Dans cet article, nous discutons et mettons en avant l'intérêt d'une réflexion motivée par un rapprochement analytique autour d'un unique élément ludique, celui de la feuille de personnage, particulièrement — mais non exclusivement — en lien avec le jeu de rôle sur table et sur écran. Nous explorons plus avant ce qu'est la feuille de personnage, soit ce que recoupe ce motif et comment il s'insère dans la pratique grâce à des exemples singuliers et variés, issus de formats et de modalités ludiques habituellement peu rapprochés, de manière à faire apparaitre son caractère adaptatif, pérenne et pervasif. Nous nous interrogeons enfin sur les êtres fictionnels que les feuilles de personnages offrent d'interpréter à partir de l'usage d'indicateurs numériques et sur les symboliques associées à ces manipulations de grandeurs. Sur le plan méthodologique, cet article vise également à offrir une démonstration d'analyse centrée sur le concept de motif ludique.

Publié sur le site internet d’un journal généraliste suisse, le jeu vidéo Quatre apparts et un confinement (2020) met en scène les quotidiens de quatre personnages inspirés de faits vécus lors du semi-confinement instauré en Suisse, au printemps 2020, en raison de la pandémie de COVID-19. En utilisant les concepts de « jeu d’actualité documentaire », de « réalité opérationnelle » et de « réalisme social », cet article explique la démarche créative derrière le développement de ce jeu vidéo qui, à l’aide de choix de dialogue, de mises en scène et de mini-jeux, rend compte des expériences vécues par des personnes aux différents profils sociodémographiques en temps de pandémie, en s’intéressant aux impacts psychologiques de cette situation sur ces dernières.

ai pu y donner une longue conférence filmée dans un immense amphithéâtre.

In this presentation, we would like to open for discussion the availability and role of source codes, binaries, and graphical and audio assets, for game historiography. With that objective in mind, we offer to present a case study focusing on the original source codes of ​Bong (Daniel Roux, 1987), a game developed for a local Swiss series of computers, the Smaky. We will explain how these source codes were recovered, and sketch how they can be “read”, and thus used to trace patterns, influences, signatures and innovations from a source code point of view. We are looking forward to discussing some of the existing methods with the workshop attendees.

This chapter presents a dataset of 1,725 historical video games released between 1981 and 2015, with a particular focus on the distribution of these games across platforms, genres, and historical eras over time. The same importance is given in this large-scale analysis to an ‘blockbuster’ game as to a forgotten ‘one-person’ game developed decades ago. It follows a ‘distant reading’ approach, allowing to attempt to uncover aspects of video game history by highlighting tendencies at a macro level. Placed on a year scale, two distinct growing time intervals are observed: one from 1981 to 1997, followed by a sudden acceleration leading to a second period of growth from 1999 to 2007. This second period coincides with the ‘fifth generation’ of home consoles (PlayStation, Saturn, Nintendo 64) and ends with the arrival of the ‘seventh’ generation (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii). It is then followed by a regression possibly caused by the market of mobile gaming (not included in the dataset).

Introduction In this paper, we propose a set of guidelines which can serve to conduct projects combining preservation and analytical tasks concerning a given platform, including its video games, especially at a regional level. As the capabilities of such local platforms influenced how video games were to be designed and developed, we consider that they must be documented and understood when studying regional video games history during eras when local platforms were more frequent. We illustrate our approach with an ongoing research project focused on the heritage of the Swiss computer Smaky (1978–1995) and the video games it welcomed.

Pour une analyse des discours sur le jeu vidéo : l'exemple des « cinématiques »Le jeu vidéo God of War (Santa Monica Studio), paru le 20 avril 2018, a été qualifié à l'unanimité de jeu en « plan-séquence » par la presse spécialisée, nous rappelant ainsi la prégnance du lexique cinématographique au sein des schèmes de perception et d'évaluation des productions vidéoludiques.L'absence de « saute » dans le flux visuel du jeu amène un journa liste de Libération à le qualifier de « plan-séquence de 30 heures » 1 , avant de se fendre d'une référence à La Corde (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, E-U), puis d'ajouter : « Pas un temps de chargement, pas un plan de coupe, pas un fondu au noir ne vient interrompre la progression d'une forêt enneigée à la cime d'une montagne.Les cinématiques n'ont pas disparu mais la transition reste quasi invisible.» 2Cet exemple illustre la place de choix qu'occupe le cinéma en qualité de « médiateur des imaginaires » 3 dans le contexte de l'industrie du jeu vidéo, marquée par des logiques généralisées d'hybridation et de convergence médiatiques et par une histoire culturelle riche en synergies industrielles et économiques.Il témoigne également du fait que parallèlement aux termes empruntés au cinéma, le lexique vidéoludique a aussi créé ses propres notions, parfois au contact d'autres médias, comme en atteste le vocable « cinématique » 4 (ou « cutscene » en anglais, suivant la terminologie majoritairement employée).Dans le cadre de cet article, nous proposons de retracer l'histoire de la notion de « cinématique » à partir d'un corpus de magazines spécialisés publiés entre 1982 et 1998.Afin de conduire une « lecture distante » de ce corpus textuel composé de 70 000 pages environ, nous avons développé une méthodologie d'analyse des données utilisant des outils informatiques inédits dans le domaine des game studies.L'objectif de cette recherche consiste à proposer une alternative à l'étude des relations entre le cinéma et les jeux vidéo (fondée sur l'analyse d'éléments formels) au profit de l'analyse des discours dans une perspective résolument 1 Marius Chapuis,

This paper introduces a way of studying science fiction works using mathematical methods grounded in graph theory. Our approach combines close and distant reading in order to describe the structural roles of characters, as they appear in the network built from their co-occurrences in the text. This study includes three main results. The first consists in the introduction of « middle reading », a method combining close and distant reading to analyze character systems in works of fiction. It relies on network visualization together with mathematical concepts like centrality or cluster detection. The second result consists in a typology of the works composing the corpus, based on the structure of their character networks. The third result is a reading proposal based on character qualification as scientist, technician or politician. This approach adds a dimension to these characters networks, thus allowing a richer interpretation of characters systems.

