The New Open Culture

My good friend Dan Colman has recently moved his great site Open Culture to its new Internet home, the one it should have had all along: www.openculture.com. I wrote a few blog posts for Dan back in the day (far fewer than I'd actually said I would, alas), and I love the site.

If you've never seen it, be sure to check it out, especially his incredible, expanding archive of free high-quality podcasts, lectures and more--including a great list of free audio books.

The Future of Search

I've been meaning to post this for a long time. A couple of months ago I wrote a short article about a Stanford Humanities Center workshop that I help coordinate. Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access is doing some cutting-edge research in the digital humanities. Check it out!

Open Culture: Another Blog Life

My friend Dan has invited me to start contributing to Open Culture, his awesome blog and compendium of all things podcastic, free and/or cultural. Check out my first post!

CanonWar!

Well, maybe not, but it was still exciting to see two of my colleagues from Stanford get some Newspaper of Record facetime today for their work on video game research. Henry Lowood and Matteo Bittanti have both been involved in the study of games as cultural forms and it's nice to see their work reaching such a major audience.

The article discusses their efforts to create a draft canon for game studies. Of course, this is just as contentious in video games as it is in literature or film, and the difference between a formal canon and a top ten list is awfully thin. However, I think both Henry and Matteo would be quick to argue that the point isn't to isolate a few games for special treatment but to get the rest of us thinking about games as artifacts worth studying and archiving. Henry has done an amazing job of building up the Stanford Library's collection of games, consoles and more.