The talk that Jennifer Middendorf and Samuel Hope presented at the National Digital Forum in Wellington in November, titled “Human ethics challenges in digital community story-telling”, is now available to view on YouTube.
In the talk, Samuel and Jennifer discuss some of the ethical challenges faced by the Understanding Place project while developing the Red Zone Stories app.
What new forms of storytelling are possible when we use computers to generate and curate narratives? From the strict causal logic of plots and conflict models and the dreamlike free-association found in fairytales and modernist fiction to the endless possibilities of dramatic events emerging from large scale social simulations, this talk is a beginner’s guide to the weird and wonderful world of computational narrative.
As well as introducing practical methods to generate stories and model narrative structures using the tools of systems and simulations, we’ll look at how artists, writers and researchers can incorporate these methods into their creative practice, the aesthetic consequences and tradeoffs, and the reasons why people might want to generate stories in the first place.
Speaker: Mark Rickerby – Writer, designer and programmer
Date: Thursday 17 October
Time: 1:00–2:00pm
Venue: Room 526, Meremere (Law), Ilam Campus, University of Canterbury
Do you need permission to film a mural? Who owns the copyright for Popper’s passport photo? How do you get a photo into Wikipedia? Is museum taxidermy art, and can you legally photograph it? What is copyfraud? New Zealand Wikipedian at Large Dr Mike Dickison will talk about how we can share our photographs and protect artists’ rights, in an age where everyone has a camera in their pocket and reproduction costs nothing.
Date: Friday 7 June
Time: 12:00–1:00 pm
Venue: A3 Lecture Theatre, Ilam Campus, University of Canterbury
If you’ve ever wanted to know how Wikipedia works and how to edit it, come along to this practical workshop organised by the NZ Wikipedian at Large, Dr Mike Dickison. There’ll be a one-hour talk and tutorial to begin, followed by an afternoon of hands-on editing. Bring a laptop.
Date: Mon 20 May
Time: 1:00–4:00 pm (main presentation 1:00–2:00)
Venue: 388 Puaka-James Hight (TBC)
Did you hear about the young farmer from Dannevirke who got his name added to a Wikipedia list of mythical Japanese monsters, and it ended up appearing in a board game? Stories like this make it seem like Wikipedia’s easy to vandalise; how much can we trust it? How do we detect hoaxes? If we were sociopathic enough to want to get false information into the encyclopaedia and make it stick, what would we need to know? New Zealand Wikipedian at Large Dr Mike Dickison has been travelling the country encouraging the public to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia, but in this one-off exclusive talk he’ll turn things around and reveal the grubby world of making it less accurate.
Date: Fri 17 May
Time: 1:00–2:00
Venue: A1 lecture theatre
Do you need permission to film a mural? Who owns the copyright for Popper’s passport photo? How do you get a photo into Wikipedia? Is museum taxidermy art, and can you legally photograph it? What is copyfraud? New Zealand Wikipedian at Large Dr Mike Dickison will talk about how we can share our photographs and protect artists’ rights, in an age where everyone has a camera in their pocket and reproduction costs nothing.
Date: Friday 7 June
Time: 12.00-1.00
Venue: A3 lecture theatre
When: Thursday, 15th November, 3-4pm
Where: Spark Place, Community Level 1, Tūranga
Join us for a seminar on Red Zone Stories, an app developed by the UC Arts Digital Lab to record and share community stories about past and possible future spaces in the Residential Red Zone.
In this session the Arts Digital Lab team will give an overview of the project and invite members to download and try an early version of the app.* The idea of this session is to encourage people to start contributing their stories, connections to, or thoughts about the Red Zone.
* this app is currently only available on Android devices, but we do have a website version that those without an Android device can use.
** As this is a Human Ethics approved project, you will need to agree to and sign a consent form before contributing material to the app/website.
When: 3-5pm, 11th October
Where: Poutama Room 388, Puaka-James Hight Library, University of Canterbury
Dr Ben Adams (UC Geography)
“A massive amount of geographic (spatial) and historical (temporal) information exists in document collections online and in libraries. Because these datasets are often too large to annotate by hand, computational tools are required. In this session, we will discuss some existing geoparsing and temporal parsing tools that can be used to automate this process for textual documents. We will look at a variety of options, including web services and open source software. The tools are getting better but they are still error-prone, so we will also highlight some issues to keep an eye out for when using them.”
Dr Ben Adams from Geography and Dr Jonathan Dunn from Linguistics are presenting on “Geospatial Corpora” as part of the COMS and UC Arts Digital Lab “Digital Methods and Tools Seminar Series”.
Ben will present his project Frankenplace (www.frankenplace.com), an interactive thematic map search engine that uses geographic context as a means to discover, organize, and interactively visualize the documents related to a search query. Jonathan will present the Common Crawl Global Dialect Corpus, a new dataset for understanding regional patterns in language use that is drawn from ~80 billion web sites and contains examples of hundreds of languages across every country in the world. Ben is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Jonathan is a Lecturer in Linguistics.
Social network analysis (SNA) refers to structural research that examines the ties linking social actors. It adds a dimension or set of factors that can explain human behaviours, viewing individuals as actors embedded in thick webs of social relations and interactions, and each person’s connections may affect his or her behaviours. SNA can help us understand more about collective actions, organization behaviours, social influence, and transmissions of diseases, ideas, and information. In this seminar, we will discuss the basic concepts of SNA, and the use of UCINet as a software package for SNA. UCINet: https://sites.google.com/site/ucinetsoftware/
