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

Stanford Libraries preserves historical software collection with Federal Agency - Tue, 05 Mar 2013

Two-year project will image one of the largest pristine historical collections of microcomputing software in the world for historical and cultural research.
 
Read the full article here.

GameCity 2012 and game preservation - Wed, 17 Oct 2012

I will be on the program of this year's GameCity festival in Nottingham, England.  I will have a couple of chances to talk about PVW/PVW2 and will be having conversations with James Newman, Iain Simons and some other people at NTU (Nottingham Trent University, where the UK National Videogame Archive is located) about projects.
The two public events for me are:

Monday, 9am.  GameCity Breakfast talk. "You're All Going to Die." This is a panel with James, me, and Stella Wisdom of the British Library.  I expect that one theme will be the link between web archiving and game preservation.

Monday, 2.30pm. "Before It's Too Late: The National Videogame Archive Four Years On."  This is a "keynote" with James giving the main talk about the NVA, and I will respond.   Yes, the title has a familiar ring, and I'm sure that's intentional.

Tips for Nottingham and the Midlands are welcome.
 

New Oral History released by Computer History Museum: Al Alcorn - Thu, 20 Sep 2012

The Computer History Museum has just released the oral history I conducted with Al Alcorn back in 2008. The transcript can be found here.  The two interviews (both about two hours long) were also videotaped, and I am sure CHM will be releasing clips from the interview for various purposes.
 
Here is a short excerpt to whet your appetite.  

"Lowood: You made a quick comment in there. Do you think Steve Jobs was influenced by Bushnell?
 
Alcorn:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  Again, my personal belief-- remember, Steve was an adopted child, right.  And I don't think the relationship with his parents was that good, and and he was, what, 18, 19 years old?  To all of a sudden see this weird relationship between Nolan and myself, how the dynamics worked and how, you know, we already were known to be a pretty innovative company.  He came to us because it was clearly a fun place to work.  And then to see that process and the very nature of what happened with the Breakout story, you know, that Nolan would get him to go do this thing.  You heard the Breakout story. You know.   
 
Lowood:  Yes.   
 
Alcorn:  And not even tell me about it, you know, to get things done.  I mean, look at how things happened with the Macintosh and things at Apple later on, the same kind of thread, just flat out not taking no for an answer.  I think that Steve was affected by that [relationship with Bushnell.]  Yeah."
 

CFP: The History of Games International Conference, Montréal, 21-23 June 2013 - Thu, 30 Aug 2012

 The History of Games International Conference

 

Stanford acquires archives of "Bay Area Video Arcades: Photographs by Ira Nowinski, 1981-1982." - Thu, 02 Aug 2012

The Stanford University Libraries have acquired the photographic archives of "Bay Area Video Arcades: Photographs by Ira Nowinski," 1981-1982."  The collection consists of approximately 650 35mm images, with contact sheets, as well as prints and digitized images for approximately 50 selected images. 

Ira Nowinski is an acclaimed documentary photographer who has created extraordinary photo essays in a variety of areas of recent history, including North Beach in San Francisco, the evacuation of elderly citizens in San Francisco's SOMA district, aspects of Southeast Asian, Jewish, and Native American culture, and an important photographic study of Holocaust Memorials.  

The Bay Area Video Arcades photographs were taken in 1980 and 1981 at several locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The locations include the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the Exploratorium (site of the 1981 Atari Asteroids competition), and other arcades in Oakland and San Francisco.  One might think of these photographs as companions to Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus' classic essay from the same period, "The Arcade Subculture," first published as a chapter in their Mind at Play: The Psychology of Videogames (Basic Books, 1983).  They wrote that the video arcades of the 1980s served a similar function as the drive-in theaters of an earlier generation.  They are "not only ... novel but they are also a breeding ground for social interaction  They’re places where social  contact is made In a frlendly atmosphere and where frlendshlps are formed. They constitute the foundation of  a subculture with its own norms, values and patterns of communications."  Loftus & Loftus pointed out, for example, that the Arcade was a place where it was perfectly acceptable to stare at what another person was doing (playing an arcade game), without speaking to them.  Ira Nowinski's photographs capture this sense of a place for the congregation of a new subculture, one that perhaps seems a bit strange, but one that has also become familiar with the passage of time. 

 

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Richard Dawkins

James Shapiro goes after natural selection again (twice) on HuffPo - Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution Is True - Wed, 22 Aug 2012

I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to play very little role at all.  Even though he’s spreading nonsense in a widely-read place, I don’t go after him very often, for he just uses my criticisms as the basis of yet another abstruse and incoherent post. Like the creationists whose ideas he appropriates, he resembles those toy rubber clowns that are impossible to knock down.  But once again, and for the last time, I wade into the fray. . .

In his post of August 12, “Does natural selection really explain what makes evolution succeed?” (the answer, of course, is “no”), Shapiro simply recycles some discredited arguments used by creationists against evolution. The upshot, which we’ve heard for decades, is the discredited idea that natural selection is not a creative process. I quote:

“Darwin modeled natural selection on artificial selection by humans. He ignored the inconvenient fact that human selection for altered traits has never generated a truly new organismal feature (e.g., a limb or an organ) or formed a new species. Selection only modifies existing characters. When humans wish to create new species, they use other means.”

