Humanities Computing

This group is briefly mentioned in the chapter on Pranks in this week's reading. The fired game designer for the SIms helicopter game left and joined this group-- pretty much pranksters of an online nature. While it has little to do with video games, it has everything to do with ethos in an Internet age.

This blogger makes some really great points extending Joseph Reagle's ('The Argument Engine' in Wikipedia Reader) ideas of the filter than publish principle of academic publications. Haranguing the filter than publish operation, this author writes how the peer review system adulterates the author's real content writing, "In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want."

Augmented reality means that " . . . our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once." This short post was referenced in both "The Myth of Cyberspace" and "Picture Pluperfect," so I thought I'd bookmark it here in case anyone was interested.

The divide between the "digital" and the "real" is false. This dualism serves a useful purpose, however: "Part of the seductiveness of the cyberspace fantasy is that, by denying the complex, mutually determining relationship between our society and the Web, it makes our lives and our everyday judgments simpler."

This article argues that social media aren't just about exhibitionism, and that we can instead view the Web as a painting. Instagram and Pinterest are picturesque, which he defines as "something that is more pleasing in a mediated representation."

The author argues that Word has too many workarounds, and especially when it comes to publishing on the web. There's another nice example of the code Word throws in there, too.

An article about Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid. His game is featured in the first chapter of Bogost's book ("Art") as an example of a proceduralist game.

On "casual" games and their addictiveness

An article about Inbound Writer, software that helps writers revise their content to maximize search engine optimization. The author's conclusion: "Just like the Internet it is served across, InboundWriter is just an information source, and it can be used for good or evil."

This is Bogost's personal webpage and I thought it was interesting to look at not just to gather more info about Bogost, but also because the website itself has an interesting layout worth dissecting or borrowing for our own sites. :)

Ok-- so maybe this doesn't DIRECTLY apply to a reading on the syllabus, but this is a kind of joke site and will make you look super important and busy on the job or wherever. Kind of interesting to try to decipher what this code is doing. I certainly can't figure it out.

Here's a blog documenting some not-so-obvious hex colors we might use for our sites.

Bogost on gamification.

Why? Good question. $1 billion seems like a big chunk of change to shell out when there isn't an obvious indicator that there will be a turn of profit.

Have you seen the Daily Show bit on this? Hilarious! Does seem rather odd, but I have faith that almighty Facebook has some sort of plan...maybe.

This article looks at how lowering e-book prices now could lead to less competition and consequently the danger of prices rising in the future.

Nye, who argues that "the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century's great political shifts", looks at the implications of cyber wars on the security budget as well as international relations within the political context.

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

Lawmakers are finally putting a stop to this practice. Since we broached the topic of rhetorical strategies in making arguments in class, the argument one law expert makes is interesting: ""It lays down boundaries on what you can and can't do. It takes a gray area and makes a bright line ... The bill is a win for employees who want to protect their data security and their personal content passwords. But it's also a win for employers. ... Employers don't want to have access to this content. With access comes responsibility."

This is a very user friendly time frame of viruses from the birth of the concept up until 2004. It doesn't cover everything, but it is interesting to see the evolution.

You can take or leave the comic, depending on your tastes, but the idea of Umwelt and its applicability to our subject matter is fascinating.