Inspired by Franco Moretti’s creation of maps from nonvisual texts, the aim of this project is to work with maps of virtual spaces and examine events and objects associated with them. While we are treating these maps as texts, it is important to note that virtual environments are visually rendered, as opposed to the malleable, imagined spaces created when engaging with "traditional" texts. For this project, maps were taken from two different virtual environments (Second Life and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) and turned into "critical GeoWikis," publicly editable maps that correlate information to map locations. The ultimate goal of the project is the stimulation of scholarly interaction with and commentary on the GeoWikis.

Second Life maps: For this prototype, the source material is the maps of two regions. There are various applications, reviews, and other commentaries on certain spaces, but thus far none of this has been collected in a comprehensive manner. The maps were collected as .JPG-formatted screenshots for use in the GeoWiki application. The map data were collected from internet sources (including blogs, web reviews, and more). These were then connected to the GeoWiki to allow for multifaceted exploration.

A Link to the Past: The map source is the map of kingdom of Hyrule captured and assembled by Ian Albert.  For this project, only the main "overworld map" (featuring only the exterior areas of the kingdom) is used, and not maps of individual dungeons, in order to limit the scope of the data collection.  Initial data for placement on the GeoWiki include plot events, major item acquisitions, and boss battles. Ideally, entries from visitors to the wiki will flesh out critical observations, personal experiences, and the like.

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Bola C. King - Review and Campaign Analysis of Health Locations in Second Life (Session III)
keywords: health campaigns, virtual worlds, "Second Life"

The public communication campaign is a vital tool for social and behavioral change. The goal of this project is to examine health-related locations in Second Life (SL) specifically from the perspective of communication campaign theory.

A variety of health-related locations exists in SL. These include: venues for support groups; information centers and libraries for both public and private organizations; training sites for health personnel; and shopping and roleplay sites for both entertainment and identity enhancement.

There are, however, essentially no Second Life-based health campaigns. Those few campaigns that do have a presence in-world are basically composed of content imported from other media, mostly brochures and websites. In general, though, public health campaigns as such are not really underway. Cases in point are the CDC, American Cancer Society, and Red Cross sites; the best these have to offer is undirected information. This is symptomatic of corporate, government, and NGO presences in-world.

Second Life should be treated as a “place,” like a real-world region, with a distinct population and culture; this means that campaigns cannot necessarily be simply transplanted into the region from other, theoretically successful campaigns. Residents of SL spend time in-world for specific reasons, and their world has unique facets just like any culture does. An organization looking to create a successful campaign should start from scratch, looking to learn exactly what the characteristics of this population are and how best to engage them, perhaps beginning with an eye to utilizing the sense-making model. Only after this work is completed can specific theories be brought to bear with any hope of success.

Word frequency visualization offers a new way of reading that goes far beyond its former "at-a-glance" and concordance uses. Using word frequency visualization tools on a set of broadside ballads from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I argue that while such critics as Pamela Allen Brown argue that popular literature offers only two choices for women, shrew or sheep, ballads in fact present a complicated spectrum of possible roles for women. The visualization techniques I use (tag clouds and word trees) help me conceptualize that spectrum while at the same time introducing a tool to literary analysis.

Tag clouds render word frequencies in a user-supplied text by size and word trees render both word frequency and word networks. Because my project centers on literary texts, I am most interested in the possibilities for tag clouds or word trees and literary analysis. Joe Lamantia, writing about what he calls the "text cloud," claims, "the growing use of text clouds hints at a (potential) deeper cultural shift in the way we go about reading and comprehension: a shift from linear modes based on reading words and sentences, to nonlinear modes based on viewing summaries of content in aggregate as a way of discovering concepts and patterns." The text cloud captures the non-linear elements of a text and makes them clear to the reader.

Someone once claimed that the tag cloud is "the mullet of web 2.0," and the significance of this project has a lot to do with that comparison. The hairstyle is one everyone loves to hate and mock; in the popular imagination it now stands for everything "Blue Collar Comedy." That is, the ridicule of the mullet is linked to classism and regionalism. When commentators fret over the tag clouds' "popularity," they are really fretting about the expansion of users' access to the technology to make tag clouds. Thus tag clouds are positioned in much the same way as close reading was in Post-World War II America—they have the potential to open up texts to people who may not have otherwise had access in this way to them before.

The 1,850 ballads in Samuel Pepys’ collection have long been studied for their textual, cultural, and musical significances. Less studied are these ballads’ woodcut illustrations, which have been described as crude, and have been difficult to access or categorize for all but the most specialized scholars. Fortunately, the digitization of these ballads by our Early English Ballad Archive (EBBA) includes unprecedented work on these woodcut illustrations: cataloguing, keywording, written descriptions, and linking between images. This presentation will showcase some of the Woodcut Archive’s features, discuss our philosophy about the woodcuts, and offer some possible scholarly uses of the archive.

The image of the narrative data stream arises out of an attempt to frame the concept of narrative in such a way that it can account for the narrative experiences of "readers" who take in vastly different kinds of texts, from books to films to games and things in between and beyond. Taking as its starting point the phenomenon of spatial narratives in digital games, the project explores the relationships between narrative and database, database and interface, and reading and navigation.

At the core, a narrative text presents the reader/spectator/gamer/user with a combination of data streams that construct an account of the passage of a certain period of time. The creators of these texts work with both content and form (database and interface), hoping to develop an aesthetic experience compelling enough to induct the consumer into a narrated world with a particular story to tell.

Discussing narrative in terms of the data stream opens the vocabulary for a comparative discussion of the narrative strategies of different media objects without getting caught up in hardware particulars. The contents of a media object like a book might be described as a single, sequentially accessed narrative stream made up of textual data, whereas a video game might incorporate streams of audio, visual, and spatial data that may (or may not) encourage non-sequential access. Concepts developed by classical narrative theorists can be tested against nonstandard narrative texts using a common vocabulary.

Giselle Beiguelman's "esc for escape" (2004) is a multifaceted art project that solicits and archives error messages from computer users around the globe and re-expresses them in a variety of contexts and media. The project includes a public exhibition of error messages on electronic billboards in São Paulo, Brazil; a repository of selected error messages published on the web, entitled "The Book of Errors"; "The Monastery," an archive of all error messages related to the project; a dvd of the project; a project blog; as well as several "trailers," which offer ironic visualizations of various error messages by the artist.  In addition to providing a playful space for people to express their most "unforgettable" error messages, "esc for escape" offers a subtle commentary about the relationship between computer code and natural language.  In this presentation I will demo Beiguelman's project and offer some speculations about the function of error in her work.