US Maps in R

A really great read (it's a chapter) about the use of maps in R (at least, US maps specifically), from Kieran Healy's Data Visualization. What are you trying to show with your map? What is your data? Is it spatial? Or, maybe it's actually about population, so why is Montana bigger than Connecticut?

There are some great projections, there's the standard geographical one, and the weird "geography squished into population size" one (Figure 7.1, lower left), and the electoral college/population one isn't bad depending on what you are trying to do (Figure 7.1, lower right), although I end up liking the one that makes all the states the same size, each a square (statebins, in section 7.3). (Of course, what is a state? They are not all comparable at all! What is Washington, D.C.? Why not Puerto Rico? Etc.!)

No post about maps is complete without XKCD's heatmap comic and another on map projections, as well as a link to the segment from The West Wing about map projections which everyone should watch.

Geertz and Global Tides

As the world becomes more thoroughly interconnected, economically and politically, as people move about in unforeseen, only partially controllable, and increasingly massive, ways...(1)

Geertz was writing about identity, as can be seen from the rest of the quote, but it is relevant at the moment what with the novel coronavirus, covid-19. I am sure that Castells has something similar in one of his great, perhaps today overlooked, The Information Age trilogy books.


(1) Geertz, C. (2012). Available light: Anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

HICSS 53

HICSS 53 is underway, and this is the fourth year we've run the Games & Gaming minitrack in the Digital and Social Media track. Great to have all the hard work come to fruition.

FDG 2019 SLO

FDG was a great conference! Small (I think 175 people?), great people and many great and diverse papers (from digital humanities topics to code and algorithmic efficiency).

One of the keynote speakers was Tarn Adams, of Dwarf Fortress fame, a game I have described as "I can never play it again because it would ruin my life", meaning, it's so great I would just get sucked into all of its amazingness and details. Actually, maybe I could just oh okay there you see? But maybe! Just be good about limits (it's difficult to limit with DF). But anyways, Adams gave a great and interesting and insightful talk about procedurally generated content and storytelling within the setting of DF.

Is that Tarn Adams back there in the blue shirt? It is! Selfie time!

One of the attendees also made this cool and beautiful card game with everyone's papers as a part of the game! I managed to find one of mine and may have kept it to put on my refrigerator.

Summer Conference Listing

Busy summer.

May 24-28: ICA (International Communication Association)

June 11-14: ICWSM (International Conference on Web and Social Media)

June 16-19: Bled eConference

June 30-July 3: WebSci

August 6-10: DiGRA (Digital Games Research Conference) (This is the only one I am not going to, but it would be awesome, it's in Kyoto.)

August 26-30: FDG (Foundations of Digital Games)

Mourning in Skyrim

Skyrim, originally released over seven years ago (11/11/11), is still much-beloved and pretty incredible in many ways. Recently Bethesda re-released it for the Switch (2017) and released the Special Edition in 2016, remastered for the current consoles.

As a fan of Geertz (yes I had to do that), especially his piece Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example about a boy's funeral, how it did not go according to custom, and how ritual is important, I was rather fascinated by a scene in Skyrim I came across (although it is probably not mourning and it is probably slightly bugged, but hey these are games and we have to use our imagination to create the fiction, and we can imagine different things).

A dragon attack in the town of Falkreath earlier in the game-day had left Lod and another villager dead (as you can see in my slightly lousy photo of my TV screen since I play on the Xbox). Lod tends to die in dragon attacks, apparently. I came back later in the day (it was night), and although the dragon skeleton had unspawned, Lod and the other villager were still there at the base of his stairs, surrounded by two guards, the graveyard keeper and one other villager. They were all waving their hands over the bodies of their slain townfolk. For good measure, my horse decided to stand on them, it seems to like standing on dead bodies.

So this was kind of creepy, but it wasn't really clear what they were doing, although the presence of the graveyard cleric added some weight to the gathering. I spoke to each of them and as I did, they would stand up and walk away.

It seems like this is just a bugged corpse investigation animation event, where NPCs get looped/stuck, but it's not clear to me if that's the actual call in the code for NPC behavior or what. Other players have noted this, and the two I link here to both refer to it as mourning, so clearly it's easy to interpret it as such.

On Skyrim-related mourning, there is the epic story of the loss of a companion that is worth reading, or even re-reading if it's been a while, and the player's attempt and eventual success at a burial. (It's Lydia, of course.)

But players have cracked open the game on the PC (hooray, modders!) and found all sorts of awesome unfinished and unimplemented code and items, including some mourning behavior which is now available through a mod. Somewhat tangentially there is apparently a space for dead bodies, and there's a great page at the UESP with unused NPCs, some of which were meant to be in the game but others are just for testing, such as Do Not Delete Me - needed for export to work and also TestJeffBCarryWaterBucket. The unused NPC page also links to the Test Cell page, which is fascinating and you should go read it (there is also a page for unfinished quests).

