Category Archives: Academic

Supporting digital scholarship in the humanities

Digital Humanities, Presentation, , , ,

31 August, I was part of a panel in Curtin’s research week to discuss digital scholarship. And from my notes I was asked to email here are some of my suggestions that might be of some interest and not just for library makerspaces..

In my brief chat I said when I was the project leader of Dighumlab for 4 universities (and now 2 libraries) in Denmark, I asked myself the following questions (abridged):

  • What is a research infrastructure?
  • What do we mean by a laboratory – is there only one?
  • What kind of databases do we have?
  • What about funding?
  • Who is the audience?
  • What should we deliver and when?
  • What are the goals for success after the 5 year period (our contract period) and how do we measure it?

I suggested that genuine infrastructures invest and support not just equipment but also people, skills, training, exchanges, enthusiasm.
Most DH centres are resource based or centre-based, few are distributed. But the most important thing is to work out who you want to work for and with and what resources and profile you hope to focus around.
For our discussion in research week I was not sure if people are talking about a cluster, centre, lab, and for learning, scholarship or support. Perhaps all three but I suggest to focus on one or two but ensure knowledge is carried on past individuals and some of the research aims to evaluate maintain and improve the quality or quantity of that information (it should not just be a pipeline, the pipeline itself should also be an area of research).
I did say some form of meeting space is important (like Curtin Library Makerspace!), archives are important (our Library has that but perhaps it needs to start looking at new more public focussed ones as well), and there are related degrees. So you could tackle any one of those three areas I mentioned, learning, scholarship and support.

For example with this UNESCO chair I have 3 years of workshop funding and 4 years of visiting fellowship funding. Rather than invite people who arrive talk and leave I think it best for me to build it around the makings a 3D archive, invite experts* in the first year to help us survey and build best practice, invite people to help us build it, invite experts in year 3 to help us evaluate it with local communities etc.. AND build a summer workshop or senior class around the visiting experts and workshop funding.

*With DIGHUMAB in 2012 I organised a 1 day conference, invited 4 experts from Nordic/UK countries and 2 infrastructure leaders (CLARIN and DARIAH), in areas we wanted to learn more about or connect with, to come and talk.
What did we get out of that? DARIAH helped DIGHUMLAB academics find partners for an EU project application and asked to host a meeting in Copenhagen, CLARIAH received ERIC EU status with a strong Danish leadership component, Sweden (HUMLAB) invited two of us to their conference; Oslo invited me for a talk and so did Aalto U (Finland), and Lorna Hughes helped bring NeDiMAH people to Copenhagen in 2013 for a conference on cultural heritage tools and archives, and a book (Cultural Heritage Digital Tools and Infrastructures, Routlege 2017 or 2018, google books?) will come out of that. All from a one day conference with just 6 invited and 4 local speakers! Oh, breakout time helps.

See also

 

 

 

 

UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage & Visualisation at Curtin University of Technology

Announcements, archaeology, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, heritage, PhD, Postdoc, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, ,

Just received this by email, last night:

Establishment of a UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Visualisation at Curtin University of Technology. Third Parties: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

So the agreement is signed and I will hear from Human Resources regards the provision of two PhD students and a contracted Research Fellow. The majority of their work will be in providing workflows and tutorials and repository guidelines for the storage and deployment and educational use of 3D heritage models/site simulations. I will have to find other avenues of funding for my major line of research, game-like simulation design of heritage sites and historical events and processes.

The specific objectives of this Chair are to:

  • create a Cultural Heritage and Visualisation network to use and advise on 3D models of World Heritage Sites, as well as to show how 3D models can be employed in teaching and research;
  • build capacity through community workshops and learning materials and distribute the teaching resources digitally at no cost to the end user, as well as train research students, post-doctorate scholars and visiting fellows;
  • recommend long-term archive guidelines and ways of linking 30 models to scholarly publications and related scholarly resources and infrastructures;
  • disseminate the results of research activities at conferences and workshops, via online papers, applications and learning materials; and,
  • cooperate closely with UNESCO on relevant programmes and activities, as well as with other relevant UNESCO Chairs.

