CIRCA

Congratulations to the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) on their 3rd Around the World forum!

2015-05-26T16:51:48Z

Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell, Director, Kule Institute for Advanced Study

This year’s theme was Big Data and the conference streamed live for 12 hours on April 30th, 2015. The benefits and challenges presented by working with Big Data sets continue to push the parameters of what constitutes meaningful and ethical research. KIAS helped bring together a conversation on Big Data and its impact on research and culture from universities around the world: 49 panelists from 12 countries across 5 continents participated, including speakers from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, and the United States. Previous years’ talks focused on Privacy and Surveillance (2014) and Technology and Culture (2013).

Here is a link to the archived talks: http://aroundtheworld.ualberta.ca/

DigiDay at University of Alberta

2015-04-22T23:10:45Z

CIRCA is proud to help present:

Dr. Chad Gaffield

The Surprising Ascendance of Digital Humanities:Why now? What’s next?

March 31, 2015

9 – 10:30 AM

Education North 2-115

Recently, there has been widespread discussion about whether humans have modified the environment enough to have pushed us into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. We suggest that the rise of the digital has pushed humanity into a new cultural epoch: the Digicine. Digital technologies and environments are transforming cultures, identities, art, education and even ourselves.

Humanists, social scientists, and artists are well situated to provide spatial, temporal, and social context for the Digicine, because we cannot understand its impacts without exploring the origins, emergence, and futures of humanity in a digital world.

Dr. Chad Gaffield is Professor of History and University Research Chair in Digital Scholarship, University of Ottawa, and past President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

This presentation is made possible by a collaboration between the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education, and the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in the Arts (CIRCA).

University of Alberta Talk: Ken Wissoker Editorial Director of Duke University Press

2015-04-23T03:38:53Z

Ken Wissoker,

Editorial Director of Duke University Press

Title: Writing and Publishing in a Time of Media Transformation
Date: Thursday, 16 October, 2014
Time: 1:00pm-2:30pm
Location: HC L-3, University of Alberta, Edmonton

*** Light reception to follow in HC 4-29, between Ken Wissoker’s talk and Sara Ahmed’s (in HC L-1 at 3:30).

Abstract: Taking research done for a thesis or for an audience of like-minded scholars and turning it into a book that will be read across oceans and disciplines has always been a challenge. Now, in a difficult financial climate for publishers and with electronic forms of the book proliferating, it is more difficult than ever. This talk will cover both the biggest issues — what might we expect books to look like in five years — and more grounded advice on how scholars should approach their own writing and publishing.

Bio: Ken Wissoker is the Editorial Director of Duke University Press, acquiring books in anthropology, cultural studies and social theory; globalization and post-colonial theory; Asian, African, and American studies; music, film and television; race, gender and sexuality; science studies; and other areas in the humanities, social sciences, media, and the arts. He joined the Press as an Acquisitions Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; and was named Editorial Director in 2005. Starting this fall, in addition to his duties at the Press, he will be Director of Intellectual Publics at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

He has published close to 900 books which have won over 100 prizes. Among the authors whose books he has published are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Charles Taylor, Joan Scott, Lisa Lowe, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Arjun Appadurai, Sara Ahmed, Randy Weston, and Fred Wesley.

Wissoker is the author of the Cinema Journal essay “The Future of the Book as a Media Project and the earlier Chronicle of Higher Education articles “Scholarly Monographs Are Flourishing, Not Dying” and “Negotiating a Passage between Disciplinary Borders” the latter of which was later reprinted with responses from five social scientists in the Social Science Research Council newsletter, Items and Issues. A three-part interview with him by Adeline Koh appeared in April 2013 on the Prof. Hacker blog.

Introducing Shuji Watanabe

2014-10-12T20:22:43Z

The GRAND Digital Humanities project welcomes Shuji Watanabe. He is an Associate Professor of Image Arts and Science visiting the University of Alberta from Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. He is in Edmonton on sabbatical for 7 months with his family.

His research is around prototyping user generated content games. At the University of Alberta he is collaborating with GRAND researchers Geoffrey Rockwell and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon.

