The Sheffield Wargames Corpus.

Recognition of speech in natural environments is a challenging task, even more so if this involves conversations between sev-eral speakers. Work on meeting recognition has addressed some of the significant challenges, mostly targeting formal, business style meetings where people are mostly in a static position in a room. Only limited data is available that contains high qual-ity near and far field data from real interactions between par-ticipants. In this paper we present a new corpus for research on speech recognition, speaker tracking and diarisation, based on recordings of native speakers of English playing a table-top wargame. The Sheffield Wargames Corpus comprises 7 hours of data from 10 recording sessions, obtained from 96 micro-phones, 3 video cameras and, most importantly, 3D location data provided by a sensor tracking system. The corpus repre-sents a unique resource, that provides for the first time location tracks (1.3Hz) of speakers that are constantly moving and talk-ing. The corpus is available for research purposes, and includes annotated development and evaluation test sets. Baseline results for close-talking and far field sets are included in this paper. 1

Representations of gender in Warhammer 40,000

This thesis explores the representations of gender in the miniature tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000. Warhammer 40,000 is the world's most popular miniature wargame, and has spawned a sprawling transmedia franchise including novels, digital games, films, and even music. Despite being the world’s most popular miniature wargame, Warhammer 40,000 has received little academic study. Through a combination of visual, narratological, and ludic analysis, this thesis explores the representations of gender as they manifest in the game’s models, the transmedia franchise’s narrative fiction, and the gameplay mechanics of the wargame itself. This study finds that while many of the representational aspects of the game and franchise align with the typical sexualized and erased representations of gender within digital and analog games, the particularities of the miniature wargame medium provide nuances to representation which are not afforded by other games mediums.Master's ThesisMEVI350MASV-MEV

Libraries, Makerspaces and Wargaming

This paper focuses on understanding if public libraries can and should form deeper relationships with wargaming and modelling hobby communities. Already adjacent to maker communities, wargaming and modelling communities often exist in third spaces that are explicitly paid. Libraries may want to consider partnering with local communities to promote miniature painting and hobbying

Models of war 1770–1830: the birth of wargames and the trade-off between realism and simplicity

The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the ‘free’ German wargame (Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history

clicktatorship and democrazy: Social media and political campaigning

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise