PLEASE NOTE: This is currently being re-formatted
Definition
Making software that celebrates creativity
- “And why write about it? Because this period of translation and exploration has just begun for Casual Creative software. It remains uncategorized, falling into a half-dozen different categories on the app store. The focus of thinkers and researchers, both in academia and in industry, remains focussed on “creativity support tools” and the broad, professional productivity tools, like Maya and Photoshop, while this area remains unexamined. And, for a field of such seemingly simple pieces of software, there’s a lot to examine.”
Wondering - if creativity is the new normal, is this kind of software enabling us to think through concepts, kind of like the way artists and designers use sketches to work through a concept before committing it to a more high-fidelity version. In this vein, I wonder if the idea of a casual creator can branch out and differentiate casual creators from those who use this type of software as a way to wireframe or rapid-prototype ideas before committing heavier resources to them.
- “Why do we want “normal” people to be creative?
Wondering - Do we want normal people to be creative or is creative just the new normal?”_
Creativity
Making software that celebrates creativity
- “This dichotomy is frequently characterized as the “Big C, Little c” creativity. A child playing with paints is being “creative”; Mozart, while composing a symphony, is being “Creative”. Presumably, if Mozart played with paints as a child, he, too, was little-c “creative” in those moments. James Kauffman extends that to 4 Cs, including creativity in the learning process and professional, but not transformative, creativity.”
I find this problematic in that it creates “classes” of creativity that may in fact discount certain aspects of creativity or certain acts of creativity, simply because one is a child or an adult. It can also have an effect of limiting the types of people and knowledge domains that can be creative, which I also find problematic.
- “It’s also telling that a lot of the creativity research is sponsored by the military, with the goal of enhancing workflow and generating better ideas”
I don’t find this surprising, given that creativity is largely about being able to find less-obvious solutions to problems within given constraints.
- “game is about pleasure, not productivity”
Unless it’s both, like in the case of FoldIT, an online proline folding game, whose outputs actually help inform research for curing diseases. Phyllo (from McGill university is another example. http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/
Towards an Evolution of the Discipline
Digital Practice as Meaning Making in Archaeology
- “Far from being a definitive statement, we see these articles as being the opening words of a conversation that will continue indefinitely and which will provoke new ways of thinking about our discipline and those that work within it.”
Wondering - It seems odd to have to make a statement such as this, since any discipline should always be actively engaged in the discourse surrounding its own evolution, lest it becomes out of touch with the world that surrounds it, and loses relevance and the ability to effectively do research an provide outputs that can be shared in meaningful ways.
- “Diversity is an increasingly prominent characteristic of digital heritage research as well as the interdisciplinary studies that we have described above.”
Wondering - I’m thinking that embracing open source is key here, so that we can perhaps start to look across disciplines and start developing patern libraries for different approaches to research in the humanities, that can then inform the development of new platforms and/or plug-ins to enable different kinds of research and its outputs. There has already been some evidence of this with open source tools out there such as R, but it is also important to make sure that we don’t make this about the technology, instead making it about what it is we are researching (which, yes, may well be technology; but then it is the subject of the research).
- “It also seems an exceedingly odd way to shape our methodological strategies.”
Wondering - is this an argument for Archaeology to take on a more agile approach to the discipline perhaps? Having said that, in my experience, it is easiest to stay on course when the goals and objectives are clear, as well as the strategies that enable them. It is easy to get caught up in the what and how of a thing and lose sight of the why. With a clearer sense of the underlying values of the discipline, perhaps it would prime people to start with defining what they want to research and why, and then move towards seeing what is out there to enable the research in the most efficient way possible.
- “to characterise methodological transformation in terms of technological innovation” Wondering - is this just simply the process of evolution for the discipline’s tools for engagement? One could argue that in this kind of situation, it behooves one to test the limits of the technology in terms of enabling process and methodology before one starts to revisit theory on its effects. I.e. you need to start making change before you can look at what its effects are.
Tools
Twine Article
- “They are both tools that allow the creation of fantastic interactive texts, both have passionate adherents, and there are many fascinating discussions on the web comparing and analyzing both.”
