Grand Text Auto

The final report of the Media Systems workshop has just been released:

“Envisioning the Future of Computational Media.”

You can download either the executive summary alone or the whole report.

I took part in the Media Systems workshop in 2012 with about 40 others from across the country. The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Microsoft Studios, and Microsoft Research. As Noah Wardrip-Fruin, co-author and co-organizer of the workshop, writes on the HASTAC site:

Come see Geoff and Max talk about the Metadata Games project this Friday at DPLAfest in Boston to get a first-hand look at the project’s newest games!

DPLAfest 2013 is a two-day series of DPLA-related workshops, discussions, and other hands-on activities that are free and open to the public celebrating the April 2013 launch of The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) – a platform that aggregates and disseminates “the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums.”

Mark Sample has posted five basic statements, ahem, I mean 5 BASIC statements, on computational literacy.

I must point out that while they are all programs, the third and fifth ones actually include multiple statements. And, the program that number 4 is referring to is:

10 PRINT "GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD"
20 NEW

Very much worth a read – from the standpoint of understanding programming and its cultural intersections generally, not only because Mark is promoting the book that he, I, and eight others wrote, which will be published in November.

I’m at the intriguing and very sucessful third 2011 symposium of TILTS, the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies. (Interestingly, TILTS can be spelled using only letter from “The X-Files.”) I might have written more about the event, but my computer has been identified by automated UT-Austin systems as being a rooted Windows machine (although it’s not a Windows machine at all) and is banned from the network. Desite my radio silence, though, the symposium has certainly been a space of lively discussion of digital media work, computational linguistics and its application to humanistic inquiry, and the representation of technology in media.

Trying to find traction in my pursuit of academic scholarship is quite daunting at times.  There are just so many people in the world doing so many interesting things, and it often feels like an endless catching up with the many experts of today.  What I do know is my childhood aspiration to tell stories through video games drives me on this adventure of discovery.  What I didn’t know was how many communities of thought there would be along the way: communities that care about stories, communities that care about games, communities that care about stories in games.  (It keeps me constantly feeling like the “the new kid” in school.)  And what I take away from this last conference is a new collaboration of interesting research questions that I could’ve very well been working on.  Not that I’m second guessing the path I’m currently on, but rather, I look forward to bringing my own discoveries to the intersection of all these communities.  So, let me share a little bit of what I learned about the Digital Humanities community.