Professor Watanabe’s experience includes the planning and overseeing of various games such as Magic Pengel(/Garakuta Meisaku Gekijo Rakugaki Okoku)/, which was recommended by the Examination Committee at the 15th Media Arts Festival Media Art Interactive Division, and Minna no shiro, which won the Grand Prize at the First Annual Game Koshien Awards. He is an advocate of “ecological-sketch”, which visualizes rules and is a game design technique that begins from observations of the world as opposed
to imitating the works of others. He conducts research and development in not only traditional game development, but also in applicable fields such as education and crisis management appropriate for “gamification”. He is a member of the Research Committee, Japan Digital Game Association
and Steering Committee, Ritsumeikan Center of Game Studies.

Digital Studies Special Issue, Call for Proposals

2015-04-16T21:48:12Z

The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques will be publishing a refereed selection of papers from its May 2014 Digital Humanities Without Borders meeting at Brock University in Digital Studies/Le champ numériques. The issue will be edited by the program chairs, Geoffrey Rockwell and Michael Sinatra. The publication of this special issue is scheduled for Summer of 2015. Submissions are invited from all participants at the meeting. Speakers may supplement, expand on, or refine the material they presented at the conference. It is expected that most submissions will range from between 3000 to 6000 words (approximately 10-20 pages), but there is no minimum or maximum length. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is also always willing to consider generically unusual submissions. The expected timeline for this issue is as follows:

October 28th: Submissions due
January 30th: Reviews and editorial decisions
March 1st: Revisions due
March 30: Final copy approval
April 30-May 15 Proofing and publishing

Submissions should be in a contemporary word processing format (Word or Open/Libre Office preferred), LaTeX, (X)HTML, or TEI XML. Bibliographic citations should conform to the latest Chicago Manual of Style (author-date format). DS/CN style avoids foot/endnotes as much as possible. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for any images or similar material in their manuscripts before submission. Submissions should be sent by email to dscn@journalincubator.org before October 28th, 2014. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique publishes in French and English.

Replaying Japan 2014

2014-08-20T21:55:40Z

Replaying Japan 2014
2nd International Japan Game Studies Conference
August 21st to 23rd, Edmonton, Canada
Location: Edmonton Clinic Health Academy, Rooms 420 and 430

With support from GRAND the University of Alberta is hosting the second international conference on Japan game studies. This academic conference is jointly organized with Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. Keynote speakers include:

Tomohiro Nishikado (Taito, Video game developer known for Space Invaders)
Mia Consalvo (Concordia University)
Kevin Kee (Brock University)
Vadim Butko (University of Alberta)
Martin Picard (U de Montréal)

Registration is free, but we ask that people register so we have a sense of numbers. There will be a banquet on Thursday the 21st; cost will be $30. Please indicate if you want to attend the banquet on the registration form so we know how many to expect.

Registration now at: https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/replayingjapan2014/home/registration

See you there!

Twitter: #ReplayJapan2014

Replaying Japan is supported by the GRAND Network for Centres of Excellence, the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, the Prince Takamado Japan Centre of the University of Alberta, and the Japan Foundation.

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon: GRAND Scholar

2014-08-12T21:57:42Z

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon has been selected to be a 2014 GRAND Scholar associated with the Digital Humanities (DigHum) project.

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon is a former recipient of the Monbukagakusho Research Student Fellowship awarded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. He conducted research at Wako University (Tokyo) on Japanese video game culture and game localization, expanding on the subject of his master degree previously obtained at McGill University. He blogs for Kinephanos where he is also currently co-editing a new journal issue on Japanese video games and the media mix.

He is currently enrolled at the University of Alberta in the programs of Comparative Literature and Humanities Computing where he has worked on GRAND projects since starting his Ph.D. program. Current projects for GRAND include the translation of the book Famicon to sono jidai, the organization of the coming Replaying Japan 2014 conference, liaison agent for the Bioware Video Game Archive and design for mobile games on the fAR-Play platform. His thesis subject focuses on the analysis of Japanese arcade culture, specifically through the social affordances provided by the interplay between game software, cabinet design and the space of the venue.

Encountering the Media Mix – Perspectives on the Kakokawa Summer Media Mix Program

2014-08-09T00:21:28Z

Two GRAND DH graduate students participated in a special seminar on Japanese popular culture in Tokyo this July that was organized in collaboration with the publishing house Kadokawa hoten and the University of Tokyo. About twenty students from around the world and twenty students from the University of Tokyo were invited to take part in this special research encounter centred around the theme of the ¨media mix¨, the Japanese embodiment of the concept better known as ¨convergence culture¨ in North America. I was fortunate enough to be invited as one of those students.

