How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City's Dark Side for 'L.A. Noire' | History | SoCal Focus | KCET

Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games' L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game's developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.

Designers consulted street maps created by the city's planning department and the Works Progress Administration, aerial photography combined with topographical information from the U.S. Geological Survey, photograph collections from the University of Southern California and UCLA, the police blotters of historical newspapers, and the papers of writer Raymond Chandler to reconstruct an historically accurate 1947 Los Angeles. Also, in promotion of the new game, the L.A. Times and Rockstar Games collaborated on this "special archive edition Crime Map" that presents newspaper accounts of real crimes from 1947 on an interactive map.

Author Disconnects From Communication Devices to Reconnect With Life

PBS NewsHour | Aug. 16, 2010

William Powers, author of "Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age," makes reference to this quote by Thoreau in the PBS piece (link) above:

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

Likewise, as Powers explains in the interview, the book's title is taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5:

Ghost:
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.

Hamlet:
O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:
So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word;
It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'
I have sworn 't.

Marcellus:
Within My lord, my lord,--

(Excerpt courtesy of Shakespeare Searched.)

The wax tablet and stylus were not Elizabethan inventions but had in fact been used as a temporary writing technology since Homer's time.

Google's Digital Library Failed--Can Academics Succeed?

Fast Company:

Not long ago a federal judge in Manhattan scuttled Google's plans to create a digital universal library (a dream kicked off when Larry Page scanned 'The Google Book' years ago--his company has since scanned 15 million more). While some lamented the decision, others have cheered, and among the latter is a group of academic librarians who think that a digital universal library should be a public, rather than a private, good.

Check out some articles on this topic by Robert Darnton, Harvard's University Librarian and leader in the public digital library effort.

iPad 2: "Tech married with the liberal arts"

Check out Engagdet's recent live-blogging of today's unveiling of the new iPad.

11:12AM [Steve Jobs:] "This is worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology is not enough. It's tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it's the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive." (emphasis added)

We shall see, we shall see.

HyperCities Egypt - Voices from Cairo through Social Media

This is a pretty darn cool digital humanities project out of UCLA:

"HyperCities Egypt" streams and then archives tweets from protesters in Cairo who are taking part in the pro-democracy push that has captured the world's imagination since Jan. 25.

"You just let the program run, and you almost feel like you're there," explained Yoh Kawano, a member of the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities program, who built the program's interface. "It collects tweets live from Cairo and displays them in real time on a map."

Subtitled "Voices from Cairo through Social Media," the program displays a new tweet every four seconds over a digital map of Egypt's capital. Because it gathers tweets from those who have enabled Twitter's "add location" function, the program also maps the precise location in Cairo from which they were sent. And the Twitter users' avatars — often photos of the protesters themselves — accompany the poignant messages, providing a moving immediacy to the experience.

(Via Resource Shelf.)