Wondering - Personally I prefer it when a tool is something that enables me to complete the task I want to do, rather than something that becomes about having to learn the tool first, and then getting to your task. Granted, there are times when you just need to learn a tool to get certain things done, but this should not be the default; to have to learn yet another tool to complete a seemingly mundane task.
- “Effectively researching and designing even a modestly accurate interpretation of the past in the form of a text adventure, in short, requires students to engage in high order historical thinking and doing.”
Wonderful - I love the idea of this a allowing students to not only gain an appreciation for the past, but also to be able to unpack the cause and effect nature of history in more meaningful ways, since this method allows them to think through the impacts that different decisions may have had.
Digital Practice as Meaning Making in Archaeology
- “Besides vision, sound and haptics he also calls for more pronounced olfactory triggers to be introduced in situ (i.e. smellscapes) to facilitate more fully embodied and kinaesthetic explorations of, and deeper engagement with, archaeological landscapes, as demonstrated in the evocatively named Dead Man’s Nose project, which is part of Moesg√ord Museum’s archaeological trail.”
Wondering - is this fascination with technology about proving better simulations, as a way of being able to do “cheaper” research through technology before going out there and doing first-hand research? It seems that there is a lot of effort being spent on trying to simulate the “being there” aspects.
- “Murphy et al.’s research is a pertinent reminder to the archaeological research community that meaningful engagements with the past, whether through research or through contact with mediated content, frequently emerge from beyond the limits of our discipline.”
Wonderful - I think this reinforces the fact that the technology is something that is there to enable the discipline, not necessarily become its primary focus. It is one thing to go and study the effects of technology on a a single or many disciplines, and it is another to use it to help in the study of other things. In DH, these lines may be blurred by the fact that the interest in the digital underlies the niche that can be applied to the different disciplines, however, my thinking is that this is more because we are glamoured by the cool factor of technology, and perhaps even the validation that showing something in a neat new way provides, rather than really focusing on what the knowledge is that we are trying to put into the world.
- “Far from being passive consumers of technology, archaeologists need to be involved in a constant negotiation with technology, informed by cultures of research and practice”
Wondering - I would not limit this to archaeology. I think anyone doing any kind of research would do well to maintain a healthy surface-level awareness of available technologies so as to enable them to go see what would fit best once the research question(s) have been determined.
- “Largely lacking from this discourse, however, has been a recognition of the emergence of traditions of practice that are distinctly digital but which are rooted in archaeological epistemologies or, in other words, the development of a digital archaeological praxis.”
Wondering - is this because technology changes so quickly that it does not give us time to fully reflect on one tool before we are already looking at another one?
- “interplay between computing and archaeology has been less explicitly theoretical and less discursive than the interplay between the arts and archaeology”
Wondering - is this the difference between a more operational/tactical approach and a more strategic one with tech as the former and arts as the latter? I.e. is tech more of a tool that enables archaeology, while the arts is more of a counterpoint or partner in the discourse?
Making things: Photobashing as Archaeological Remediation?
- “The relationship between how something looks and feels in reality, how it looks and feels in a photo and how it looks and feels in an artistic render and how we can navigate, understand and reflect between these spaces.”
Wonderful - I really like the concept of this as something akin to generating an emotional interpretation (read: subjective, personal, organic) of what is seen. Even though this is generated digitally, and therefore reproducible, it is somewhat closer to art, given that the interpretative layer is superimposed on top of the “real” layer in terms of what the camera captures as a fixed eye of sorts. I also find this to be metaphorical of how we interpret the past and present world around us, in that we impose that interpretative layer on top of the way something “is” and turn into what we “interpret it to be”.
Making software that celebrates creativity
- “website like colourlovers.com, and polyvore.com, and even in tiny or seemingly silly pieces of software like memegenerator.
Wondering - These should also include sites such as IMGUR and Reddit, whose communities will upvote content that they like, providing validation and additional feels that may get these casual creators going back for more.
- _“creativity is both restricted and supported to allow greater accessibility, ease of use, and, perhaps, greater creativity because of that.”
Wondering - creativity is both restricted and supported to allow greater accessibility, ease of use, and, perhaps, greater creativity because of that.