With the recent works of Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide) and especially of Marc Steinberg (Anime’s Media Mix) the subject of intermedial connections between forms of popular culture is becoming important for academics in the arts and humanities. During the two weeks of the event, we developed our awareness of the issues around the ways media are mixed in Japan as well as becoming better equipped to deal with the mix in our own work. Coupled with a series of fantastic paper presentations by experts in the field and a great on-site cultural experience in Tokyo, this event should have an impact on reflections on contemporary Japanese popular culture.

While a great seminar, the activities were limited to invited students. With the objective of sharing the ideas with a wider audience, I have produced a three-part blog series (in French) on the website of the academic journal Kinephanos in order to chronicle what I considered to be the highlights of the Kadokawa Summer Media Mix Program. I invite French readers to take a look a those entries should they have an interest on Japanese popular culture, the media mix or convergence culture in general. Hopefully, those will also stimulate other to think about those issues.

You and whose army? Game of Writing used to teach academic writing

2014-07-31T00:51:11Z

The Game of Writing is being used for the first time in a writing course WRS 102 Writing in the Disciplines. This course is the first test of the online gamified writing environment that started as a GRAND prototype research project but not the last – we expect 200 students to enroll in the fall 2014 class.

The Game of Writing, or GwRIT (account needed), is an online writing environment that can be used in a writing course to support student writing development. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Alberta have built GwRIT so that it can be a platform for representing information about a user’s writing back to them through analytics or gamification components. Our working hypothesis is that gamification and analytics can be playful ways of representing real information back to users so that they can make decisions and possibly be motivated to write differently. GwRIT combines composing tools (word processing), reviewing opportunities (commenting), research guidance (resources), models for writing (sample documents), and advice about writing (from a variety of sources) through the GwRIT interface.

But what sets GwRIT apart from other online learning systems is its focus on student writing in a social network. Innovative aspects of this course include students’ sharing their progress on the assignments with peers and the instructional staff; the ability for all students to see who is working on the same assignments; and the ability to ask for help or advice from those other students. In addition, feedback and informal assessment is available online from peers in the class; from paid peer tutors; from GTAs; and (eventually) from alumni. Commenting in GwRIT takes advantage of social networking practices by allowing students and instructors to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” in response to comments. Instructors can also “pin” a comment to the top of the comments list, which appears in a window alongside the word processing window. Students learn what makes for a good comment by reviewing comments that get both a “thumbs up” from the writer of the text and also gets “pinned” by an instructor to the top of the comments list. By writing in this social network and learning from analytics derived from their writing, we have created an innovative and exciting approach to improving student writing.

GwRIT started as a prototype developed with GRAND support by investigator Geoffrey Rockwell. GwRIT was then redeveloped for use in writing courses in partnership with Roger Graves and Heather Graves of the University of Alberta’s Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. The development was supported by the Faculty of Arts, the Centre for Teaching and Learning and University of Alberta Blended Learning Award. With the first blended course run with GwRIT we now have a platform for the innovative teaching of writing.

A short paper on Gamification, Research and Writing was presented at “Building partnerships to transform scholarly publishing”, Whistler, BC, February, 2014.

Understanding Video Games

2014-07-28T17:43:53Z

The University of Alberta today launches its second MOOC, Understanding Video Games. This MOOC is a thorough overview of theory pertaining to video game media. Participants “learn how to study games and engage in informed discussions about them.”

Understanding Video Games was led by Digital Humanities researcher Sean Gouglas and developed with the help of world renowned video game developer, BioWare Corp, located in Edmonton, Alberta.

DigHum @ DH2014 (Lausanne)

2014-07-08T10:13:43Z

Several researchers involved in DigHum presented papers and posters, along with a workshop and the Zampolli Award Lecture at this year’s meeting of ADHO in Lausanne. You can find the list below and links to their descriptions.