#GLAMVR16

Academic, augmented reality, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, heritage, HIVE, Presentation, respositories, Symposium, talks, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation,

Well #GLAMVR16 was the twitter hashtag for Friday 26 August’s event held at the HIVE Curtin university, Perth. In the morning two invited speakers (Assistant Professor Elaine Sullivan and Mr Conal Tuohy) gave talks on Digital Karnak and Linked Open Data. They were followed by myself and my colleagues at the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, then a workshop on Trove data feed into UNITY game engine dynamically (Mr Michael Wiebrands) and Augmented Reality, Vueforia>Unity (Mr Dominic Manley).

There were three themes/reasons for the morning talks and afternoon workshops.

1.Digital Heritage: Workflows & issues in preserving, exporting & linking digital collections (especially heritage collections for GLAM.

2.Scholarly Making: Encourage makerspaces & other activities in tandem with academic research.

3.Experiential Media: Develop AR/VR & other new media technology & projects esp. for humanities.

The event was part of a strategic grant received from the School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, so thanks very much to MCCA!

Schedule and links to slides

Session title and links to slidesharePRESENTER
IntroductionsEar Zow Digital
Digital KarnakElaine Sullivan, UCSC USA
Linked Open Data VisualisationConal Tuohy, Brisbane
MORNING TEAmorning TEA
Making collections accessible in an online environmentLise Summers
Digital scholarship, makerspaces and the libraryKaren Miller
Digital Heritage Interfaces and Experiential MediaEar Zow Digital
Simple Biometric Devices for Audience EngagementStuart Bender
Usability of interactive digital multimedia in the GLAM sectorBeata Dawson
Emotive Media – Visualisation and Analysis of Human Bio-Feedback DataArtur Lugmayr
Visualising information with RAM iSquaresPauline Joseph
LUNCH
digital workflows (UNITY) Michael Wiebrands
Introduction to Augmented RealityDominic Manley
final questions/social networking/ SUNDOWNERCentre for Aboriginal Studies Foyer

Some thoughts on the 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap of Australia

Academic, Digital Humanities, respositories, , ,

The publically available documents are at

I enjoyed reading this, thought it had promise over the ealier research priorities, but I have five suggestions:

1. Missing Details About Heritage and Cultural Heritage In General

However heritage is only mentioned once, 8.3.2 and it requires major investment in infrastructure, especially research data storage, linked to the CADASTRE problems Australia is experiencing and that I am sure CRCSi would have told you about. Not only was heritage only mentioned once there was no mention of heritage collections yet Australia has 19 world heritage sites (http://www.australia.com/en/articles/world-heritage-sites-australia.html) not to mention the many state heritage sites and heritage towns. Digital collections are described but in terms of ecology, there are also cultural digital collections and cultural heritage collections, infrastructure between libraries archives galleries and museums that should have shared features, formats and efficient, scalable infrastructure.

2. Missing Infrastructure Theme: Tourism

Tourism is another big missing item. Smart tourism is a great industry to have but requires investment and infrastructure.

3. Encouraging co-curation and management and data replication

Also, although communities are mentioned, they could play a vital role vis a vis crowdsourcing, i.e. researchers and government departments need to develop better methods to disseminate data to communities, the skills and techniques to understand that data, and the capabilities to help curate, manage and develop that data. The roadmap still feels very much like data is stored and preserved and transmitted only by experts but Australia won’t have the money to pay these experts effectively and comprehensively.

Ways to allow partial editorial access at institutional and community level is vital for public engagement, feedback and budget efficiency.

4. More Emphasis On Education

Education is Australia’s 3rd or 4th biggest export industry, surely there should be more planning on how to educate and base education around the use and challenges of these major research infrastructures and how to measure their impact? Education is mentioned four times, but only, as far as I can see, in terms of access to infrastructure.

5. Academic Publication

The ways in which academics can publish and how they are measured is changing rapidly. Infrastructure could be more dynamically and effectively tied into publication and dissemination systems. Traditional proprietary journals published static research data and deny or delay access, digital publication means they could be produced more efficiently and quickly, be reformattable/reconfigurable for a variety of platforms and purposes and they could also be linked dynamically to updateable research data.

11.3 is the only place to mention publication and all it asks for is a “transformed environment where data and tools are provided reliably to researchers, and then the outputs of research – the publications, data and methods – are available in an integrated, reproducible form.”

GLAM-VR

Academic, augmented reality, Conference, Digital Humanities, Symposium, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , , , , , ,

 Event: GLAMVR short talks and workshop (Friday 26 August, THE HIVE, from 9:00AM)

On Friday 26 August (just before Curtin Research week) a School of Media Culture and Creative Arts academics, Curtin University Library and friends will host at the HIVE a morning series of short presentations.

