On the London School of Economics Review of Books blog, Peter Webster has said some very nice things about our edited book from last year

Anyone concerned with the future of digital humanities research will find much to ponder in this timely and important collection of essays, recommends Peter Webster..

This collection of essays is a very valuable contribution to that process of assessment, and deserves to be widely read. It will be of interest not only to humanities scholars, but also to those in the GLAM sector concerned with user engagement and access, as well as policymakers in and around government… Readers will differ on the answers to this question, but anyone concerned with the future of digital humanities research will find much to ponder in this timely and important collection of essays.

as well as making some good points and raising pertinent questions about infrastructure:

Beyond this book, however, the wider debate about how to enable distributed humanities scholarship is still often framed in terms of the shape that such infrastructures should take; their desirability in principle is not often stated as such, but is assumed. Andrew Prescott has rightly taken issue with the whole metaphor of infrastructure as an unhelpful way of imagining what is required (1). To envisage things in terms of infrastructure implies permanence, rigidity, standardisation.

Thanks Peter.

Thanks also to the editors and authors who kept this book in progress, to DIGHUMLAB (especially Marianne Ping Huang) and EADH and the National Museum of Denmark for supporting and hosting it…

I’d also like to thank those who supported disseminating news of this edited collection, including

https://pro.europeana.eu/post/cultural-heritage-infrastructure-in-digital-humanities

and London School of Economics..

Conference. June 14-15, 2018: History, Culture, Art, and the Built Environment

In-person, skype, pre-recorded presentations, written papers.
Tangible – Intangible Heritage(s)
14-15 June 2018. University of East London. Abstracts: 01 April 2018
Themes: Art and Architectural History, Cultural Studies, History

Organisers:
The University of East London with the research organization AMPS and the scholarly journal Architecture_MPS.
It forms part of an international publishing network PARADE (Publication and Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments. It brings together: Routledge, Taylor&Francis, Intellect Books, UCL Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Vernon Press and Libri Publishing.

In Portugal at a Presence conference, Fred Brooks Jnr (or Wikipedia), famous for an article on the slowness of software development) said something very important: when doing your research predict what will happen even if you have very little idea. It will help you refine your experimental design

Actually I am not sure if this was at Presence 2002, Porto, or at VAST 2005 Pisa. Probably the former.

[abstract for Critical Archaeological Gaming -Workshop, UCLA, LA USA, 25-26.01.2018]

The Sin of Completeness versus the Lure of Fantasy in Contested Possibility-Spaces

“..virtual archaeology was not only about ‘what was’ and ‘what is’, or just about developing digital tools… It included a licence to imagine ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might come to be’.”1

In contrast to virtual archaeology, I will outline but question how the fantasy elements of computer games’ pretend completeness enrich ritual, player choice and reward. Could archaeology-focused games leverage fantasy (imagination) for not just engagement but also for critical reflection?

Reference

[1] Beale, G. and Reilly, P. 2017 After Virtual Archaeology: Rethinking Archaeological Approaches to the Adoption of Digital Technology, Internet Archaeology 44. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.44.1 [Section 2].

via The King’s Hall of Minas Tirith and the Romanesque Basilicas

Join us in at the Australian National University in Canberra for the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres’ 2017 Annual Meeting with the theme of The GLAMorous Humanities: Working with Cultural and Collecting Institutions.

This is an opportunity to participate in best-practice around research excellence in the humanities. Our program includes pre-meetings and workshops on Wednesday 8th November, a Public Lecture from Rebe Taylor on the evening of Wednesday 8th; two days of speakers and panel sessions exploring best practice in collaborating across sectors, the question of research infrastructure for the humanities and the relationship between collaboration and impact. Full program to be circulated soon.

For more information see the ACHRC website or go here to register or contact Tully Barnett for more information.

I presented this paper at the Presence 2002 conference in Porto, Portugal. Bits were conveyed in Playing With The Past, but the initial ideas have been taken up and applied by others beyond my original concerns. A new or more extensive theory is required, especially with the development of augmented and mixed reality, biosensors, camera tracking, and new Head Mounted Displays.

But the new article will probably not appear for about a year, I am not certain where it should or could be published!

Anyway, the 2002 paper is attached.

In February 2016, Mathew Tyler-Jones wrote (about my Critical Gaming book):

There’s only one point I take issue with. Drawing from this blog, he says:

Playing in a digitally simulated world can leave the feeling that the virtual world’s entire causal mechanics rotate around the player

…as thought that’s a Bad Thing. Which I guess it might be if you are primarily seeking immersion or presence, as the VR guys call it. But in fact I’m coming to the conclusion that that feeling (which I’ve dubbed in a couple of presentations “the Apotheosis Moment”) is something special about games, which in a way, I’m trying to recreate in physical cultural heritage environments.

