Planned European trip 2017

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Last trip of the year planned (still to be confirmed, approved, of course)..

 

 

 

Conference paper: Inside Out: Avatars, Agents, Cultural Agents

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Paper accepted for Researching Digital Cultural Heritage – International Conference, Manchester UK, Dates: 30/11-1/12/2017 twitter #digheritage17

Keywords:Digitally enabled collaborative, participatory and reflexive approaches in cultural heritage design, research and practice.

If conveying cultural significance is a central aim of virtual heritage projects, can they convey cultural significance effectively without an understanding of the contextual role of cultural knowledge? In this talk I will argue this is very difficult, but even populating virtual environments with others (human-guided or computer-scripted), there are still vital, missing ingredients.

In virtual heritage projects with enough computational power and sophistication to feature intelligent agents, they are primarily used as guides (Bogdanovych et al. 2009). They lead players to important landmarks, or perhaps act as historical guides (revealing past events, conveying situationally appropriate behaviour). Intelligent agents are usually designed for limited forms of conversation and typically help convey social presence rather than cultural presence. For an enhanced “sense of inhabited place”, engaging narrative- related elements, or embodiment, a cultural agent recognizes, adds to, or transmits physically embedded and embodied aspects of culture. They could provide a sense of cultural presence, becoming Aware-Of-Not-Quite-Being-‘There’.

Cultural agents would not be mere conversational agents if they were able to:

  1. Automatically select correct cultural behaviours given specific events or situations.
  2. Recognize in/correct cultural behaviours given specific events, locations, or situations.
  3. Transmit cultural knowledge.
  4. Modify, create, or command artefacts that become cultural knowledge.

To fulfil the above criteria, cultural agents would be culturally constrained. Not just socially constrained; their actions and beliefs would be dependent on role, space, and time. They could understand and point out right from wrong in terms of culturally specific behaviour and understand the history and possibly also the future trajectory of specific cultural movements. In this talk I will discuss three scenarios for cultural agents, their relationship to roles and rituals, and two more missing ingredients. The result? A more situated, reflexive appreciation of cultural significance via virtual heritage.

“Learning GIS with Game of Thrones” free book

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gvSIG blog

Have you decided to learn to work with a Geographic Information System and you don’t know how to start? Now that the premiere of the new season of Game of Thrones series will be in a few days, we recommend you do it using the book that we have just published: “Learning GIS with Game of Thrones“.

This book compiles a series of post with practical exercises that have been published in the gvSIG project blog previously. The objective is that anyone, without previous knowledge and through a series of practical exercises, learn to handle a GIS in an entertaining and funny way.

Everything necessary to follow the course is available free of charge, including gvSIG Desktop software – a free GIS used in more than 160 countries – as well as the data (download links are available in the book) and this tutorial, distributed…

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hardware, software, simple coding

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Time for a quick update on recent tech offerings

Rough Outline on Architected Place

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I am finishing a chapter (Chapter 3: ‘Architected’ Places) for my own book on Virtual Places, but the structural arc has escaped me until now. It will be polemical and controversial so I need to rewrite it to show that I realize this, there will be gaps and generalizations.

The basic premises are:

  1. Architectural theory is essentialist.
  2. Architectural tools are instrumentalist, architects don’t work on or near the site, as they need specialist tools connected to databases not to experiences.
  3. Architectural media is loath to include people and architectural spaces don’t work as places without people (Marseilles, by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, architectural masterpieces tend to be pavilions).
  4. Architects are not trained in user experience design and evaluation.
  5. Nor are architects trained in interactive media, their tools (see argument 2) are instrumentalist and passive.
  6. Traditional architectural craft is embodied, sited, takes time and records care. This is less and less the case.
  7. So applying theories of architecture, or practices of architectural design to interactive digital media in order to create virtual places, may well leave some gaps. How to resolve these in the design of virtual places? Corruption? Fancy theory? Post modernism? No, through embodiment, multimodality, role-play (and thematic affordances), allowing user-infill, environmental change to affect the design environment, and digital personalized patinas, materials that show the effect of time, wear and care.

 

Conferences for 2017-2018

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*START* DUE CONFERENCE THEME LOCATION
22-Oct-17 12-Jul-17 UIST ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology-posters Quebec City, Canada
31-Oct-17 15-Jun-17 VSMM2017 23rd Int’l Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia Dublin Ireland
08-Nov-17 ? Chacmool The Future of Archaeology: How Technology Can Influence a Discipline Calgary Canada
08-Nov-17 30-Jun-17 VRST Virtual Reality Software and Technology Gothenburg Sweden
28-Nov-17 16-Jun-17 ozchi17 OzCHI 2017 – Human-Nature Brisbane Australia
01-Dec-17 21-Jul-17 DCH2017 Digital Cultural Heritage Manchester UK
04-Dec-17 31-Jul-17 dha 4th Digital Humanities: Data First! Innsbruck Austria
05-Dec-17 10-Jul-17 GALA 2017 Games and Learning Alliance conference Lisbon Portugal
07-Dec-17 01-Jun-17 Postcolonial Post colonial memory Amsterdam Netherlands
18-Dec-17 25-Aug-17 TAG UK Theorectical Archaeology Group Cardiff Wales
17-Mar-18 29-Sep-17 CRDH Current Research in Digital History Arlington, VA
19-Mar-18 ? CAA2018 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Tübingen, Germany
21-Apr-18 12-Sep-17 CHI2018 Computer Human Interaction Montreal, Canada
24-Apr-18 ? CAA2019 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Kraków, Poland
02-May-18 ? Best Practices Best Practices in World Heritage: Archeology Menorca Spain
09-Jun-18 ? DIS Designing Interactive Systems Hong Kong
19-Jun-18 ? IDC2018 ACM Interaction Design and Children Trondheim, Norway
24-Jun-18 ? DH2018 Digital Humanities 2018 Mexico City, Mexico
12-Aug-18 ? SIGGRAPH18 SIGGRAPH Vancouver Canada
01-Sep-18 31-Mar-17 2018achs Heritage Across Borders (sessions) Hangzhou China
19-Sep-18 01-Feb-18 eCAADe2018 computing for a better tomorrow Lodz Poland
14-Oct-18 ? ? ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Berlin Germany
 
START *DUE* CONFERENCE THEME LOCATION
08-Nov-17 30-Jun-17 VRST Virtual Reality Software and Technology Gothenburg Sweden
05-Dec-17 10-Jul-17 GALA 2017 Games and Learning Alliance conference Lisbon Portugal
22-Oct-17 12-Jul-17 UIST ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology-posters Quebec City, Canada
01-Dec-17 21-Jul-17 DCH2017 Digital Cultural Heritage Manchester UK
04-Dec-17 31-Jul-17 dha 4th Digital Humanities: Data First! Innsbruck Austria
18-Dec-17 25-Aug-17 TAG UK Theorectical Archaeology Group Cardiff Wales
21-Apr-18 12-Sep-17 CHI2018 Computer Human Interaction Montreal, Canada
17-Mar-18 29-Sep-17 CRDH Current Research in Digital History Arlington, VA
19-Sep-18 01-Feb-18 eCAADe2018 computing for a better tomorrow Lodz Poland