist for the Media Award given in 2008. �Bernhard's efforts as an investigative journalist in Second Life are yielding unique video documentation of the uses and issues in this virtual world and thus we are very pleased to have his work in the Archives.

6 Days: A collaboration of J. Joshua Diltz and Joseph DeLappe - Wed, 05 Aug 2009

“6�Days” is a new piece stemming from a collaboration of master machinima maker Joshua Diltz and artist-provocateur Joseph DeLappe, two people whose work I have long admired.�It has just been added to the Machinima Archive.�Here is the introduction provided by Joshua:
�
“’6 Days’ is an experimental documentary that examines the consequences of a military conflict that rages over a period of six consecutive days in a virtual game world.�Through the lens of both a static and a roaming ground camera, the movie captures both visceral action and a sobering body count.
�
Based on the game “Call of Duty 4,” the film pays homage to the lives, both military and civilian, lost during the Second War of Fallujah.”
�
I will say only two things about this piece:
�
1. Do not use the flash viewer.�Yes, this is a 751MB download, but you will need to suck it up this time and download the file.�
�
2. I believe this collaboration stems from the Play Machinima Law conference we held at Stanford in the spring.�As far as I know, Joseph and Joshua did not know each other beforehand.� [On this point,�Joshua just wrote the following in e-mail:�"Yes, the project did originate from the conference.� Both meeting Joseph and listening to the concept of preserving data that could be played back in real time.� The captured footage came from captured data in multiplayer sessions.� It's actually quite an interesting means of creating movies and recording how people interacted in the virtual space.� All the data fits into about a 5mb file than came be played back and explored post capture.� The demo capture allows you to view players actions and the conversation they had while playing.� All in that tiny file."]
�
Ok, three things: This is a pathbreaking example of what I think will become an important creative form: non-fiction machinima.�In this sense, as a documentary, it ties in beautifully with our own Preserving Virtual World efforts and the impulses behind it.

Please, if you have reactions to the piece, feel�free to submit a review�via the Machinima Archive (on the movie�page) or comment here.
�
Henry

Play Machinima Law -- April 24, 25 at Stanford - Mon, 13 Apr 2009

Our machinima spot on the conference, by J. Joshua Diltz.

Stanford Magazine covers Preserving Virtual Worlds - Thu, 20 Nov 2008

Stanford Magazine, the publication of the Stanford Alumni Association, provides a nice piece in its November/December 2008 issue on the Preserving Virtual Worlds project.� Under the title "Saving Worlds: Preserving the Digital and Virtual," neatly summarizes the project and its work, with quotations from Henry Lowood (me) and Beth Dulabahn of the Library of Congress, as well as�a couple of nice photos.� By the way, the workshop described in the article was "Preserving Knowledge in Virtual Worlds," put on as part of Media-X' Summer Institute at Wallenberg hall.

Doug Wilson's HTGG projects now in Second Life - Thu, 06 Nov 2008

Back in 2003, Doug Wilson prepared two video loops for the "Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences" show I curated with Casey Alt for the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford.� This was the first of the exhibitions the project has prepared over the years.� More recently, the project has been active in Second Life, particularly through the Life-Squared project with Lynn Hershmann and the "Preserving Virtual Worlds" project.

And now the twain have met, as Doug's work has been made available in Second Life as part of the American Library Association's first annual National Gaming Day on 15 Nov. 2008.�� As the announcement tells us:

"ALA Island in Second Life is showing the two-videos-in-one video, "Crafting the Virtual World and The Art of Interactive Storytelling" which was recorded, edited, and written by Douglas Wilson. Watch the video at the Galen Noltenius Sky Platform on ALA Island (206, 100, 46)."

Doug's two projects include footage he captured (nicely, too, which was saying something in 2003) from games ranging from MUD to "The Legend of Zelda" to "Neverwinter Nights."�

"Crafting the Virtual World" and "The Art of Interactive Storytelling"will also forever be available for viewing in the "Archiving Virtual Worlds" collection.� As always, use the downloadable files for best video quality, not the stream.

Congratulations, Doug!

