2005 March | xirdalium

bedford’s metamorphosis

Posted on Wednesday, 16th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalApril 11, 2013

hotbeds of creativity — the appropriation of the truck in Sudan Gabriel Kläger has produced a substantial update to his website Africars, a subpage of the website of the Institute for Sociocultural Anthropology, Munich. As I still am a tremendously generous and forthcoming webmaster, I immediately set the update online. Kläger transformed Prof. Kurt Beck‘s article “Bedfords Metamorphose” (Beck 2004) into html, ‘hyper-augmented’ with a load of exclusive, illustrative and commented photographies, stemming from Beck’s recent fieldwork in Sudan. The pictures document the technological process of appropriation and make the latter comprehensible. Since ‘globalization’ and ‘glocalization’ became issues in anthropology, … Continue reading →

gamer stereotypes fragged

Posted on Tuesday, 15th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

The (U.S.) entertainment software association (ESA) had Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc. conduct a study which’s findings contradict the usual clichés of gamers. This goes well with the findings of studies undertaken by the Forschungsschwerpunkt Wirkung virtueller Welten (research focus “virtual worlds’ virtue”) of the University of Applied Sciences Cologne (articles are in German). The stereotypes are fragged for now, but they sure as hell will respawn. And of course the argument will come up that the study was commissioned by the ESA, and was done by a commercial institute. The german studies were commissioned by the government, and … Continue reading →

world’s greatest

Posted on Tuesday, 15th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

BBC-News carries an article on pro-gamer legend Jonathan Wendel aka Fatal1ty: Golden boy gamer becomes a brand . The golden boy has to say something on the social dimension of gaming, too: “Socialising online is awesome – you are talking to all these gamers just about random topics. It’s like you are on the phone talking to a friend almost. Then you get to meet these guys at LAN parties. It’s a total blast.” During the last months I noticed a substantial increase of articles on gaming issues in the supra-regional major daily newspapers and magazines — at least in … Continue reading →

wandering astray

Posted on Sunday, 13th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 12, 2012

on boundaries, fieldwork, and tags in letters It is sunday and I am at home. That means going online is only possible on 56k—a slight difference to the 100Mbit/s at the office; I shy away from going online so slow and am working offline. Working means reviewing and sorting the fieldnotes, -downloads, and logs of the last days into their appropriate daily folders. Apart from this I try to finish the begun weblog-entries, and try to bring them into an online-publishable format. By format I do not mean technicalities like inserting html-tags, but the texts themselves. Writing for immediate publication, … Continue reading →

new snake

Posted on Saturday, 12th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 12, 2012

taming of peripheral computer hardware revisited Today I bought a Razer Diamondback, the follow-up of the legendary Razer Boomslang. It glides over the pad seemingly almost without any friction. Its 1600dpi suit me very well, as meanwhile I am used to my Boomslang’s 2100. The ‘magma-glow’ looks nice, although I do not think it is necessary. The mouse really feels good, but despite of the glow does not radiate the mythical atmosphere of its predecessor. There simply is neither the same kind of history nor tradition yet — at least to me. And I indeed feel something like a traitor, … Continue reading →

lord vader visits troops

Posted on Thursday, 10th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 1, 2012

Galactic News Service reports: “TWILIGHT CITADEL, Tatooine (Valcyn) – Emperor Palpatine’s supreme military commander, Lord Darth Vader, recently made a surprise inspection tour of an Imperial military stronghold here. […]“ The staff at Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) had noticed, that inside the gameworld of their MMORPG “Star Wars Galaxies” (SWG) a group of players (forming the “203rd Tatooine Expeditionary Stormtrooper Legion”) had their troops very well organized and trained for quite some time. So SOE decided to stage an “ingame-live-event” and made Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, visit the troops. A global celebrity of a mythical character, well … Continue reading →

ethnography of online technology communities

Posted on Thursday, 10th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 3, 2012

MADANMOHAN, T. R. AND SIDDHESH NAVELKAR. 2004. Roles and knowledge management in online technology communities: an ethnography study. International Journal of Web Based Communities 1(1). Electronic Document. Available online: http://www.inderscience.com/filter.php?aid=4800(.pdf, 211KB) http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/madanmohan2.pdf (.pdf, 96KB) official abstract: “The internet is a heterogeneous network of millions of computers that is continuously evolving. The interaction among people around the world on the internet has led to the formation of communities. Technical communities are groups who share a common interest in a technology. The literature on technology communities lacks a conceptual understanding of the roles of various players in the online community. An understanding … Continue reading →

thick description of personal weblogging practice

Posted on Thursday, 10th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalJuly 6, 2012

David Brake, PhD-student (Media and Communications) at the LSE (not the Stock Exchange, but the London School of Economics and Political Science, where Malinowski was appointed to the first Chair in Social Anthropology in 1927), plans ethnographic research on blogging: “This study will provide a “thick” qualitative description (Geertz 1975) of personal weblogging practice in a particular context – that of authors from across England, purposively sampled to provide demographic variety, who have created their sites using either LiveJournal or Blogger’s software. [What about those who use geek-style software like blosxom? ;-] This description will be based on semi-structured interviews … Continue reading →

california digital library

Posted on Thursday, 10th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalOctober 3, 2012

“Harnessing technology and innovation, and leveraging the intellectual and cultural resources of the University of California, the California Digital Library supports the assembly and creative use of the world’s scholarship and knowledge for the UC libraries and the communities they serve. Established in 1997 as a UC library, the CDL has become one of the largest digital libraries in the world.” Searching for “Anthropology” delivered 61 anthropology-books online for free. via cyberanthropology … Continue reading →

videogamestudies

Posted on Wednesday, 9th March 2005 by zephyrin_xirdalFebruary 14, 2012

cultural difference on intercultural persistent state worlds Alan Meades, a Masters-degree (Electronic Arts) student at Middlesex University (UK) does post-graduate research in cyberanthropology: “This study aims to verify if players originating from geographically and culturally different backgrounds exhibit different game preferences, and therefore behaviour within Massively Multiplayer Online games. This study focuses specifically on Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XI because of the design of the server infrastructure, and the resultant feature that each server is shared with people from many cultures and nations. […]“ On his website Alan hosts an according online-survey, both in English and Japanese language! When I hit … Continue reading →

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Blog by Zephyrin Xirdal (since 2001)

Monthly Archives: March 2005