Melissa Terras' Blog

Sometimes, its fun to do something a little out of your safe bubble in academia. To that end, one of my most recent papers went up today in the International Journal of Digital Curation. Called ‘Grand Theft Archive’: A Quantitative Analysis of the State of Computer Game Preservation, its co-authored with Paul Gooding, who is now the BBC Sports Librarian.

Paul did most of the research, I just helped him polish and polish and buff and polish it into good shape. A fun project for me to be involved in - and an interesting read about the issues regarding preserving our gaming heritage.

Well, I know a good few of you read this blog, so here is another project of mine for further down the line. If any readers are working on relevant research, do get in touch.

Call for Papers: Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture

Editors Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan) and Melissa Terras
(University College London) invite submissions for a collection of
essays on “Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture” to
be published in the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies Series edited by Ray Siemens and William Bowen.

This collection of essays will build on the accomplishments of recent
scholarship on materiality by bringing together innovative research
on the theory and praxis of digitizing material cultures from roughly
500 A.D. to 1700 A.D. Scholars of the medieval and early modern
periods have begun to pay more attention to the material world not
only as a means of cultural experience, but also as a shaping
influence upon culture and society, looking at the world of material
objects as both an area of study and a rich source of evidence for
interpreting the past. Digital media enable new ways of evoking,
representing, recovering, and simulating these materials in
non-traditional, non-textual (or para-textual) ways and present new
possibilities for recuperating and accumulating material from across
vast distances and time, enabling both preservation and comparative
analysis that is otherwise impossible or impractical. Digital
mediation also poses practical and theoretical challenges, both
logistical (such as gaining access to materials) and intellectual
(for example, the relationship between text and object). This volume
of essays will promote the deployment of digital technologies to the
study of material culture by bringing together expertise garnered
from complete and current digital projects, while looking forward to
new possibilities for digital applications; it will both take stock
of the current state of theory and practice and advance new
developments in digitization of material culture. The editors welcome
submissions from all disciplines on any research that addresses the
use of digital means for representing and investigating material
culture as expressed in such diverse areas as:

• travelers’ accounts, navigational charts and cartography
• collections and inventories
• numismatics, antiquarianism and early archaeology
• theatre and staging (props, costumes, stages, theatres)
• the visual arts of drawing, painting, sculpture, print making, and
architecture
• model making
• paper making and book printing, production, and binding
• manuscripts, emblems, and illustrations
• palimpsests and three-dimensional writing
• instruments (magic, alchemical, and scientific)
• arts and crafts
• the anatomical and cultural body

We welcome approaches that are practical and/or theoretical, general
in application or particular and project-based. Submissions should
present fresh advances in methodologies and applications of digital
technologies, including but not limited to:

• XML and databases and computational interpretation
• three-dimensional computer modeling, Second Life and virtual worlds
• virtual research environments
• mapping technology
• image capture, processing, and interpretation
• 3-D laser scanning, synchrotron, or X-ray imaging and analysis
• artificial intelligence, process modeling, and knowledge representation

Papers might address such topics and issues as:

• the value of inter-disciplinarity (as between technical and
humanist experts)
• relationships between image and object; object and text; text and image
• the metadata of material culture
• curatorial and archival practice
• mediating the material object and its textual representations
• imaging and data gathering (databases and textbases)
• the relationship between the abstract and the material text
• haptic, visual, and auditory simulation
• tools and techniques for paleographic analysis

Enquiries and proposals should be sent to brent.nelson[at]usask.ca by
10 January 2009. Complete essays of 5,000-6,000 words in length will
be due on 1 May 2009.

The Europeana website was launched on the 20th November, a large european-wide digital library and archive, featuring digitised items from many major institutions.

And it promptly fell over under the weight of 10 million hits per hour.

The wierd thing about this is that the majority of people were searching for "mona lisa". (Andy Warhol famously commented, when the Mona Lisa visited New York in the 1960s, that they should have just sent a facsimile. And it seems that nowadays, that's what the Internet is delivering, and what people want to see).

It seems to reveal something about how people use digital libraries and archives. Woohoo, lots of stuff has been digitised! great! What shall we look up first? Erm..... dunno.... think of something famous that we already probably know....

As part of the LAIRAH research project, we demonstrated that some subjects were the most popular - or most requested - in digitised resources and collections. The Census, witchcraft, suffragettes, shakespeare, chaucer, WWI, WWII... I guess we can now add "Mona Lisa" to that list.

Questions. How many people wont ever come back to this website once it relaunches, given the 404? and really, how exciting is the entry on the Mona Lisa?

There seems to be a raft of new ways to customise bags/wallpaper/think-of-a-flat-surface-you-can-stick-a-digital-image-on with your own pictures at the moment. But the one that really made me go.... "wow" is Spoonflower: print custom designed fabric on demand. Now, let me just get that sewing machine out....

One of the great things about being in academia is the aspect of working from home, as often as you like/can. However, recently my office has just been taken over with all manner of small person's stuff, cot, etc. Where's a person to keep her books? ...Well, I'm excited to report I've just ordered a "home office" to be built at the bottom of the garden, aka "my shed". In a few weeks I'll be able to disappear off, and me and the gnomes can hang out in peace... Next up, figuring out how to make our wifi reach all the way down there.

