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
Date: 10:00 -11.00, Monday 2 October 2016
Venue: Aula Magna Silvio Trentin,Ca’ Foscari University, Palazzo Ca’ Dolfin, Venice, Italy.
The Games Industry. In 2016, will reputedly become a 100 billion USD industry with mobile games overtaking PC and game consoles for the first time. While the year before, in 2015 Minecraft became the second highest selling game of all time, at $54 billion USD (GameCentral for Metro.co.uk, 2015; Mojang, 2016). And the year before that, in 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft for 2.5 billion US dollars. So surely it would make sense to appropriate game design to the purposes of the humanities, especially to history and heritage? In this talk I will examine the promise of serious games and the related global industry for communicating aspects of the past, but I will also outline key issues that have hindered the employment of games for education and dissemination, and provide examples of serious games and virtual heritage projects that I have worked on over the last fifteen years.
References
Announced via our internal Curtin University website:
Partnership with UNESCO
Curtin recently signed a contract to establish the University’s first UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage and Visualisation for Professor Erik Champion (School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts). The Chair will cooperate closely with UNESCO on programs and activities, and facilitate new projects and collaborations with other UNESCO chairs and scholars, particularly in the field of digital cultural heritage. Two related PhD Scholarships and a Research Fellow position will shortly be advertised and there will be a program to invite visiting fellows from around the world.
At the partnership signing with Professor Alan Dench, Associate Professor Michele Willson and Professor Erik Champion of the Faculty of Humanities.
Mechanics, Mods and Mashups session for CAA2017 in Atlanta Georgia 14-16 March 2017 has been accepted!! More soon.
The symposium/workshop is now over (my blog post here, EVENTBRITE details here, twitter feed here), cultural hackathon next. VR equipment has already started to arrive.
Working on proposal with Dr Stuart Bender and A. Prof Michael Broderick (Murdoch), based on Fading Lights.
Small Grant WAND application, advisor: (submission by Michael Ovens, CI., UWA). See Michael’s blog https://thineenemyproject.wordpress.com/
Submitted “Travelling heritage – exploring mixed realities for the digital reuse of cultural materials” application with colleagues and U of Hamburg and Leuphana. Results due November.
Title “Mechanics, Mods and Mashups: Games of the Past for the Future Designed by Archaeologists” and blog post here.
Archaeologists and people of a historical persuasion:
At the workshop the writers will either:
The writers will:
Ask the audience to play through or role-play the actions that would be in the creative piece.
The audience will:
Give the writers feedback ideas and nominate the best presentation in terms of fun and engagement, imaginative ideas, and archaeological relevance (in promoting archaeology, teaching archaeology or extending archaeological scholarship).
Books
Book chapter
Book review
Journal article
Conference paper/session
Upcoming talks
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:
My proposal to the 2017 Computer Applications and Quantitive Methods in Archaeology (CAA) international conference, March 14th and 16th, 2017 at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA) has been accepted.The below will be updated when I speak to the co-organisers but we are thinking of a morning presentation and (possible) game pitch, and an aftertoon work on key ideas..
CAA2017 Atlanta: Other Session
Mechanics, Mods and Mashups: Games of the Past for the Future Designed by Archaeologists
Organizers: Erik Champion, Michael Nitsche, Natalie Underberg-Goode
Are you a fan of Assassin’s Creed but upset over how it could have made history exciting without having to employ and manipulate central historical characters? Love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider if only the tomb-raiding (stealing) mechanics could be replaced by something more meaningful? Wish that the Total War Series allowed you to employ agent modeling to test competing archaeological theories of migration, colonization and invasion or just to improve its historical accuracy? Dream you could use the language, graphic vision and immersion of Far Cry Primal in the classroom to explain (through engaging interaction) the Mesolithic rather than primarily use it as a backstage to fight semi- believable creatures? Then this workshop is for you. Correction. This workshop is BY you.
Archaeologists and people of a historical persuasion:
The audience will:
Give the writers feedback ideas and nominate the best presentation in terms of fun and engagement, imaginative ideas, and archaeological relevance (in promoting archaeology, teaching archaeology or extending archaeological scholarship).
Potential tools:
Gameplay cards, game prototyping tools, scenes or videos from a 3D editor or game editor (Unity, Unreal, Blender), board games as prototypes, playing cards, physical artifacts that are role-played by the presenter, illustrations, slideshows, game editors (like the SIMS: https://www.thesims.com/en_GB) used to make films (Machinima), roleplaying videos, flowcharts, interactive fiction (like https://twinery.org/). We will provide a fuller list of tools and examples to potential attendees before the workshop.
