Every weekend (if I have time, which is not always the case) I read news and essays on Digital Culture that I collected during the week, from various sources, trying to give them some perspective, The collection is idiosyncratic and highly personal, but not, I hope, without interests for the few readers of this blog.
[A slightly different Italian Version is published on Leggere, scrivere e far di conto]
Streaming videogames session, live or recorded (youtube), has become more and more popular in recent years. The phenomenon was described in the Guardian and The Conversation in 2014, and has been the topic of a Master’s Thesis at the University of Utrecht).
On the website in media res there was an interdisciplinry discussion on Video Game Spectatorship (8-12 january 2018), with a number of short essays:.
- Sustained Viewership: (Re)Playability of Video Games (Ashley Jones, Georgia State University)
- Despite Host’s Infamous Toxicity, Independently-organized Tyler1 Championship Series Rivals Official League of Legends eSports Viewership (Eric A James, NorthWestern University)
- Gacha Gonna Get Ya: Watching Mobile Card Collecting ( Caitlin Casiello, Yale University)
- Fan Community and Celebrity in Video Game Spectatorship (Lindsey Decker — Boston University)
- Twitch Plays Diversity: Building Community on Streaming Platforms (Laurel Rogers & Dan Lark, University of Southern California )
In media res is one of the many experiments shaped by the Institute of the Future of the Book, a small think-and-do tank “investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens”. The idea behind it is to promote “collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship”, thanks to a “more immediate critical engagement with media at a pace closer to how we experience mediated texts”.
The pieces, published every week, are short video clip or visual image slideshow taken from the web and repurposed and contextualised (framed) through a a short impressionistic response by a curator (like in museums).
In other words, the distance, in time, between the vision and the critical analysis is almost non existent.
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Danah Boyd suggests we read Automating Inequality, a book of digital anthropology that shows how a deterministic and uncritical adoption of algorithmic decision-making tools to enable social services can make the situation worse.
On the same topic: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy di Cathy O’Neil.
At Academic level one can read the Reading list on Critical Algorithm Studies published on the Social Media Collective Research Blog.
On Newspapers:
- In US, Pro Publica has a section on Investigating Algorithmic Injustice.
- In France, the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés) published a report on ethical issues of algorythms and artificial intelligence and a n summary of a one-day seminar on the role of algorithms on daily lifes of citizens (Montpellier, 14 october 2017).
- Still in France, Le Monde interviewed the philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy (29 dicembre 2017): “De mon point de vue, ce ne sont pas les algorithmes qui posent problème, mais plutôt notre propre paresse, notre renonciation à nous gouverner nous-mêmes”.
- also on Le Monde: La peur de l’intelligence artificielle n’est pas (encore) d’actualité.
The topic of fake news, surely not new (as many panels in the recent MLA conference show), came back with a vengence with the advent of social media. The Poynter Institute published a guide.
And lets not forget the Around The World 2017 conference (KULE Institute) who addressed the role of Digital Media in a Post-Truth Era.
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I should also mention the publication of
- two new issues of DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly) appeared: the third one and a preview of the fourth of 2017.
- the book Les humanités digitales. Historique et développements by Olivier Le Deuff (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), a history of the origin and development of DH, with a focus on epistemology. You can download for free the Introduction and the Table of Content.
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Call for Papers
International Conference for Electronic Publishing 2018: Deadline Extended to 31 January (#ELPUB2018).
Mathematics and Modern Literature, Manchester, 2018 (Deadline: 5th February 2018)
Multilingual Digital Authorship, Lancaster University, 8-9 March 2018 (Deadline: 2nd February 2018).
7th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications, July 26 – 28, 2018, Porto – Portugal (Deadline: March 13, 2018)
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Programming tutorials for humanists
Python programming for the humanities
Correspondence Analysis for Historical Research with R
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More
L’intelligence Artificielle – 60 secondes pour comprendre
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Giorgio Guzzetta (January 14, 2018). DH Talk of the Town. Books are Falling Apart. Retrieved January 22, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/owft
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