6 research outputs found
Videogame Editions for Play and Study
We discuss four types of access to videogames that are analogous to the use of different sorts of editions in literary scholarship: (1) the use of hardware to play games on platforms compatible with the original ones, (2) emulation as a means of playing games on contemporary computers, (3) ports, which translate games across platforms, and (4) documentation, which can describe some aspects of games when they cannot be accessed and can supplement play. These different editions provide different information and perspectives and can be used in teaching and research in several ways
Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report
The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a collaborative research venture of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab, conducted as part of Preserving Creative America, an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. The primary goals of our project have been to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage
Following the instruments and users: the mutual shaping of digital sampling technologies
The socio-musical practice of sampling is closely associated with the re-use
of pre-existing sound recordings and the technological processes of looping. These
practices, based on appropriation and repetition, have been particularly common within
the genres of hip-hop and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Yet early digital sampling
instruments such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) were not
designed for these purposes. The technologists at Fairlight Instruments in Australia
were primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to imitate the sounds of acoustic
instruments; sampling was a secondary concern. In the first half of the thesis, I follow
digital sampling instruments like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator by drawing
on interviews with their designers and users to trace how they were used to sample the
sounds of everyday life, loop sequenced patterns of sampled sounds, and sample extracts
from pre-existing sound recordings. The second half of the thesis consists of case studies
that follow the users of digital sampling technologies across a range of socio-musical
worlds to examine the diversity of contemporary sampling practices. Using concepts
from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this thesis focuses on the ‘user-technology
nexus’ and continues a shift in the writing of histories of technologies from a
focus on the designers of technologies towards the contexts of use and ‘the co-construction’
or ‘mutual shaping’ of technologies and their users. As an example of the
‘interpretative flexibility’ of music technologies, digital sampling technologies were
used in ways unimagined by their designers and sampling became synonymous with re-appropriation.
My argument is that a history of digital sampling technologies needs to
be a history of both the designers and the users of digital sampling technologies