Keeping the Game Alive

Here’s an interesting article from the International Journal of Digital Curation that explores strategies for the digital preservation of console games: “Keeping the Game Alive: Evaluating Strategies for the Preservation of Console Video Games”

From the abstract:

Interactive fiction and video games are part of our cultural heritage. As original systems cease to work because of hardware and media failures, methods to preserve obsolete video games for future generations have to be developed. The public interest in early video games is high, as exhibitions, regular magazines on the topic and newspaper articles demonstrate. Moreover, games considered to be classic are rereleased for new generations of gaming hardware. However, with the rapid development of new computer systems, the way games look and are played changes constantly. When trying to preserve console video games one faces problems of classified development documentation, legal aspects and extracting the contents from original media like cartridges with special hardware. Furthermore, special controllers and non-digital items are used to extend the gaming experience making it difficult to preserve the look and feel of console video games.

Anne Stewart: 2010-2011 HASTAC scholar

I’m thrilled to report another UO undergraduate will be serving as a 2010-2011 HASTAC scholar, Anne Stewart (Literature). Anne was nominated by faculty mentor Alisa Freedman, East Asian Languages and Literature, with additional support from Andrew Bonamici (UO Libraries). Here is Anne’s bio from the HASTAC nomination:

Anne Stewart, UO HASTAC scholar

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Anne is currently an undergrad in Literature at UO, working on a minor in Japanese with a focus on culture. Her areas of interest for research include the intersection of new and old media, how new media and audience participation in new and old forms are changing what we think of *as* media, and the new folklore of an internet culture where word of mouth moves faster and further than ever before. Manga/anime and other graphic narrative forms, speculative fiction and fanworks in all genres are other prominent areas of interest.

Currently Anne works in the consulting division of UO’s Center for Media and Educational Technologies, helping professors and GTFs to use and understand technology in education. After next year, she’s planning to get a Masters in Library and Information Science, to further study and share these interests with others.

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Congratulations, Anne and Alisa!

Oregon Petrarch Open Book earns a Digital Humanities Start-up grant

Romance Languages Professor Massimo Lollini’s labor of love and scholarship, the Oregon Petrarch Open Book (OPOB), has won a Digital Humanities Start-up grant from the Office of Digital Humanities.  The Level II grant of $49,978 will support development of a more interactive database-driven website for OPOB.

OPOB is built around Petrarch’s 14th century collection, the Canzoniere.  The ODH award will fund an open-sourceware rebuild of OPOB’s digital assets and tools, and strengthen the groundwork for international collaboration among scholars and institutions around this central work of world literature. In OPOB, a scholar may read a poem in the original, examine a Renaissance commentary, compare a series of different translations, analyze contemporary rewritings, and finally, explore multimedia assets associated with the poem.

Lollin writes, “We call OPOB the ‘open-book’ initiative, partly in homage to the open source software movement whose tools we will be using (Drupal, PHP, MySQL), and partly in reference to the way computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology and online professional networking has opened up new ways of building academic communities. But mostly we call it ‘open’ because our approach articulates new interdisciplinary paths for teaching and learning in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, and Translation Studies.

“In designing a system around the idea of the open book, the Canzoniere is the perfect text. Not only is it the most influential collection of poetry in the European tradition, but it is constructively and profitably read as a work-in-progress and as an unfinished text; Petrarch continued to produce different versions of his collection and shift the order of the poems until his death in 1374. The last version of the manuscript, as  printed today, merely reflects the last of his edits and ignores the fragmentary nature of the different versions emphasized by its original Latin title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or Collection of Fragments in the Vernacular.“

Lollini argues that the idea of a text as an ongoing and emerging project is muffled by the very nature of a printed book. To view and understand a text’s development and its many possible iterations, it is necessary to see the parts in different orders, see the connections between the parts, the drafts, and the future incarnations of the text. This is only possible through the use of digital technology thanks to hypertext and its ability to make the relationships between textual components visible and explicit.

New Tools: OpenScholar & Anthologize

Two new tools to help  faculty digitally manage  and present assorted  research/teaching tasks  were announced this week in the Chronicle.

OpenScholar (Chronicle 8/1), developed in 2009 for Harvard faculty as a user-friendly WYSWYG website builder, is now freely available  to rest of the scholarly community. DRUPAL-based, it’s designed to be installed by institutional IT, after which individual faculty can log in to customize personal websites and research-project websites.

In their words, OpenScholar is “enormously scalable, easy to set up and administer with a minimum of resources required. Scholars create and then manage content their own sites.” “Scholars” is the key word: OpenScholar’s plug-ins are designed entirely for research professors and instructors, unlike, say WordPress. Plugins include course calendars, course announcements, blog, CV, publications, research projects and image galleries; the developers made OpenScholar accessible even to techphobes.

OpenScholar is interested in working with institutional partners. This could be a solution for UO to pull its 20th century faculty (reluctant to do any digital teaching, course management or research) into the 21st century where UO’s digital natives (students, graduate students, and many junior faculty) get most of their their work done.

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Anthologize (Chronicle 8/4) was crowd-hacked during the  One Week, One Tool project at the Center for History and New Media the last week of July. Anthologize is a free, open-source plugin designed to turn your WordPress 3.0 blog and other feeds into platform for publishing electronic texts. Online student research projects can be harvested, ordered, and edited into an anthology, for instance, and exported as PDF,  TEI or ePUB.

Anthologize cannot be installed on WordPress.com, however–your WordPress 3.0 has to be running on another server. Should UO decide to adopt WPMU, this will not be an issue. But here at UODS, we can’t run Anthologize.

Still under development–and admittedly buggy–, Anthologize has a user forum where you can see the kinks worked out. You can also follow its development on Twitter @Anthologize.