Below are all of the upcoming 2009 MLA sessions related to new media and the digital humanities. Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments and I'll add it to the list. You may also be interested in following the Digital Humanities/MLA list on Twitter. (And if you are on Twitter and going… Continue reading Digital Humanities Sessions at the 2009 MLA
Category: New Media
Unthinking Television Screens
Last spring I participated in an interdisciplinary symposium called Unthinking Television: Visual Culture[s] Beyond the Console. I was an invited guest on a roundtable devoted to the vague idea of "Screen Life." I wasn't sure what that phrase meant at the time, and I still don't know. But I thought I'd go ahead and share… Continue reading Unthinking Television Screens
The Uncanny Valley of Action in Videogames
The agility afforded by blogging means nothing if you sit on your ideas for months or let half-written posts rot in your draft folder. That's a lesson I learned today when I discovered a host of recent references to Masahiro Mori's famous graph of the uncanny valley, mostly in reference to zombies (see posts by… Continue reading The Uncanny Valley of Action in Videogames
On Hacking and Unpacking My (Zotero) Library
Many of my readers in the humanities already know about Zotero, the free open-source citation manager that works within Firefox and scares the hell out of Endnote's makers. If you are a student or professor and haven't tried Zotero, then you are missing out on an essential tool. I use it daily, both for my… Continue reading On Hacking and Unpacking My (Zotero) Library
Facebook versus Twitter
Facebook is the past, Twitter is the future. Or phrased less starkly, Facebook reconnects while Twitter connects. All of my friends on Facebook are exactly that: friends from real life, or at the very least, people whom I actually know. Colleagues, students, family members, former classmates, childhood friends. A significant chunk of those Facebook friends… Continue reading Facebook versus Twitter
Television Emulation for the Atari VCS
This is absolutely stunning: Ian Bogost had his computer science students at George Tech modify Stella, the opensource Atari 2600 emulator, to reproduce the same kind of visual artifacts you would've seen when you played the VCS on a CRT television (those big boxy TVs with tubes, for those of you who don't remember). Their… Continue reading Television Emulation for the Atari VCS
Electronic Literature Course Description
A few of my English department colleagues and myself are preparing to propose a new Electronic Literature course, to replace a more vaguely named "Textual Media" class in the university course catalog. Here is an incredibly first draft version of the course description, building in part on language from the Electronic Literature Organization's own description… Continue reading Electronic Literature Course Description
Southern States Web Expo and Exchange
While it seems like Web 2.0 outfits are dying left and right and venture capital for dot coms has all but dried up, I've noticed that there is still a market in Web 2.0 events: demos, expos, workshops, summits, conferences and so on, with tickets running $200/head. There may be no money in perpetually beta… Continue reading Southern States Web Expo and Exchange
What happens on Facebook when we die?
Anybody who follows Facebook has probably heard about the user who found it impossible to delete his account; even after he deactivated his profile, it showed up in searches and various Facebook news feeds. If you can't get out of Facebook when you're alive, what happens when you die? What happens to your Facebook profile… Continue reading What happens on Facebook when we die?
What I hate about books about videogames
There's been a burst of scholarly books about videogames in the past two years, and I've been going through as many as I can get my hands on. While there are astonishingly bright spots in individual books, the books overall have repeatedly been disappointing. I've begun noticing trends of things I hate about academic books… Continue reading What I hate about books about videogames
The Amazing Amazon Mechanical Turk
Clive over at Collision Detection reports on the new Amazon service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allows companies to hire (via Amazon) "Turks" who, in their spare time, do seemingly mindless tasks online, for example, tag photographs of shoes according to color. The tasks are mindless--but only for humans who have minds. For computers, the… Continue reading The Amazing Amazon Mechanical Turk
D.C. Area Humanities Forum on Video Games
Taking Games Seriously: The Impact of Gaming Technology in the Humanities Monday, May 15th from 4-6pm Location: Car Barn 316, 3520 Prospect St. NW, near Georgetown University Overview and Participants: Please join Michelle Lucey-Roper (Federation for American Scientists) and Jason Rhody (National Endowment for the Humanities) for a discussion moderated by Mark Sample (George Mason… Continue reading D.C. Area Humanities Forum on Video Games
The Best Spam. Ever.
Yesterday I received this bizarre spam, from someone "named" Solly Brit. The subject heading was "time card celibacy" and this nonsense phrase only hints at the random strings of English in the message, which reads like some methed-up computer-generated poetry slam: zest, detect pronoun imperfection and lens radically, in as historian disposable of rest home… Continue reading The Best Spam. Ever.
Professors, students, and emails
A recent article in the New York Times details some of the changes that email has wrought upon professor-student relationships in higher ed: At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance. I… Continue reading Professors, students, and emails
Career Killing Blogs
Slate has a new article on academics who blog, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? by Robert S. Boynton. The article mentions the infamous (among a very small circle of academic bloggers) Chronicle article, Bloggers Need Not Apply, which essentially argues that academics who have their… Continue reading Career Killing Blogs