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Wider Library Acceptance and Games

The OCLC midwinter 2005 conference presented a symposium on online Games and the significance for information literacy. This is excellent news as what has been known for a while is finally being acknowledged within wider institutional parameters. This entry summarizes a few discussions at this panel. To note, this excellent panel is available with streaming video and parallel powerpoint at http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/default.htm#launch and is definitely worth reflecting upon.

George Needham pointed out that gaming is a forum for collaborative development. Games are a metaphor for how our field may operate in the future, gamers are always the stars of their games, in games, there is always a solution and failure is always a part of success.

Kurt Squire, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presented on the larger parameters and economo-cultural implications for games and society. Currently, the online games industry tops Hollywood in billions of sales. Games can be critically and intellectually engaging and create vibrant online communities. Games are a push technology driving technological innovation, requiring new literacies but also enabling learning. Expertise is valued rather than 'accreditation'. Personally meaningful learning occurs and sites of collective intelligence such as "Wikipedia" constantly revise and improve on knowledge - they are immediately dynamic and fluid knowledge mechanisms. Kurt raised an excellent question regarding libraries and digital possibilities: Why is it that I go to Amazon to see what my peers are reading (networking ) possibilities. Why do I go to a blog to see what is new in my field?

Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin-Madison talked about massively multiplayer online games (1 million +) in which the populations of many games dwarfs real cities. These games are interested in online social interaction and centrally concerned with literacy practices, problem solving and learning. Constance pointed out that the content of the game also generates a centripetal force with ancillary waves of 'knowledge' around the actual game. Constance pointed out gaming is a 'literacy practice itself', gamers as producers with collective intelligence generated from gaming. Qute typical of gameplay is 'multimodal' thinking (i.e. mutiple attention spaces, multitasking with different screens, applications and tasks open, information becomes tool for future action). Mentorship happens in online gaming through participation and apprenticeship.

John Beck, author of Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever, talked about capturing the value of the gamer generation. The scarcest resource is attention and everyone is trying to get it. Websites that have a game component to them get the most attention. Gamers continue to immerse themselves in ever more powerful learning technologies, hold new beliefs about what is important in life. They think different, learn different, believe different and are different. Growing up on games creates a new way of thinking about the world - games are a valid way to experience and learn about the world, games change how people respond to incentives and risks and how they absorb new concepts. 10 % of what you read is retained, 40% of what you hear is retained, 70% of what you do is retained. Strategy guides give impetus to learning. Loyalty is a characteristic more endemic to gamers and gamers are more sociable and work better in teams.

There is a lot of material to absorb here. At the least, academic library research agendas should take note if not on the level of implementation that at the least, demographics as this population is large growing and our future essential audience.

New Possibilities for Data Visualization

An new generation of commercial and easier-to- use'data' visualization applications are emerging. In a sense, building on Ben Shneiderman and the HCIL at Maryland's work on dynamic database queries and taking advantage of new possibilities with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2.0, these applications begin to visualize multivariate data groupings dynamically by taking simple everyday data programs such as Excel and turning these into interactive data visualization applications. This entry looks at one of these new applications, Infommersion's Xcelsius.

Essentially, Infommersion's Xcelsius takes data from an Excel spreadsheet and fairly easily pulls this through Macromedia Flash to produce datasets that can be visualized in online chart format but also significantly manipulated directly and dynamically. While the product's focus is business/financial oriented, what will be really interesting to see is how this product can be reappropriated and remixed by scientists and social scientists to take their datasets and augment intelligence by allowing us to visualize this data dynamically and see unperceived relationships and trends. The immediate advantage with this application is dealing with multivariate or high-dimensional data where all the variables are interrelated and dependent on each other.

While examples given by the company are largely uninspired (i.e. Retirement Calculator), they are very useful. Up to now, the world of datasets and dataset analysis has largely been the province of mathematicians and statisticians. Visually, tools like Xcelsius are ones to watch out for as they will lead a new direction in aiding cognition. The trick here is to begin research and investigation with creative interface possibilities. Reimagination needs to occur both towards the conventiional divide between statistics and visualization but also towards medium possibilities online.

New Perspectives on Leonardo - Horizons for Digital Possibilities

In the last year there has been a wealth of interesting publications with regards to Leonardo Da Vinci. What is so interesting about some of these newer texts is that focus has shifted from the paintings to more renaissance perspectives covering the notebooks, design, mathematics and visual/scientific investigations of Da Vinci. This entry briefly glances at some of these newer texts abstracting some of this material in the hopes of creating awareness of renaissance modalities with regards to our own projects and information systems, digital libraries and possibilities for visualization and multimedia.

Perhaps the most baroque of these texts is the new Taschen catalogue raissonnée. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519: the complete paintings and drawings/Frank Zollner. Koln: Los Angeles, Taschen, 2003. Physically, the book is enormous, the full color reproductions beautiful and precise with the most advanced digital reproduction methods possible. What is most amazing about this text and revealing are the notebooks and drawings. The notebooks open Leonardo as a designer, scientist, draughtsman and inventor. The visualizations and range of Leonardo's scientific work is remarkable. It gives one pause as to the 'aesthetics' necessary in creating whether this be 'digital libraries', 'information systems' or any of Leonardos flights of fancy. The books division and liner notes are worth noting:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) possessed one of the greatest minds of all time; his importance and influence are inestimable. This XXL-format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo's masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes.

Part I explores Leonardo's life and work drawing upon his letters, contracts, diary entries, and writings. All of his paintings are presented and interpreted in depth and fold-out pages.

Part II comprises a catalogue raisonne of Leonardo's paintings, which covers all of his surviving and lost painted works. Each and every painting that can be justifiably attributed to Leonardo is included.

Part III contains an extensive catalogue of his drawings arranged by category (architecture, technical, anatomical, figures, proportion, cartography, etc).

On another level and opening up another important aspect of Leonardo is Bulent Atalay's "Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo. Written by a retired physics professor, Math and the Mona Lisa looks at the unity of art and science in various aspects of Leonardos life and work. Atalay looks at science and art in art in Leonardo —painting, architecture, sculpture, music, mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, and engineering—and the unity of the cultures. Take note here again for our own current digital concerns. Atalay delves into the underlying mathematics and aesthetics of science and art, paying special attention to the Fibonacci series and golden ratio. Interestingly, Ataley marvels at the symmetries to be found in art and the natural world, discussing the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8...) and the golden ratio related to it designated by the Greek letter phi (1.618...). Again, there is a lot here and this is not an easy text but worth noting.

Finally, more easily accesible as a general overview is Martin Kemp's Oxford University Press Leonardo. Admittedly, this is a reissue but Kemp who is also the author of Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science is also very good on more 'renaissance' and holistic perspectives of Leonardo. Also worth mentioning again, especially with this group is Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo on the Laptop which ideally should be read in tandem with the above aforesaid mentioned texts. Digital library designers, information systems architects and current information design theorists take note, expand horizons - a lot of lessons may be learned here.