Author: David Ciccoricco

Seminar back on: “What You Should Know about Simulation if You Care about Videogames”

This Friday the Department of Computer Science and Information Science Seminar Series is hosting Associate Professor David Ciccoricco for a talk titled:

“What You Should Know about Simulation if You Care about Videogames”

ABSTRACT: This talk historicizes the tangled relationship between two kinds of simulation, the mental simulations that happen in human minds and the digital simulations that happen on computer screens, and speculates about that relationship’s transdisciplinary future. It also suggests some ways in which aesthetic appropriations of simulation – as seen in videogames and other creative media – can play a significant and revealing role in mediating between the cognitive and the computational.

WHEN – 4 September at 1PM

WHERE – live & streamed online

Room G34 (Owheo building, 133 Union St. East)  (places limited – to secure a seat you must email:  
csadmin@cs.otago.ac.nz )

& online on Zoom at:

https://otago.zoom.us/j/98869375927?pwd=dmRTWTNrL2V4VEtRTkpwVmE2MlBwdz09

Password: 965073


BIO – David Ciccoricco is Associate Professor in English and Linguistics at the University of Otago. His research is focused on literary and narrative theory with an emphasis on emergent forms of digital literature, as well as digital culture and posthumanism more generally. He is the author of Reading Network Fiction (2007), a book on pre-Web and Web-based digital fiction, and Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media (2015), which is focused on cognitive approaches to narrative and literary theory in print novels, digital narratives, and story-driven videogames.

INTRODUCING… the Literary Games Group

We’re thrilled to announce the start of Otago’s Literary Games Group – an open, informal, undergraduate group devoted to the critical study of literary videogames.

The group will meet weekly in the Digital Humanities Hub (Arts Building room 1W4, on Wednesdays at 11am.

Contact literary gamer Jacob Cone for more details: conja458@student.otago.ac.nz  

 

 

Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA)-affiliated Research Assistant

Photo by G. Ashworth

We’re pleased to announce our first “Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA)-affiliated Research Assistant” for the University of Otago Humanities Division Digital Humanities Hub.

Gavin Ashworth, an artist and art history/linguistics student who has worked in artistic spaces in Sydney and Dunedin, started his role earlier this month.

The main task of the ADA-affiliated Research Assistant is to conduct data analysis of the Aotearoa Digital Arts Network online archive and compare that to other online collections internationally, with the aim of increasing the presence of NZ digital art and literature in those collections.

Free Pop-up Digital Humanities WORKSHOP

We’re pleased to announce the addition of a free pop-up workshop to precede this year’s Digital Humanities Expo:

String Games: getting started with web scraping in Python

WHO: Dr Christopher Thomson (U. Canterbury)
WHEN: 10 – 11:30am, Monday 14th October 2019
WHERE: HR ITS Training & Development Room 1, 270 Leith Walk [map]
HOW: spaces are limited – register here http://tiny.cc/DHPopUp
CONTACT: email alexander[dot]ritchie[at]otago for further information

Still Image of Artist Vera Frenkel's String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video (Montreal–Toronto, 1974) featuring a street-scene with artist making a cats cradle shape using their bodies and rope
Vera Frenkel – String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video (Montreal–Toronto, 1974)

This free workshop is for anyone who wants to learn how to use simple code to pull text from webpages for their research.

Using programming language Python, we will work from examples to understand the key steps needed to achieve common tasks, such as obtaining a ‘clean’ text from the web to use for further analysis, or selecting pieces of information and organising them in a structured form, such as a spreadsheet. We will introduce some programming concepts along the way, but will focus on the ‘big picture’ – that is, understanding how these techniques can be used in academic contexts, and how to apply them to your own work.

Register here – http://tiny.cc/DHPopUp

Christopher Thomson is Head of Digital Humanities at University of Canterbury and Co-director of the UC Arts Digital Lab

[Open Hours Week 7] – Form 3 Party this Friday!

 

Ever wonder how new digital humanities courses are created?

At the University of Otago, all it takes is a Digital Humanities Hub, some imagination, and a mysterious document called a Form 3. For this week’s Open Hours, we invite you to help us dream up and develop DIGI200, a new digital humanities paper in the works for 2020…

Join us for our “Form 3 Party” this Friday 7 Dec from 12 noon to 1pm, as we chart a course called DIGI200: methods and critique, which promises to: develop exciting project-based assessment; cultivate keen critical eyes on our current digital culture; and draw on a wealth of inter-disciplinary and cross-divisional expertise at Otago in the process.

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 7 December 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

HOST: David Ciccoricco

[Open Hours –Week 3] – Who’s Afraid of Digital Literature?

Join us on Friday 9 November between 12 noon and 1pm at the Digital Humanities Hub for the third of our weekly Open Hours!

Topic – Digital literature

This session moves from the distant reading – and ideally not the distant memory – of last week’s focus on textual analysis, to the practice of close reading works of digital-born fiction and poetry – also known as digital (or electronic) literature.

After making some sense of what this stuff is, we’ll consider the relationship between digital humanities and creative media, and also what happens to the literary imagination itself when minds and machines commune, and compose.

We ask not how humanists are using computers to understand text (after Ted Underwood), but how computers might be using humanists…

 

Viewing – Leonardo Flores, “I ♥ E-Poetry,” TEDx Talk (2016)

Reading – Scott Rettberg, “Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities”

https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch9

Exemplar – Will Luers, “Tales of Automation”

http://will-luers.com/tales-of-automation/

 

WHEN: 12pm – 1pm, Friday 9 November 2018

WHERE: Digital Humanities Hub, Room 1W3, First Floor, Arts Building

WHO: Anyone in the University community – there’s no advance registration required, but we always appreciate knowing in advance if you are planning to come along!

 

HOST: David Ciccoricco – dave.ciccoricco@otago.ac.nz