Theoreti.ca

From Kathryn I found this longish blog entry/essay on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Steel Bananas » The Slandering of Linda Hutcheon: Language Zombies. A Semiotic Virus. What could be more Allegorical Autobiographical?. Steel Bananas presents itself as “guerrilla academic”. It is a “a not-for-profit art collective and culture zine”.

Google today has included a playable Pac-Man as their logo. If you “Insert Coin” you can play it. It is written, apparently in Javascript and HTML so it will work on an iPhone. All of this in honour of the anniversary of Pac-Man.

(Thanks to Sean for pointing this out.) Lets see more such games!

Susan pointed me to a hilarious YouTube video about Brontë sisters action figures. The authors of it write,

This was a fake commercial we made in 1998 for a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures. Its educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired.

I’m at a conference organized by Kevin Kee called Playing with Technology in History. I am writing my conference notes at, philosophi.ca: Playing With History. The theme of the conference is gaming to teach history.

The first day is an unconference where we first decided what we wanted to do. Bill Turkel brought all sorts of fabrication stuff. We had sessions about different types of games.

Sean pointed me to a video (abvoe) explaining the working of a real Turing Machine built by Mike Davey in Wisconsin. It is worth noting that Turing didn’t (to my knowledge) every try to make the machine he described for theoretical purposes. Also worth noting (as is clear in the video) is that there are actually 3 settings for each position: nothing, 0 or 1.

Some Humanities Computing and Industrial Design students put on an Arduino workshop on Saturday. Once again I’m struck by how much fun it is to get simple things working with an Arduino. There is something integrative about making physical interactives that appealed to everyone at the workshop – you have to program, you have to wire things, you have to understand a bit about circuits and you have to fiddle. How can we weave such learning into our humanities computing courses?

The Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2010 has started. We have folk in Australia blogging.

This year we have over 150 participants – lets hope nothing blows up.

I was just sent an invitation to IconoTag by an old friend, Jame Turner. It is a multilingual image tagging research project where you choose a language and tag 12 images in that language. I’m not sure what the research is, but it reminds me of the Google’s Image Labeler which seems loosely based on Luis von Ahn’s work – projects like CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.

Seamus pointed us to a great animation on YouTube, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster. They nicely dramatize the challenges and need for digital preservation.

Scott Smallwood came to talk to our interactives group about his work on musical instruments. Scott was involved with the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and demonstrated one of the hemispherical speakers that they designed so that laptop musicians could join and play with others. The idea was that a laptop musician, instead of plugging into a sound system (PA), should be able to make sound from where they are just like the analogue instruments. I wonder what the visualization equivalent is? Will these new pocket projectors we can begin to imagine visualization instrument that are portable. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry’s demo of SixthSense at TED is an example of creative thinking about outdoor interface.