Hopeful Monsters: Computing, Counterfactuals, and the Long Now of Things is an examination of the role of conjectural methods, counterfactual reasoning, and speculative design in the humanistic disciplines. It is a contribution to the rapidly emerging literature on the “digital humanities” that takes seriously the idea that the future (as well as the past) is a viable domain for humanistic inquiry and—crucially—that it is also computationally (and materially) accessible. More than half a century ago, C. P. Snow asserted that scientists have “the future in their bones,” while humanists act as if “the future did not exist.”[1] Although few today would frame the differences in terms as stark as these, the idea that the disciplines are divided along predictive-historical lines persists.   Hopeful Monsters reexamines this duality by arguing that the number and diversity of humanistic genres and fields of study prefiguring or otherwise deeply engaged with the future have, over the course of the last decade, reached critical mass. These would include, among others, possible worlds theory; imaginary media; tangible futures and design fiction; culturomics; constructed languages; environmental and sustainability studies; digital curation and preservation; and massively multiplayer forecasting games, such as World Without Oil, Urgent Evoke, and Find the Future.  (The Long Now of my title is taken from the non-profit foundation of the same name, which seeks to furnish tools and methods for reckoning with “deep time,” time measured in intervals of not only decades, but also hundreds or even thousands of years.)[2]  Individual chapters develop the critical and theoretical tools necessary for developing practical heuristics for conjectural thinking by ranging in scope from digital preservation techniques and the culture of game modding and emulation to the design of weird computer architectures and counterfactual machines to the creation of “artifacts-from-the-future” for transmedia storytelling and Alternate Reality Games.  Simultaneously seeking to both broaden our conception of digital humanities (in particular by counterbalancing its current emphasis on “big data” with the DIY cultures of making, modding, and tinkering) and reorient the humanities toward a more hopeful, less crisis-ridden future, Hopeful Monsters is about the strange loops and hybrid products of what-if thinking in the service of art, design, preservation, and communication.

RECEPTION HISTORY

Formal requirements are slightly different for this paper topic: six double-spaced pages, plus bibliography of at least five sources. You don’t need to quote or summarize or overtly reference these sources in the body of your essay; they should inform your work indirectly rather than directly. I will be looking for evidence that you’ve absorbed and synthesized some of the core themes of ENGL467 and are able to extend them in novel yet credible ways.

Create a hypothetical reception history for Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel, Roberta and Ken Williams’ Mystery House, OR Sean Stewart’s Cathy’s Key that spans 25 or 50 years in the future. Think of yourself as a biographer, only you’re writing the life of an artifact, not a person. This is where the rubber meets the road: where issues of preservation, intellectual property, technology, authorship, creativity, reproduction, scholarship, and geo-politics coalesce to determine the fate of your object. Will it turn viral to survive–or be locked down 200 feet below ground in a cold-storage vault? Will it remain inviolable–or ripped, mixed, and burned so repeatedly that it morphs into something bearing no physical resemblance to what the author(s) originally created? Will it be taught in classrooms, exhibited in museums, studied by scholars, and propagated across online communities? Or will it slowly rot and decay in the trashbin of history? Will it be irradiated by the heat of a nuclear holocaust–or will humanity’s better angels prevail? Migrated across media and platforms, or permanently fixed in a material substrate? Remembered or forgotten? Lost or found?

To do well on this assignment, you will need to give considerable thought to how our various course themes interrelate: how, for example, does intellectual property affect preservation? How do media and technology affect preservation? At a more basic level, what is preservation, anyway? If a community of individuals transmits an object over time but mutates it in the process (think William Gibson on little Johnny X), does this transformission (a term coined by textual scholar Randall McLeod, which splices the words “transmission” and “transformation”) constitute a legitimate form of preservation? What if only a fragment of the original survives—is that preservation? What if the artists have created a work whose different nodes are distributed across multiple media, as in Cathy’s Key? Do some parts of this multi-unit work stand a better chance of survival than others?

Narrative point of view: lots of possibilities here. You could write from the vantage point of a third-person omniscient narrator. You could also tell the story from the point of view of the object itself; a future researcher, curator, collector, fanboy, or amateur; or all or none of these.

Vivid detail: give me granular information!

Limited space: six pages isn’t a whole lot of space in which to tell the life story of an art object. You may have to choose one or two key moments to relate rather than attempt to give an exhaustive account of the object’s transmission and reception. This is not necessarily to dissuade you from offering a more comprehensive view–rather it’s intended to get you thinking about how best to structure your writing.

VIDEO GAME PRESERVATION LAB

(collectively, these lab exercises should be spread out over 2-4 class sessions)

This set of exercises has three parts. In Part I, students are introduced to Mystery House Taken Over, a crossbreed between a remix project and a preservation project. Working with the reimplemented source code of Mystery House–a classic 1980s-era game of interactive fiction–students can study, alter, and recompile the code to create their own mash-ups. In the process, they learn a lot about the history of the game (the first work of IF to include graphics) and what it means to update and re-create a vintage video game for a contemporary platform. The commented code gives insight into the creative decisions made by the programmers, who elected, among other things, not to require players to enter commands in all caps, as was the case in the original, while at the same time choosing to reproduce a programming bug.

In Part II, students run another early work of IF, Mindwheel, in an emulator. After playing the game, they  obtain a hash value: a unique alphanumeric code that acts as a digital fingerprint for the file. To test its efficacy, they alter the game’s disk image in a “Hex editor,” and then obtain a new hash value, which demonstrates that the bits have changed in the interim. Digital archivists use hash functions to monitor the integrity of the digital objects in their care over time.

[The instructions for the hash values are adapted from a handout created by Matt Kirschenbaum and Naomi Nelson for their "Born Digital Materials: Theory and Practice" course at UVa's Rare Book School.]

Part 3, which I still need to write up, uses a Kryoflux and a disk drive to rescue bits off of old 5.25 or 3.5 inch floppy disks.

MYSTERY HOUSE (NB: I haven’t checked these links in a while, so it’s possible some are broken)

Modding the game:

• Mystery House Taken Over project
• Brass Lantern Adventure Game Website
• Brass Lantern Guide to downloading and running text adventures
• Interactive Fiction Wiki
• Mystery House Walkthrough
• Another Mystery House Walkthrough
• Glulx interpreters
• Free Zip Utility for Windows
• Online Image Converter
• Inform 6 website with instruction manuals
• Inform 7 (natural language-based version)
• Creative Commons Search Engine

Tips and Suggestions for Game Play and Game Mods

• Begin by playing the original version of Mystery House online. If you need help, consult one of the walkthroughs by clicking on a relevant link above. Spend 15 minutes or so familiarizing yourself with the game.
• You should already have the MHTO Occupation Kit on your desktop.
• Consult the “Read Me” file in the MHTO occupation kit folder to help you make game modifications, recompile the code, and Blorbify it (we’ll go over this in the workshop). If you are a PC user, open the “Read Me” file and the Inform source code file in WordPad instead of NotePad for better formatting/legibility.
• If the source code or “Read Me” file is still difficult to read because of the formatting, then copy and paste the mhto.inf file into Microsoft Word, and then copy and paste the contents back into your original file and save. Make sure you replace the old content with the new.
• Suggestions for mods: Change the description of the house (or any other description); change the text of notes as printed on the screen; change the descriptions of the Non Player Characters (NPCs); change the number of turns that elapse before the “It is getting dark” message appears (original number is 20).
• Guidelines for changing images: locate Flickr photographs released under CC licenses by using the CC search engine. Once you’ve downloaded an interesting image, use your favorite image editing software (default choices would be the “Paint” program on Windows or “Preview” on Mac) to change the file format from jpeg, gif (or whatever) to .png file format. (As a last resort, use the online image converter–see link above.) Rename the image using the exact same file name as the original image you want to replace (e.g., “Attic1.png”). Make sure you put your new image in the same folder as the original image (either “Items” or “Views”). The name of the image file for the house (front view) is “front_yard.png”).
• If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, use the “Paint” application installed on your machine to create new notes. (NB: these notes are image files. You can save them directly in the required .png file format and then store them in the appropriate MHTO occupation kit image folder. Make sure they are labeled in such a way so as to replace an original image note (see previous bullet point).
• Before playing your modded game, make sure you’ve recompiled and reblorbified it following instructions in the “Read Me” file. Also make sure you’ve downloaded an interpreter, or reader, for the game (see “Glulx Interpreters” link above).

Experimenting with hash functions:

Windows/PC Users: start out by locating two kinds of utilities/programs and downloading them:

• HexEditor: HexEdit or FSHED (there are also others)
• Find and download a free MD5 utility for Windows/PCs
• Then proceed to the rest of the instructions for Mac users and adapt them for your purposes

Mac Users:

• Copy the “Creative_Futures_Lab folder from the USB drive directly onto your desktop (rather than in “Documents” or “Downloads” or any subdirectory).
• Open the “Mystery_house_hexfiend” folder in the Creative_Futures_Lab folder and drag the “mystery_House2.DSK” out onto your desktop.
• Open “Terminal” (the UNIX shell/command line interface) on your Mac.
• Type in the following command (minus the quotation marks): “cd Desktop”
• Now create an MD5 hash by typing in the following command (minus the quotation marks): “md5 Mystery_House2.DSK”
• You should get back a long alphanumeric string that looks something like this: 2af9aeaab8d67d9d63114fabe11e5068. Copy this string into your text editor or Wordprocessor (e.g., MS Word)
• Return to the “mystery_house_hexfiend folder and fire up the “Hexfiend” Hex reader by double clicking on the icon.
• Open the “Mystery_House2.DSK” file you just hashed. Change a byte or two. Then save, and run your MD5 command again in Terminal (see above).  Copy and paste this new alphanumeric string directly beneath the previous one in your text editor or word processor. What do you notice?

MINDWHEEL

INTRODUCTION

Title: Mindwheel: An Electronic Novel
Creator: Robert Pinsky
Creator: Steve Hales
Creator: William Mataga
Contributor: Richard Sanford
ContributorS: Kazuko Foster, Richard Blair, Thom Hayward
Publisher: Synapse Software Corporation / Broderbund Software
Date: 1984
Type: Interactive Fiction / Adventure Game
Format: 5-1/4 floppy disk + hardbound book
Format: BTZ [Better Than Zork] parser/programming language
Description: Developed by Synapse software and distributed by Broderbund, Mindwheel was one of five interactive electronic novels published by the company as part of its text adventure series. Initially released for IBM and Apple, versions of the game were also adapted for the Atari and Commodore (the complete list of platforms includes the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS)

Description: The user (or “player character”) adopts the persona of a “mind adventurer” who must travel telepathically into the past to retrieve the Wheel of Wisdom, a mysterious object upon which the fate of humanity rests. With the help of Dr. Virgil, the user travels through the minds of four deceased individuals: a rock star, a dictator, a poet, and a scientist. Along the way, she solves puzzles, answers riddles, and encounters the Cave Master, a prehistoric creature from whom she must obtain the wheel in order to avert disaster and save humankind from extinction. The book that accompanies the disk serves as both an instruction manual and fictional guide to the plot. It includes excerpts from an alleged textbook on “matrix immortality,” an interview with Dr. Virgil, an apocryphal note on the genesis of the novel, illustrations, photographs, poems, and blank pages for the user to jot down thoughts about the game.

Rights: Riverdeep, Inc.

MS-DOS version of game: http://www.igorlabs.com/etc/games/index.html

Walkthrough from GamesOver.com:

http://www.gamesover.com/walkthroughs/mindwhee.txt This walkthrough does not specify what system it is for.

