internet

Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts introduces you to the study of early text technologies, focusing principally on the medieval book, but covering other textual objects, too, such as scrolls and diplomata. The Digging Deeper team of scholars from Stanford and Cambridge reveals how to investigate manuscripts within repository settings and through online resources, what to look out for when confronted with manuscript images, and how to exploit all the information a manuscript offers. You will learn major characteristics of book production, the terms and methods used by manuscript historians to describe the book, and key themes in early book history. Where were manuscripts made and who made them? What kinds of materials were used and what can those materials tell us? What kinds of texts were created and copied during these centuries? How did multilingualism matter in the medieval period? In pursuing these questions, you will study some of the most significant and beautiful books held by the university libraries of Cambridge and Stanford.

Digging Deeper is a six-week course, with each week featuring filmed sequences of experts with manuscripts, reading assignments, a short transcription, and self-testing quizzes. Assignments will help you develop a basic knowledge of how to access manuscripts in person and online, skills in codicology (the study of the medieval book and the physical make-up of manuscripts), palaeography (the describing and analysis of medieval scripts), and transcription (the reading and interpretation of writing in manuscripts). Participants who finish the course will earn a Stanford Statement of Accomplishment.

Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts will be followed in Spring with a course focusing on the interpretation and preservation of manuscripts in the digital era.

via https://class.stanford.edu/courses/English/DiggingDeeper1/Winter2015/about

CFP: Fans, Videogames and History
via http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/play-it-again/2015/01/20/cfp-fans-videogame...

Over the last two decades, a substantial amount of research has addressed the fan culture phenomenon, particularly in relation to film and television; the focus has centred on the impact that fan communities can and have had on the ‘official’ creative works that are released by film and television studios. More recently, researchers have examined the impact that the internet has played in empowering and expanding the fan network and fan communication structures, and in affecting the production, marketing and audience engagement with the fan object.

Games are now central objects of study within Fan Studies, yet to date there has been only isolated consideration of gaming’s long history of fandom, and fans’ important roles in game history and preservation. Little academic writing has focused on the impact and centrality that fan communities play — as a collective intelligence, as a pool of individual creators of games, and as interested and engaged parties in the collecting and remembering of game history.

For this anthology we seek essays that address issues that come out of the various possible configurations of the terms: fans, games, and history. We invite proposals for chapters addressing one of three broad axes:

• Historicising game fandom
• Fan contributions to game history
• Methodological reflections on studying historic game fandom

We invite abstracts of 500 words that address the relationship between game fans and history. Possible themes and issues may include but are not limited to:

• Fan communities and the preservation of games • Online communities and gamer memories • Digital fandom before the internet • Nostalgia and history • Historicising fans’ creative output • Magazines and fanzines as sources • how to ‘do’ fan history • Fans as authors of game history

Please send an abstract and brief bio to the editors by 30th April, 2015. Full papers to be submitted by 30th August 2015.

Email: playitagain@flinders.edu.au

Editors – Melanie Swalwell, Angela Ndalianis, Helen Stuckey
- See more at: http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/play-it-again/2015/01/20/cfp-fans-videogame...

New Weird Australia is concluding its mission after five years in operation, and will mark the moment with a three-volume set titled "Passages".

Each volume is curated by one of New Weird Australia's three directors - Stuart Buchanan, Andrew Tuttle and Innez Tulloch - and features 51 tracks from the project archive, including music from Holy Balm, Guerre, Kučka, No Zu, Kirin J Callinan, Oscar Key Sung, Matthew Brown, Chrome Dome, Mere Women and many more, with design by New Weird Australia art director, Heath Killen.

Since its inception in 2009, New Weird Australia has established a number of projects in support of Australian experimental music, clocking up over 400,000 downloads in five years, distributed through its own online channels and via its long-standing association with WFMU's Free Music Archive. New Weird Australia projects included its 23-volume compilation series, the acclaimed netlabel Wood & Wire, the "New Editions" series of individual artist releases, a long-running radio show on Sydney's FBi and a nationwide series of live shows.

New Weird Australia founder Stuart Buchanan notes: "When we launched five years ago, Australian experimental music was often frustratingly hard to uncover. We saw an opportunity to connect audiences into work that was beyond the fringes, and offer artists opportunities to widen their community. Although that mission could well be endless, online networks now afford artists easier access to fans and supporters, in ways we could not have imagined five years ago. This therefore feels like a good moment to conclude, to reflect on the collective achievements of all the artists involved, and to showcase some of the work that has made the project so compelling."

In addition to the 'Passages' compilation trilogy, New Weird Australia's netlabel, Wood & Wire, will release its final album featuring exclusive soundtracks recorded for FBi's "Ears Have Ears" experimental music program, with extended material from Fatti Frances, Rites Wild, Hollow Press and Cycle~ 440. Download from woodandwire.com.au.

The full New Weird Australia project archive will remain online indefinitely, acting as a record of a unique and vibrant period in the outer limits of Australian music.

http://newweirdaustralia.com/2015/01/new-weird-australia-concludes-with-...

the Understanding Contemporary Art class videos playlist has been uploaded

the OOED class ran online in 2014 and is running again in 2015
https://www.ooed.org/learn/understanding-contemporary-art-spring-2015

Urban Tapestries is the name of a research project and experimental software platform for knowledge mapping and sharing – public authoring – conceived and developed by Proboscis in partnership with collaborators such as the London School of Economics, Birkbeck College, Orange, HP Research labs, France Telecom R&D UK, Ordnance Survey. The original research project began in late 2002 and was completed in Autumn 2004, with a follow-on research programme of experiments with local groups and communities called Social Tapestries starting in April 2004 and completed in Summer 2007 (additional publications and outputs were released in 2008).

Urban Tapestries investigated how, by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems, people could 'author' the environment around them; a kind of Mass Observation for the 21st Century. Like the founders of Mass Observation in the 1930s, we were interested creating opportunities for an "anthropology of ourselves" – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities.

The Urban Tapestries software platform enabled people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them. It provided the basis for a series of engagements with actual communities (in social housing, schools and with users of public spaces) to play with the emerging possibilities of public authoring in real world settings. The projects are documented in a variety of ways - from essays, project reports and academic papers to videos, installations and software (interfaces and code).

http://urbantapestries.net
http://socialtapestries.net
http://research.urbantapestries.net

Kris Weston AKA Thrash ex member of The Orb is doing a kickstarter / kris-starter so he can make more music. see https://krisweston.com

Thanks to all who donated to #Funds4DaMasta

The Auction is now live @ http://search.ebay.com.au/?sass=aliak77&ht=-1 or visit http://funds4damasta.tumblr.com

Once again, the cream of the crop of Australia's hip-hop community has banded together to offer some rare and exclusive items up for auction in benefit of a good cause… This time for our good friend and fellow musical brother in hip hop; MC, DJ & turntablist, DA MASTA who has been enduring a long-term battle with cancer. 100% of the profits (amount raised minus ebay & paypal fees) of the items sold in this auction will go directly to the DA MASTA to help with medical bills, living expenses and aid in the release of his forthcoming album.

A lot of the items up for auction are one offs and rarities kindly donated from all corners of Australia, friends, artists and peers have all chipped in, so reach deep, as cancer is a horrible disease that has a further reach than just the hip-hop community, along with the recent loss of Australian hip-hop icon MC Hunter (RIP).

The support and donations have been overwhelming and your bids are appreciated. If you do not happen to be able to bid, and want to make a donation, alternate details will be posted soon where you can directly contribute to DA MASTA. This auction was put together by DJ Sheep and being overseen by Reason and AliaK.

We'd like to send our special thanks to all who have donated items for these auctions:

360
Bigfoot
Blue Corner Records (DJ Damage & DJ Sheep)
Chris @ Soulmate Records
Chris Kelly (Adicts / Sunday Scratch Jamboree)
Crate Cartel Records
Debate (Train Of Thought)
DJ Damage
DJ Sheep
Down For The Count Records
Elefant Traks
Evolve
Evolve & Mids
Face (SSF / Smoke Screen Family)
Fizzy Fizz
Funkoars
Hams
Hilltop Hoods and Golden Era Records
Horrorshow
Jacquey (Weird Gear)
Joe Resetar
Kevin Riddell
Lau and MarleyBear on behalf of SBX
Len-1
LookUP crew, Bingethinkers, That's Them & Sarm
Mata & Must / Pang Productions
Matty Fresh & DJ Damage
Media Fortress
Minimal Aesthetics Records
Mortar / Clandestien
Nikk-C
Porsah Laine
Ran MC
Realizm
Smokescreen Family (Da Masta)
Soul Clap Records
Soulmate Records
Southside Custom Ink
Stealth Collection (Mark Pollard via/& AliaK)
Steven Baillie
The Masta (SSF)

Many thanks from the #Funds4DaMasta team.

http://funds4damasta.tumblr.com

Mez has been writing mezangelle / code poetry / netwurks on mail lists and the web since the 1990s. Trauma Wien Art Club has released a new book of Mez' mezangelles from 2003-2011 called "human readable messages - mezangelle 2003-2011" The book will be available at the Trauma Wien site, and also be on amazon in January 2012 (technically December 31st, but with the time difference in Australia, check in January) For those who can't wait (like me), it's also available from Lulu. There's a preview of the book on the Lulu page, including the table of contents. There are mezangelles with titles such as, "_Sub.Mission[s]_", "_Squashed Tele.biology_", "_Dream Fullscreen_" and many more.

Florian Cramer has described mezangelle as (from netwurker.de) :

[quote]As florian cramer says: “The beauty of "mezangelle" is that it uses elements of programming language syntax as material, i.e. reflecting formal programming language without being one. For the reader of mez's "netwurks", it remains all the more an open question whether the "mezangelle" para-code of parentheses and wildcard characters only mimics programming languages or is, at least partially, the product of programmed text filtering.”. Jim Andrews asserts that: “The term 'code poetry' has been used in connection with Mez's writing…as in using the devices often found in computer languages (like deep bracketing) and applying them meaningfully to natural language. These devices, in computer languages, are often used to represent data structures in code (like trees or other 'graphs') and also manage processes on these data structures (like insertion/deletion/tree balancing). Mez takes these ways of representing often non-linear structures and introducing/managing process in these structures and applies/deranges them in natural language--there is little computer language in her work. Like the text contains its own neath text.” les schaffer’s take on mezangelle is “mez's style is just the most delightful play on coding. I think of her as a cross between James Joyce and... Larry Wall – author of the Perl programming language and a linguist by training.....". [/quote]