Geolocation, Archives, and Emulators (not all at once)

May 5th, 2010 |

My involvement in the digital humanities is wide-ranging, but there are three areas that I would particularly want to focus on at THATCamp.

First, I have a pedagogical interest in geolocation and mobile computing. While some of the benefits of geolocation are immediately apparent to historians and teachers of history, very few people have thought about using geolocation in a literary context. Even less attention has been paid to the ways geolocation can foster critical thinking in students. I am currently thinking of ways to “re-purpose” Foursquare in ways unintended and unforeseen by its creators, for use in a new media studies class in Spring 2011.

My second area of interest concerns digital preservation, social networking, ephemerality, and creativity. That sounds like a muddle, and it is. What I’m fascinated by is the tension between (1) digital preservation as a social act and (2) erasure, fallibility, and unreliability as a creative or political act. I see pedagogical, scholarly, and artistic implications in this tension that are worth exploring among other like-minded (and differently-minded) digital humanists.

And finally, I’ve recently realized we need to think more critically about the use of software emulators (those programs that mimic other platforms, allowing you to run otherwise inaccessible programs and games using the original ROMs). As I wrote in a comment to John’s post on Hacking Ethics for Edupunks, these emulators are crucial for our scholarship, but they often rely on copyrighted BIOSes and ROMs that are, strictly speaking, illegal to possess (unless you happen to have gotten the ROM from a legal copy of the original software that you already own). So, there are ethical concerns to consider. But there are also important process-oriented questions we should be asking. How does an emulator change our experience of a program? What does an emulator add or take away from the original program? What about the emulation gap—the technological, methodological, and epistemological gap between studying software on its original platform and on an emulator?

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7 Responses to “Geolocation, Archives, and Emulators (not all at once)”

  1. nowviskie Says:

    Mark, I’d love to hear more about that second concept: “the tension between (1) digital preservation as a social act and (2) erasure, fallibility, and unreliability as a creative or political act.” It would be fun for me to think about how/whether we can trace this back to the Victorian explosion of printed ephemera and its afterlife…

  2. Zach Whalen Says:

    Your first two points are in the ballpark of my original proposal, so I’ll try and build those bridges when I get around to posting mine, but you raise some really important questions about emulators that I’d love to explore some more.

    Like you, I come at these kinds of things from a textual angle, but I think THATcamp is a great opportunity to look at it in a room likely to include many historians.

    I think there’s an implicit connection between your tension between preservation and erasure and the idea of the emulation gap. What emulation implies, culturally speaking, is a restorative nostalgia that is undermined by the conditions of its own production. You can’t run Stella (Atari 2600 emulator) on a Channel F, for example.

    So one of the more apparent dissonances, in my experience, is that we use software like MESS, which can be a hassle to configure properly, to emulate systems that are on their own naively simple to operate. I have a Vectrex, for example. To operate it, I plug it in, turn it on and play. On the other hand, running it in MESS required finding good copies of the BIOS files and convincing MESS to run in vector mode at a reasonable resolution. The end process, of course, is a simulated vector display (not emulated) so that emulation gap exists as a kind of infinite relation between text and artifact. Consider Stella’s inclusion of CRT-style filtering, for example. That’s a really finely-tuned medial epistemology at work there.

    Anyway, the legal ethics of emulation are pretty important, too, especially when we try and bring these things to our students. I’m satisfied, personally, that my use of console BIOS files is well within DMCA and Fair Use, but that satisfaction comes from accepting some personal risk (however minor that might be). I’m significantly less comfortable passing that on to my students. Of course, the legal/ethical questions can make for good class discussion because it raises the stakes on the whole classroom context while narrowing the focus on the technological processes underlying the game itself (which is often my point anyway).

    So yeah, let’s talk about emulation this weekend.

  3. THATCamp 2010 » Blog Archive Says:

    […] for ARG scholarship. (The imaginary ideal for an ARGhive would have to be some kind of reality emulator, and that doesn’t make […]

  4. briancroxall Says:

    I too have been interested in the notions of ephemerality and digital preservation for a while now. To what degree do we need to interrogate the drive to capture everything? One can certainly say that if we have the storage space then we’re better of preserving things than we are in letting them fade into graceful degradation. But on the other hand, what does it mean to preserve something like William Gibson’s Agrippa in the UCSB project, The Agrippa Files. The amazing technical achievement notwithstanding, preserving the text changes its very nature. There’s a bit of a gap–an emulation gap–then between what we are reading on a screen and the original object.

  5. The “digital humanities” term and the clowns who usurpated it. | Jean-François Gariépy's blog Says:

    […] they did mention emulators. Let’s see what Mark Sample had to say: And finally, I’ve recently realized we need to think more critically about the use of […]

  6. The “digital humanities” term and the clowns who usurpated it. | Jean-François Gariépy's blog Says:

    […] they did mention emulators. Let’s see what Mark Sample had to say: And finally, I’ve recently realized we need to think more critically about the use of […]

  7. The “digital humanities” term and the clowns who usurpated it. | Jean-François Gariépy's blog Says:

    […] they did mention emulators. Let’s see what Mark Sample had to say: And finally, I’ve recently realized we need to think more critically about the use of […]

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