Walkthrough from IFArchive.com: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/Mindwheel.sol

PLAY THE GAME IN AN EMULATOR

• Open the “Agrippa and Mindwheel” folder in the Creative_Futures_Lab folder
• Drag and drop the “vMac.ROM” on top of the “Mini vMac” emulator
• Once you get a flashing disk icon with a question mark in the emulator, drag and drop the System701_boot.dsk in the folder on top of it.
• Now drag and drop the “Mindwheel.img” file onto the emulator window and then double click on it once it appears in the emulaor.
• To start playing Mindwheel, you’ll be prompted for a password. To obtain the password, identify the relevant page number, line number, and word number the program asks for by opening the “nw0010023.pdf” file (which is a copy of the Mindwheel game book).
• Enter the password and start to play (see below for information on Mindwheel and how to find online walkthroughs).

OBTAIN A HASH VALUE (JUST AS YOU DID FOR MYSTERY HOUSE)

•  Copy the “Creative_Futures_Lab folder from the USB drive directly onto your desktop (rather than in “Documents” or “Downloads” or any subdirectory).
• Open the “Agrippa and Mindwheel” folder in the Creative_Futures_Lab folder and drag the “Mindwheel2.img” out onto your desktop.
• Open “Terminal” (the UNIX shell/command line interface) on your Mac.
• Type in the following command (minus the quotation marks): “cd Desktop”
• Now create an MD5 hash by typing in the following command (minus the quotation marks): “md5 Mindwheel2.img”
• You should get back a long alphanumeric string that looks something like this: 2af9aeaab8d67d9d63114fabe11e5068. Copy this string into your text editor or Wordprocessor (e.g., MS Word)
• Return to the “Agrippa and Mindwheel” folder and fire up “Hexfiend” by double clicking on the icon.
• In Hexfiend, open the “Mindwheel2.img” file you just hashed. Change a byte or two. Then save, and run your MD5 command again in Terminal (see above).  Copy and paste this new alphanumeric string directly beneath the previous one in your text editor or word processor. What do you notice?

PART III: [STILL TO BE WRITTEN UP: RESCUING BITS OFF OF OLD MEDIA WITH A KRYOFLUX]

For those wanting more information on how to salvage bits from old storage media, particularly magnetic media, see Jeanne Kramer Smyth’s excellent “Rescuing 5.25″ Floppy Disks from Oblivion” and Archive Team’s wiki page on “Rescuing Floppy Disks.”

For more on how archivists, scholars, and players are preserving vintage videogames, download the “Preserving Virtual Worlds” final report, a white paper to the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure for Preservation Program.  Co-authored with Jerome McDonough, et al.

Also forthcoming is ” ‘Do You Want to Save Your Progress?’ The Role of Professional and Player Communities in Preserving Virtual Worlds,” co-authored by me and Rachel Donahue. For a preview, you can listen to my recent talk at the New York Public Library. And if you’re interested in the legal angle on videogame preservation, check out my article in the Journal of Visual Culture.

Finally, you can read a description of our current work on videogame preservation here.

Here’s the abstract:

Kari Kraus, ” ‘A Counter-Friction to the Machine’: What Game Scholars, Librarians, and Archivists Can Learn from Machinima Makers about User Activism” (Journal of Visual Culture 2011 (10): 100-112).

The author examines the legal issues associated with machinima creation in relation to archival and preservation efforts. Specifically, she argues that what makes machinima as a cultural practice particularly interesting from a legal perspective is its ability to dramatize the tension between copyright law and contract law; public rights and private rights; and the right of reproduction versus the right of adaptation. She proposes that game scholars, librarians and archivists take a page from the play book of machinima creators when developing their own professional approaches to user activism and digital access and preservation.

