Further reflecting metadata (and ontologies)

In the last two weeks, I had the opportunity to speak with some people I trust a lot in terms of metadata and ontologies, namely Julien Raemy and Lozana Rossanova. Both independently brought up that Records in Context will not magically add value to my inquiry and my outlined problems with contextualizing could easily be approached through the CIDOC CRMdig extension or Linked Art, which draws from CRMdig dig as well.

Still, I’m unsure where to go exactly with this. There is no apparent problem that presents itself to me and asks me to engage with it. And, after expanding all that metadata, I’m also not offered a hypotheses that I could try to prove. I have a hunch, that the metadata corpus might still lack in either scope or detail, or both. My wish to be able to create better historic contextualization, outlined in Reflecting Metadata still stands. While speaking with Julien, I was able to slightly expand on that. Let’s try to put it into words.

I’m interested in early video game graphics programming practices (I let go of calling that creative coding, see below). Trying to model those practices, as one does in the digital humanities, I could imagine a close reading of source code, where I try to link up parts of it with provenance sources, as well as it’s output on screen. The latter would leverage the Assembling a Video Game Screenshots Corpus and fit to my general research interests. In the case of Robox.md) I already did one interview and got informed about the importance of one specific magazine issue as inspiration and for code examples. I got design documents, like maps, that were adapted from the magazine. And, the interviewee also mentioned how they got into possession of some Assembly code that was used to make the game load quicker. Those pieces of information could be linked up together into a model.

This approach would not solve any apparent problem, but at least build a strong case example of an interesting historic contextualization. Right? Have to discuss that with Julien. I tried to rudimentary map the Robox case in Miro in order to figure a bit out what’s around and what can I wrap or express those things.

Log 2024-08

• Worked on adding releases to the games on Wikidata, for which I first had to figure out how to do that properly. Some notes on the process can be found under Releases and Ports.
• Got two comments on my dissertation’s pitch on researching creative coding practices in the context of video games in the 80ies and 90ies. Both were questioning the term “creative coding” which I understand. It was a way of describing my research interest, but it’s not necessarily that easily applicable or holding up critique. I guess, bringing the pitch closer to my original contribution to science would help a lot. So… what is my original contribution to science? Probably something along the lines of a “multimodal inquiry of digital artefacts with a focus on programming practices, program code, and video game graphics design”. Added as todo to the Synopse
• Read through a bunch of papers that concentrate on Video Game Metadata and Ontologies. Got some insights, mostly that the presented approaches don’t help me much in my own endeavour, since they often concentrate on describing what is in the game. Although working on video games, I more interested in the coming into being of those artefacts and I need other ontologies to describe that.