Month: December 2019

The game I’ve chosen doesn’t have amazing graphics nor does it have much of an open world system compared to more modern games, but it is quite a host unto itself when it comes to storytelling and character development. 

‘Fable III’ is a medieval/ steampunk based game that includes magic and whatnot ( essentially all the aspects of a well rounded fantasy game). Although not very technologically advanced for nowadays is have an amazing spin on player involvement in the game. you begin as a neutral character with not much skills or knowledge or the world your playing in except a basic mission and goal. However, this is a decision based game that works off the tree map system used in game design meaning one choice will lead to a different branch of the tree and will change how the rest of the game is played drastically. As you develop in the game and make decisions based on scenarios you’re confronted with you’re character changes from being neutral to being either and good benevolent monarch or a tyrant ( I should have mentioned this earlier but you start as a prince/princess who has to go undercover as a commoner to help stop and evil in the kingdom). I find this way of having a character develop is amazing and genius, because you can play this game countless times and never get the exact same story arc for you character each time.  while playing the game , unless you aware of this development, you don’t realise that the way your story is going is essentially a reflection of how you yourself would react in this situation and really makes you reflect on your character outcome  at the end of the game. 

I personally would say this game is one of my all time favourite games solely because of the storytelling aspect and how it twists your character as you play. not very up there in technology wise but pretty good in player interaction wise. 

I’ve decided to write a response/ review of the talk given to us in weeks 5 and 6 by Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez re: Open access and Social Media.

Open Access

For me these were the two topics we’ve touched on in the module that I am really interested and passionate about. From a young age I was taught about open access and the freedom of information, and it is something that’s been in my mind even more so now that I’m in a environment that is so dependent on these things. I agree with the fact that we should have more open access documents and the digitisation should be a given in most cases for archiving however there’s also the fact of money. As much as we want everything to be free it just isn’t feasible with out current resources, digitisation takes a lot more time and money than most people realise and academic journals are, in some cases, the sole income for some academics. Eventually we’ll get to a time when academics are paid their dues and everyone has a better living wage but until there monetisation of knowledge is still some thing that needs to be done as a sacrifice while work on better outcomes.

Although I realise this is slightly contradictory to the point I just made, the fact that certain information is pay walled, for example: books for school and classes, basic historic archives as well as quite a large amount of general knowledge. Now, I don’t mean pay walled in the outright sense in all cases, in cases such as LSOTR we forget that all the books and journals on there aren’t openly accessible and that our capitation fees go towards paying for our use of this knowledge outlet. Which, in my opinion, creates this knowledge hierarchy among those who have attended college or an institution and those who maybe decided to pursue another path such as an apprenticeship. This alienation through academia is extremely toxic and creates further socio-economic divides that will continue if more resources aren’t made available to the general public.

Social Media

When it comes to social media there’s dozens of debates one can touch on and extrapolate. In the lecture we didn’t so much talk much about the platforms themselves but their use of our data for things such as marketing and political campaigns.

I never found it surprising that our privacy and our data was no longer our own once we embarked on our online social adventures, part of me hold the opinion that anyone who still thinks that they are able to have absolute and sure control over their own privacy and information is only fooling themselves. Sure, there are steps one can take to stop people knowing about you and attempting to keep yourself as safe a s possible but there will always be someone out there who has information on you and will distribute it whether we like to admit it or not. Of course the Cambridge analytica scandal shook people to their cores, that they were prey to psychological endeavors and were manipulated. Personally I’m just surprised they got caught, it seems like quite a sloppy job, but I mean the corporations involved have now become sloppy in their day to day goings on.

For one of the other assignments I did, I responded to an paper re: the trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media. This was interesting and talked about the measures taken by platforms to stop the spread of ‘fake news’ on their websites and how there’s been a steady decline over the past 2 years in some websites, however, in others there been and exponential increase in the spreading of misinformation and pseudoscience in that same time period. I can see how this paper ties in to the general topic of social media and it touches more so on the finer points that we as a community need to actually focus on and bring forward an awareness of. There’s also a certain level of acceptance that needs to be had among us that, we as a people most likely cannot change what will happen with our data in the near future nor can we stop our information getting out but that we can work on making sure future generations have some forms of security and safety concerning these matters

*From my writings on canvas and my website I only had around 1000 words so I will be essentially be writing a small piece on what I did for my presentation in class as I realise I was not clear enough about it when talking to people who do not know much about historical recreation.

The Symington Collection

The Symington Pattern Collection is a online archive of original patterns from the Symington Corset factories. The Archive was digitised only a few years ago but gained much popularity in the world of historical garmenting. I will go into a brief explanation as to why this was such an important step in digitisation.

Usually when we think of digitisation we think of only academic uses or for museum exhibitions. With this collection we are seeing it being used in a more practical open source manner that doesn’t alienate people with the thought of it being a solely academic archive. Now for us costumers it is academic in a way as we will study and note on it the same as a professor would a manuscript, however many of those in our area were self taught and may not have gone to a university or other academic institution to study historical textiles and construction. This archive allows those of us who do not have the resources that others in institutions might have. The archive is free and the pieces may be freely downloaded, you can also buy to scale prints of the pieces should you not be able to completely redraft is with your skill set.

This is just one way digitisation was used to benefit a certain group but it could be used in so many different ways. Currently most of what we work off of is books that researchers have spent years putting together and piecing into existence. For example, Janet Arnold was a fashion historian and spent the last 25 years or so of her life recreating patterns of historical garments to put into a book so that those who weren’t able to access these resources could get them and do their own work. For quite some time Janet’s books were pretty much all we had until open source books and high quality imaging came around and the freedom of knowledge became more widely spread. Now thankfully we have platforms and online free institutes that are making partnerships with museums to get more patterns digitised and to allow for high quality imaging of pieces that in previous years you would have had to waited to see. One in particular is the Peacock Dress by the Worth fashion house made c.1890. The Worth gown mentioned is one of the most elusive gowns of it times and still is today for those in the recreation business. The dress was embroidered with gold and silver fibres and over time those have rusted and begun to damage the Indian silk the dress was made from. Two dress historians (Cathy Hay and Bernadette Banner) have taken up the task of re-creating the original gown and have in turn begun gathering extremely high quality imaging of the dress and its exquisite embroidery.

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