For the past two years Maryland’s iSchool has been providing a select number of MLS students with an internship opportunity at the Maryland Institute for Technology (MITH) or one of two other prestigious Digital Humanities Centers: Nebraska’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Michigan State’s MATRIX.  Funded by a generous grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the internships support students through a combination of Graduate Student Assistantships and summer stipends.  After reviewing our budget, we have determined that the University of Maryland is able to support one final UMD iSchool student in Summer 2011 at one of the following digital humanities centers:

•    University of Maryland, College Park. Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).  http://mith.umd.edu/
•    Michigan State University, Lansing. MATRIX http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/
•    University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) http://cdrh.unl.edu

To apply for an 8-week internship for summer 2011, please download and complete the application form attached to this message and return it via email–along with a copy of your CV–to Dr. Kari Kraus at karimkraus@gmail.com by Friday, 6 May 2011.

Depending on circumstances, students may be offered either a residential (on-site) or distance internship.   In your email message submitting the application, please rank your preferences for internship location.

Application deadline is Friday, 6 May 2011 at 5:00 pm.

To learn more about the internships and the hosting sites, I invite you to attend an informal informational session on Thursday, April 28 from 10:00-11:00 am in Hornbake room 2116. If you have any questions, please contact me at karimkraus@gmail.com or 301.529.0977. I’d encourage you to drop me a note if you plan on applying.

A while back, I tweeted that I’d love to teach a course based on Long Now principles.  Inspired by people like Stewart Brand, Jane McGonigal, and Stuart Candy, I decided to do it.  Below is a draft of a proposal for an undergraduate Honors course, some version of which I’ll teach next fall.  I’m particularly interested in bringing archival science and digital preservation–disciplines of the cultural record with notoriously long time horizons–to bear on the content and method of the class.

The idea of creating a start-up manual for civilization comes from Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now.  Other suggestions for readings and projects much appreciated!

Creative Futures

The most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?”

~ Jonas Salk

We need to start playing with the future.

~Jane McGonigal

In 1960, the city of Detroit was an international symbol of American prosperity and ingenuity, a bustling metropolis whose automobile industry was known the world over.  Fast forward to 2010: many of the Motor City’s once opulent skyscrapers have been razed, the doors of its grand hotels shuttered, its stores and residential areas vacated, and its assembly lines shut down.  For researcher Stuart Candy, Detroit represents a particularly dramatic example of the consequences of “failed foresight”: the failure to adopt future-aware thinking and to act in a way that benefits not only ourselves, but also those who come after us.

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of long-term thinking in the service of art, design, preservation, communication, and civic engagement. Our aim is to learn how to use the present as a space in which to incubate the future—the future as imagined, represented, created, and invoked by poets, artists, scholars, gamers, scientists, the media, the public, and (of course) ourselves.  Over the course of the semester, we will incrementally expand our time horizons, drawing inspiration in part from the Long Now Foundation, which seeks to furnish tools and methods for reckoning with “deep time,” time measured in intervals of hundreds or even thousands of years. The Rosetta Disk—a latter day Rosetta Stone three inches in diameter containing a microscopically etched archive of over 1500 languages—is intended as a proof of concept for the Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library.

The course has been developed with a range of applications and industries in mind, from the formulation of better public policy to the design of next-generation products and services to the creation of immersive worlds for science fiction and film (consider, for example, the constructed language of the Na’Vi and the flora and fauna of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar). Students will have the opportunity to stage their own prospective scenarios, drawing on the techniques of speculative design (or “design fiction”), which involve the mocking up or prototyping of artifacts that embody our ideas about the future.  The syllabus also includes examples of Massively Multiplayer Foresight Games–notably World Without Oil and Superstruct–which function as platforms for developing what Jane McGonigal calls “future world-making skills.”  Other class projects may include a time capsule, a message to posterity, and a start-up manual for civilization.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the semester, students should be able to:

• recognize the ethical, political, and societal stakes of long-term thinking
• understand how science, technology, and the arts are increasing humanity’s communicational range across time
• apply time theory in the areas of art, design, communication, preservation, and civic engagement
• demonstrate and evaluate the methods of speculative design
• provide examples of projects, initiatives, and institutions that practice and promote future-aware thinking
• appreciate the potential of games as spaces in which to collectively imagine and create the future
• implement future world-making skills
• offer historical and cross-cultural perspectives on social constructions of time
• identify potential techniques for extending and transforming the temporal frameworks of institutions and organizations
• discuss the principal challenges of and approaches to digital preservation

Possible Readings and Topics:

Theory and Method

• Stewart Brand, Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility
• Gregory Benford, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia
• Stuart Candy on Experiential Scenarios, Found Futures, and Design Fiction
• Jim Dator’s Laws of the Future and the Four Generic Futures
• Richard Grusin, Premediation
• Colin Martindale, The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change
• Bruce Mau, Massive Change
• Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time
• Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images

Art & Culture

• Massively Multiplayer Foresight Games and Alternate Reality Games
• World Without Oil
• Superstruct
• Evoke
• Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
• Constructed and Imaginary Languages (e.g., Future English)
• “Capturing Avatar”: feature-length documentary of the making of James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction film, Avatar
• Wired Magazine’s Artifacts from the Future (series)
• Bruce Sterling on Design Fiction
• Andrew Bennett on the culture of posterity

Science and Technology

• Peter Ward, Future Evolution: An Illuminated History of Life to Come
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
• 10,000 Year Warning: Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), U. S. Department of Energy

Preservation and Provenance

• Jeremy John, Digital Lives / Personal Digital Archives for the 21^st Century: An Initial Synthesis
• David Lowenthal, “Material Preservation and its Alternatives”
• Linked Data and the Semantic Web
• Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report. Jerome McDonough, Robert Oldendorf (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kari Kraus, Doug Reside, Rachel Donahue (University of Maryland); Andrew Phelps and Christopher Egert (Rochester Institute of Technology); Henry Lowood and Susan Rojo (Stanford University)
• The EU Provenance Project
• W3C Provenance Report
• Bruce Sterling on “spimes”
• The 50,000 Year View: The KEO Project

• Over at THINKtransmedia, I’ve posted a new blog entry about the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry.
• Our slides from Meaningful Play 2010 are now available here.

Derek Hansen, Assistant Professor; Kari Kraus, Assistant Professor; and Elizabeth Bonsignore, Doctoral student, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland

Margeaux Johnson, Science and Technology Librarian and Instruction Coordinator, University of Florida

Georgina B. Goodlander, Interpretive Programs Manager, Smithsonian American Art Museum

• Slides
• Instruction sheet for hands-on activity (reconstructing the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry); see below
• YouTube video with examples of artifacts produced for the Gallery
• cryptic blog posts published in advance of the conference here and here

LRS-V Conference October 2010
Beth Bonsignore, Georgina Goodlander, Derek Hansen,
Margeaux Johnson, and Kari Kraus

Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry: Reconstructing Cabinet No. 1171706
Instruction Sheet

“Creativity always builds on the past.  And you’re creating the past now.”

~Lawrence Lessig

In 1844, Samuel Morse, a one-time professor of arts and design at New York University, sent a sequence of electromagnetic pulses over wire from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland.  Those pulses transmitted the first message sent via telegraph, the parent technology of our current telecommunications infrastructure.  The content of that first coded message–”What hath God wrought!”–was chosen by Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of a friend of Morse’s.  If there was a current of divinity barreling through that wire, as Ellsworth’s choice implies, then there was also one of common humanity: Morse’s telegraph was cobbled together from odds and ends lying about his artist’s studio and his brother’s print shop.  Type slugs, an artist’s canvas stretcher, wire from a paper mould, a compositor’s stick, and an old clock-work were salvaged from the jetsam to create a device that would chart a new communications course for civilization.  The telegraph was assemblage art, hacked together from found objects. Or call it remixing: think of Duchamp sampling da Vinci; or Picasso, Velazquez; or Keats, Boccacio; or Reubens, Titian. It is the very banality of this tale that makes it what it is: a parable of invention.