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins' singing debut! Symphony of Science - 'Our Place in the Cosmos' (ft. Sagan, Dawkins, Kaku, Jastrow) - Mon, 23 Nov 2009
"Our Place in the Cosmos", the third video from the Symphony of Science

Influence on equal terms - Mon, 23 Nov 2009

Children who front Richard Dawkins' atheist ads are evangelicals - Mon, 23 Nov 2009
The two children chosen to front Richard Dawkins’s latest assault on God could not look more free of the misery he associates with religious baggage.

Beyond belief - Mon, 23 Nov 2009
Since the publication of The God Delusion a common response has been that Richard Dawkins’s depiction of religious believers is crude and one-dimensional, and that he misunderstands the subtleties of theology.

The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial - Mon, 23 Nov 2009
Adapted from the original trial transcript by Peter Goodchild.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

A new, online open access journal on virtual worlds started publication this July, entitled (logically enough) the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, with Jeremiah Spence at UT Austin as the lead editor.  They have a blog, too

Assoc. of Virtual Worlds Open House

The Association of Virtual Worlds will be holding an open house at their virtual headquarters on Wednesday, 9/24/2008 from 12:00 noon to 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S.).  You can find a link to their virtual headquarters at the AVW’s website: http://www.associationofvirtualworlds.com

Intelligence Analysis & Virtual Worlds

Federal Computer Week has a story up about the intelligence community’s interest in using virtual worlds for their trade, both as a workspace for collaboration and as a tool for data analysis.  This is part of a growing interest in a variety of fields for 3D spaces for scientific and analytic work (see William S. Bainbridge’s article in Science for a more extended discussion of science and virtual worlds).  Our project’s work has focused on more open, public spaces; it is an open and debatable point to my mind whether the approaches which might work for preserving public virtual space are in fact applicable to something like a virtual world for intelligence analysis.  I think this points to the need for more research on why people want virtual worlds preserved, and the need for serious discussion how we might vary our  approach to digital preservation based on the needs of the community to be served.  The implications of the ‘designated community’ portions of the OAIS Reference Model have been a bit neglected, I think, and software preservation, particularly  for something as complex as a Second Life or WoW are going to require giving them more attention.

Update: the Archiving Virtual Worlds video collection

One of the resources we have created in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is the Archiving Virtual Worlds video collection, hosted by our partner, The Internet Archive.  This collection is a collaborative effort of the How They Got Game Project project team in the Stanford University Libraries and the Internet Archive, as part of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the U.S. Library of Congress.

So, what is the content you will find in this archive?  It is dedicated to historical preservation of documentation of virtual worlds, ranging from in-world capture of events and activities to real world interviews with people who have developed or worked in virtual worlds.  For example, you will find documentation of the last minutes of the recently closed virtual world, EA-Land.

I am pleased to announce that the collection is closing in on 200 videos only a couple of months after its launch, thanks in large part to two important additions of videos.  The first is the remarkable collection of historical videos contributed by Bruce Damer, a pioneer in the effort to save the history of the technologies and communities of virtual worlds.  Some of you may know of Bruce’s work on the history of virtual worlds, especially his book Avatars!, or his work on the Digibarn Computer Museum.  The documentation provided by his collection covers a variety of virtual worlds going back to the mid-1980s; check out, for example, this amazing video footage on Habitat, one of several videos that at last make available views of this seminal LucasFilm project. (As a general note, use the streamed versions of the videos to get an idea of the content, but download video files to get the best quality.  Some of the more recent captures are captured in HD quality and provide sharp images that provide legible chat and user interface text.)  We are very grateful to Bruce for sharing his collection.

The second addition to the collection was provided by our project group and involved “embedding” one of our team members in the virtual worlds Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EA-Land over the past summer and capturing video of activities, events, and locations.  This project developed out of conversations with our new project partner, Dyyno, about documentation of cultural heritage through media such as videos captured or streamed out of virtual worlds.  Alex Degtiar from our project team (now a student at UC Berkeley, but we will not hold that against him) carried out the capture, rendering, and metadata creation tasks for more than fifty videos, all presented at high-resolution (again: use the downloadable files). He documented a wide range of activites, from the closing of EA-Land mentioned above to PvP play in World of Warcraft and popular sites in Second  Life. We will soon be adding more material in this vein contributed by Dyyno, the State of Play conference, and myself.

The Archiving Virtual  Worlds is already, shortly after launch, a unique resource for documentary video on the history of virtual worlds. We expect it to grow rapidly. Please feel free to contact me if you have videos you would like to contribute.

– Henry Lowood