The Object of Platform Studies: Relational Materialities and the Social Platform (the case of the Nintendo Wii)

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System,by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, inaugurated thePlatform Studies series at MIT Press in 2009.We’ve coauthored a new book in the series, Codename: Revolution: the Nintendo Wii Video Game Console. Platform studies is a quintessentially Digital Humanities approach, since it’s explicitly focused on the interrelationship of computing and cultural expression. According to the series preface, the goal of platform studies is “to consider the lowest level of computing systems and to understand how these systems relate to culture and creativity.”In practice, this involves paying close attentionto specific hardware and software interactions--to the vertical relationships between a platform’s multilayered materialities (Hayles; Kirschenbaum),from transistors to code to cultural reception. Any given act of platform-studies analysis may focus for example on the relationship between the chipset and the OS, or between the graphics processor and display parameters or game developers’ designs.In computing terms, platform is an abstraction(Bogost and Montfort), a pragmatic frame placed around whatever hardware-and-software configuration is required in order to build or run certain specificapplications (including creative works). The object of platform studies is thus a shifting series of possibility spaces, any number of dynamic thresholds between discrete levels of a system

Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 3 / Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 3

Die zunehmende Verfügbarkeit digitaler Reproduktionen, eine qualitative Verbesserung von Reproduktionstechniken und die Entwicklung neuer Verfahren zur Analyse von Schrift und Beschreibstoffen in den vergangenen Jahren hat in die Zuwendung der historisch orientierten Geisteswissenschaften zur Materialität der schriftlichen Überlieferung gefördert. Anknüpfend an die vorangegangenen Bände der Reihe präsentiert dieser Band aktuelle computergestützte Forschungen zu schriftlichem Kulturgut. Der thematische Rahmen reicht dabei von der Vorstellung neuer Reproduktionstechniken über die Anwendung von Bildmanipulationen zur Lesbarmachung schwer entzifferbarer Manuskripte und lexikostatistische Untersuchungen bis hin zur Vorstellung von Materialdatenbanken zu Beschreibstoffen. Inhalt: Oliver Duntze: Einleitung (IX) Tal Hassner, Malte Rehbein, Peter A. Stokes, Lior Wolf: Computation and Palaeography: Potentials and Limits (1) Digitale Reproduktion als paläographischesWerkzeug / Digital imaging as a palaeographic tool Fabian Hollaus, Melanie Gau, Robert Sablatnig, William A. Christens-Barry, Heinz Miklas: Readability Enhancement and Palimpsest Decipherment of Historical Manuscripts (31) Christine Voth: What lies beneath: The application of digital technology to uncover writing obscured by a chemical reagent (47) Verwaltung von Erschließungsdaten / Organizing descriptive information Rombert Stapel: The development of a medieval scribe (67) Matthieu Bonicel, Dominique Stutzmann: Une application iPad pour l’annotation collaborative des manuscrits médiévaux avec le protocole SharedCanvas: «Formes à toucher» (87) Erwin Frauenknecht, Maria Stieglecker: WZIS – Wasserzeichen-Informationssystem: Verwaltung und Präsentation von Wasserzeichen und ihrer Metadaten (105) Elisa Pallottini: Un corpus di iscrizioni medievali della provincia di Viterbo: Metodologia d’analisi e alcune riflessioni sulla sua informatizzazione (123) Appendices Kurzbiographien – Biographical Notes (137

Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies : Round Tables

Following the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, the Organizing Committee decided to produce an online publication of Proceedings from the Round Tables. According to the official title of the congress, Byzantium - a World of Changes, AIEB together with the Organizing Committee, have decided to implement some changes to the concept of the Round Tables. The aim of these changes were to encourage discussion at the Round Tables by presenting preliminary papers at the website in advance. The idea was to introduce the topic and papers of the individual Round Tables that would be discussed, first between the participants, and then with the public present. Therefore, the conveners of the Round Tables were asked to create Round Tables with no more than 10 participants. They collected the papers, which were to be no longer than 18,000 characters in one of the official languages of the Congress and without footnotes or endnotes. Conveners provided a general statement on the goal of each roundtable and on the content of the papers. The present volume contains papers from 49 Round Tables carefully selected to cover a wide range of topics, developed over the last five years since the previous Congress. The topics show diversity within fields and subfields, ranging from history to art history, archeology, philosophy, literature, hagiography, and sigillography. The Round Tables displayed current advances in research, scholarly debates, as well as new methodologies and concerns germane to all aspects of international Byzantine studies. The papers presented in this volume were last sent to the congress organizers in the second week of August 2016 and represent the material that was on hand at that time and had been posted on the official website; no post-congress revisions have occurred. We present this volume in hope that it will be an initial step for further development of Round Tables into collections of articles and thematic books compiled and published following the Congress, in collaboration with other interested institutions and editors. With this volume, the organizers signal their appreciation of the efforts of more than 1600 participants who contributed, both to the Round Tables and to the Congress in general