The main themes are:

  • Digital Heritage: Workflows and issues in preserving, exporting and linking digital collections (especially heritage collections).
  • Scholarly Making: How to encourage makerspaces & other activities in tandem with academic research.
  • Experiential Media: How to learn and develop AR/VR and other new media technology and projects especially for the humanities.

Primary Objectives:

  1. To encourage humanities and especially digital humanities research, connecting research project ideas with an idea of possible equipment and the skills required.
  2. To get people together to discuss their projects and get feedback
  3. To help push forward prototypes and proof-of-concepts
  4. To uncover potential design ideas and available datasets for the Cultural Hackathon later in the year (see below).

Friday Morning: Short Presentations (on Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media)
Speakers include

  • Assistant Professor Elaine Sullivan, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, who will speak on Digital Karnak.
  • Mr Conal Tuohy, software developer from Brisbane, will speak on digital collections, visualisation and Linked Open Data.
  • Short presentations from academics at Curtin and there may be a few slots available to others in Perth.

Friday Afternoon: Digital Workflows/Augmented Reality WORKSHOP (3-3.5 hours)

In the afternoon Mr Michael Wiebrands will present workflows on importing digital records and other media assets into the UNITY game engine and he will be followed by Mr Dominic Manley, who will demonstrate Augmented Reality (AR) technology and how to use AR in research projects.

 

Cultural Hackathon, October/November 2016

In October or November we plan to host a CULTURAL HACKATHON. Academics propose ideas, and provide datasets (and so can Libraries, Galleries, Archives and Museums). Hobbyists, programmers, students will spend the entire day in teams working on application prototypes using that data and the VR/AR equipment provided. Proof of concept ideas will be presented and the best project will win a prize and the chance to work with the academics in the near future.

PLEASE NOTE: The event is free for attendees but they will have to register at EVENTBRITE (link to follow) for either the morning presentations or the afternoon workshop. We recommend people register and attend both but having separate registrations is to encourage those who can only make one session. Numbers will be limited.

Publications Available for Download

heritage, Journal, publication, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , ,

Fo those interested, many of my publications are available for download at

https://curtin.academia.edu/ErikChampion

Also, the following paper passed its embargo period so feel free to download that one as well.

Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments

(Presence, Vol. 24, No. 3, Summer 2015, 179–186, doi:10.1162/PRES_a_00234, 2015, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Abstract
This article describes the primary ways in which intelligent agents have been employed in virtual heritage projects and explains how the special requirements of virtual heritage environments necessitate the development of cultural agents. How do we distinguish between social agents and cultural agents? Can cultural agents meet these specific heritage objectives?

Book in preparation “Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space”

3D and game editors, Announcements, Book, Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

Indiana University Press just approved the contract for the following book in their Spatial Humanities Series. The chapters may change slightly over the next half-year, and final publication is of course dependent on a full final academic review, but here is my plan for it (and I would appreciate suggestions, links, readings to add to the final product).

Title: Designing The ‘Place’ Of Virtual Space

Despite the many architects talking about virtual environments in the early 1990s (Novak, 2015, Novak and Novak, 2002, Packer and Jordan, 2002, Wiltshire, 2014), there is relatively little publicly accessible research on making, experiencing and critiquing virtual places is only in conference papers, book chapters and edited collections. These forms of academic literature are also more likely to be found in the computational sciences, and are not often or easily accessed by humanities scholars. So I have an overall purpose here: to communicate with humanities scholars the importance of understanding how digital and virtual places are designed, experienced and critiqued.

I suggest that technology is not the fundamental problem in designing virtual places. Are there specific needs or requirements of real places that prevent us from relying on digital media and ‘online worlds’ experts? Or is it not so much that the new tools are currently too cumbersome or unreliable, but instead it is our conventional understanding of place design and platially situated knowledge and information that needs to change?

Secondly, I will review concepts in various space and place-related disciplines, both historically and in terms of digital media, to examine where they converge or diverge, and which methods and tools are of relevance to digital (and especially virtual) place-making. Here I suggest the terms Place, Cultural Presence, Game and World are critically significant. Clearer definition of these terms would enrich clarify and reveal the importance of real-world place design but also for virtual world design in terms of interaction, immersion and meaning. I will then apply these terms and concepts to virtual worlds, virtual museums and online game-environments to see if the theories and predictions match what happened to the various digital environments.

