South Jersey Digital

For the final set of panels where I have a choice, I’ve decided to move to the more experimental papers. Maybe this will be more “relaxing” for me.

The conference ends with a open panel of funding for digital humanities, which I’ll also attend.

First up is Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Baltimore on Social Media and Digital Humanities (in the abstract book, it was listed as “Literature, the Literary, and Dataworld”). Starts with a provocation, calls print and broadcast “fossil media.” Social media are important because something is going to change. Not quite sure what the change is going to be. But it is a transition from content to data. Calls himself part of the “crankiest generation,” where ELO “electronic literature organization” will part with OLE “outside the legitimate enterprise.” Current economic crisis helps Moulthrop argue that doubts about the bubble can link back to uncertainty about where social networking is taking us. Imagines homology between securitization of debt and new media and humanism. But “boring new media” is not an option. He sees transition to “systemic media” where there a data streams attached to every object.

Next up is Steven Jones of Loyola University of Chicago on “social text as digital game space; or what I learned from playing spore”. “This talk should be hyperlinked to Stuart’s slide 12.” It follows from his discussion of the as yet unreleased game in his previous book. Starts with his own provocation. Let’s compare texts and games as systems for sharing and reediting their content. He gives a general account of where games fit in recent digital humanities scholarship from McKenzie to McGann. Game Facade developed in 2005 shows similarities between role playing game and improvisational theater. Parts were played by improv actors. Author of spore wanted players to “feel more like George Lucas than Luke Skywalker.” Hybrid model which enables users to populate universe with one’s own creations and interact with other people’s creations without having what you do to other people’s creations affect what happens to their own universes. Calls it a “massively single-player game.” He then circles back to how activities of digital humanities follow some of the same processes as building creatures in Spore.

Q: With emergent processes, how do you recognize something important when it’s there?