Semioclast

In the Labyrinth was the first book of “literature” I think I ever read without having been assigned it. There was a time that all I wanted to do was write like Robbe-Grillet (probably a curse of many young, aspiring novelists). He is one of the reasons I now do what I do. Damn you Robbe-Grillet!

Obits here and here. (h/t Silliman.)

According to LTC Bob Bateman, even in the “Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” culture of the U.S. military (a culture that still struggles with social conventions that have emerged since the 1950’s), the man-hug is gaining popularity:

The realization of a definite shift in behavior did not really hit me until late October this year. But in hindsight, as is normal with an epiphany, I could look into my mental rear-view mirror and see the outlines. What precipitated my thoughts was that inside of the space of a single week I received (and I must admit, somewhat awkwardly returned) three hugs from brother officers. One of them was a full colonel.

The other two were generals.

What’s interesting, however, isn’t simply the spontaneous eruption of paralinguistic homosociality, it is the message implicit in the procedural rhetoric behind the gesture:

So why the sudden change in the Pentagon? Why has our culture made this leap? As I said, it took me a little while to puzzle this one out. I think I have it now. There are certain rules that seem to apply, and I should note that I am speaking only of what I have seen, and that is only within the Army.

Rule #1: A hug is only appropriate between two men who have not seen each other in at least a year. It only occurs on the first meeting of those two after such a gap.

Rule #2: During that period, one or both of them have been to combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither has died or was crippled beyond repair. Both now know too many who have been so.

Rule #3: The hug occurs in conjunction with a forearm gripped handshake. It is brief. Right arm in shake, left arm over the other man’s shoulder, two or three hearty slaps or punches to the back. No more. Release. The sentiment is as direct as the action: “I am glad you are not dead.”

In other words, what changed us was war.

That seems to make sense.

via Danger Room.

We’ve seen tons of surveillance cameras, and even a few surveillance cameras camouflaged as birdhouses, but Celine Shenton brings us the first birdhouse disguised as a surveillance camera we’ve seen. I like the mashup of one object we should see more frequently in urban spaces with another we see all too many of.

Via TrendsNow.

The University of Pittsburgh Colloquium on Electronic and Interactive Texts (which I co-organize with Professor Don Bialostosky) will be hosting a lecture and seminar with our second guest speaker, Stuart Moulthrop, Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore. Professor Moulthrop’s wife and writing partner, Nancy Kaplan will be joining us for the seminar. She is currently Professor and Director of the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore.

We will be discussing the place of New Media in the academy as well as the ways in which it is shaping current scholarship in the humanities. The seminar will be followed by a lecture entitled, “Releasing _Content_.”

The metaphor (or ideology) of _content_ — some stable or irreducible quantity/entity at the core of all communications, in whose service mechanisms and media are assumed to operate – remains powerfully pervasive even as media evolve rapidly away from static inscription, toward the very different regime of signal processing and computation. Kaplan and I believe modern media require a new approach, based not on a scheme of containment but rather one of dissemination and (in Pierre Levy’s terms) “interaction.” We therefore suggest a new general term, _data_ (that which is _given_), as a crucial supplement, suggesting at least three forms of _giving_ that may be discerned in contemporary practices. In place of _content_, we propose a _content/data complex_, as a way to address the inherently complex relationship between so-called new and old media forms, and their respective cultures of reception. We offer instances of this complex in operation, in both the carnival context of the Internet’s viral media, and the more austere domain of emerging scholarly practice.

After this explanation of our agenda, we address what seems a first critical problem: how does this approach – in company with other theories of new media, by, e.g., Levy, Manovich, and Bogost – strand apart from the general project of poststructuralism in the last century? We explore several answers to this challenge, adding our own, which focuses on the feedback loops of Zuboff’s “informating,” or the convergence of communication with logical processing, or control.

Ultimately, we argue, the challenge of theoretical priority becomes a challenge _to_ that tradition. Near the end of the last century, two late poststructuralists wrote: “If you read books, justify it.” A similar question might well be put to those who write books, especially academic humanists. Has the idea of the book changed substantially since the advent of digital networks? What else might we (and do we) write, besides books? How do engagements with new and old media interfuse and co-evolve? In the release of _content_, we hope to prepare the ground for exploration of new forms and institutions for discourse, as part of a much larger project we understand as a renewal of the life of writing, or _secondary literacy_.

