Grand Text Auto

Happy Holidays from the Tiltfactor team! If you are scrambling for last minute gifts, here are some more suggestions, this time from Tiltfactor intern Shaun and project manager Sukie:

“Fire in the Library” is an article in the new Technology Review about digital archivist, documentary filmmaker, and cat impersonator Jason Scott.

“The Curse of Cow Clicker” is an article in the new Wired about game developer, ontologist, and cowpocalyptic force Ian Bogost.

Enjoy your holiday season with these fine profiles.

I recently had the chance to revisit the Gendered Conference Campaign, which is not new (it’s more than two years old) but is (unfortunately) still relevant. Without fixing blame on conference organizers, this page lists several “all-male” academic conferences (those where all the invited speakers are men) and offers useful, concrete suggestions for including women in your own conference.

The journal New River has a new issue, very nicely designed and with a diverse selection of work. Editors Brianna P. Stout and Christopher Linforth have five different sorts of collaborative works, by Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams; Chris Funkhouser and Amy Hufnagel; Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova (who translated my “Concrete Perl,” “The Two,” and “Through the Park” into Russian); Jason Nelson and several Virginia Tech collaborators; and Alan Bigelow with those readers who respond. Here’s the link to my three poems, which are short computational works that operate on the level of the letter, word or phrase, and sentence.

Here’s an announcement about a new, free hypertext authoring system from my collaborator Alex Mitchell:

We are pleased to announce the first public release of the HypeDyn
hypertext fiction authoring tool: http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn

HypeDyn is a procedural hypertext fiction authoring tool for non-programmers
who want to create text-based interactive stories that adapt to reader
choice. HypeDyn is free to download and open source, and runs on Linux,
MacOS and Windows. You can download HypeDyn from
http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn/download.html

HypeDyn was written in Kawa Scheme, http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/

Looking for gifts but don’t know what to get? The Tiltfactor staff has come up with gift picks that should satisfy the “non-gamer” or 733t player.

Check out the gift suggestions from Tiltfactor’s most popular Post-Doc, Geoff, and incredible interns Max and Erika (reprinted from our Facebook Page):

In the Boston area? Please join us today for the last Purple Blurb event of the semester:

Penumbra: Rich Media & Gestural Text

Samantha Gorman

Creator of Penumbra, Books of Kells, Canticle

Instructor in Performance Studies & Digital Literature, RISD
M.F.A. Brown University

Monday, December 5, 5:30 pm

MIT’s 6-120

Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, dance, performance, and digital culture. She holds an MFA and BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. Penumbra, a hybrid art/literature app for the iPad created with Danny Cannizzaro, challenges the notion of a static “ebook” by carefully integrating short film, rich animation, illustration and fiction.

Sponsored by the Angus N. MacDonald Fund

As always, this Purple Blurb event is free and open to the public.

Madden NFL 11 – EA Sports

Game telemetry is being used both during development and post release. One of the most exciting applications of this work is the use of game telemetry to support the game design process. Game telemetry analysis can help a designer answer the following questions:

• How do players interact with the game?
• Which features, modes, and content are players experiencing?
• Why do players quit playing the game?