Thirdly, I will describe recent development in neuroscience and how they may help our understanding of how people experience, store and recollect place-related experiences. Can these discoveries help our design of virtual places? The chapter on learning and especially place-learning will benefit from this survey of recent scientific research.

Fourth, this book will cover game mechanics, and how they can be used in virtual place design to make digital environments more engaging and the learning content more powerful and salient. The importance of interaction design is typically underplayed, under-reported and under-evaluated. We still have not truly grasped the native potential of interactive digital media as it may augment architecture, and that is why debate on the conceptual albeit thorny issues of the subject matter is still in its infancy. I believe that understanding game mechanics is of great relevance to virtual place designers and I will put forth an argument as to why, a clear definition of game mechanics and an explanation of different types of game mechanics suited to differing design purposes.

The fifth aim of this book is to give a brief introduction to new and emerging software and devices and explain how they help, hinder or replace our traditional means of designing and exploring places-is technology always an improvement here?

The last subject chapter will then explore evaluation methods (both traditional and recent), which address the complicated problem of understanding how people evaluate places, and whether this knowledge can be directly applied to the evaluation of virtual places.

Chapters

  1. Place Theory Applied to Virtual Environments
  2. How Mind Remembers Space, How Places are Meaningful and Evocative
  3. Dead or Dying Virtual Worlds
  4. Place Affordances of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances in Real Places
  5. Place Interaction and Mechanics
  6. Learning from Place
  7. Place-Making Devices, Place-Finding Devices
  8. Evaluation
  9. Conclusion

Curtin Research Fellowship scheme open

Academic, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, Postdoc, virtual heritage

Applications for the Curtin Research Fellowship scheme are now open. Early career, senior researcher and Indigenous researcher fellowships are available, but please note that applications require a well-developed research proposal, support from a mentor in the relevant School, and support from the School. The Fellowships are highly competitive.

Please forward this message to researchers who may be eligible and interested in applying for a Fellowship. The attached flyer has more information, as does the webpage:research.curtin.edu.au/guides/fellowships.cfm. Applications close at 9am on Monday 8th August.

-I am happy to give feedback and or mentorship in the area of serious games, digital humanities research infrastructures (preferably 3D) and virtual heritage).

New Digital Humanities series ARCHumanities Press

Announcements, Book, Conference, Digital Humanities, Open Access, publication, , ,

Dymphna Evans, new editor at www.arc-humanities.org (THE APPLIED RESEARCH CENTRE IN THE HUMANITIES AND PRESS LTD) informed me they are developing a digital humanities list on digital humanities.
I don’t know the press but I vouch for Dymphna as editor (she was the editor for Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, when she was at Ashgate before it became Routledge).
As well as publishing monographs and collections they are launching a series of short books (20-40,000 words).

Refer https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/series/impact/
The Arc Impact book offers a new route to publication at Arc Humanities Press connecting and looking beyond medieval studies to contemporary humanities research issues. The Arc Impact book offers a route to publish for scholars who have undertaken a specific research project, which does not lend itself to publishing as a traditional journal article or a long-form academic monograph. A more generous word count and faster turnaround time than a journal article allows for rapid publication of results, more scope for case study material and a more immediate impact on the field. The books are typically 20-40,000 words long and priced at an affordable level with open access options.

Philosophy of Place

Digital Humanities, , ,

Last week at the East-West Centre University of Hawaii was the Philosophers’ Place conference

I have not been to a Philosophy conference for around 25 years but it was a warm and inviting conference in a magnificient I. M. Pei designed venue with its own Japanese garden.

To be honest, a big reason to go was to hear Edward Casey speak. I learnt a great deal about Confucius and to lesser extent Laozi or Lao Tsu (not so much about place) but one question from CHENG Chung-ying (University of Hawai’i) really got me thinking: what exactly is virtuality?

Another big question or two lying in wait is what is philosophy? Do traditional non-western cultures have philosophy. Obviously to the Eastern philosophers there the answer is yes but how each saw as fundamental elements of philosophy was left unsaid.

A third issue, especially for ‘rationalist’ and western-trained philosophers was whether they should spend any time examining mythical beliefs, that was an interesting question at one panel I attended.

As to place and the design of place? I met a few designers and one architect interested in the question, but the majority of attendees seemed happy to just talk about it as if place was a given. Oh well.