The seminar will be held on November 26th at noon in room 362 of the Cathedral of Learning; the lecture will follow at 3:30 in Cathedral of Learning room 501.

For information on upcoming events (including information on our spring speakers as it becomes available) check out the Pitt-Etext Google Group.

Steven Poole has released a newly revised copy of his book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. The best part is that he’s made the book available via a free (as in beer and as in speech) PDF download.

Poole describes the book as, “a book about the aesthetics of videogames - what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.”

Also, check out his new book Unspeak, a book “which analyses state-of-the-art rhetorical weaponry, from community through sound science and ethnic cleansing to the war on terror.” Rhetorical weapons? Terror? Now you’re speaking my language!

Via Videoludica (once removed).

Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester of the Center for History and New Media have released their first two WordPress plugins over at their new site Scholarpress.net. Separately, each plugin offers something interesting for academics (especially educators) who use WordPress as their platform of choice. Dan Cohen gives us an overview at the Digital Humanities Blog:

ScholarPress’s inaugural plugins are Courseware and WPBook. Courseware (co-developed by New York Public Library’s Josh Greenberg), turns WordPress, normally a blogging platform, into a full-fledged course management system, including easy syllabus creation, assignments, bibliographies, and scheduling. (And yes, you can have a class blog too.) WPBook creates your very own Facebook application out of your WordPress blog, allowing it to be embedded in Facebook.

That’s when things start to get interesting. By using Courseware to create a blog/CMS system and then embedding that blog in a Facebook app with WPBook, you have effectively set yourself up to use Facebook (rather than that god-awful Blackboard) for course management. Despite it’s “simplicity” students still have trouble with Blackboard. So, would moving CMS over to where the students already are (Facebook) make things easier overall?

Two stories today show us how, even when they are not provided for us (as they are in Alternate Reality Games), we find ways to create our own rabbit holes:

The first story, from the blog Save The Robot, chronicles the author’s recent fascination with a minor player on an yet another MTV Networks reality show. The girl, Ellie, barely gets a paragraph on her MTV bio; probably because she gets axed pretty early in the game. But Chris is intrigued. There’s something about her; she’s different than the others. She was the “rocker” and they were (mostly), well, strippers lunging for the bright lights.

The rabbit hole was deep:

I keep Googling. Is Heagney a model? (Scroll down on the page - no seriously, keep scrolling you perv, we’re making a point here.) Is she in this photo of an all-girls swimming pool party, being held by a girl who looks a hell of a lot nicer than Tila Tequila? Is this where she went to high school? And whoa - is this her, SPC Ellie Heagney on a skiing trip in Korea? It looks like her, shy Maggie Gyllenhaal smile and all. Was she in the military?

Eventually, all of this access starts to squick him out. Even beyond the creepy stalker vibe it gives off, the impulse to fill in untold parts in the stories that interest us is a powerful one. Writers turn to fanfic to fill in the fictional blanks themselves; but when the characters are real people the shift seems to be away from writing, towards research.

But when it’s a real person, two things get in the way: 1. They’re real, and probably creeped out. And 2. there’s a nagging feeling that, even if I became obsessed with Ellie Heagney, even if I wanted to write fan fic about her and wiki her and do all the other kinds of things that say, obsessive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans do with their favorite marginal characters, well, at the end of the day - shouldn’t she be telling us all that stuff? Characters are characters because we get to project stuff onto them. We learn about ourselves by watching what they do and letting them press our buttons. But in this case, we don’t have much right.

The second story, from the newly-added-to-my-RSS-reader NYT column The Medium, takes up a similar impulse and applies it to transmedia storytelling. With access to paratexts of all kinds, from IMDB to Wikipedia, research is becoming an increasing component of casual viewing.

Every visitor to the Internet, or even user of e-mail, is greeted by insidious questions, seductive links and tantalizing chances to click. These rabbit holes — the kind Alice fell down, the kind that tempt Neo in “The Matrix” — provide microportals into what can only be described as new worlds. There’s a blog, Stolen Vermeer, where you can trade tips with people searching for the Vermeer boosted during the $300 million art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990; Flickr pages where you can scrutinize and discuss photos of what people around the world are wearing today; and a vast message board, prisontalk.com, where in addition to advice for the incarcerated and those who love them you can find poetry and letters by people currently in prison.

