digital culture – Page 24 – frans goes blog

Beauties of Translation, pt.2: Lempiä lainausmerkit hänen

As I wrote earlier in my post about Dr Okell’s Wondrous Beer Translation, I am great fan of machine translations — they sort of underline our close and affectionate relationship with information technology, and the current (rather cute) state of artificial infan… I mean intelligence. This time I dedicate my love to a sidebar widget provided by Google, titled “Lempiä lainausmerkit hänen”. I suppose the original title has something to do with memorable quotes about love, but the machine translates ‘quotes’ with the Finnish word for ‘quotation marks’, and also the actual content of these “quotation marks” follows the same, delightful logic:

This is so cute — just think about it: the machine even has translated ‘Honoré’ as ‘kunnioittaa’ (meaning ‘respects’). *smileysmiley* Link to widget’s page:
http://www.google.fi/ig/directory?url=charles447.googlepages.com/love.xml

Edit: the original de Balzac quote is probably this: “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”

Participating in Digital Archiving seminar

Today I am taking part in the ‘Digiaika talteen’ seminar in the Finnish National Library in Helsinki. At the beginning of this year, a new law came into operation, concerning archiving digital cultural heritage. New kinds of ‘cultural materials’ have existed since the development of first computers, and exponentially when the Internet started connecting people using these digital technologies. We have actually lived sort of ‘digital dark Middle-Ages’ in terms of archiving, since so much of the early history of digital texts, images, games, web pages and other forms of digital expression have already been lost. Now there is at least a law that dictates how everyone, who publishes something in Finnish that is made available to public, is obliged to collaborate with the archivists to provide permanent copies into the National Audiovisual Archive (the old SEA, the movie archive). The job is huge; one estimate is that 50 million pages with c. 2–3 terabytes of data will be gathered in two automatic annual searches.

Nokia N95 8 GB and the era of ultraportables

Along with some new research projects where we look into the service distribution models of games, my new primary work phone has changed into Nokia N95 8GB model. So far I have been mostly satisfied; and in contrast to E70, this time it is possible to connect my Sony DR-BT50 headphones to the mobile phone (N95 supports A2DP over Bluetooth). N95 is also a decent media player and it is possible to listen to mp3 music and watch videos. Internet browser has improved and social media sites like YouTube and Flickr are taken in with some special consideration – image upload from the camera application to Flickr is now just one click away.

Games are still perhaps the biggest question mark of the upgraded N-Gage brand. I am not particularly enthusiastic about rally or sports games, and those feature visible in the opening portfolio. More games should be arriving soon, including pet simulation (Dogz), more pets simulation (Sims 2 Pets), golf, yet another Worms and Snakes, plus action: Brothers in Arms, ONE. The service in itself looks interesting, with player profiles, buddy lists and other social service basics in place.

All in all, it is surprising how powerful contemporary mobile phones already are. Yet, the usability of Nokia OS is still seriously behind e.g. that of Apple iPhone. Where you just want to have one thing to happen, N95 will still ask you verifications for this and that, get stuck in dialogues or wait for input from softkeys, where iPhone would automatically just have started the default action. But I have not yet used iPhone for anything beyond most casual first impression, so a more thorough comparison needs to wait for later. (Timetable for 3G iPhone launch, anyone?)

I must admit I am so text oriented user, that the biggest drawback of N95 for me is that it does not have a QWERTY keyboard. The size is compact for that reason, of course, but this means that I still need to carry two devices with me always.

The happy note is that ultraportable laptops like Asus Eee PC, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC and other UMPC and upscale/next gen PDAs are blooming and a gadget freak will have happy times ahead. (Asus Eee PC 900 review here: http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2008/04/asus-eee-pc-900-video-review.html)

Not travelling

I have made few somewhat painful personal decisions and radically cut down the amount of international travel I do. Travelling might be something we are told we have to do, that our careers require it, and that internationalisation or globalisation even dictates that we should be flying around the globe all the time, busily collaborating with everyone else. But why? Don’t we really have any communicational tools that we could use to cut down this insane waste of time, energy — both human energy and precious reserves of natural energy, turning it into carbon dioxide? I think we can do better. I was supposed to present game studies papers in two important conferences, CHI 2008 in Italy, and Crossroads conference of cultural studies in Jamaica. It was a real pity, but I decided not to go. Continue reading “Not travelling”

Presenting in the AoIR conference

I just got information my abstract has been accepted, and I will be presenting my paper “Play in the Mobile Internet: Towards Contextual Gaming” in the Internet Research 9.0 conference, taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, from October 15th – October 18th 2008. Link to the conference web page: http://conf.aoir.org/index.php?conference=ir&schedConf=ir9

New article: Museums for the Game Literate Generations

Just a quick note: my short article has been published online. See: ‘Preserving the Virtual Cultural Heritage: Museums for the Game Literate Generations’, in: Making Cultural Heritage Truly Common conference publication (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2008, p. 9-12). Online: http://www.cultureforall.info/news.php?aid=12030&k=11097 and http://www.cultureforall.info/articles

Speaking about horror in tv

Today Inari Uusimäki called me and I agreed to participate in next ‘K-rappu’, a culturally oriented television show in YLE1 channel. I will be talking about horror, possibly also in terms of games, but mostly from a general cultural semiotic perspective, so stay tuned: the show will go live at 19:20 in Tuesday, 19th of February. Link: http://ohjelmat.yle.fi/krappu/k_rappu

Internet censorship in Finland

There is an escalating row currently in Finnish blogosphere and media about Internet censorship: there is now a special law in Finland which allows police to create secret lists of materials that they deem ‘inappropriate’ with some criteria and other, and ISPs are required to block access to those addresses. The law was pushed through with arguments of blocking child pornography, but now it seems that also other kinds of pages, or entire domains, are being blocked, and police declines to give any information about the censorship lists, or publicly defend their decisions. You can read more in Finnish from blogs of Jyrki J.J. Kasvi, an MP, and Petteri Järvinen, an IT author, who comment on the blocking of access to activist Matti Nikki’s anti-censorship site. An issue of fundamental rights, and I hope there will be more serious discussion about the overall ethical problematics of censorship after this.

Read eBooks, save the planet

There is apparently something called ‘Read an eBook Week’ being celebrated during the first week of March (talking about festivities I did not know existed). A real eBook would require a real ePaper/eInk solution, and unfortunately those are not yet at our hands (even if Amazon Kindle and its kind are making fast progress). But there are actually some worthwhile points to support literature to go ‘e’; see:

http://epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2008/02/30-benefits-of-ebooks.html

Future Play proceedings in ACM library

You might be interested in taking a look; the Future Play 2007 conference proceedings have been published online in the ACM digital library:
[click here]
However, this is yet another closed, pay-to-view repository, so the Pervasive Games in Ludic Society paper by Jaakko Stenros, Markus Montola and myself might be locked in there for some. Lets see if it is possible to upload an authors’ version somewhere for open access.