Magic: Software implementation of humanities-centered interactive media

Many digital humanities projects require not only a plan to develop software, but a complex set of software protocols to represent culture. Magic will demonstrate the innovations present in cultural code and provide an in-depth look at the practitioners engaged in their solutions. The interface will include media such as video documentaries, audio interviews, and text analysis, while also including interactive techniques to demonstrate how code represents culture and vise versa.

Concept design for Magic. Code excerpts in the right column are annotated by cultural material in the left column. Going the other direction, cultural material is annotated by code.

A Magic reader will see two columns: in the right column are code excerpts; in the left column are cultural materials. Hovering your mouse over specific pieces of the code will reveal media objects describing and annotating the code. The media objects might be textual descriptions, interviews with the creators and users of the software describing its significance, writing about related themes, or a snippet of the front-end project it operates on. Likewise, interacting with the cultural material in the left column will reveal code that produces or engages the material. Using the split-screen, one side examines the “who” and “why” of culturally-sensitive software, the other discovers the “what” and “how”.

Magic explores the relationship between software and culture while also highlighting humanities projects that have made impacts on culture. The content of Magic will be dictated by the projects it features, and we are in the process of discovering projects to include. A part of Magic that may be of particular interest to Critical Code Studies is that the actual executable software created by running a piece of code is weighted equally with all other media that annotate the code. Rather than focusing on code as a means to an executable end, the executable is merely one interpretation of a text document written in a coded language.

(This post originally published at the Critical Code Studies Working Group, February 2, 2010.)

Magic co-creator Craig Dietrich presented a prototype design of the Magic interface to a live audience at USC’s Digital Studies Symposium, February 11, 2010.

A Magic reader will see two columns: in the right column are code excerpts; in the left column are cultural materials. Hovering your mouse over specific pieces of the code will reveal media objects describing and annotating the code. The media objects might be textual descriptions, interviews with the creators and users of the software describing its significance, writing about related themes, or a snippet of the front-end project it operates on. Likewise, interacting with the cultural material in the left column will reveal code that produces or engages the material. Using the split-screen, one side examines the “who” and “why” of culturally-sensitive software, the other discovers the “what” and “how.”

Craig Dietrich speaks in front of a Magic prototype design at USC’s Digital Studies Symposium

Fellows from this summer’s Vectors-IML NEH Institute in Los Angeles speak about their collaborations and interests in an interactive media installation across the country in Maine. Magic is presently installed at the Without Borders VI: Conjunction gallery show on the University of Maine campus, and features video interview segments and theme-based navigation to explore the processes by which interactive media projects are produced. Co-produced by Vectors staffer Craig Dietrich with U-Maine Intermedia graduate student John Bell, and L.A.-based installation artist Vanessa Vobis, the team created the installation as an early introduction to Magic, intending a full, Web-based release in 2010.

To see the installation on the Web, visit http://magic.craigdietrich.com/WithoutBorders

Early Magic interview videos featured in an interactive gallery installation at the University of Maine’s Without Borders, September 2009. Video still: Elizabeth Losh

Software and data innovations are routinely present in projects that examine culture. Magic will showcase these advances and the process, design, and implementation by which they are created. Specifically, Magic is comprised of three core intents:

— To provide a platform for discussion of innovations in interactive media. Through interviews, annotated code, descriptions, and video demos, the magical space between database and front-end design, where programming turns flat data into objects, will be revealed.

— To create a resource for culturally-sensitive interactive media projects, as this project genre often requires a rethinking of approaches in both content and software.

— To act as documentation for open source projects. With many projects hoping to open up their code for reuse by others, but whose development team lacks the resources to document their code and tactics, Magic will be the documentation.

Consider a new media project linking Indigenous cultural protocols and media content. The project would require presentation and media delivery software. In addition, it would also need to create logic based on the cultural protocols. This isn’t a task written up in how-to books by major software houses in America, but rather is the domain of humanities groups and individuals interested in advancing knowledge and community. Creating a resource hub for sharing between these groups—and new teams venturing out—will benefit similarly-minded practitioners and educate others on the efforts required to create such projects.

Resources presented in Magic could be technically-oriented and cross-disciplinary: how team A mapped migration routes; how team B overcame relational data limitations to create mind maps; how team C created an innovative way to represent a culture’s sharing protocols with a MySQL database.

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