Equipment:
PC with sound and display, some floor space to move around in for physical re-enactments. Tables or some form of desk to provide written or graphical feedback.
Length:
Participants: 26 maximum (ideally) where 6 present. We require half an hour a presenter so three hours for 6 presenters, 6 hours a whole day if we want to go to 12 presenters.
Ideally the non-presenting audience is not too large, preferably up to 20.
Outcome:
We will approach 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.
We would also like to invite presenters – if they can make it – to a workshop at DIGRA2017 Melbourne Australia to test out their demonstrations and play-throughs to game academics.
References
Champion, E. (2012) Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism. Entertainment Technology Centre Press.
http://www.www2017.com.au/ main conference website
http://www.www2017.com.au/about/call-for-papers.php call for papers
For more than two decades, the International World Wide Web Conference has been the premier venue for researchers, academics, businesses and standards bodies to come together and discuss latest updates and the future of the web. The proceedings of WWW are published online (open access) and through ACM Digital Library, and it is considered one of the most impactful conferences in computer science.
Research tracks
Important dates
(All deadlines are 11:59pm, anywhere in the world)
Our internal small grant (School of Media Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University) was successful!
Here is a synopsis of the application (redacted):
Digital Heritage, Scholarly Making & Experiential Media
We propose
The above would help progress the below research projects:
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
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.
For research fellows and other scholars who have a PhD awarded after 1 March 2010, please consider applying for a Curtin Research Fellowship (there are also indigenous and senior research fellowships for those with a PhD awarded before 1 March 2010):
http://research.curtin.edu.au/conducting-research/curtin-research-fellowships/
The internal expression of interest deadline is June 4 (the head of a school or centre has to support the application).
Please note this is a very competitive scheme.
I’m particularly interested in talking to researchers who focus on virtual heritage, digital archaeology, game design, VR evaluation, machinima, digital humanities, interaction design or similar subjects that could take place in the Humanities..
It was a very nice surprise to discover the 3 reviews on Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage at
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472422910
I tried for a more conversational style that sprang from simple ideas as starting points so I was very happy to hear from people that it has helped them in their projects and grant applications-even if only as a primer.
I am indebted to the reviewers!
-Erik
Reviews: ‘If anyone doubts that games, gamification, and play do not provide a serious and essential path to creativity and knowledge-production about the past, then Erik Champion’s book will surely change their minds. The book is a must for teachers, historians, archaeologists, and museum and cultural heritage professionals interested in critically using games and virtual reality as tools for teaching and research.’
Ruth Tringham, University of California, Berkeley, USA
‘Champion’s newest work represents a treasure trove of ideas for both scholars and practitioners in the field of digital heritage. Digital media designers will find a plethora of design ideas while researchers will encounter as many useful evaluation suggestions, both with the goal of creating virtual environments that convey a sense of cultural presence and facilitate cultural learning.’
Natalie Underberg-Goode, University of Central Florida, USA
‘By emphasizing the new cultural role of serious games, game-based learning, and virtual heritage in making scholarly arguments, this book demonstrates the relevance of visualization, interaction and game design in a contemporary humanities discourse. It will be of great use to scholars and educators who want to include new digital methods in their research and courses while it will provide indispensable digital literacy, references, and case studies to 21st century students in humanities and heritage-related fields.’
Nicola Lercari, University of California, Merced, USA
Update: http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/arf.html?event_ID=74777&date=2014-02-11
Schedule of my visit to the San Francisco Bay Area:
1) Monday 10 February, 2014. 4pm-6.00pm. Kroeber Hall, Gifford Room.
Title: What is Virtual Heritage?
Virtual heritage could be viewed as a hybrid marriage of Virtual Reality and cultural heritage. Stone and Ojika (2000) defined it as
“[It is]…the use of computer-based interactive technologies to record, preserve, or recreate artifacts, sites and actors of historic, artistic, religious, and cultural significance and to deliver the results openly to a global audience in such a way as to provide formative educational experiences through electronic manipulations of time and space.”
The above is an interesting definition but I wish to modify it slightly, for it does not explicitly cover the preservation, communication and dissemination of beliefs, rituals, and other cultural behaviours and activities. We also need to consider authenticity of reproduction, scholastic rigor, and sensitivity to the needs of both audience and to the needs of the shareholders of the original and remaining content. No doubt this is due to the many issues in the presentation of culture. One is the definition of culture itself, the second issue is to understand how culture is transmitted, and the third is how to transmit the local situated cultural knowledge to people from another culture. In the case of virtual heritage, a fourth also arises, exactly how could this specific cultural knowledge be transmitted digitally?