Anyway, I recall a visualisation professor telling me he hated humanities conferences because they read full papers! Remembering this, I had a sudden dreadful suspicion I had to also write and read from a full paper when the panel chair emailed and suggested we share our papers first. Now I, being the idiot that I am, thought I had to write and read from a paper as well as deliver slides. I won’t bore you with the slides, but I wrote and sent a 6000 word paper, trying to explain why I was there. And that was to get feedback on hermeneutic environments and phenomenology for the evaluation of virtual places.

So that is what the draft paper circles around. I believe there will be proceedings so I may be asked to complete the paper. But someone may be interested in the draft paper and give me feedback in the meantime! Oh and the other speakers did not write or speak from or distribute written speeches. So I just talked to my slides.. 🙂

So here is the draft paper

 

 

 

 

3DH talk: notes from Geoffrey Rockwell

Digital Humanities, Virtual Reality, visualisation, , ,

After a wonderful conference in April at Leiden: Interactive Pasts   (and if you get the chance I recommend going to the next one), the very next day I gave a short presentation at the University of Hamburg for the first lecture of their new research group, 3DH:

3DH is a 3-year pilot project for the preparation of a larger research co-operation in a second phase. 3DH focuses on the dynamic visualization and exploration of Humanities data from a DH perspective, and with particular emphasis on 3D-visualizations. The major goals for the pilot phase are (a) to establish a methodological and theoretical orientation as well as to develop prototypes of visualization tools as demonstrators, and to (b) prepare and submit a funding appliaction for phase 2.

You can see notes of my talk, as recorded by Geoffrey Rockwell on their threedh blog here.
Mark Grimshaw gave a talk on Rethinking Sound, a few weeks later, notes for his talk are here. (Mark Grimshaw was editor of The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, for which i wrote a History and Cultuarl Heritage in VE chapter).

NB Johanna Drucker, like Geoffrey, is another in-residence scholar for the project.

 

Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2014 NOW online

3D and game editors, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, Proceedings, virtual heritage, visualisation, , , , , ,

The Proceedings of 2014 are now live!! Finally!!

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/book/dhc2014

My article:Ludic Literature: Evaluating Skyrim for Humanities Modding
Related slides of presentation are on slideshare.net

This article evaluates the practical limitations and dramatic possibilities of modding (which means modifying) the commercial role-playing game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the visualization and exploration of literature. The latest version of a 20 year-old game franchise, Skyrim has inspired various writings and musings on its relation to Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has moved to a more immersive, participative, tool-making medium, a recent report on digital archives has proposed digital tools integrate with history curricula (Sampo, 2014) and that “digital history may narrow the gap between academic and popular history”. Can games also be used to promote traditional literary mediums as well as experiential and immersive archives?

EDIT: They have the wrong version uploaded on the Sheffield website. I will add the correct version here:

This is an open access publication with a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. As such, PDF versions can be deposited in institutional repositories. Our specific copyright statement is as follows:
“Copyright of all content is retained by the individual authors who are permitted to re-publish their work elsewhere. Likewise, other sites and media are permitted to re-use the works of authors on condition that they include a citation that references the content’s original publication by HRI OpenBook and an accurate attribution of the author’s IP and copyright.”
Finally, there is a new Call for Papers out for DHC2016, available here: http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/dhc2016

Who is this 3D heritage all for?

3D and game editors, Digital Humanities, virtual heritage,

Lorna Richardson on twitter linked to the sketchfab blog with this provocative header.

For the life of me I don’t recall this discussion at Digital Heritage, VSMM, VAST or any of the other virtual heritage conferences I have attended and it reminds me of other problems that someone needs to summarise and dispel:

  • Preservation friendly tools and archives of 3D models: where are they, what are they, and how are they effectively used?
  • Clear and preferably verifiable reasons why 3D visualisations help the spread, democratization and understanding of the heritage objects, the intangible value and the research contribution that led to the 3D digitization
  • Non-jargon explanation of the use of 3D models to 2D humanities types (yes there is an issue).

Not likely to become a book, but perhaps a book chapter somewhere?

Two new full papers added

Academic, publication, virtual heritage, , , , ,

I have been given permission to upload these two journal articles to my website. Click the paper title to go to the PDF in question:

Champion, E. (2015). Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments,” Summer 2015, Vol. 24, No. 3: pp. 179–186. MIT Press. URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/pres/24/3

Champion, E. (2015). Entertaining The Similarities And Distinctions Between Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Projects. Special Issue in the Journal of Entertainment Computing on the theme of Entertainment in Serious Games. Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74. Elsevier. Online.