Originally uploaded by monkeysorama

Just back from two weeks away, doing the grand tour of the uk relations with the Wee Man. Back home, and now glued to the internet to catch up.

Apparently, China have just formally defined Internet Addiction as a disease...
Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse.

I'm loving bookninja's competition to "rebrand" and "dumb down" book covers of classic novels.

Here it is! two years in the making. First thoughts - jings, thems a lot of words to be writing about images.

Have already found my first typo (the whole copy-editor-changing-the-word-losing-to-loosing thing, grrrrr)... but in general: its all smiles here. Hurrah!

There's a new book out soon about the Antikythera mechanism, called "Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer" by Jo Marchant which looks like its worth a peek. Interesting discussion about it on the Guardian's science podcast, too.

Over the last year or so, I've been working with Greg Crane, of the Perseus Project, on a special issue of DHQ in honour of Ross Scaife. Its going to be an impressive and hefty volume - 10 very good papers, plus detailed intro and conclusion - about "where classics will be in 2018". A potentially important roundup of the issues currently being raised about the use of information technology in classics.

We're working like daemons to get try and get the issue up by the TEI meeting in London at the start of November. If not completely finished by then, it wont be long behind. I'm really looking forward to seeing this issue up - its a very fine testament to Ross Scaife's legacy.

Have just been told that the book has arrived in the warehouse! will see it in the next few days. eek!

Its all true. Especially the bit about the Dundee Cake.

The Secret Museum of Mankind Published in 1935, the Secret Museum is a mystery book. It has no author or credits, no copyright, no date, no page numbers, no index. Published by "Manhattan House" and sold by "Metro Publications", both of New York, its "Five Volumes in One" was pure hype: it had never been released in any other form.

Advertised as "World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs" and marketed mainly to overheated adolescents (see the 1942 Keen ad, left), it consists of nothing but photos and captions with no further exposition.

Good example of the type of quirky digital edition only a keen amateur would put together. And what a strange imperialistic text....

.... and this passed me by when it came out. Excellent overview by Charles Arthur of the Guardian on why reading stuff on screen is difficult.

Interesting discussion going on over at the Guardian blog, regarding whether
the brave new world of digital literature has been largely anti-climatic.
Worth checking out the comments.

We all have our set of "essential" websites we have to check first thing in the morning. Depending what mood I'm in, I'll have a sneaky peek at fffound, or http://www.booooooom.com/, (or etsy, if I'm in the mood for shopping), to see what the "creatives" are up to these days. I was particularly taken by this work by Nicolas Burrows. Sums up how I've started the day for the past 15? years...

... from the film "You, Me, and Everyone We Know"

Housewares Saleswoman: I think everything's gonna be computerized in twenty years.
Sylvie: Soup won't be computerized.
Housewares Saleswoman: Why not?
Sylvie (exasperated): It's a liquid!

The new advert for the Nintendo Wii on youtube is genius. Keep watching...

In the Spring, we invested in a decent Digital SLR. Ironically, I was too busy to get to grips with it, given I was working all hours (on top of the day job) to finish the book on Digital Images before the arrival of The Wee Man. Now, I'm enjoying having the time - and a captive subject to play with - to experiment with it a little.

Photography and children go hand in hand. Susan Sontag said
Cameras go with family life. Not to take pictures of one’s children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference… Those ghostly traces, photography, supply the presence of dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family (Sontag 1979, On Photography, p. 8-9).

A child born today will probably have more photographs taken of them in the first year than a child born 50 years ago would have had in their lifetime, given the affordances of point-and-click digital cameras. The silent problem, though, is that folks are so lackadaisical in their approach to long term maintenance of personal digital image collections, that most of these digital images will not be around in 50 years time. Discuss.

"Official" photography of babies is still big business, even in the digital era. In the UK, a few hours after giving birth, you are accosted by the "Bounty Lady", sponsored by the government and industry, to provide you with all the forms you need to register the birth, sign up for child support benefit, and get your hands on child trust fund money. In return for all your details, you also get a bag full of samples of pampers and fairy liquid and the enviromentally-unsound like (and research shows that folk tend to stick with the brands they are presented with when their baby is first born. Kerching!). Then the Bounty Lady sticks a Digital camera in your baby's face (oooh, fancy), and for the bargain price of only £30 or so you can have a Digital print of your wee lamb. At least, I think that was the cost of the smallest package - I was still out of it, having been awake for 3 days by that point.

We smiled smugly and pointed out our range of digital cameras and camcorders which we had with us, and neglected to pay the inflated fee for the snapshot. (You'll have to be my friend on facebook to see such video classics as "Thumper throws shapes" and "Rhythm is a Dancing Baby".) Every single other new mother on the ward stumped up for the costly point and click snap.

In a few weeks, the Bounty Lady (or other commercial equivalent) is turning up to mother and baby group, again, to take a snapshot of all the babies, and charge inflated prices for photo-printed tat just in time for xmas. I'm tempted to take along the DSLR and practice my photography skills with other folk's kids for free. Then they can trot down to the interweb and get whatever they want printed up themselves at normal prices. But maybe that's not the way to win any new friends (or get a free pack of environmentally-unsound pampers). Just say cheese like everyone else...