(I do not have many photos from this week)
Since the last thesis class I’ve been busy both conceptualizing where my work will sit between, and continuing to experiment with my Apple II. In between my classes, projects, and work I also found time to meet with a few faculty for office hours. I’ve talked with Simone, Pedro, Sarah, Tanika, and (this Wednesday) Nasif.
I think I have a clear understanding of what I want to conceptually do and achieve over the next two semesters. I have a clear interest bridging the Digital Humanities and Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, investigating Media Archeology and Software Studies, and I believe I have the opportunity to create new knowledge that can help link these disciplines together.
I’ve been (trying) to read as well. Currently I’m working through Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications by Erkki Huhtamo and The Stack by Benjamin Bratton. Earlier, Nasif also suggest a chapter on Wiring in Different Engines by Andrés Burbano. Broadly, Media Archeology seems to simply be a term to investigate past cultures through the media and communication technologies. I’ve been focusing much of my reading on Media Archeology since it was a discipline I hadn’t heard of before, but because of how broad it is, I am going to turn my focus towards Software Studies. The hard part will be trying to make my own artifact and verify any new frameworks I may come up with.
Software Studies is similar to Media Archeology in that it investigates culture through code. Since the discipline grew out of Digital Humanities, writing related to the field relates more to computational poetry, and from Digital Humanities journals I’ve seen cross-over from Human-Computer Interaction but less digital humanity writing crossing the technical boundary.
Here’s a list of people I’ve learned of (in no specific order):
One struggle I want to overcome through my thesis is not making my work too technical with a story to tell. Much of the work and writing by the people above are very academic and/or technical, and I would want my project to be readable by a larger non-technical audience.
Meanwhile for my love-hate relationship working with the Apple II. Last Thursday, I thought an IC in the computer’s motherboard had broken. The SCSI card I had orderd (and had working) was not being recognized by the computer’s ROM chip causing its initial startup screen to hang. After a day of stressful debugging, it was working as normal once again. I found a good “recipe” to reset my BlueSCSI in order. It involves a lot of SD card formatting and iteratively adding disk image files until the opersting system and files were back where it belonged.
Today I made some advancements though. I have a system to consistently load an operating system with basic networking software. Now I am working to verify that the Apple II can correctly communicate with the BlueSCSI in order to create a custom adapter to handle network communications. The good news is three weeks ago a hobbyist Apple II software developer released a set of drivers to improve the link between the Apple II and BlueSCSI.
I have a lot of work to do, including learning some basic Assembly, to get the vintage computer connected to the internet. I still do not know why I am going down this sisyphean task, but I feel like there’s merit to it.
That’s all for now.