PART I.  In the spirit of Morse’s invention, we’re soliciting your help in reconstructing the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry out of the fragments of patent models that survived the mysterious fire of 1877. To help prepare you for working with fragments and other mechanical remains, we’ve created a search and retrieval exercise intended to immerse you in the nineteenth-century culture of invention.  One of the striking aspects of patented designs during this era is their partial nature: inventors often modified or improved on parts of objects rather than creating wholes (e.g., skirt borders, drawer pulls, clock fronts, coffin handles, frying pan bottoms, watch chains, watch guards, lock case nosing).  The exercise should thus prime you for thinking creatively about found objects.

• To begin, point your browser to the Historical Patent and Trademark Databases at http://ptdla.org/history.
• Click on “Design Patents to 1873” to download the patent spreadsheet and open it on your desktop.
• Try to find a 19th-century design patent that corresponds generically to at least one of the objects assigned to you.  (Hint: you may need to coarsen or refine your grain of analysis when searching for and selecting a patent record.  Because the object on your card is part of a larger whole–a watch gear, for example, as opposed to a watch–you should generally think at the “part” level).  Note that for some objects, while there may be more than one relevant patent record, you only need to choose one.
• If you get stuck, turn your card over, where you’ll find a relevant patent number encrypted in Morse code.  Feel free to use an online Morse code translator to decipher it: http://morsecode.scphillips.com/jtranslator.html.
• Once you’ve successfully located a relevant patent record, you should complete each of the information fields on the patent label attached to your object (patent number, name of the inventor, name or description of the object, and year of invention)

PART II (can be undertaken concurrently with PART I). What sorts of wondrous, retro-futuristic inventions might have populated the Arcane Gallery of Gadgetry?  Help us curate a reconstructed version of Cabinet No. 1171706 by repurposing the objects of your search and retrieval exercise, as well as those in your assemblage kits.  Possible categories of inventions include but are not limited to communications devices, weapons and ammunition (think secret Civil War technologies), cryptographic devices, and medical equipment.  Once you’ve finished your model, fill out a patent tag with the name or description of your object, today’s date, and your team members’ names.  Then bring your invention up to the display area at the front of the room.

Interdisciplinary Designers, Designing Interactions

Beth Bonsignore, iSchool, University of Maryland
Rachel Donahue, iSchool, University of Maryland
Georgina Goodlander, Luce Foundation Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Kari Kraus, iSchool and Department of English, University of Maryland
Marc Ruppel, Department of English, University of Maryland

This panel will examine Alternate Reality Games as multi-disciplinary design spaces that support creative, choreographed exchanges among diverse design practitioners. Panelists will survey design principles across four disciplines and sectors, with the ultimate goal of abstracting away from the details to see what is most relevant to games, specifically ARGs, and how these principles might coordinate with one another. The design approaches surveyed include Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design; Narrative Design; Graphic Design; and Outreach, Marketing, and Strategic Design. A secondary objective is to position educational and cultural institutions (universities, museums, libraries) as Designer-Players beyond industry and entertainment. Because universities are frequently incubators for the design methods under consideration (which are then transferred to memory institutions via what Marcia Bates terms “disciplines of the cultural record“), they function as zones of experimentation and methodological cross-pollination. Adopting a case set approach, the panel will anchor specific design concepts in concrete examples drawn from the cultural, academic, and commercial sectors, including Ghosts of a Chance, the first ARG played out in a museum environment.

The design approaches surveyed are as follows:

● Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design: Because they are designed across multiple media, and require players to collaborate across multiple media as they make sense of the story, ARGs offer possibilities for HCI designers to develop methods and tools to encourage collaboration and facilitate players’ creative expression during game play. Further, ARGs as a platform may offer HCI designers the opportunity to test emergent collaborative technologies with players who are highly invested in their use. The HCI design portion of the roundtable will address the ways in which ARGs pose considerations for the design of collaborative sensemaking tools, as well as the ways in which the collaborative activities of the players themselves can become a means for enhancing collaborative sensemaking and extending participatory design methods.

