I have been thinking that I should have the above in future slides.com/erikchampion/ presentations.What to use? Inside slides.com you can use code (frames etc) so why not try:
Smoothly animate thousands of points with HTML5 Canvas and D3
Peter Beshai (16 Mar 2017 blog post)
https://bocoup.com/blog/smoothly-animate-thousands-of-points-with-html5-canvas-and-d3
I found myself in a meeting yesterday on the above. It reminded me of the DH2014 workshop that I wrote the call for and then couldn’t get to go to.
The points below, I feel I have to return to:
1. What are the objectives of each digital infrastructure project, and what are its intended users?
2. What are the functionalities and outcomes it aims to provide, and how do they serve the overarching goal of supporting and transforming humanities research?
3. To what extent were the needs of humanities researchers considered, and how is the digital humanities research community involved in the project?
4. Are there potential synergies, and actual collaboration, with other infrastructure projects? Conversely, are there any overlaps?
5. What are the main lessons learned from the life of the project so far? What are the pitfalls and potential failures, and what improvements could be achieved?
LUDIC PASTS: “Game Simulations of Past Cultures and Places” Workshop
ORGANIZERS:
Erik Champion, Curtin University Australia, email erik.champion@curtin.edu.au
Michael Nitsche, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, email michael.nitsche@gatech.edu
The fusion of archaeology and gaming has become known as archaeogaming, although this term covers several approaches. For example, Reinhard (Reinhard 2015) wrote: “I had originally thought of Archaeogaming as a framework around studying how archaeology and archaeologists are portrayed by game developers, and how they are received by gamers. I was also curious to see how (or even if) I could apply real-world archaeological methods to virtual spaces, studying the material culture of the immaterial.” However, this is not simply a workshop about archaeogaming, there are other related fields interested in the ludic simulation of past places and past cultures (art history, museum studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, urban design, geography, to name a few). There may be specific issues that distinguish, say heritage-based games (Champion 2015) from history-based games (Chapman 2016) but there are also common themes, authenticity, accuracy, imagination and how interaction helps learning.
Despite increasing interest in archaeogaming theory, there is little discussion of the field in terms of actual game design. And despite the increasing range and quality of courses (Schreiber 2009), books (Fullerton 2014) and presentations (Lewis-Evans 2012) on game design and game prototyping, there is still a paucity of available game design tools and techniques specifically for capturing and communicating the past (Manker 2012) (Neil 2016, 2015). In addition, we face a lack of venues for archaeogaming developers and related experts to present, pitch, playtest and perform their game prototypes (Ardito, Desolda, and Lanzilotti 2013, Unver and Taylor 2012, Ardito et al. 2009). Hence content experts in history and heritage-related fields often lack the experience or knowledge to test game ideas, and, conversely, game studies scholars may not be aware of discipline-related problems in history, heritage, museum studies and archaeology.
This half-day (4 hour) workshop brings together researchers and designers interested in evaluating and tackling issues in the simulation of past places, events and cultures through computer game interaction. The format will combine the presentations with a discussion centered on the question of how games can support cultural heritage. Each participant will present on a particular theme, challenge or case study.
We invite contributions from any domain, including game analysis, interaction design, digital humanities, play studies, among others. In the second part, we will identify key issues arising from the presentations and in small groups will suggest a game design scenario that could address the issue in an interesting way. We are also interested in theoretical papers that examine and suggest answers for issues in converting history, heritage and general archaeology projects into potential games.
SUBMISSION:
DEADLINES:
WORKSHOP GOALS:
THE FORMAT AND ACTIVITIES PLANNED FOR THE WORKSHOP:
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE (4 hour workshop, 240 minutes total):
POTENTIAL TOOLS:
Whiteboard, pen and paper. If there is a video projector or large screen, then digital game scenarios/sketches could be shown as well.
AUDIENCE
PUBLICATION
We will discuss approaching a creative publisher (Liquid Books, University of Michigan Press or other) to provide an online or printable output of the demonstrations and the audience feedback.
If you are interested in submitting a chapter, but cannot attend the workshop, please email the organizers a proposal similar to the 1 page workshop proposal outlined above.
CITATIONS AND REFERENCES
TO CONTACT THE ORGANIZERS
Erik Champion, Curtin University Australia, email erik.champion@curtin.edu.au
Michael Nitsche, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, email michael.nitsche@gatech.edu
Erik Champion was awarded a small school grant of $2000 to present conference papers at Genoa Italy in October 2016.
GENOA ITALY
He presented two conference papers which are now in the Eurographics Digital Library.
