MIT Press has authorized what is probably one of the first blog-based peer reviews for a forthcoming book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, digital media writer, artist, and professor of coummincations at the University of California, San Diego. Every weekday over the next ten weeks, Wardrip-Fruin will post a section of his new manuscript, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, on the popular Grand Text Auto blog (where he is a regular author), with the hope of receiving quality feedback from the site's readers. The GTxA community represents a vibrant network of media scholars, artists, designers, gamers and gaming professionals who are perfectly suited to critique this inherently cross-disciplinary work. When Doug Sery, the editor at MIT, asked Wardrip-Fruin who would be the ideal reviewers for the manuscript, his first instinct was to somehow bring the process onto the blog: "I immediately realized that the peer review I most wanted was from the community around Grand Text Auto."
"Given that ours is a field in which major expertise is located outside the academy (like many other fields, from 1950s cinema to Civil War history) the Grand Text Auto community has been invaluable for my work. In fact, while writing the manuscript for Expressive Processing I found myself regularly citing blog posts and comments, both from Grand Text Auto and elsewhere. Now I'm excited to take the blog/manuscript relationship to the next level, through an open peer review of the manuscript on the blog."
The Institute for the Future of the Book has partnered with Wardrip-Fruin to develop a version of its popular CommentPress software (which enables paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text) that fully integrates with the existing Grand Text Auto site, allowing the manuscript to be woven seamlessly into the daily traffic and intellectual life of the blog.
Although a traditional peer review process will carry on alongside the blog-based one, we believe this experiment affirms the importance and legitimacy of online communities in the development scholarship, and represents a significant step forward by an academic press into possible new hybrid models of publishing and review. The work of the Institute for the Future of the Book is largely dedicated to the idea that building intellectual community and creating infrastructure for scholarly exchange will be major roles that publishers, academic and non, will play in the digital age. With this experiment, we inch a little closer to an exciting fusion of old and new forms.
Please help spread the word in your communities and by all means participate in the discussion on Grand Text Auto.
Important links:
- Noah Wardrip-Fruin's introduction to the experiment
- The Institute for the Future of the Book's introduction
- Coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education
- First section of Expressive Processing
About the participants:
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media writer, scholar, and artist whose current work is focused on fiction and play. He has recently edited three books: The New Media Reader (2003, with Nick Montfort); First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004, with Pat Harrigan); and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007, also with Harrigan). His art/writing has been presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, VR Caves, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums - as well as discussed in books such as Digital Art (2003) and Art of the Digital Age (2006). He has been a research scientist at New York University, a creative writing fellow at Brown University, and an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore. In 2006 he became an assistant professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Vice-President of the Electronic Literature Organization and, of course, he blogs at http://grandtextauto.org.
Grand Text Auto is a blog collectively authored by six digital media creators and scholars: Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Beyond blogging, Grand Text Auto members have shown in major art museums, published a variety of scholarly and literary books, and shipped games that have sold millions of copies. In Fall 2007, at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology, Grand Text Auto became the first widely-read blog to spawn a gallery exhibition.
The Institute for the Future of the Book is a small New York and London-based think tank dedicated to exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing in the digital age. Over the past three years the Institute has produced a series of groundbreaking publishing experiments that rethink the book's form and function in the context of social Web technologies. The Institute publishes the popular if:book blog tracking new developments and ideas in the electronic publishing realm.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
CommentPress 1.4.1
The Software Studies Initiative collaborated with the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) on developing the future of blog-based peer-review. In the latest version, commenting plugin CommentPress (v.1.4.1), which allows comments on invididual paragraphs, can now be integrated with existing blogs.
The testbed for the project was provided by SWS member Noah Wardrip-Fruin's, whose online blog-based peer-review of his book manuscript Expressive Processing successfully integrated the stand-alone comment system with an existing and extensive scholarly blog community (GrandTextAuto) for the first time. Software Studies provided programming labor, oversight, and testing throughout the process.
Reviews of the blog-based peer review and its implications for the future of academic peer
review have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. (PDF) and in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. For more on the history of if:book's CommentPress project, see About CommentPress.