 

Interactive Fiction, Cultural Tourism, Archaeology and Gaming

3D and game editors, archaeology, Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, summer school, , , ,

 Interactive Fiction

Over 4-5 April I attended the Interactive Pasts conference in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was organised by Archaeology PhD students, and they also created a gamified kickstarter project to get the funding required for an open access book publication of the proceedings. If you missed the conference (which was also on twitch), the presentations are on YouTube.

How does this relate to Interactive Fiction? Tara Copplestone and Angus Mol ran a workshop in the last session on interactive fiction.

Figure 1: #TIPC Interactive Pasts Conference Summary-Erik and Lennie photo by Tara Copplestone

Four of us (myself, Lennart Linde, Catherine Flick, B. Tyr Fothergill) used Twine (Mac version 1.42, PC is version 2.0), to develop the beginnings of an Interactive Fiction (IF) game, called A Career In Ruins, which is an archaeology conference simulator, where the student or junior researcher has to attempt to maximise their reputation while maintaining other important functions (such as phone battery and regular toilet breaks) without missing important sessions.

twine a career in ruins

FIGURE 2: IF PROTOTYPE DEVELOPED WITH TWINE 1.4.2-A CAREER IN RUINS

Like many in the digital humanities, I was a fan of Steve Jackson Adventure Books in the 1980s (yes I was young then) and I had developed my own interactive fiction/D n D game on a 1628 byte CASIO FX-702P Programmable Calculator (around 1982?) I was very keen on expanding my knowledge of what these interactive writing tools can do.

Firstly there is a wide range of these tools: Google Docs.

Secondly, open source HTML-based TWINE and application INFORM are perhaps two of the most widely known tools (and TWINE is perhaps best to start with for beginners), but Squiffy (Mac, PC, Linux) looks most to interesting to me, and I was happy to discover that Adobe’s Phone Gap Application can port the Squiffy interactive fiction / games to mobile phones. I think HTML is a big advantage over those formats that require readers to download a specialised executable and HTML 5 also has other possibilities such as extending to JavaScript (three.JS, Angular.js Node.js or WebGL exported UNITY etc.). There are a variety of ways to create the 3D model for JavaScript and there are good tutorials online, the main challenge is how to incorporate 3D with interactive fiction.

There have even been IF-isometric driving games! The other possible advantages of the JavaScript that I mentioned are that they can offer videos, panoramas, and possibly 3D models.

About 10-15 years ago a program called RealViz allowed you to create 3D layers to panoramas, allowing movies and 3D objects to co-exist (would love to refind the Embarcadero example). Some exciting work and examples was done (via Shockwave 3D) with the imagemodeler but RealViz was bought out by Adobe and no longer exists. I don’t know of a comparable software application today.

However, using the above software I mentioned, I think we can link interactive fiction, panoramas, 3D models, and possibly even 3D panoramas with JavaScripted riddles (there are similar existing applications, like Pannellum).

It would be even more interesting to create these interactive-fiction panoramas for the new head mounted displays like the HTC Vive.

htc vive

FIGURE 3: HTC VIVE, DEMO, LETS MAKE GAMES, PERTH

The possibilities for creative writing and also for archaeological story-making and cultural tourism really interests me and with European partners I hope we can propose a summer workshop. Possibly we would propose two workshops, one for creative writers and cultural tourism (using people’s own holiday snaps and other media, or drawing from digital archives of local heritage) and a second for archaeologists to create interactive fiction/fact/riddles/hypotheses. The first might combine lectures on Nordic Noir and its influence on cultural tourism. If the workshops actually take place, I think they would probably be in Denmark or Greece, or both. Best to start working on the proposal, then!

UPDATE: Inklewriter also looks promising according to this post of its use in a Choose Your Own Witchcraft Trial course.

VH has to be realistic? Not Necessarily

Digital Humanities, heritage, virtual heritage,

In Ancestor Veneration Avatars, by William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation, USA, he writes:

Some scholars of human-centered computing believe that virtual architecture must be visually very realistic to achieve psychological immersion (Champion, 2011), but in this project the emphasis was placed on realistic function

No, I never said that! I have seen this several times by academics, but I only referred to others who said that the lack of photorealism is an issue in Virtual Heritage (VH). But where in Playing With The Past do I argue for photorealism?