Urban Data Marks

Really interesting talk at Boston CHI by Prof. Dietmar Offenhuber a few days ago, where one of the projects he detailed was "Dust Mark". So, in Stuttgart, Germany, some areas of the city suffer from air quality issues, as is true in many cities. One way to measure this over time is with reverse graffiti, which struck me as a really interesting concept and approach to urban marking. Instead of making a long-term mark or addition to measure something (say, with paint or a physical object like a meter of some sort), you can power-wash away accumulated air particulate from concrete surfaces. This can get around anti-graffiti laws, since you aren't adding anything (paint, chalk) to a surface, instead you're removing and actually cleaning the surface!

Anscombe's Quartet

I love Anscombe's Quartet. Four obviously different sets of X-Y data (so, like, on the XY plane, a graph), but with exactly the same basic statistics (descriptives). Yes, you have to know your data and graph your data. (So, from the numbers they "look" the same, but when you graph them you see they are actually quite different.)

Sorting Out Regressions

A great post over at R-Bloggers, [link broken as of 12/2020] "15 Types of Regression you should know." Also, how to choose which one is the right one? So many stats books (I have a few) are just terrible. They tend to throw stats language at people, and it's incredibly bizarre (p-hat? a hat? are you kidding me?) which is a problem because language is supposed to enlighten, not confuse. They also, at least for my English-language background, tend to throw Greek letters around and assume you know what the heck they are, which is an idiotic assumption. Again, language, especially in a textbook that is supposed to be explaining things, should be enlightening and clear, not obtuse. But, all the textbooks I have rarely cover anything but the most basic regression, and they always throw the regression equation at you, which is weird since never have I seen a paper with a regression equation in it, it's always a table.

Edit: Except now the post is no longer there and the URL redirects to R-Bloggers' best guess. Possibly this is the post, or something like it: https://www.listendata.com/2018/03/regression-analysis.html

Recent Work

Two recent work-related items of note: AoIR and a book chapter out!

I presented some work where I'm part of a team working on end-user issues around Google's Smart Reply and related predictive reply technologies, so, where AI is writing the reply for you, at AoIR in Montreal. It was a really great conference and it was awesome to see so many people I've gotten to know over the years.

Also, a chapter is finally out (from June 2016!) in a great collection, Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Games, subtitled Digital Hunter-Gatherers. Mine is chapter 12, "Safety in Numbers: Online Community Sizes in Response to Digital Human Predation", which looks at guild sizes in PvP guilds in Everquest II.

The official reviews (for the publisher) are pretty great, including...

"A fact-filled and vitally important book in which top scholars successfully employ evolutionary theory to better understand the causes and effects of digital games." – Patrick Markey, Villanova University, USA.

Top scholars! That's me. Awesome.

ESO Trade Guilds

I'm currently doing some interview-survey work on large trade guilds in The Elder Scrolls Online, and it is only working thanks to the awesomeness of the guild leaders I have approached digitally so far. I'm pinging 2-3 each week, and so far so good.

Some work in the past suggested that guilds of about 35 members were the maximum sustainable size in an MMO (specifically, this work was from WoW), but with ESO trade guilds we quite often see 400-500 members sustained over time. (500 is the maximum number of accounts allowed in a guild, ESO does guild membership differently, I have a paper in-progress about that too.)

So, how are guild leaders building and maintaining such large groups over time? Can these lessons be applied more broadly?

If you have played ESO, you'll be familiar with guild recruiting messages in general/zone chat, and a lot of them mention a few common elements, like weekly minimums or fees, events, auctions or raffles, or an inactive policy. Poking around on the web in various places you can get a bit more data about these methods, but I need to actually see what the guild leaders think about it all.

Guild leaders are usually busy enough as it is--running the guild, auctions, bidding on their favorite trader, and maybe actually having time to play the game!--so I feel badly bugging people for their help, but thankfully people often like talking about the things they like, and guild leaders for a guild of 400-500 people had better like it or else they wouldn't be doing it!

I don't play ESO anymore, well not currently. I love the TES single player series, though. ESO is amazingly beautiful, and vast--so vast I felt fairly lost for a while (if you are a long time player, I joined after One Tamriel, if you aren't, the world was leveled like in WoW and EQ2 but they did away with that). I had a hard time accepting dolmen farming/grinding, since that is not at all like in TES, but it makes sense in an MMO and I certainly did it for my 2nd and 3rd characters. I also, in TES, usually made a sneaking ranger-type character (sneak, medium armor, some sword and board, some magic, maybe a bow but aiming in TES is serious business), but sneaking the way it is in TES is completely gone in ESO. You sneak into a delve (small public dungeon), and there are a half dozen other characters in there running around and pulling everything and trains back up to the door until they leash. However, the game certainly does a lot of things right, although some players I've spoken too feel it is too monetized recently.

Post at Esoteric Gaming

Exciting news, Mark Chen just rolled out the second issue of Esoteric Gaming (along with his team, of which I am proud to say I am one), and I have a piece on EQ2, multi-boxing, and the prison server! Super cool, and all the articles are well-worth reading. You could head over there now!

The articles in the second issue are:

• The Guilt of Cheating
• Co-Playing with My Mom: Mega Man 2
• Celebrating a Portal to The Nether with Cake! Emergent Play in Minecraft
• Death of a Guild, Birth of a Child: Multi-Boxing and Self-Imposed Exile to the Prison Server in EQ2

I love the Minecraft/Portal mashup there in that one title.