Say I get e-mail that mentions Nasdijj. Is that an amp manufacturer, I hazily wonder, picturing a logo? Two minutes later I’ve read the Wikipedia entry, and I’m onto source material. Turns out he’s one of those fraud memoirists whom everyone adored until they found out he wasn’t who he claimed to be.

Such research and close attention to textual cues are key elements of the ARG experience. And this reminds me why the ARGs that I enjoy most have been ones that draw very closely on real world events, using reality as a diagetic element and then layering gameplay over that. One of the best moments in Metacortechs a few years ago was when we figured out that one of the characters had “caused” the 2003 northeastern US blackout.

These ARGs are rare, however, most likely because they not only have to deal with the unpredictabilities of player communities, but with an even more unpredictable reality.

Eludamos.org is a new, peer reviewed, online game studies journal. Their 2007 issue (they’re published biannually) is online now.

ELUDAMOS positions itself as a publication that fundamentally transgresses disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to join questions about and approaches to computer games from decidedly heterogeneous scientific contexts (for example cultural studies, media studies, (art) history, sociology, (social) psychology, and semiotics) and, thus, to advance the interdisciplinary discourse on digital games.

This approach does not exclude questions about the distinct features of digital games a an aesthetic and cultural form of articulation, on the contrary, the issue is to distinguish their media specific characteristics as well as their similarity to other forms of aesthetic and cultural practice. That way, the editors would like to contribute to the lasting distinction of international game studies as an academic discipline.

They currently have an open CFP for their 2008 (so much for biannual) issue. Full CFP below the fold.

Via Grand Text Auto

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In the wake of the DMCA and its triennial exemptions (the most recent of which allows educators to break CSS encryption on DVDs to make clips for students, among other allowances), clarity on intellectual property issues escapes many academics who feel that, in their classrooms at least, anything goes when it comes to “fair use.”

Well, SCMS released their long-awaited statement on fair use in film and media studies yesterday. This foray into the increasingly murky waters of fair use (or, what Lessig calls, “uses that trigger the law of copyright, but which are nonetheless free because the law deems them ‘fair’ — such as copying words from a book in a review of the book“) has been a long time coming and will, hopefully, do more than just clarify the organization’s position on the matter.

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) strongly supports the attempt to define the fair use of visual and aural materials by film and videomakers, educators, programmers and curators, and other film and media practitioners. As a scholarly organization with an ongoing interest in advising its members and constituents on the considerable ambiguity regarding fair use practice and its possible ensuing consequences, SCMS supports the principle of clarifying the legal, ethical, and practical implications of the fair use of visual and aural materials. To this end, SCMS has constituted a committee on public policy, which has been charged with developing a stance on fair use practice, among other policy matters. SCMS seeks to work with other organizations to develop a comprehensive policy stance regarding the fair use of visual and aural materials.

SCMS’ “Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching” (PDF!) is geared towards all educators, but attempts to clarify issues that are especially pressing for those who are teaching online. I found it most interesting that, while fair use is fairly understandable in the physical classroom, online the distinctions get much more troublesome. For example, if I show a film as part of my class during in-class time, I’m fine. However, if I rip the whole film and put it on my Blackboard site things get problematic. This is despite the fact that Blackboard has a notoriously closed architecture that limits access to course materials.

In this installation of DiGRA’s Hardcore series, “Un-Situated Play? Textual Analysis and Digital Games,” Diane Carr takes up a textual studies approach to digital games:

The shortcomings associated with analysis that focuses ‘on the game itself’ are widely and casually acknowledged, yet ‘textual analysis’ as a methodology remains rarely or broadly defined in Game Studies literature. Sometimes broad definitions are appropriate, but when the topic under discussion is a methodology (or its limitations) something more specific is probably called for. I don’t think that we can satisfactorily critique textual analysis just by listing the things that it does not do, and I suggest that defining the textual analysis of games should involve making reference to theories of text. Otherwise, why call it ‘textual’ analysis? In fact, various versions of textual analysis could be proposed, depending on the theory of text that’s being evoked in each case.

The whole piece is well worth a read. I think that many of us who study games from within English departments take for granted that games can be read as “texts.” Carr’s piece argues (as I have recently) that textual analysis has its problems when applied to the analysis of digital games, but that we should look towards textual analysis as a model that can be integrated into game studies.