- Brown, Susan (School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph, Canada), Brundin, Michael (Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, University of Alberta, Canada), Chartrand, James (Open Sky Solutions, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), Knechtel, Ruth
(Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, University of Alberta), MacDonald, Andrew (Open Sky Solutions, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), Rockwell, Geoffrey (Humanities Computing, University of Alberta, Canada), Sellmer, Megan (Humanities Computing, University of Alberta, Canada): “THE CWRC-WRITER BRIDGE: FROM CODER TO WRITER, XML TO RDF, DH TO MAINSTREAM” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Poster-782.xml)

- Brown, Susan (University of Guelph), Adelaar, Nadine (University of Alberta), Dobson, Teresa (University of British Columbia), Knechtel, Ruth (University of Alberta), MacDonald, Andrew (McMaster University), Nelson, Brent (University of Saskatchewan), Peña, Ernesto (University of British Columbia), Radzikowska, Milena (Mount Royal University), Roeder, Geoff G. (University of British Columbia), Ruecker, Stan (IIT Institute of Design), Sinclair, Stéfan (McGill University), Windsor, Jennifer (University of Alberta), and INKE Research Group: “PROBING DIGITAL SCHOLARLY CURATION THROUGH THE DYNAMIC TABLE OF CONTEXTS” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Poster-740.xml)

- Couture, Stéphane (McGill University, Canada), Sinclair, Stéfan (McGill University, Canada): “BEYOND THE TOOL : A REFLEXIVE ANALYSIS ON BUILDING THINGS IN DIGITAL HUMANITIES” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-805.xml)

- Eberle-Sinatra, Michael (Université de Montréal, Canada), Sinclair, Stéfan (McGill University, Canada), Dyens, Olliver (McGill University, Canada), Vitali Rosati, Marcello (Université de Montréal, Canada): “CRÉER UN CENTRE DE RECHERCHE INTERUNIVERSITAIRE SUR LES HUMANITÉS NUMÉRIQUES AU QUÉBEC : DÉFIS ET SUCCÈS” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Poster-791.xml)

- Engel, Maureen (University of Alberta), Zwicker, Heather (University of Alberta), Frizzera, Luciano (University of Alberta), Pedraça, Samia (University of Alberta), Regattieri, Lorena (University of Alberta), Schoenberger, Zachary (University of Alberta), Windsor, Jennifer (University of Alberta): “VISUALIZING HOMELESSNESS” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Poster-516.xml)

- Martin, Kim (University of Western Ontario), Greenspan, Brian (Carleton University), Quan-Haase, Anabel (University of Western Ontario): “STAK – SERENDIPITOUS TOOL FOR AUGMENTING KNOWLEDGE: BRIDGING GAPS BETWEEN DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL RESOURCES” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-314.xml)

- Martin, Kim (University of Western Ontario), Quan-Haase, Anabel (University of Western Ontario): “DESIGNING THE NEXT BIG THING: RANDOMNESS VERSUS SERENDIPITY IN DH TOOLS” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-425.xml)

- Montague, John Joseph (University of Alberta, Canada), Rockwell, Geoffrey (University of Alberta, Canada), Ruecker, Stan (IIT – Institute of Design, USA), Sinclair, Stéfan (McGill University, Canada), Brown, Susan (University of Alberta, Canada), Chartier, Ryan (University of Alberta, Canada), Frizzera, Luciano (University of Alberta, Canada), Simpson, John (University of Alberta, Canada): “SEEING THE TREES & UNDERSTANDING THE FOREST” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-924.xml)

- Siemens, Ray (University of Victoria): “ZAMPOLLI AWARD LECTURE: Communities of Practice, the Methodological Commons, and Digital Self-Determination in the Humanities” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Plenary-11.xml)

- Sinclair, Stéfan (McGill University, Canada), Rockwell, Geoffrey (University of Alberta, Canada): “TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF TEXT ANALYSIS TOOLS” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Paper-778.xml)

- Van Zundert, Joris (Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), Jannidis, Fotis (Würzburg University), Drucker, Johanna (University of California, Los Angeles), Rockwell, Geoffrey (University of Alberta), Underwood, Ted (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Kestemont, Mike (Antwerp University), Andrews, Tara (Bern University): “WHAT IS MODELING AND WHAT IS NOT?” (http://dharchive.org/paper/DH2014/Panel-671.xml)

- Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell have a workshop titled “My Very Own Voyant: From Web to Desktop Application” (http://docs.voyant-tools.org/resources/run-your-own/voyant-server/)