Yes I think it is a problem for virtual heritage, and especially for agent-based virtual heritage (VH with bots/AI)..why should a world, especially a past world re-visited to explain past cultural significance, revolve around a current-world player?

So how does this relate to BDI agents? (Belief Desire Intention Agents)..

A virtual heritage project should convey

• cultural significance
• cultural loss
• the issue of recovering/re-interpreting the past
• intangible heritage (not only the materiality of 3D objects)
• sociability and community related to cultural values
• the relative values of culture, society and what was treasured

In many if not most past societies, this trumps the value of the individual (perhaps unless you were the Supreme leader..)

And in AI ,well AI based on BDI, the above are not usually directly considered.

I would add specific components should be:

1. agent-aware feelings of community and strangeness (belonging and exclusion)
2. relative values of tangible and intangible cultural processes, products and assets
3. specifically situated embodiment (especially important for ritual and helping with both #1 and #3).

These are just brief notes to ponder on in more detail at a later time (but before the end of November!)

Source: Intangible and Invisible, Canberra 2017

I was one of 3 presenters to give a talk at the below (today)

• My slides are at https://www.slideshare.net/nzerik/computing-3d-models-and-intangible-heritage
• Dr Miller spoke about Paradisec (and VR even!) http://www.paradisec.org.au/
• Prof Craig discussed computational answers to Shakespeare questions and mentioned his free to download intelligent archive tool https://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/centre/education-arts/cllc/intelligent-archive

https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/events/243187376/

2017 Tech Talk in October: Data Computing in Humanities

Digital Humanities

Researchers in humanities are increasingly using computational approaches to analyse data objects such as text, painting, film and other artefacts. Example applications include text analysis, investigation of cultural changes, detection of origin of species and many more. In this October event, three speakers will show us a glimpse of this area by introducing their fascinating projects or application.

Venue was live meeting hubs in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and Brisbane..Vote on topics for future tech talks! https://poll.ly/#/2JYgEl3G

This month’s speakers:

– Dr. Julia Miller (Australia National University) – PARADISEC: Visualising the past, present, and future of digital archiving

Dr. Julia Miller is the Senior Data Manager for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and runs the ANU unit of The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). She received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington, investigating acoustic properties of tone in the endangered Athabaskan language of Dane-zaa.

– Prof. Erik Champion (Curtin University), Computing, 3D Models and Intangible Heritage

Professor Erik Champion is UNESCO Chair of Cultural Visualisation and Heritage at Curtin University and Visualisation theme leader at the Curtin Institute of Computation (http://computation.curtin.edu.au). He researches issues in the area of virtual heritage as well as game design, interactive media, and architectural computing. Before joining Curtin University, he was Project leader of DIGHUMLAB in Denmark, a consortium of four Danish universities, hosted at Aarhus University. His publications include Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage (Routledge, 2015), Playing with the Past (Springer, 2011), and he edited Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (ETC Press, 2012). His next book (out in October) is Cultural Heritage Infrastructures in Digital Humanities, (Routledge, 2017), with co-editors Agiati Benardou, Costis Dallas and Lorna Hughes.

– Prof. Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle), Three Shakespeare questions you can only answer through Computation

Abstract:

Many scholars react to the idea that quantitative analysis has anything to offer in literary studies with indignation. Yet computational stylistics has been quietly solving Shakespearean problems for some years now, starting with questions of who wrote what, and recently broadening to wider questions of style. In this talk I will discuss three questions I argue have been answered by computation, and could only be answered by computation — whether or not Shakespeare collaborated with his rival Christopher Marlowe in playwriting, how up to date or otherwise his dialogue was, and whether his vocabulary was indeed prodigiously large.

Bio:

Prof. Hugh Craig works at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he directs the Centre for 21st Century Humanities and the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing. He has been publishing in computational stylistics since 1991. With Arthur F. Kinney, he edited Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (2009). Many of the new findings about Shakespeare authorship in this book are now enshrined in the New Oxford Shakespeare, which came out last year. He has publications with colleagues from bioinformatics and speech pathology, and on language and ageing and nineteenth century journalism, as well as on literary writings of the Shakespearean period. Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship, co-authored with Brett Greatley-Hirsch, is due to appear in late 2017.