What I actually said, in Chapter 2, (page 20-23), was

Without content relating directly to how we perceive the world, an emphasis on formal realism is not creating a virtual reality, but a storehouse of visually represented objects…Meaningful interaction seems to be a crucial issue here. Research surveys indicate that when presented with realistic visual fidelity users also expect highly realistic interaction in order to be engaged (Mosaker 2001). While others have indicated that meaningful interaction is preferable to photo-realism (Eiteljorg 1998).

Grr.

EDIT: Found an earlier reference to the passage that so irked me, it was in

Archaeology, Heritage, and Civic Engagement: Working Toward the Public Good

By Barbara J Little, Paul A Shackel, page 45.

Centres that engage in virtual heritage, archaeology and games research

heritage, PhD, Postdoc, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality

I get asked this by people quite often and while this is by no means a definitive list, it might help those interested in game-focussed archaeology/heritage PhD opportunities and postdocs:

USA:

Europe:

Asia-Pacific:

As I said, this is by no means a definitive list (and very English language-biased) but I have noticed the above often promote PHD and Postdoc opportunities. I will have some opportunities in PhD positions and a postdoc that I will put on this site, hopefully before June.

game mechanics during the Iron Age in Yorkshire

Academic, archaeology, virtual heritage, , , , , , ,

‘Hugely important’ iron age remains found at Yorkshire site

The above is not really a picture of the beautiful artefacts, rather, my colleague Karen Miller’s snap of her class’s Lego schematic of Deakin Uni’s digital literacy framework, but you get the drift..

Hugely Important Iron Age Remains!

So says the Guardian (Nazia Parvenu, North of England correspondent,Thursday 17 March 2016 11.01 AEDT).

In the comments, however, quite a few don’t see the point, at all!

“The comments show a distinct misunderstanding of what archaeologists do & why, & basic archaeological chronology: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/17/hugely-important-iron-age-remains-found-yorkshire-site.. As archaeologists, it’s eye opening: these comments reflect a lack of basic but authoritative info we should have on Wikipedia, at least” tweeted @lornarichardson (Umeå).

Yes! We need to educate on process not only product (if a virtual heritage model is a product). Reading the comments to an article on a find in Yorkshire might lead archaeologists to despair. However a more optimistic (the glass of hemlock is half full) approach might lead us to conclude from the comments:

People are genuinely interested in process (how old are the beads and how did they get there and what happens to the bodies?

The answer might appear prosaic:

“Hello, anyone interested in learning more about the archaeological process in relation to this site can head to the East Riding of Yorkshire Planning Portal and search for application ref 13/02772/STPLF Documents logged there include the Desk Based Assessment by MAP Archaeology from August 2013 that predicted the presence of the barrows on site using aerial photos in the Humber Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) and a letter from the SMR clarifying details of the proposed excavation of the site, such as amount of the site to be sampled and the necessity for full publication.”

But it very distinctly shows the process of exploration, quest,  and of discovery as part of doing archaeology.

So how does this relate to mechanics?

Mechanics are used oh so confusingly (see a discussion on the MDA framework, and the comments, or this older 2006 article by Lost Garden with their definition below).

Game mechanics are rule based systems / simulations that facilitate and encourage a user to explore and learn the properties of their possibility space through the use of feedback mechanisms.

Thank you Lost Garden! But now we have another problem:

GM=Rules+PlaySpace/PossibilitySpace+Affordances+Feedback! Not much left over really (perhaps aesthetics, but aesthetics means more than appearance or taste).

And I could spend hours thinking about a more accurate definition of GM (Game Mechanics) but the issue here is really what sort of game mechanics would be of use to archaeologists and historians and heritage people who want to design, teach and experience such things?

Some definitions are more teleological
http://gamestudies.org/0802/articles/sicart:
“..I define core mechanics as the game mechanics (repeatedly) used by agents to achieve a systemically rewarded end-game state…
Primary mechanics can be understood as core mechanics that can be directly applied to solving challenges that lead to the desired end state.
Secondary mechanics, on the other hand, are core mechanics that ease the player’s interaction with the game towards reaching the end state.”

And yet Professor Sicart concludes the article with what to me seems to be a third and distinctly different definition:
“This article has defined game mechanics as methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world.”

Notice the above don’t directly or primarily aim to influence the player’s mind or behaviour. Is there no space here for a little procedural rhetoric?