At the presentation in Genoa he was invited to discussion collaboration with the world heritage lab: HIVE, University of California Merced:
VENICE ITALY
He was also invited to present at Ca Foscari Venice (picture above) -apart from being the guest speaker on a digital humanities panel at the academic year opening of Ca Foscari, University of Venice and he was interviewed by their student paper.
VALETTA MALTA
He was also invited to present at the National Centre of Creativity, organised by the University of Malta and the talk was announced in the national paper, Times of Malta. He also met Heritage Malta and another institute who are keen to collaborate in cultural heritage projects.
He’d like to thank MCCA-Curtin, Arianna and Milena for organising his talks in Venice and Malta respectively and Eurographics for the GCH conference in Genoa.
Thanks to a Curtin MCCA Strategic Grant six reseachers and Library staff at Curtin University bought Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality equipment and ran two events to help staff develop digital prototypes and experiences using cultural data resources and digital humanities tools and techniques
Our Curtin Cultural Makathon, great fun, four finished projects, excellent judges and data mentors, fabulous colleagues and atmosphere, plus pizza! Must do again but with more 3D and entertainment technology! Slides: http://slides.com/erikchampion/deck-4#/
There are also GLAMVR16 slides: http://slides.com/erikchampion/glamvr16-26-08-2016#/
Yes you can control the slides.com slides from your phone! if you like the slides.com technology, check out http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/
Want Western Australian / Australian datasets for your own hackathon? http://catalogue.beta.data.wa.gov.au/group/about/curtin-cultural-makathon
I have a new article out online:
Digital humanities is text heavy, visualization light, and simulation poor, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Oxford Journals, http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/11/07/llc.fqw053 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw053 First published online: 11 November 2016. Issue , 7 November 2016.
Abstract
This article examines the question of whether Digital Humanities has given too much focus to text over non-text media and provides four major reasons to encourage more non-text-focused research under the umbrella of Digital Humanities. How could Digital Humanities engage in more humanities-oriented rhetorical and critical visualization, and not only in the development of scientific visualization and information visualization?
Hack/slash/cut/bash/scrape/mod/mash – it’s a culture thing
Join the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts and Curtin Library Makerspace to hack cultural datasets and heritage information.
Use government, institutional research data portal, gallery, library, archive and museum information as data sources. Experiment with data for a research project or proposal; create something accessible, beautiful and/or useful using craft, games, virtual reality, apps or something else: it’s up to you.
Date:
Thursday 10 November 2016 (5pm – 7pm launch / team registration) &
Friday 11 November 2016 (8.30am – 6pm)
Location:
Lounge @ your Library, Level 2
Robertson Library (Building 105)
Curtin University
Kent Street, Bentley
Registration: Free via eventbrite
For more information visit the Curtin Cultural Makathon website.
Seems to me we leave this sort of topic to keynote speakers who almost accidentally argue for a field/issue/method/tool that they themselves (research centre, department) and associates are currently working on.
Human nature. But if people who are currently not working on defined projects/tools/applications/sites met and discussed the issues what would they say? I’ll stick my neck out and say
1 Impossible to find, access and use/re-use the models, tools, paradata.
2 No consistant, standard framework.
3 No best practices, prizes*, competitions (but plenty of surveys and state of the art papers-only they read to me more as literature reviews).
4 Interaction is not saved ( not just user data but the game mechanics and interactive tools and techniques).
How would this lead to challenges?
*Best of heritage? I had high hopes but I met an organiser who told me this is not primarily what Best of heritage does. It isn’t a ranking/rating/critical appraisal system but a communication of what is happening in the (museum) field.
Title: A Schematic Division of Game-Learning Strategies Relevant to Digital Archaeology and Digital Cultural Heritage
Abstract
How can we transmit the values and interpretations of cultural heritage (using virtual reality) which is low-cost, contextually appropriate, educationally effective, and collaborative? While much excellent research has been undertaken on social presence in virtual environments (Swinth, 2002), research on the design and evaluation of cultural presence, the perception another culture is portrayed and experienced in a virtual environment, lags behind. Where cultural presence has been explored, it has not been directed towards the experiencing of culturally significant heritage (Riva et al., 2002), and organizations such as UNESCO have not prescribed how to determine if the user experience achieved the goals of the designers and shareholders. One possible solution for digital archaeology is to deploy commercial games that allow themselves to be modded (as in modified). This chapter will provide a simple classification of the ways in which game-based examples may help communicate digital archaeology and related content, and argue that there are at least four major areas of research that need to be investigated further.
if you are in Valetta, stop by at 6PM, I am talking about computer games and history/archaeology.
A talk linking computer games and culture and heritage is being held tomorrow at St James Cavalier in Valletta, Malta.
