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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Missed UCSD’s SoftWhere 2008 conference and curious what went on? Well, video of the public portion of the conference is now popping up on the SoftWhere 2008 page in QuickTime and YouTube. A lot of big names (like Ian Bogost, above) had some very interesting presentations on a variety of topics — even my Japanese historiography professor showed up and had a lot to say about history, time, and software. It was a pretty diverse group, and owing to the zippy format, you can get a good feel for a lot of the research and ideas without spending half an hour or more listening to one presentation. Confining academics to such a short period of time? Sheer brilliance.
SoftWhere 2008 videos [Grand Text Auto]
I poked my head in to the public ‘pecha kucha’ session for UCSD’s SoftWhere 2008, but couldn’t stay for the whole thing since I had a paper to write and was feeling really under the weather; I did get a chance later to talk with one of my professors, who participated in the event, and have been checking out the roundups floating around the internet at this point. I’ve got my own opinions on the ‘___ Studies’ ghetto, being part of it myself — though an attempt to create a field of ‘software studies’ is, at the very least, not burdened with Cold War politics. Anyways, there are some concise (and not so concise) appraisals of the event floating around. Anne Helmond, who presented on the relationship between search engines and the blogosphere, had this to say:
