Reflecting Metadata
This week was important to finalize a second phase of gathering and importing metadata on our video game corpus into Wikidata. The intermittent results are two SPARQL queries:
- Swiss games until 2000, with publishers and developers: [https://w.wiki/866)
- Swiss games until 2000, but with staff: https://w.wiki/96Vu
Working that intensely gave me a good feeling for the corpus at hand. The corpus isn’t huge yet, with just 120 games in question, but especially trying to figure out who (companies and people) were behind the games painted a good image of the developer scene back then.
A thing that stuck with me, is the question of what makes a game a Swiss game. The question is trivial. Ascribing nationality to a game is futile. Nonetheless, it is a good entry point to the wider network of the things we’re interested in. In Ludens, video games are windows into complex pasts where cultural, social, economic, and political movements and changes entangle. The question could then be, what makes this game a game from exactly back there and then?
Most of this ascription was happening through the actors who produced the game. If the developing studio or the majority of the people working on the game were registered in Switzerland, it’s a Swiss game. But that definition is often useless. I found this case where a Swiss person ported a UK game, on a Japanese console, for the EU market. It’s certainly not a Swiss game per definition, but it’s interesting to our inquiry. I wrote some more thoughts on that in Wikidata
Thoughts on the Corpora Paper
Working with Wikidata made me realize how precise such a purely descriptive knowledge graph can be, let alone old-school database approaches like Mobygames. I noted down some of the Open Questions I encountered. The core problem seems to be the local development with global entanglements, such as migrating workforces, international markets, informal knowledge transfers and global pop-cultural influences. A good first question summarizing this problem could be “How can the digital humanities describe video games not as objects, but capture them as complex activities, involving many actors and epistemologies that compressed into this artefact?”
Log 2024-06
- I added the staff of our video games’ corpus to Wikidata. That was quite a lot of work. Checking what games have information on the people who worked on them, figuring out their roles, adding them to the master list, reconciliating those people, and finally associating them with the games in Wikidata. The whole process raised some questions that I noted under Wikidata.
- Yesterday I continued the Intersection DH and Video Game Studies article, but the part about our intermittent findings was tough to write, and I didn’t advance as wished.
- The Wikidata Metadata part feels quite advanced by now. Adding staff was important. Following, I produced two SPARQL queries. Looking at the query results, especially through the graph view, gives a good overview of the video games development scene. I will at least add “systems” and “programmed in” attributes and then try to delve a bit into the data, to see if I can emerge some patters.
- A rough research on metadata, ontologies and vocabularies regarding games didn’t unearth a lot of material. There is maybe only that much that can be done. Archives are perhaps a bit further in that regard, then the digital humanities, since they had specific use cases to advance the topic. On the other hand, I’m not quite sure yet, where to go with the metadata. I guess I’ll need to figure out a hypotheses or question, for which I would have some first thoughts.
- Added an Agenda part to the phd-synopse. After reading KS’ funding application, I felt the need to clarify and flesh out the pursued outputs and how they connect to my research interests and schedule. Likewise, I expanded on Relevance and broader impact.