Hi SIGCIS, It's great to hear all this love and appreciation for recent publications! I am pleased to be able to add 2 more to the tally of computer history books published recently. 1. In August, my monograph Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality was published, with MIT Press. Here's the blurb:
From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, low-end microcomputers offered many users their first taste of computing. A major use of these inexpensive 8-bit machines-including the TRS System 80s and the Sinclair, Atari, Microbee, and Commodore ranges-was the development of homebrew games. Users with often self-taught programming skills devised the graphics, sound, and coding for their self-created games. In this book, Melanie Swalwell offers a history of this era of homebrew game development, arguing that it constitutes a significant instance of the early appropriation of digital computing technology. Drawing on interviews and extensive archival research on homebrew creators in 1980s Australia and New Zealand, Swalwell explores the creation of games on microcomputers as a particular mode of everyday engagement with new technology. She discusses the public discourses surrounding microcomputers and programming by home coders; user practices; the development of game creators' ideas, with the game Donut Dilemma as a case study; the widely practiced art of hardware hacking; and the influence of 8-bit aesthetics and gameplay on the contemporary game industry. With Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality, Swalwell reclaims a lost chapter in video game history, connecting it to the rich cultural and media theory around everyday life and to critical perspectives on user-generated content.
The title is #6 in the MIT Press Game Histories series, edited by Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins. More info: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-dig... 1. In May, my latest anthology Game History and the Local was published by Palgrave. The blurb: This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of 'local' game history. The title brings together some of the most exciting authors and work happening in game history at the moment, in my opinion. I think it will be of particular interest to scholars working at the interface of game history/computer history, but hopefully many others as well. Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access. If your institution has Springerlink, then you may have access to the whole thing here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0 Regards, Melanie -- Melanie Swalwell Professor of Digital Media Heritage Co-Chair, SIGCIS<http://www.sigcis.org/> Centre for Transformative Media Technologies School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education Swinburne University PO Box 218, Hawthorn Vic 3122 Australia Tel +61 3 9214 3911 AS419 mswalwell@swin.edu.au http://transformativemedia.swinburne.edu.au/ New books out in 2021! Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-digitality> Game History and the Local<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0>
Warmest congratulations! I am looking forward to reading these works, Ksenia
On Sep 8, 2021, at 11:35 AM, Melanie Swalwell <mswalwell@swin.edu.au> wrote:
Hi SIGCIS,
It’s great to hear all this love and appreciation for recent publications! I am pleased to be able to add 2 more to the tally of computer history books published recently.
In August, my monograph Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality was published, with MIT Press. Here’s the blurb: From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, low-end microcomputers offered many users their first taste of computing. A major use of these inexpensive 8-bit machines—including the TRS System 80s and the Sinclair, Atari, Microbee, and Commodore ranges—was the development of homebrew games. Users with often self-taught programming skills devised the graphics, sound, and coding for their self-created games. In this book, Melanie Swalwell offers a history of this era of homebrew game development, arguing that it constitutes a significant instance of the early appropriation of digital computing technology. Drawing on interviews and extensive archival research on homebrew creators in 1980s Australia and New Zealand, Swalwell explores the creation of games on microcomputers as a particular mode of everyday engagement with new technology. She discusses the public discourses surrounding microcomputers and programming by home coders; user practices; the development of game creators' ideas, with the game Donut Dilemma as a case study; the widely practiced art of hardware hacking; and the influence of 8-bit aesthetics and gameplay on the contemporary game industry. With Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality, Swalwell reclaims a lost chapter in video game history, connecting it to the rich cultural and media theory around everyday life and to critical perspectives on user-generated content.
The title is #6 in the MIT Press Game Histories series, edited by Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins. More info:https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-dig... <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-digitality>
In May, my latest anthology Game History and the Local was published by Palgrave. The blurb: This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of ‘local’ game history.
The title brings together some of the most exciting authors and work happening in game history at the moment, in my opinion. I think it will be of particular interest to scholars working at the interface of game history/computer history, but hopefully many others as well.
Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access. If your institution has Springerlink, then you may have access to the whole thing here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0 <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0>
Regards,
Melanie
-- Melanie Swalwell Professor of Digital Media Heritage Co-Chair, SIGCIS <http://www.sigcis.org/>
Centre for Transformative Media Technologies School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education Swinburne University PO Box 218, Hawthorn Vic 3122 Australia
Tel +61 3 9214 3911 AS419 mswalwell@swin.edu.au <mailto:mswalwell@swin.edu.au> http://transformativemedia.swinburne.edu.au/ <http://transformativemedia.swinburne.edu.au/>
New books out in 2021! Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-digitality> Game History and the Local <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0>
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Dear SIGCIS, while this is the day of announcing new books, please join me in congratulating Bernadette Longo and Jacqueline Léon on their publications in the Springer History of Computing Series<https://www.springer.com/series/8442>. Computers and language is the common theme of the two monographs . Gerard Alberts Words and Power <https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030703721> Computers, Language, and U.S. Cold War Values by Bernadette Longo When viewed through a political lens, the act of defining terms in natural language arguably transforms knowledge into values. This unique volume explores how corporate, military, academic, and professional values shaped efforts to define computer terminology and establish an information engineering profession as a precursor to what would become computer science. As the Cold War heated up, U.S. federal agencies increasingly funded university researchers and labs to develop technologies, like the computer, that would ensure that the U.S. maintained economic prosperity and military dominance over the Soviet Union. At the same time, private corporations saw opportunities for partnering with university labs and military agencies to generate profits as they strengthened their business positions in civilian sectors. They needed a common vocabulary and principles of streamlined communication to underpin. Automating Linguistics <https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030706418> by Jacqueline Léon Automating Linguistics offers an in-depth study of the history of the mathematisation and automation of the sciences of language. In the wake of the first mathematisation of the 1930s, two waves followed: machine translation in the 1950s and the development of computational linguistics and natural language processing in the 1960s. These waves were pivotal given the work of large computerised corpora in the 1990s and the unprecedented technological development of computers and software.Early machine translation was devised as a war technology originating in the sciences of war, amidst the amalgamate of mathematics, physics, logics, neurosciences, acoustics, and emerging sciences such as cybernetics and information theory. Machine translation was intended to provide mass translations for strategic purposes during the Cold War. Linguistics, in turn, did not belong to the sciences of war, and played a minor role in the pioneering projects of machine translation.Comparing the two trends, the present book reveals how the sciences of language gradually integrated the technologies of computing and software, resulting in the second-wave mathematisation of the study of language, which may be called mathematisation-automation. The integration took on various shapes contingent upon cultural and linguistic traditions (USA, ex-USSR, Great Britain and France). By contrast, working with large corpora in the 1990s, though enabled by unprecedented development of computing and software, was primarily a continuation of traditional approaches in the sciences of language sciences, such as the study of spoken and written texts, lexicography, and statistical studies of vocabulary.
participants (3)
-
Gerard Alberts -
Ksenia Tatarchenko -
Melanie Swalwell