Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames

[T]his article is a call for a refocusing of academic work on historical videogames.  A call for an approach that does not get detained by primarily examining the particular historical content of each game (i.e. historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) but instead tries to establish an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e. how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to explore/configure discourse about the past). The benefit of this is that we do not just gain knowledge of a particular historical representation but instead, conclusions about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) are then transferable to an understanding of games made up of similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.

Funding & Opportunities, News

Opportunity: Feds Will Team up on Digital Curation Residency Program

IMLS, working in partnership with the Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI), is developing a national residency program in digital curation. (For the purposes of this program, “digital curation” means the act of collecting, selecting, managing, making accessible, and preserving digital assets over long periods of time.)

Planning for the project has just begun and the first residents should be in place beginning in the summer of 2013

Job Announcements, News

Jobs: Digital Stewardship Librarian at Texas Tech University Libraries (Two Positions)

As a member of the LTMS (Library Technology Management and Services) Research and Development Team, this tenure-track Library faculty position engages in highly innovative and sustainable digital library stewardship, to include preservation and curation research and development activities and initiatives, and digital library business continuity solutions; and works closely with library faculty and staff, the TTU community, other academic institutions, and other partners in a variety of collaborative ways.

News, Resources

Resource: Spot visualizes tweet commonalities

Twitter is an organic online location, full of retweets, conversations, and link sharing. Jeff Clark tries to show these inner workings with his newest interactive, Spot. Enter a query in the field on the bottom left, and Spot retrieves the most recent 200 tweets. You then can choose among five views: group, words, timeline, users, and source.