The testbed for the project was provided by SWS member Noah Wardrip-Fruin's, whose online blog-based peer-review of his book manuscript Expressive Processing successfully integrated the stand-alone comment system with an existing and extensive scholarly blog community (GrandTextAuto) for the first time. Software Studies provided programming labor, oversight, and testing throughout the process.
Reviews of the blog-based peer review and its implications for the future of academic peer
review have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. (PDF) and in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. For more on the history of if:book's CommentPress project, see About CommentPress.
EQUIPE | Grupo Software Studies
 | Lev Manovich: Diretor, Software Studies na UCSD; Professor, Visual Arts |
 | Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Diretor Associado, Software Studies na UCSD; Professor Assistente, Comunicação |
 | Jeremy Douglass: Pesquisador de Pós-doutorado no Software Studies na UCSD |
 | Helena Bristow: Administradora do Grupo Software Studies na UCSD; MSO, CRCA |
PROFESSORES PARTICIPANTES DA UCSD
- Sheldon Brown: Professor, Visual Arts; Diretor do CRCA; Diretor do Experimental GameLab
- Shlomo Dubnov: Professor Associado, Depto. de Música
- Jim Hollan: Professor, Ciências Cognitivas; Co-Diretor do Distributed Cognition & HCI Laboratory
- Stefan Tanaka: Professor, História
- Geoff Voelker: Professor Associado, Ciência da Computação e Engenharia
AFILIADOS
- Benjamin H. Bratton: Diretor do Advanced Strategies Group, Yahoo! em Santa Monica, CA
- Matthew Fuller: Professor, Convenor of MA Cultural Studies & MA Culture Industry, Goldsmiths College, London University; Editor do livro ‘Software Studies, a lexicon’ MIT Press, 2008
- Scott Lash: Professor de Sociologia; Diretor do Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London University
Cicero Silva: coordenador do Grupo Software Studies em São Paulo, Brazil @ FILE Labo
PESQUISADOR VISITANTE AFILIADO
SPRING 2008
 | Tristan Thielmann: Professor Assistente em Media Studies no Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Alemanha |
PESQUISADORES
SUMMER 2008
 | Jia Gu: pesquisadora de graduação, UCSD -- "new software interfaces for image collections" |
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| Reunião do Grupo Software Studies no CRCA. Da esquerda para direita: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Helena Bristow, Jeremy Douglass, Lev Manovich, Tristan Thielmann. |
HASTAC II - second Annual HASTAC conference
This MAY 22-24, 2008, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is having it's second annual conference, HASTAC II. The event will be held at UC Irvine and UC Los Angeles.
For additional information, please visit www.uchri.org.
This year's theme is "techno-travels" and explores the multiple ways in which place, movement, borders, and identities are being renegotiated and remapped by new locative technologies. Featured projects will delve into mobility as a modality of knowledge and stake out new spaces for humanistic inquiry. How are border-crossings being re-conceptualized, experienced, and narrated in a world permeated by technologies of mobility? How is the geo-spatial web remapping physical geographies, location, and borderlands? How are digital cities interfacing with physical space? How do we move between virtual worlds? And what has become of sites of dwelling and stasis in a world saturated by techno-travels?
This year's conference literalizes and metaphorizes travel, as attendees will participate in sessions at Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego, and on the connecting corridors of Southern California.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Deadline: February 15, 2008
Registration will be open February 1, 2008.
For additional information, please visit www.uchri.org.
RESEARCH
Cultural Analytics
using interactive visualization and data analysis for research, teaching and presentation of cultural dynamics and artifacts
About Cultural Analytics | what it is
Cultural Analytics on 215 megapixel HIPerSpace | how we do it
projects 2009-2010
(currently being updated):
Manga.viz: | one million manga pages
Science.viz: | Science and Popular Science magazines, 1872-1922
Anna_Karenina.viz: | Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
freakangels.viz: | temporal patterns in a web comic
Google.viz: | design variations in Google logos, 1998-2009
KingdomHearts.viz: | visualizing 100 hours of Kingdom Hearts gameplay
Timeline.viz: | changes in communication strategies and content in Time magazine, 1923—2009
MondrianRothko.viz | comparing artistic development of Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko
Vertov.viz | Films by Dziga Vertov
projects 2008-2009:
macro.viz: | visualizing art, industry, territory and global economy in Brazil
ArtDiaspora.viz | Korean modern art diaspora in a global world
ArtHistory.viz | development of modern art, 1848-1917
BettyBoop.viz | Betty Boop cartoons
FilmHistory.viz | 1100+ feature films, 1904-2008
MotionGraphics.viz | motion graphics and graphics design
What color is Slumdog Millionaire? | how to characterize dominants colors in feature films
UCSDD student projects 2008-2009:
N^3 Report | mapping 28 years of TV news
Art Objects as Data Points | 200,000 images in UCSD art library
MySpace.viz | tracking visual conversations in social networks
theory, context, methods:
Cultural Analytics history | development of the ideas for computational analysis of large-scale cultural data sets
Cultural Patterns Recognition, or Seeing Through Images | using image processing and computer vision for content analysis of visual and media cultures
Surface is the New Depth | multiple coordinated views for cultural visualization
NURBS theory | conceptualizing cultural processes: from timelines and boxes to curves, surfaces, fields
software tools (partial list):
Cultural Analytics Research Environment | real-time visualization on a 215 megapixel display
PowerWall Presenter | using gigapixel displays for humanities and social science research and teaching
Visual Analysis Toolkit | a set of software tools for automatic analysis of images and video
Game Studies
new tools and methods for studying video games
Re:Game Libratory | a research lab / library for platform studies of video game consoles
GamePlotBranching | tracing variations in gameplay experiences of "Knights of the Old Republic"
PlayDVR | networked hardware for capturing gameplay on game platforms (from Atari 2600 to Playstation 3)
PlayPower | 8-bit learning games for radically affordable computers
VideoGamePlay.viz | graphing temporal patterns in game play
SculptingTime.viz | temporal structures in structured video
Catch and Release | identifying the dynamics of uncanny experience in "Fatal Frame 2"
Discourse
books, articles, workshops
CommentPress 1.4.1 | extention to a blogging software which allows for commenting on individual paragraphs
"Software Studies" book series | MIT Press book series
Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command | new book draft, 11/2008
SoftWhere 2008 | international workshop in Software Studies at UCSD, May 21-22, 2002
Saturday, December 1, 2007
in development: eMerge: software studies community aggregator
eMerge, the Software Studies Initiative community aggregator, scans social networking web-services for software studies content and publishes them into an open shared space.
Authoring in eMerge is as simple as applying the tag software_studies to your entries to whatever web-service you use. Current supported entries and web-services include images from Flickr and Yahoo, bibliographic citations from CiteULike and LibraryThing, videos from YouTube and Google Video, and blog entries from the entire internet.
Unlike current aggregation web-services such as Plaxo, eMerge community members are not required to create an account and password or change tools - they simply continue using whatever web-services they are most comfortable with, and their contributions are still accepted when they change web-services.
The project website is currently in alpha.
Authoring in eMerge is as simple as applying the tag software_studies to your entries to whatever web-service you use. Current supported entries and web-services include images from Flickr and Yahoo, bibliographic citations from CiteULike and LibraryThing, videos from YouTube and Google Video, and blog entries from the entire internet.
Unlike current aggregation web-services such as Plaxo, eMerge community members are not required to create an account and password or change tools - they simply continue using whatever web-services they are most comfortable with, and their contributions are still accepted when they change web-services.
The project website is currently in alpha.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Announcing Jeremy Douglass, Postdoctoral Researcher in Software Studies
The Software Studies initiative at UCSD is pleased to welcome our new Postdoctoral Researcher, Jeremy Douglass. Jeremy will be researching critical approaches to software and code using the analytic frameworks of the humanities and the social sciences, working on software projects for analyzing (software) culture, and playing a key role in field-building activities for software studies worldwide.Jeremy is appointed to Software Studies with support from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). He will be working with Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts) and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Assistant Professor, Communication) to develop models and tools for the cultural criticism of software, establish the field as a complement to existing research in cyberculture and new media, and investigate how next generation cyberinfrastructure technologies can be used by humanists, social scientists, and cultural practitioners.
Jeremy arrives with a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara's Department of English. His dissertation, "Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media," explores several critical techniques of interest to the software studies field, including the ongoing influence of code and development tools on software genre formation and the use of close-reading techniques on source code. In addition to a history of publications and presentations on electronic literature and software, he creates visualization artworks and writes for the new media art blog Writer Response Theory.
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