August 2020 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

FW: teaching resource on hacking and digital hum resources for teaching
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 05 Aug '20

05 Aug '20

May be of interest to people preparing online courses… Tom ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Gabriella Coleman, Dr. <gabriella.coleman(a)mcgill.ca <mailto:gabriella.coleman@mcgill.ca> > Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2020, 13:08 Subject: [Air-L] teaching resource on hacking and digital hum resources for teaching To: air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org <mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> <air-l(a)listserv.aoir.org <mailto:air-l@listserv.aoir.org> > Hi AoiR If you, like us, are about to enter a year of teaching like no other, and you are hard at work re-thinking *everything* we might have a helpful resource : https://hackcur.io/ Hack_Curio is a video exhibit about hackers that covers a range of topics that precipitate out of hacking: disinformation; the visual culture of the last 40 years; media stereotypes; disability and technology; the economics of information; the history of computing; surveillance; whistle blowing and leaking; cyberpunk; gaming; equity and inclusion in computing and silicon valley...Each video comes paired with a paragraph or two written by a scholar, hacker, or journalist. The videos and entries are short but also try to a make a point or two which your students can learn from, take apart, rework, or expand on. By Sept we should have 60 entries. You can check out the full list here https://hackcur.io/the-list/ or explore the site by category or tags. If you use it, do tell us how it worked! Although there are more entries being written, we are taking a small break from soliciting entries so we can focus on putting together our syllabi but if you are interested in writing for us, please do reach out after September 15th. We have a collection of 100 + clips on all sorts of topics and plan on publishing for the next few years. If you have other digital-type resources you love and that work well in the classroom, we'd love to hear about them as well. A few others I really like are: The Eugenics Archive https://eugenicsarchive.ca/ A is for Another: A Dictionary of AI https://aisforanother.net/ Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence https://atozofai.withgoogle.com/intl/en-US/ Critical Media Project: https://criticalmediaproject.org/ All the best, Biella (along with Chris, Paula, and Nathan) _______________________________________________ The Air-L(a)listserv.aoir.org <mailto:Air-L@listserv.aoir.org> mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

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CFP of possible interest: Blackness @ Play: Communities, Culture, Creativity
by Racquel M Gonzales 05 Aug '20

05 Aug '20

Dear Colleagues, Wanted to share a special issue call that might be of interest for those researching Black gamers/gaming and histories of Black figures in computer/VG play histories: ******* *Call for Papers: Blackness @ Play: Communities, Culture, Creativity* Special Issue of the *American Journal of Play* Guest Editor: TreaAndrea M. Russworm, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Deadlines: 300-word abstract: September 15, 2020 Full papers, if accepted: December 31, 2020 (articles 6,500 to 8,000 words; other works vary in length) Queries and submission: russworm(a)umass.edu <russworm(a)umass.edu> Psychologists, educators, cultural theorists, and activists have long-argued that play and playfulness are essential tools of everyday survival that open up pathways for cognition, creativity, criticality, and collective joy. For example, writing in 1897 W.E.B. Du Bois posited that although amusement and play were not commonly framed as central to Black health and wellness, “at all times and in all places, the manner, method, and extent of a people’s recreation is of vast importance to their welfare.” The idea of a Black “people’s recreation”—of “recreation for the people”—remains full of potential. Despite this potential, nearly 125 years later scholarly discussions of play in Black communities remains underemphasized, just as play scholarship and theories of play have been plagued by practices of exclusion and racial bias. The politics of play remain real and widespread, as American police have shot and killed Black children who were playing; viral videos have spread on social media of Black pool parties and birthdays interrupted by gatekeeping neighbors making 9-1-1 calls; in schools, where Black children have been detained during playtimes like recess, play can been seen as a luxury of whiteness; Black adults are often harassed and actively excluded from mainstream fan communities and other adult play spaces. Surely, *who *plays and *what *constitutes play has always been political, contested, and ever-connected to what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.” And yet, the ingenuity of Black people at play has always evinced a resiliency that includes but also stretches beyond lived experiences with state-sanctioned violence and racism. This special issue of the *American Journal of Play* seeks essays, interviews, and other creative and scholarly perspectives on past, present, and emerging examples of the intersections between Black culture and play. Just as the forms, methods, and tools of Black play are infinite, so too is the state of blackness at play expansive. As such, we seek a range of works that depict and explore the dynamic nature of Black people at play—from Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll studies, linguistic play, double dutch, and histories of playing the dozens, to DJ D-Nice’s Club Quarantine dance parties, *Black Panther* Cosplay, Black gaming enclaves, and the playful and critical interventions of Black digital content creators. We welcome a wide range of thought-provoking and timely material on play in Black culture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Possible topic areas might include: - the politics and intersections of “playing while Black” - oral folklore and word play traditions (hip-hop, rap, rhyme games, slam poetry, jokes,) - film, television, and other media representations of Black play - new critical perspectives on the Doll Test and Black childhood play development - science fiction, Afrofuturism, and worldmaking - digital play communities (gamers, streamers, Black Twitter, gifs/meme culture, etc.) - cosplayers, LARPers, and other crossover forms of Black child/adult play - Black players of board games, table-top games, and roleplaying games like D&D - Black toy makers; Black memorabilia collectors of toys, dolls, board and card games, video games, and other playthings For special issue consideration, please submit 300-word abstracts to russworm(a)umass.edu <russworm(a)umass.edu>no later than *September 15, 2020*. We remain mindful of the complicated ways in which COVID-19, anti-Black racism, and civil disobedience may impact potential contributors. We encourage interested scholars requiring additional time or accommodations due to these factors to contact the guest editor for this issue before the deadline. The *American Journal of Play*, the oldest peer-reviewed journal devoted to play, is written in a straightforward style for a wide readership of game and play scholars, educators, policy makers, museum and industry professionals, public health workers, and others who strive to understand the impact and importance of play in the world. Find out more at www.journalofplay.org. Style guidelines can be found at www.journalofplay.org/authors/style-guide Best, Racquel Racquel M. Gonzales, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) Research Historian Assistant Editor, *American Journal of Play* *The Strong*

