15.036 interactive content

From: by way of Willard McCarty (willard@lists.village.Virginia.EDU)
Date: Tue May 22 2001 - 02:08:39 EDT

  • Next message: by way of Willard McCarty: "15.037 NLP book series"

                    Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 36.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

       [1] From: David Zeitlyn <D.Zeitlyn@ukc.ac.uk> (22)
             Subject: Re: 15.030 interactive content

       [2] From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au> (29)
             Subject: Re: 15.030 interactive content

       [3] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (26)
             Subject: keep it clean! (of software)

    --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
             Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 07:00:34 +0100
             From: David Zeitlyn <D.Zeitlyn@ukc.ac.uk>
             Subject: Re: 15.030 interactive content

    We have included interactivity in some of the Experience Rich Anthropology
    project

    For example, you can draw your own genealogical tree

    era.anthropology.ac.uk/Kinship
    or (my particular hobby horse) play with a simulation of Mambila spider
    divination
    era.anthropology.ac.uk/spider.html (read about the background at
    era.anthropology.ac.uk/Divination)
    I hope this helps and is fun!
    david

    -- 
    Dr David Zeitlyn,
    Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology,
    Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing,
    Department of Anthropology,
    Eliot College, The University of Kent,
    Canterbury,
    CT2 7NS, UK.
    Tel. +44 (0)1227 823360 (Direct)
    Tel: +44 (0)1227 823942 (Office)
    Fax  +44 (0)1227 827289
    http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/dz/
    

    --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 07:00:57 +0100 From: Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@bowerbird.rmit.edu.au> Subject: Re: 15.030 interactive content

    At 6:35 +0100 21/5/2001, Humanist Discussion Group wrote: >2. >Does the anthropology of games feature in any of the MA programs currently >offered or being developed in the field of Humanities Computing?

    I believe that Espen Aarseth of the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen is in the process of developing some pedagogical material around such themes. I also believe Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Baltimore has been working and teaching around the computer game recently, but I'm unsure of the extent to which this is formalised in their program (and they are not Humanities Computing). Andrew

    Stuarts url is: http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/

    Espen's is: http://www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/ but I think you'll find it's very out of date.

    I'd be surprised if Andrew Mactavish (McMaster - a colleague of Geoffrey Rockwell's) isn't teaching something on games in their excellent Multimedia undergrad. program. http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~mactavis/

    for those not up to date games are very much a new field being rapidly colonised, from memory there are 3 international conferences on games this year. There's already been in in Denmark, one is coming up in Bristol, and I believe there's a third but I may be mistaken (and I don't remember where...).

    cheers adrian miles --

    lecturer in new media and cinema studies + media studies. rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au] + institutt for medievitenskap. university of bergen [http://media.uib.no]

    --[3]------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 06:58:25 +0100 From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> Subject: keep it clean! (of software)

    In Humanist 15.030 Francois Lachance quotes Goldfarb et al (1998) and Peter Shillingsburg, Literary Text in the Digital Age, on the desirability of "interactive content", which I take as support for an argument that "content" -- nevermind the philosophical problem in this weasel-word -- should have software intermixed. This, it seems to me, pushes us toward dangerous ground. Our great model for aggregated but loosely organised knowledge, the library, achieves much of its long-term utility from keeping books and their uses quite separate. Do we really want to encode uses, ways of reading, into our sources? Would this not be in many if not most cases to limit these sources to current ideas about how they should be read?

    I am aware that declarative encoding does somewhat of the same thing, e.g. a "this is a chapter" tag is much more specific than a page starting with some extra blank space with a number in the middle of that space. Nevertheless, as I understand good markup practice -- comments here please -- one tries VERY hard not to tell the reader how to navigate through a text &c.

    For the above reasons I wonder seriously about the object-orientated approach to computational life. I can see that perhaps the question is a matter of fine tuning -- some primitive operations might not be so restrictive as I fear. Comments from those who know about this stuff?

    Yours, WM

    ----- Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer / Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. / +44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue May 22 2001 - 02:22:45 EDT