Although I personally believe that fundamental issues of culture, place and inhabitation are still to be successfully addressed (Champion, 2014); computer games offer interesting opportunities to the audience, designer, and critic. They are no longer single player, shallow interfaces. They are turning into multivalent, multi-dimensional, user-directed collaborative virtual worlds. Commercial games are often bundled with world creation technology and network capability that is threatening to overtake the creation and presentation displays of expensive and complex specialist VR systems. In this talk I will not suggest that computer games are revolutionary, only that they are potentially changing the way we think, act, communicate, and feel.
References
Stone, Robert J., & Takeo, Ojika. (2000). Virtual Heritage: What Next? . Multimedia, IEEE, 7(2), 73–74.
Champion, E. (2014). History and Heritage in Virtual Worlds. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2) Tuesday 11 February 10.30-12.30pm. 2224 Piedmont Avenue, MACTiA lab (room 12)
Informal Workshop/Brainstorm/Discussion with Dr. Erik Champion: Games – serious or otherwise – for and about archaeology and cultural heritage
Please feel free to drop in to this workshop and brainstorming session where archaeologists with Erik Champion will work through some ideas and plans for the design of computer games that are based in data of archaeological research and cultural heritage management and the interpretations of the past.
Starting point: Champion, Erik (2011) Playing with the Past. Springer, London.
3)Wednesday 12 February, 2014. 12noon-1pm. Archaeological Research Facility Lunchtime series: 2251 Building, Room 101.
Title: Heritage Via Games and Game Mods
In this informal talk, I will discuss classroom experiences (both good and bad) gleaned from teaching game design, especially work by students to develop serious games using historical events or mythological happenings.
My central argument is that despite apparent initial barriers, both students and teachers (and academics in general) can learn from the actual process of game design, and from watching people play. Theorists learn about the entangled issues of game design, the politics of user testing, and the designer fallacy (I designed the game, I know how best to experience it, if the audience can’t work it out there is something wrong with them, not the design). Students, in turn, can begin to understand (perhaps) how theory, good theory, can help open eyes, inspire new design and turn description into prescription. There are of course even more dilemmas and difficulties for visualizing and interacting with history and with heritage, and with moving from easily accessible commercial games and open source games, to larger Virtual Reality centres, planetariums and museums, but it has been done, with some significant successes.
This talk will touch on and move past projects mentioned in the following and free to download book: Champion, Erik (Ed.). (2012). Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism. Pittsburgh: ETC Press. URL: http://press.etc.cmu.edu/content/game-mods
Off-campus
4) Thursday 13 February, 2014. 12noon. Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey.
TITLE: Cultural Heritage and Surround Displays, VR and Games for the Humanities OR Immersive Digital Humanities: When The Motion Tracker is Mightier Than The Pen
How are scholars using surround displays, stereographics, gaming technologies and new peripherals to disseminate new ways of viewing, interacting with, and understanding humanities content, and in particular, cultural heritage? Which issues in cultural heritage and interacting with historical content need to be kept in mind by VR experts when working with humanities scholars? And are there key concepts and research developments in the VR field that humanities scholars should be more aware of? Or are the fields of interaction design and (digital) humanities converging?
NB Public talk but guests have to be pre-approved as it is at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Information is available at http://chcta.wordpress.com/
The event is 26 and 27 June 2013, at the National Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen.
DIGHUMLAB DK and the DIGITAL CURATION UNIT Athens are pleased to invite you to submit to a 2 day workshop on CULTURAL HERITAGE, CREATIVE TOOLS AND ARCHIVES.
The workshop is open to all but we in particular welcome participants drawn in the first instance from the DARIAH, ARIADNE, CENDARI, NeDiMAH and other EU cultural heritage networks. We envisage it will foster the growth of a community of practice in the field of digital heritage and digital humanities, leading to closer cooperation between participants and helping attendees develop tools and methods that can be used by the wider community.
Workshop themes
Cultural heritage, for the purposes of this workshop, is taken to consist of a broad spectrum of fields of scholarly research and professional practice relating to the study, management and use of the past, including but not limited to: archaeology, material culture studies, public history, intangible heritage, the visual and performing arts, visual culture, museums, and historical archives. We invite presentations of digital heritage tools and infrastructures, established projects and case-studies, state-of the art surveys, and original research contributions on the following themes:
· Cultural heritage information systems, ontologies and knowledge representation for material and visual culture.
· Data analysis, modeling, simulation, and visualization.
· Metadata, interoperability and integration of research data and scholarly resources.
· GIS, 3D graphic reconstruction and high end imaging.
· Digital preservation and curation of cultural heritage data, archives and documentation resources.