I’d like to keep it simple, but without attempting to destroy (completely) the useful vagueness of mechanics here are some working definitions as different flavours/aims of game mechanics:

  1. Game progression mechanics (mechanics to progress the player through the game)
  2. Performance mechanics / Rewards and skills mastery mechanics (mechanics to encourage the player to improve and extend their range of skills and judgement)
  3. Narrative mechanics (tools to progress /unfold or bring together one or more apparent story threads in relation to game play). Are dramatic mechanics a subset?
  4. Behavioural and Role assimilation mechanics (mechanics which become habit through repeated game play, and accustom players to see things in certain ways)
  5. Insight and reversal mechanics (mechanics that disrupt the in-game or real-world expectations and presumptions of the player acquired previously or during the game in order to reveal to them a viewpoint they may take for granted, or to supplant the view created by game play but a view the designer wants them to suddenly by alienated from).

I understand this seems counter-intuitive to the above definitions, especially the MDA framework (Hunicke et al, 2004, summarised on the Wikipedia, visualised as gameficational lenses by Jenny Carroll, described via 8 kinds of fun by Marc LeBlanc). However mechanics helps me when I think of the public approach/response to archaeology, the public don’t see product OR process in the same way the archaeologists do.

If digital simulations are to help archaeological communication (to simplify crudely: Why archaeology? What is archaeology? How to appreciate/do good archaeology?) then we need to think of mechanics beyond a mere advancement of game play per se.

This also ties in with another issue: the English language problem in defining and distinguishing model and simulation. I am now leaning towards thinking simulation is the more confusing term, it can be a model as in a crafted or digital object, a communicated process model that explains a predictive theory, or a hypothetical model turned into a systematic generator of potential scenarios not predicted by the system designer (a weather simulation can explain what weather has or will take place OR it can create a prediction of weather based on a conceptual, verifiable model of weather that isn’t normally a physical model of weather).

Mechanics don’t just help a model to take shape, for the wheels to spin around and pull a toy train. Mechanics helps progress a fictional world of complicit belief.

Depending on what you want to do with them, game mechanics are sometimes seen as digital tropes, or as what connects parts of a game together. They are techniques or they are components. And although they are apparently crucial to game design, the inability to distinguish them clearly from other parts of a game makes me wonder – so seldom do we hear of bad game mechanics.

Will return to this and expand on it a little more. Hopefully it makes sense, but your mileage may vary.

If not DH what is it? (DH2015 presentation)

Digital Humanities, visualisation, ,

The below is the last slide from my Digital Humanities 2015 talk (“Seeing Is Revealing: A Critical Discussion on Visualisation And The Digital Humanities“) in Sydney
The paper is being reviewed for the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Journal.

Slide 48
title: If not DH what is it?

  1. More emphasis has been on scientific visualisation, on non-interactive calculation + presentation of quantifiable data but DH Vis not only about data, also interactive. vague, questioning & rhetorical.
  2. Visualisation not only pretty, (refer Baldwin, S. 2013. The Idiocy of the Digital Literary..)
  3. Visualisation has to overcome ocularcentrism as Virtual Reality reflects not only sighted reality but non-sighted reality, visualisation is more than just the visual (explain using cave paintings!)
  4. Game design is not typically part of DH but an interesting vehicle for community feedback, cultural issues, critical reflection & medium-specific techniques (procedural rhetoric). Also huge issues, HCI, authenticity, develop scholarly arguments in collaboration, preserve etc.)
  5. It employs research in traditional humanities, converts IT people to humanities research (sometimes), preserves and communicates cultural heritage and cultural significance through alterity, cultural constraints and counterfactual imaginings.
  6. History / heritage is not always literature! DH audience not always literature-focused or interested in traditional forms of literacy.

Virtual Heritage Article free to download until 21 April 2016

archaeology, Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, virtual heritage, , , , ,

Elsevier have kindly let me and others download the below article from the Journal Entertainment Computing, (Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74) up until 21 April 2016. From 22 April it will be behind the Elsevier paywall again.

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Se406gYiZRYG4
No sign up or registration is needed – just click and read!

Title: Entertaining The Similarities & Distinctions Between Serious Games & Virtual Heritage Projects

Abstract:
This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of historic violence and the possible trivialization of culturally sensitive and significant material. While virtual heritage can be considered to share some features of serious games, there are significantly different emphases on objectives. Despite these distinctions, virtual heritage projects could still meet serious games-style objectives while entertaining participants.