Part of Spazju Kreattiv’s programme, the talk will discuss the fundamental challenges and promises of computer game design and interactive media when created to assist the communication and preservation of digital heritage.
Delivered by Erik Champion, a professor at Curtin University, Australia, the lecture will examine serious games designed for history and heritage, definitions and challenges of ‘virtual heritage’ and possible technical and imaginative solutions. It will focus particularly on examples of built heritage.
UNESCO Research Fellow in Cultural Heritage & Visualisation, Curtin University.
Direct Link here or at the Curtin University Vacancies, Perth, Western Australia.
The role starts in 2016.
| Position Title: | UNESCO Research Fellow in Cultural Heritage & Visualisation |
| Position Number: | 3553170 |
| Tenure: | Full-time, fixed term until 1 September 2020 |
| Salary Range: | $97,076 – $115,277 (ALB) |
| Location: | Bentley |
| Description: | Do you have experience with digital archaeology and a passion to join the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts? Curtin University has, in cooperation with UNESCO, established a Chair in Cultural Heritage and Visualisation. The purpose of the Chair is to promote an integrated system of research, training, information and documentation on virtual heritage sites and facilitate collaboration between high-level, internationally-recognized researchers and teaching staff of the University and other institutions in Australia, Europe and North America and in other regions of the world. As a Research Fellow, you will work with the UNESCO Chair on a project which aims to survey and promote guidelines, tutorials and open access tools for the design, preservation and teaching of 3D models and landscapes of UNESCO heritage sites, particularly in Australia. You will be expected to contribute to grant writing and research publications. Along with a relevant doctoral qualification, the ideal candidate would have experience in aspects of digital archaeology, architectural computing, or databases and related programming (especially in the creation and maintenance of online repositories). Evidence of quality research outputs and interpersonal skills are also essential. |
| Benefits and Remuneration: | The salary ranges presented are those which are contained within the University’s Enterprise Agreements; as are the employee benefits which include employer superannuation contribution at the rate of the current Government Superannuation Guarantee amount up to 17 percent, study assistance, a comprehensive salary packaging and wellness programs and flexible and family friendly work practices. |
| Contact Person: | Professor Erik Champion |
| Contact Email: | erik.champion@curtin.edu.au |
| Valuing Diversity and Affirmative Action: | Curtin University embraces diversity and inclusion and invites applications from women, men and intersex individuals who share the University’s values, ethics, international outlook, value diversity and have an informed respect for indigenous people. We are committed to making reasonable adjustments to provide a positive, barrier-free recruitment process and supportive workplace, therefore, if you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application. We will then work with you to identify the best way to assist you through the recruitment process. All personal information will be kept confidential in compliance with relevant privacy legislation. |
| Submit Application: | To submit an application, click on the Apply Now button. |
| Disclaimer: | Curtin reserves the right at its sole discretion to withdraw from the recruitment process, not to make an appointment, or to appoint by invitation, at anytime. |
| Applications Close: | 5 pm, Monday 24 October 2016 (AWST) |
The call for PhD scholarships (UNESCO Cultural Heritage and Visualisation) at Humanities, Curtin University, has now been extended to 17 October 2016. See https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/scholarships/scholarship.cfm?id=2782.0
I can be contacted for enquiries or submission but I am away from 1-16 October so email replies may be slow.
There are 2 PhD scholarships now open at Curtin University, for students interested in 3D models of heritage sites, community participation, heritage issues and preservation of the 3D models themselves:
http://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/scholarships/scholarship.cfm?id=2782.0
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):
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
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:
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 slideshare | PRESENTER |
| Introductions | Ear Zow Digital |
| Digital Karnak | Elaine Sullivan, UCSC USA |
| Linked Open Data Visualisation | Conal Tuohy, Brisbane |
| MORNING TEA | morning TEA |
| Making collections accessible in an online environment | Lise Summers |
| Digital scholarship, makerspaces and the library | Karen Miller |
| Digital Heritage Interfaces and Experiential Media | Ear Zow Digital |
| Simple Biometric Devices for Audience Engagement | Stuart Bender |
| Usability of interactive digital multimedia in the GLAM sector | Beata Dawson |
| Emotive Media – Visualisation and Analysis of Human Bio-Feedback Data | Artur Lugmayr |
| Visualising information with RAM iSquares | Pauline Joseph |
| LUNCH | |
| digital workflows (UNITY) | Michael Wiebrands |
| Introduction to Augmented Reality | Dominic Manley |
| final questions/social networking/ SUNDOWNER | Centre for Aboriginal Studies Foyer |
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.”
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:
Primary Objectives:
Friday Morning: Short Presentations (on Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media)
Speakers include
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.
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).
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
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).
Ear Zow Digital