· Digital technology in fieldwork (e.g., archaeological data collecting and representation, excavation and survey data management, recording information “at the trowel’s edge”, processing survey and long series datasets, etc.).
· Digital scholarly publishing and public communication of cultural heritage.
· Sharing data and tools across European countries and partners.
· EU policy in digital heritage infrastructures, research, and cultural resource management.
· Any other topic relevant to the innovative application of digital technology to cultural heritage research, management and communication.
Presentation formats
· Project presentation: 20 minutes.
· Demonstration (of a tool, method, or project): 20 minutes.
· Paper presentation: 20 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion time. Final papers accepted may be published in a journal (to be advised).
· Panel: 40-60 minutes involving 3-5 speakers.
Submission Information
· Format: At the top of the page include your name, your country, your institutional affiliation, your EU infrastructure/project affiliation (if applicable), the title of your paper, and the suggested format of your paper (project presentation, paper presentation, demonstration, or panel presentation). An AV projector will be provided but please indicate any other requirements.
· Submit: Emailyour proposal in RTF format to dighumlab@gmail.com with the title “Cultural Heritage Workshop”. If you wish to present a formal paper, you should submit an abstract of 500-1500 words, including references. For a project presentation, demonstration or panel you should submit a proposal of 300-500 words. If you wish to present on a panel, please indicate the names and affiliations of other participants (if known) on the submission document.
· Submission date: NEW EXTENDED DATE 1 May 2013, 17:00 Central European Time
Other information:
· Notification date: Wednesday, 24 April 2013 (may change).
· Date of Workshop: Wednesday, 26 and Thursday 27 June 2013.
· Cost of Workshop: free tea and coffee will be provided; we will try to find sponsorship for lunch for both days.
· Venue: National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark.
· For more information please contact: Dr Erik Champion, DIGHUMLAB Denmark, echa@adm.au.dk
Co-organisers: Associate Professor Costis Dallas, University of Toronto & Digital Curation Unit, Athens; Dr Agiatis Benardou, Digital Curation Unit, Athens; and Professor Panos Constantopoulos, Athens University of Economics and Business.
We would like to thank the ALLC: The European Association for Digital Humanities for co-funding and the National Museum of Denmark for hosting the workshop. This is a DARIAH associated event. Other associations with organizations are still to be confirmed.
Link http://talent.au.dk/phd/arts/open-calls/phd-call-116/
The Graduate School of Arts, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University invites applications for a PhD scholarship in Digital Heritage and Virtual Culture. This scholarship is available as of 1 September 2013 for a period of up to three years (5+3) or up to four years (4+4). Candidates who are awarded the scholarship must commence their PhD programme on 1 September 2013.
Digitized and digital resources with archival institutions such as museums, libraries and research institutions are increasingly being made accessible for research, educational and public use and interaction. Digital resources and data may be both cultural heritage and everyday culture resources, and making such resources accessible and enriching them for innovative research, educational and public use and interaction are central tasks of the digital humanities.
The Danish Digital Humanities Lab (DIGHUMLAB DK), anchored at Aarhus University, is a national consortium engaged in digital humanities projects and in developing digital research infrastructures for the humanities and social sciences. With interdisciplinarity and collaborative research at the core of our vision, DIGHUMLAB can offer the PhD scholar collaborative networks with AU research centres (eg Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction, Centre for Participatory IT) and with interdisciplinary research environments including Smart Aarhus and the university’s research programmes in digital design, information science, media studies, archaeology, museology, anthropology and experience economy, as well as with international research networks and projects.
Proposals for PhD projects should focus on research in and development of methods, tools and applications for production, representation and dissemination of digital heritage and virtual culture, and may involve applied research in the development and deployment of GIS-based projects, digital heritage archives, 3D visualizations, interactive digital simulations, design or evaluation of cultural simulations in virtual environments, or game-based learning for digital archaeology and interactive history projects.
There is also a related research application to set up a network of digital heritage research, which Aarhus University is pursuing with other leading European Universities. If that grant is successful, the applicant may work as part of this new international network in digital heritage, or the research could be fractionally combined with the PhD scholarship in Heritage Studies.
Application deadline: 15 March 2013 at 23:59 Reference No: 2013-218/1-116
I believe this call is still open! But I am not sure.
Following last week’s call for archives to participate in Anvil Academic‘s Built Upon initiative, I’m now pleased to announce that we’ve released our call for authors to contribute to the series. If you are interested in producing a work of digital scholarship that makes creative, effective use of digital collections, please consider submitting a proposal.
Current archives partners include:
We hope to announce additional partners soon. You’re welcome to work with digital collections other than the ones listed here. Initial “Built Upon” works…
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