Minitel!

A working Minitel! This one was built in 1985 and is still going strong, cared for by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, who spoke recently at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program weekly seminar. They have an awesome new book out about the Minitel that hit on many of the issues I also ran into studying related technologies in my dissertation back in ~2003.

But, as they told me, all the specs for the Minitel were released when it came out in the 1980s so all the service providers could connect to it. Those specs are still available today, so they have a working Minitel and an Arduino device sending it some data. Wow! Super cool.

Minitel, front

Minitel, back, and Arduino device

Closeup, Arduino device

Civ V and Information Science!

Cool to see this nod to information science in Civ V. Shannon didn't drive around on a steam-powered automobile, and probably didn't wear a lab coat with mad scientist goggles. But, cool anyways.

Python 3 vs. Python 2.7

I decided it was finally time to move to Python 3 from Python 2. Having done so, I don't see why I wasn't using Python 3 years ago, although my code worked just fine so it wasn't really a big deal.

Python 3 has two big advantages, and there's also a third reason you should be using it by now.

1. Unicode: You don't have to worry about catching Unicode characters in string types anymore, Python 3 does it for you. This is a concern for me with web scraping. So much easier.
2. For years I've read about the following dilemma in OSX, with no solution: 
1. If you DON'T install your own copy of Python 2, you are modifying the OS's copy of important libraries and such, and that can cause problems.
2. If you DO install your own copy of Python 2, you then have two versions of Python 2 on your computer, and that can cause problems.
The solution... just install Python 3. These two problems aren't even relevant.
3. But, the best part was that about 99% of my code still works as is. All I've had to do so far is change print statements, from print "Print this Py2!"  to  print("Print this Py3!"), and get rid of the Unicode error catching.

Online Game Communities Presentation

About a month ago I did an online presentation for a summer class taught by Dr. Jaime Banks, who was over in Germany at the time, for the summer session she and Dr. Nick Bowman are involved with, SPICE: Summer Program in Communications Erfurt. It was really great, and the students had some good questions. I put the slides (slightly edited) up in Slideshare, you can find them here. The talk looked at some work in gaming, play, and communities, using different data. Just the slides are not as good as the slides and the audio, but there they are.

Gephi and iGraph: graphml

When Gephi, which is great, decides to not exactly work, you can save your Gephi graph file in graphml format and then import it into R (or Python or C/C++) using iGraph so you can also draw it the way you were hoping to. (I'm having an issue with setting the colors at all in Gephi.)

It took me a few tries to figure out which format would work. I need location (since Gephi is good at that but I don't know how to make iGraph or R's SNA package do that) and attributes for the data. So far, so good!

Some helpful pages:

• An iGraph tutorial.
• Another iGraph tutorial.
• iGraph docs for R.
• Gephi file formats.
• iGraph read_graph().

Note!!!! Apparently if you make a variable in R (at least while trying to graph something with plot) and you use a variable for your palette that you name palette, you will destroy (ok ok overwrite) some other official variable or setting also named palette, but the error you get will not at all clue you in to what happened. Better to call your variable my_palette or the_palette, which is what I usually do (so why didn't I do it here?).

Best Reviewer Award

And, here's the certificate! Nice and pixely.

Nat Poor, Best Paper Reviewer!

ICA 2016, Fukuoka, Japan

Had a great and busy time at ICA 2016: one paper, one panel presentation, moderated a session, and won an award! (Google is being impossible with photos and tables as usual. So much for interfaces.)

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on the new Computational Methods panel, for the CM interest group. I tried to give the crowd an exhortation to engaging with such methods, because we as social scientists have a lot to offer computational analyses. You can see the slides in SlideShare, but I don't spell it all out in the slides when I present. My presentation got a nice tweet too!

Presenting on the Computational Methods panel.

As part of the Games Division pre-conference in Tokyo at Nihon University (I love the neighborhood there, the Ekoda stop on the Seibu-Ikebukuro line), we all went to Akihabara, and of course we saw and did cool things, like engage in deep discourse with Mario, the working-class Italian-Japanese plumber.

"You don't think quantitative and qualitative methods
are complementary? Explain!"

I also was lucky enough to run into Sanrio's Gudetama in Hong Kong and then again in Japan.

Gudetama!

I also won the very first "Best Reviewer Award" for the ICA Games Division, which is a great honor and we need more motivations like this, as reviews are an important part of the quality of the discipline. Awards for organizing, best papers, and best reviewer!

CityU Hong Kong Summer School

Had a great time teaching a class and also an impromptu session on Gephi at the City University of Hong Kong's Summer School in Social Science Research! It's in the Department of Media and Communication, and run by my friend Dr. Marko Skoric. The main instructor was Dr. Wouter van Atteveldt, who is awesome and has great hats as you can see.

I also was fortunate enough to attend CityU's Workshop on Computational Approaches to Big Data in the Social Sciences and Humanities, which was great and had lots of great speakers.

Me, showing some great students a few things about Gephi.

The three of us in front of the department sign.