This is the old canard that artificial selection doesn’t create “new features.”  His definition of a “new organismal feature” is, of course, one that hasn’t been generated by artificial selection, so it’s all tautological.  Of course we haven’t seen whole new organs or limbs arise in the short term, for people have been doing serious selection for only a few thousand years, and have not even tried to create new organs or limbs. But we can create a strain of flies with four wings, breeds of dogs that would be regarded as new genera if they were found in the fossil record, and whole new biochemical systems in bacteria.  Both Barry Hall and Rich Lenski, for example, have demonstrated the evolution of brand new biochemical pathways that have evolved to deal with new metabolic challenges. Now that is a “new organismal feature”!

Often new species are created by hybridization, but Shapiro forgets that that hybridization is often followed by either natural or artificial selection for increased interfertility of the new hybrid form, so it truly becomes an interbreeding population that characterizes a species.  And that, of course, gives a crucial role to selection, as it did in the experiments of Loren Rieseberg and his colleagues on hybrid sunflowers.

Read more

Viewpoints: Why is faith falling in the US? - - - BBC News - Wed, 22 Aug 2012

A new poll suggests that atheism is on the rise in the US, while those who consider themselves religious has dropped. What's the cause? Two writers debate.

Thousands attended an atheism rally in Washington DC this March

Recently, researchers conducting a WIN-Gallup International poll about religion surveyed people from 57 countries.

The poll suggests that in the US, since 2005:

• the number of people who consider themselves religious has dropped from 73% to 60%

• those who declare themselves atheists have risen from 1% to 5%

What's behind the changing numbers? Is the cause churches that chase modern trends at the expense of core beliefs? Or are those who have always been ambivalent about religion now less likely to identify as Christian? We asked two writers for their take.

Rod Dreher: Progressive churches fuel apathy

As a practicing Christian of the Hitchens sort (Peter, the good one), I welcome the news that more Americans are willing to identify as atheists. At least that clarifies matters.

I respect honest atheists more than I do many on my own side, for the same reason Jesus of Nazareth said to the tepid Laodicean church: "because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to spit you out of my mouth".

Read more

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader - Robert F. Worth - New York Times - Wed, 22 Aug 2012

Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.

DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion, intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

Read more

Does this set a record for smug nastiness? - Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net - Wed, 22 Aug 2012

Tony Nicklinson died today. His appalling suffering is now at an end, no thanks whatsoever to our judges or our parliament. Obviously all decent people will feel glad for him, but I would add sorry that he failed to win a precedent that might benefit others. Indeed, it was precisely the fear of such a precedent that motivated the High Court to hand down its callous judgment. Let’s continue his fight for a more humane approach to the right to die.

In pursuing that fight, we need to take full measure of the opposition, where it is coming from, and in some cases the sheer depth of its unpleasantness. The article posted below was written before Tony Nicklinson’s death but after the High Court turned down his request to be allowed to die. The author, Richard Carvath, describes himself as a British Conservative political activist. I have never met him and have no wish to do so, nor had I previously heard of him. But I think his article could perform a useful service in laying out, clearly and relentlessly, the full extent of the nastiness of which people of his persuasion – we inevitably get to the love of Jesus before we are through – are capable. As often on the Internet today, you have to wonder whether it is satire, but on balance I am persuaded that this one isn’t. This is the real McCoy. Read it and marvel at the depths to which the human mind can sink, when its moral sense is sufficiently disabled by religion.
Richard Dawkins

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For the Love of Tony Nicklinson

Richard Carvath

Poor old Tony Nicklinson.  His wife wants to kill him, his family want to kill him, his barrister wants to kill him, the mainstream media want to kill him, the euthanasia lobby want to kill him and a vociferous mob of Twitter followers want to kill him.  It’s enough to depress anyone to the point of despair.  In a recent tweet, Cheryl Baker (yes, she of 1981 Eurovision Bucks Fizz fame) seemed to sum up the general attitude of the misguided ‘Kill Tony’ mob when she wrote: “My heart cries for Tony Nicklinson.  If he was a dog there would be no ethical or moral decision to be made, just whatever is best for him.”  But Tony is not a dog.  Tony is a human being.  Last week, thankfully, Tony failed in his attempt to change the law which serves to protect us all from murder.  The upholding of the law was applauded by champions of justice and pro-life defenders of the disabled – and rightly so.  Tony Nicklinson isn’t terminally ill; he is severely physically disabled but he is not dying; Tony has a life to live.

There are many forms of human suffering and we each suffer something at least once in our lives: severe illness; injustice; betrayal; loneliness; poverty; unemployment; crime; childbirth; bereavement; unfair discrimination etcetera.  Sometimes our suffering is our own fault and sometimes it’s the fault of others.  Suffering is inevitable and what matters is how we respond to suffering.  Do we help ourselves or are we our own worst enemy?  Do we wallow in self-pity or do we resolve to think positively? 

Read on

Missionaries of Hate - - - Top Documentary Films - Wed, 22 Aug 2012

Thanks to Mike for the link

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Correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to Uganda, where many question whether the growing influence of American religious groups has led to a movement to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. As an anti-gay movement spreads across the continent, gay Africans and their families face an increasingly uncertain future of isolation, imprisonment or even execution.

The film makes it much easier to understand why the general Ugandan public is so eager to send their peers to jail. If the most prominent spiritual leader in your community made it his life purpose to convince you that there were people coming to eat your poop and recruit your children, you would be against them too. They are only hearing one side of the story and it is the origin of their information that is truly infuriating.

Although Ugandan leaders are deeply offended by the notion, the facts definitively show that American evangelists have played a central role in defining the nation’s hard line against sexual minorities. The documentary focuses on American evangelist Dr. Scott Lively, who is widely credited with installing the dominant notion that homosexuals are after your children.

Read more and see the full playlist

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