● Narrative design: In order for an ARG to function successfully, it must have a malleable narrative that allows not only for the creation of a consistent (non)fictional world, but also as a structure that supports the various collaborative and problem solving components. In the case of Personal Effects, for example, the book’s main strategy is not only to provide the audience with the ARG’s primary narrative thrust, but also to instruct them,through various methods such as scaffolding and prompting, in the means with which to understand and navigate the ARG itself. This portion of the panel will discuss the narrative design principles that allow for successful ARG implementation, arguing that fictional worlds created in ARGs act as a fundamental interface for the other elements of design.

● Graphic design: The panel will focus on forms of visual communication that are frequently used to reinforce core themes and participatory mechanisms in transmedia storytelling. The visual puns interspersed throughout Cathy’s Key, for example, amplify the central role of double meanings within the Cathy’s Book franchise and draw attention to their significance within ARG culture more broadly—a culture that relies extensively on multimodal representations that denote two or more things simultaneously (e.g., puns, doppelgangers, and encrypted messages). The panel will cross-reference these visual devices with relevant concepts drawn from HCI, such as the design of hidden and false affordances.

● Outreach, Marketing, and Strategic Design: This component of the presentation will describe traditional outreach and public programming at memory institutions, shifting into a discussion of how the Smithsonian has begun to design games that fit into these existing strategies. For example, a primary goal with outreach is to build communities around/within the museum. The Smithsonian wants to create programs that make people feel a part of the museum by providing opportunities to interact with “real life” staff members and to contribute something of value. In Ghosts of a Chance, players were tasked to create artifacts for a museum exhibition, an activity that gave players a real sense of ownership and belonging. They responded to the fact that “the Smithsonian” valued their work, thereby initiating an ongoing collaborative relationship founded on museum/visitor trust.

Works Cited

● Ghosts of a Chance, Smithsonian American Art Museum and City Mystery (2008) http://ghostsofachance.com/
● Hutchins, J.C. and Jordan Weisman, Personal Effects: Dark Art, Har/Pap. (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009).
● Stewart, Sean and Jordan Weisman, Cathy’s Key: If Found 650-266-8202 (RunningPress Kids, 2008).

Topic #1: Write a paper about a poem of your choosing that integrates knowledge about the brain’s reading circuits into your analysis of the literary text.  The idea is to enrich traditional close reading techniques by incorporating information about written word recognition.  You might, for example, discuss Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” not only within the context of well-known literary devices (e.g. alliteration, rhyme, and meter), but also from the point of view of the cognitive science of reading: how is Carroll manipulating phonological and lexical processing of words through his use of neologisms?  How might we better understand his poetic experiments through recourse to what Dehaene calls “priming effects” and the organization of the mental lexicon?  In short, how can the discipline of neuroscience help us unlock the “meaning” of the poem or reveal its compositional patterns and devices?

Topic #2: Select a traditional or concrete poem and discuss how its visual appearance on the page contributes to its meaning and comprehension (think about how metered poetry is organized into sequential lines and stanzas, for example, or how shaped verse, such as George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” adopts a form that mimics its content).  Now imagine what would happen if that same poem were delivered to the reader using RSVP (Rapid Sequential Visual Presentation): the eyes would no longer need to move from left to right, text would no longer be organized in linear fashion, and words would be recognized and processed by the brain at a vastly accelerated rate (Dehaene 17-18).  What are the implications for experiencing and interpreting the poem under such conditions?  How are the affordances of reading changed?  What is at stake in such a conversion process? (Tip: you might want to experiment with Spreeder, the “speed reading trainer,” posted to the blog to help you think through these ideas).