Grand Text Auto

Zuff Idries ’18 Wins Script Competition

About four million Google hits for “peaceful protesters,” only about 55,000 for “peaceful police.” Anyone who has been reading the news will have seen the phrase “peaceful protesters” again and again—and probably will not have seen this other phrase. Does that mean peaceful protesters outnumber peaceful police 80 to 1? Or at least that we think and speak as if this is the case?

The Dice Tower Network features Dr. Flanagan in its podcast that explores games, game design, history and culture. This episode is hosted by Gil Hova and Emma Larkins, both tabletop designers. The hour long conversation explores psychology and games, and the meaning of games from a long term humanistic perspective. Happy listening. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ludology/id419046224

Please enjoy Post Hoc, a show I’ve put together with generous contributions from a baker’s dozen artists and seven writers. There was no pre-established theme for Post Hoc, which was prompted by our inability to get to IRL galleries and museums. Artists were simply asked for digital images, any digital image they considered an artwork. (Several works in the show do have other manifestations.) The work in the show is all from 2020. I solicited 1000–1200 character responses to each piece.

Agnieszka Kurant   response by Mary Flanagan

Christian Bök   response by Paul Stephens

Risk Management [Europe]
Agnieszka Kurant
2020
800px × 794px JPEG

The Library of Babel – Hexagonal Drawing in English
Christian Bök
2020
828px × 828px JPEG

FLY PIECE
Daniel Temkin
2020
800px × 457px JPEG

Cabaret #7
Derek Beaulieu
2020
600px × 547px JPEG
of 8″ × 8″ Letraset on Paper

Lauren Lee McCarthy
2020
1000px × 625px JPEG
of Performance, Custom Software and Electronics, Installation, Digital Image

“Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.” Isolation #6
Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault
2020
800px × 511px JPEG
of 18″ × 12″ Cattle Marker, Powdered Pastels, Pencil, Graphite on Paper

Outtake
Olia Lialina
2020
270px × 480px WebP

Visual Entanglement, 2020
Manfred Mohr
2020
828px × 828px JPEG

Head 4.054
Mark Klink
2002
800px × 800px JPEG

Yellow Melting Like a Firework Petal, from Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words)
Renée Green
2020
800px × 610px JPEG
also, 42″ × 32″ Double-Sided Banner. Part of a Series of 28 Banners

THESE N—-S IS WATCHING
Sly Watts
2020
740px × 1000px JPEG
of 42″ × 59″ Charcoal, Oil, Oil Pastel, Acrylic, Ink, and Paint Marker on Pastel Paper

Devil May Care
Susan Bee
2020
800px × 602px JPEG
of 24″ × 18″ Oil & Enamel on Linen

Panthéon
Forsyth Harmon
2020
800px × 800px JPEG
of 9″ × 12″ Ink and Watercolor on Paper

This May 21, 2020 at 7pm Eastern Time is another great WordHack!

A regular event at Babycastles here in New York City, this WordHack will be fully assumed into cyberspace, hosted as usual by Todd Anderson but this time with two featured readings (and open mic/open mouse) viewable on Twitch. Yes, this is the link to the Thursday May 21, 2020 WordHack!

I’m especially enthusiastic about this one because the two featured readers will be sharing their new, compelling, and extraordinary books of computer-generated poetry. This page is a virtual “book table” linking to where you can buy these books (published by two nonprofit presses) from their nonprofit distributor.

NarraScope is just a cool cool event, and this year it’s pay what you can and online. NarraScope 2020: Celebrating Narrative Games May 28 – June 4  2020. On Thursday May 28, we discovered that Matthew Farber is running “Terrifically Awkward: Games To Teach Social Emotional Learning” (link) using our very own Awkward Moment party card game for middle school age kids and older. Hurray! The game is backordered at Uncommon Goods, whah! but is available on Amazon.

“Sonnet Corona” is a computer-generated sonnet, or if you look at it differently, a sonnet cycle or very extensive crown of sonnets.

The sonnets generated are in monometer. That is, each line is of a single foot, and in this case, is of strictly two syllables.

They are linked not by the last line of one becoming the first line of the next, but by being generated from the same underlying code: A very short web page with a simple, embedded JavaScript program.

Because there are three options for each line, there are 3¹⁴ = 4,782,969 possible sonnets.

New York City, we are continually told, is now the “epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Italy is the world’s “epicenter.” This term is used all the time in the news and was recently deployed by our mayor here in NYC.

I’m following up on a February 15 Language Log post by Mark Liberman about why this term is being used in this way. Rather than asking why people are using the term, I’m going to discuss how this word influences our thinking. “Epicenter” leads us to think about the current global pandemic in some unhelpful ways. Although less exciting, simply saying something like “New York City has the worst outbreak” would actually improve our conceptual understanding of this crisis.

We’re excited to announce the release of the report on our large research project on bias and women in STEM! Check out Cutting Through the Bias: Using Games and Interactive Experiences to Transform Bias Against Women in STEM is now available on Amazon! This book is an indispensable document of our innovative research and study findings. The book also outlines interventions and prototypes that can be used by educators to reduce the impact of bias in the classroom.

When it rains, it pours, which matters even on the sea.

Thanks to bug reports by Barry Roundtree and Jan Grant, via the 2020 Critical Code Studies Working Group (CCSWG), there is now another new version of Sea and Spar Between which includes additional bug fixes affecting the interface as well as the generation of language.

As before, all the files in this version 1.0.2.are available in a zipfile, for those who care to study or modify them.

Stephanie Strickland and I published the first version of Sea and Spar Between in 2010, in Dear Navigator, a journal no longer online. In 2013 The Winter Anthology republished it. That year we also provided another version of this poetry system for Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ), cut to fit the toolspun course, identical in terms of how it functions but including, in comments within the code, what is essentially a paper about the detailed workings of the system. In those comments, we wrote:

The following syllables, which were commonly used as words by either Melville or Dickinson, are combined by the generator into compound words.

Years ago we created a board game, POX: Save the People, a gane tgat helped players understand infections diseases, as well as ZOMBIEPOX and POX: Save the Puppies, about vaccinating pets. Watch a video about the project, read an interview, and read one paper about an empirical study, looking at the basic question of whether transferring a public health game from an analog to a digital format would impact players’ perceptions of the game and the efficacy of the game for stimulating changes to beliefs and cognitions; or read paper two which looked at the design process and how we modeled “herd immunity.” We love public health, with or without the undead.