Papers including the topic “Networks, Relationships, Graphs” have comprised roughly 10% of submissions to ADHO’s annual conference for the past 4 years a sizable portion, to be sure, but one that has remained roughly consistent in that time (Weingart, 2015). “Networks” are, in the abstract, familiar to humanities scholars devoted to studying complex relationships. This potential is alluring, but advanced network analytical techniques are challenging to implement and interpret. And overly complex visualizations have attracted derogation from some scholars, deriding visually-impressive but uninterpretable graphs as “hairballs.” This roundtable will take up crucial questions: What kinds of data, questions and interpretive techniques are appropriate for network analysis? How does the disciplinary skillset of the humanist researcher determine, enable or limit effective network analysis? To what extent does the use of data visualization serve to surface, or submerge, essential knowledge about the data? How should scholars in the digital humanities navigate the intense methodological demands of network science? How should such scholarship be evaluated, peer-reviewed, taught, and studied? In the face of these many challenges, what are the futures of networks in DH?

In recent years, many cultural institutions have engaged in large-scale newspaper digitization projects and large amounts of historical texts are being acquired (via transcription or OCRization). Beyond document preservation, the next step consists in providing an enhanced access to the content of these digital resources. In this regard, the processing of units which act as referential anchors, namely named entities (NE), is of particular importance. Yet, the application of standard NE tools to historical texts faces several challenges and performances are often not as good as on contemporary documents. This paper investigates the performances of different NE recognition tools applied on old newspapers by conducting a diachronic evaluation over 7 time-series taken from the archives of Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

Massive digitization of archival material, coupled with automatic document processing techniques and data visualisation tools offers great opportunities for reconstructing and exploring the past. Unprecedented wealth of historical data (e.g. names of persons, places, transaction records) can indeed be gathered through the transcription and annotation of digitized documents and thereby foster large-scale studies of past societies. Yet, the transformation of hand-written documents into well-represented, structured and connected data is not straightforward and requires several processing steps. In this regard, a key issue is entity record linkage, a process aiming at linking different mentions in texts which refer to the same entity. Also known as entity disambiguation, record linkage is essential in that it allows to identify genuine individuals, to aggregate multi-source information about single entities, and to reconstruct networks across documents and document series. In this paper we present an approach to automatically identify coreferential entity mentions of type Person in a data set derived from Venetian apprenticeship contracts from the early modern period (16th-18th c.). Taking advantage of a manually annotated sub-part of the document series, we compute distances between pairs of mentions, combining various similarity measures based on (sparse) context information and person attributes.

The character network of a given narrative (novel, play, film, graphic novel, etc.) models the structure formed by the relations in its character-system (Woloch, 2003). A relation between two characters symbolises their co-presence in parts of the narrative; the entire set of relations between all characters constitutes a formal model of this character-system and lends itself to display and analysis. For example, Moretti (2011) used network modelling to compare the importance of protagonists from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, while Trilcke et al. (2015) created character networks for 465 German plays and used them to initiate a wider study of German Theatre. Most applications of character network analysis have disregarded temporality, possibly because of its representational complexity. Consequently, all relations in the system are considered as happening at the same time: one cannot distinguish if a given edge symbolises a relation at the start, at the end, or in several parts of the work under study. Furthermore, because temporality is not being accounted for, there is usually no way of relating the network visualisation with the unfolding of the source narrative. While prototypes such as those discussed in Roberts-Smith et al. (2013) offer sophisticate ways of dynamically visualising the text of theatre plays, they do so in a way that is unrelated to character network modelling. Based on these observations, we set out to develop an open source web application which models the character-system of theatre plays as a sequence of network states synchronised with the actual narrative content (https://github.com/maladesimaginaires/intnetviz). This paper proposes a high-level overview of our application , successively focusing on the underlying structure extraction process, the conception of the graphical interface, and the range of uses envisioned for it. In the conclusion, we evoke the ways in which we intend to develop it and reflect on the potential significance of this development at a more epistemological level.

This paper aims to describe and explain the processes behind the creation of a digital library composed of two Swiss newspapers, namely Gazette de Lausanne (1798-1998) and Journal de Geneve (1826-1998), covering an almost two-century period. We developed a general purpose application giving access to this cultural heritage asset; a large variety of users (e.g. historians, journalists, linguists and the general public) can search through the content of around 4 million articles via an innovative interface. Moreover, users are offered different strategies to navigate through the collection: lexical and temporal lookup, n-gram viewer and named entities.

In this work, we use network analysis methods to sketch a typology of fiction novels based on characters and their proximity in the narration. We construct character networks modelling the twenty novels composing Les Rougon-Macquart, written by Emile Zola. To categorise them, we rely on methods that track down major and minor characters relative to the character-systems. For that matter, we use centrality measures such as degree and eigenvector centrality. Eventually, with this analysis of a small corpus, we open the stage for a large-scale analysis of novels through their character networks.

Keywords: Rousseau ; character networks ; network ; read-write ; dataviz Note: Winner of graduate travel bursary. Winner of best paper award. Reference EPFL-CONF-199945 Record created on 2014-06-23, modified on 2017-05-12

Cet article etudie le concept de centralite dans les reseaux de personnages apparaissant dans Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Notre objectif est ainsi de caracteriser certains aspects des roles des personnages du recit sur la base de leurs cooccurrences dans le texte.