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How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History
by Brian Randell 04 Aug '20

04 Aug '20

Hi: "How the Digital Camera Transformed Our Concept of History" is the title of a paper by Allison Marsh that has just been published by IEEE Spectrum. It starts: > For an inventor, the main challenge might be technical, but sometimes it’s timing that determines success. Steven Sasson had the technical talent but developed his prototype for an all-digital camera a couple of decades too early. > > A CCD from Fairchild was used in Kodak’s first digital camera prototype > It was 1974, and Sasson, a young electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak Co., in Rochester, N.Y., was looking for a use for Fairchild Semiconductor’s new type 201 charge-coupled device. His boss suggested that he try using the 100-by-100-pixel CCD to digitize an image. So Sasson built a digital camera to capture the photo, store it, and then play it back on another device. > > Sasson’s camera was a kluge of components. He salvaged the lens and exposure mechanism from a Kodak XL55 movie camera to serve as his camera’s optical piece. The CCD would capture the image, which would then be run through a Motorola analog-to-digital converter, stored temporarily in a DRAM array of a dozen 4,096-bit chips, and then transferred to audio tape running on a portable Memodyne data cassette recorder. The camera weighed 3.6 kilograms, ran on 16 AA batteries, and was about the size of a toaster. > > After working on his camera on and off for a year, Sasson decided on 12 December 1975 that he was ready to take his first picture. Lab technician Joy Marshall agreed to pose. The photo took about 23 seconds to record onto the audio tape. But when Sasson played it back on the lab computer, the image was a mess—although the camera could render shades that were clearly dark or light, anything in between appeared as static. So Marshall’s hair looked okay, but her face was missing. She took one look and said, “Needs work.” > > Sasson continued to improve the camera, eventually capturing impressive images of different people and objects around the lab. He and his supervisor, Garreth Lloyd, received U.S. Patent No. 4,131,919 for an electronic still camera in 1978, but the project never went beyond the prototype stage. Sasson estimated that image resolution wouldn’t be competitive with chemical photography until sometime between 1990 and 1995, and that was enough for Kodak to mothball the project. The article ends: > Digital cameras also changed how historians conduct their research > For professional historians, the advent of digital photography has had other important implications. Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about how digital cameras in general, and smartphones in particular, have changed the practice of historical research. At the 2020 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, for instance, Ian Milligan, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, gave a talk in which he revealed that 96 percent of historians have no formal training in digital photography and yet the vast majority use digital photographs extensively in their work. About 40 percent said they took more than 2,000 digital photographs of archival material in their latest project. W. Patrick McCray of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told a writer with The Atlantic that he’d accumulated 77 gigabytes of digitized documents and imagery for his latest book project [an aspect of which he recently wrote about for Spectrum]. > > So let’s recap: In the last 45 years, Sasson took his first digital picture, digital cameras were brought into the mainstream and then embedded into another pivotal technology—the cellphone and then the smartphone—and people began taking photos with abandon, for any and every reason. And in the last 25 years, historians went from thinking that looking at a photograph within the past year was a significant marker of engagement with the past to themselves compiling gigabytes of archival images in pursuit of their research. > So are those 1.4 trillion digital photographs that we’ll collectively take this year a part of history? I think it helps to consider how they fit into the overall historical narrative. A century ago, nobody, not even a science fiction writer, predicted that someone would take a photo of a parking lot to remember where they’d left their car. A century from now, who knows if people will still be doing the same thing. In that sense, even the most mundane digital photograph can serve as both a personal memory and a piece of the historical record. Full story at https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/how-the-digital-c… Cheers Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

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eBay is selling an Apple 1 for $1.5 million
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 03 Aug '20

03 Aug '20

https://www.ebay.com/i/174195921349. There is at least a "Make offer" button. I have to say that this is more than a little unhinged, possibly a further sign (as if one were needed) of the approach of the end times. Though I did recently pay $250 for a working Apple IIe with disk drives and monitor. Simple mathematics suggests for a Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg this would be a very much smaller purchase relative to net worth. Full description at http://vi.raptor.ebaydesc.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemDescV4 <http://vi.raptor.ebaydesc.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItemDescV4&item=17419592 1349&category=162075&pm=1&ds=0&t=1582079090000&ver=0> &item=174195921349&category=162075&pm=1&ds=0&t=1582079090000&ver=0 Also an entry in the Apple 1 registry (which of course): https://www.apple1registry.com/en/79.html. Best wishes, Tom

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