David Overholt exhibited his project “Robby the Racist Robot” at the 2007 ITP Winter Show. There are a few things that I love about this project:
1) Dave interfaced a dot matrix printer with his macbook – pure genius
2) the analysis Robby conducts is based on actual data that it aggregates
3) the social commentary associated with a project like this
Robby the Racist Robot is a playful way for people to consider our mass collection of data and information, and how it can be used or mis-used depending on its context. The scanner gathers a skin tone sample and links the profile to a country of origin based on a pigment chromatic scale from the early 20th century. The system then loads and parses through X number of databases filled with up-to-date statistics for your country. For example, if 40% of the population is female, the system uses an algorithm and 40% of the time will determine you are female and 60% of the time you will be male. This is done with all of the statistics before speaking and printing the information. Obviously this will result in stats that are incorrect, and different, every time but are still based in fact.
I’m amazed that Robby aggregates all the data to perform its calculations. And while the machine misinterprets the “conclusions” it comes to, I wanted to share this project in case it could inspire Bill Turkel at Digital History Hacks or others to think of similar ways a project like Robby could be created (and interpreted correctly) using historical data. Further information is at David’s website.
Hat tip to Found History for this modern remake of the Oregon Trail computer game — The Thule Trail. It mimics the visual style and structure of the original Apple II game, while traveling West in 2007, by car. Here’s the game’s description:
Load up your car for the classic American getaway: the road trip. Feel the nostalgia as you experience all the ups and downs of the road. And if you have what it takes to be a true road warrior, you’ll score some great prizes from Thule.
I’ve previously blogged about the Oregon Trail computer and how it represents history; the Thule Trail game has no ambitions of teaching but instead is just a fun game to play. For example, the hardships of the Oregon Trail are replaced with ridiculous situations with your friends who are tagging along on the trip:
“Kris auditions for a reality show and abandons the trip”
“Tom is summoned for jury duty and must return home” or
“Jeremy just fainted from lack of food. Maybe you should hunt”
In the survey I performed about the game, students most-often said they enjoyed the hunting portion of the game so I tried it out in the Thule Trail. Visually its similar, but instead of hunting Buffalo you are aiming at candy bars and cheeseburgers; interesting social commentary in itself.
On Friday the Omeka team hit a new milestone – the fourth release candidate of our web publishing software for collections. This release includes several noteworthy changes, that in the long run are going to make a huge difference to users installing the software:
Greater Database Flexibility
Thanks to the hard work of Kris Kelly, we’ve removed the Object Relational Mapper Doctrine from our core code, in favor of a custom solution that removes an unnecessary library and makes Omeka significantly faster.
The new version also doesn’t require PDO, but can support mySQLi as a substitute instead. For some users on shared hosts that don’t support PDO, this will come in handy.
Database prefixing allows you to have multiple Omeka installs running on a single database, which is once again important for users on shared hosting.
A New Plugin
We packaged Omeka with a “Dropbox” plugin I’ve been developing – it allows you to batch upload files to get your collection online faster than entering each item separately. I’ve found this to be incredibly useful when putting images online, and I’m sure others will find this helpful as well.
RSS for Syndication of everything
A flexible solution for the aggregation of items is now included in Omeka. XML and RDF outputs can also be given, for not only new items added to a collection, but search results as well. Plugins can hook into the feed class to add their own RSS feeds as well.
Learn More
We’re currently in private beta, but adding new testers with each release. To learn more, visit our website, and email us to sign up to be a beta tester.
