[OT] Visualize McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory

Hey everyone,

No apologies for cross-posting -- infospam uber alles! ;-)

Visualize This!

How can we 'see' a written text? Do you have a new way of visualizing
writing on the screen? If so, then McKenzie Wark and the Institute for the
Future of the Book have a challenge for you. We want you to visualize
McKenzie's new book, Gamer Theory.

Version 1 of Gamer Theory was
presented by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a 'networked book',
open to comments from readers. McKenzie used these comments to write version
2, which will be published
in April by Harvard
University Press. With the new version we want to extend
this exploration of the book in the digital age, and we want you to be part
of it.

All you have to do is
register,
download the v2 text, make a visualization of it (preferably of the whole
text though you can also focus on a single part), and upload it to our
server with a short explanation of how you did it.

All visualizations will be presented in a gallery on the new Gamer
Theorysite. Some contributions may be specially featured. All entries
will receive
a free copy of the printed book (until we run out).

By "visualization" we mean some graphical representation of the text that
uses computation to discover new meanings and patterns and enables forms of
reading that print can't support. Some examples that have inspired us:

Brad Paley's "Text Arc"
Marcos Weskamp's "Newsmap"
Chirag Mehta's "US Presidential Speeches Tag
Cloud"
Kushal Dave's "Exegesis"
CNET News.com 's "The Big
Picture"
"Visuwords" online graphical dictionary
Christopher Collins'
"DocuBurst"
Stamen Design's rendering of Kate Hayles' "Narrating Bits"
in USC's Vectors
Brian Kim Stefans' "The Dreamlife of
Letters"
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Understand that this is just a loose guideline. Feel encouraged to break the
rules, hack the definition, show us something we hadn't yet imagined.

All visualizations, like the web version of the text, will be Creative
Commons licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial). You have the option of making
your code available under this license as well or keeping it to yourself. We
encourage you to share the source code of your visualization so that others
can learn from your work and build on it. In this spirt, we've asked
experienced hackers to provide code samples and resources to get you started
(these will be made available on the upload page).

Gamer 2.0 will launch around April 18th in synch with the Harvard edition.

Read GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 .

Download/upload page (registration required):
http://web.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/viz/

------------------

The Institute for the Future of the Book is
a small New York-based think tank dedicated to inventing new forms of
discourse for the network age. Other recent publishing experiments include
an annotated online edition of the Iraq Study Group
Report(with Lapham's
Quarterly) and Without
Gods: Toward a History of
Disbelief(with
Mitchell Stephens, NYU). Read the Institute's blog,
if:book .

McKenzie Wark teaches media and cultural studies at the New School for
Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. He is the author
of several books, most recently A Hacker
Manifesto(Harvard
University Press) and
Dispositions (Salt
Publishing).