The MIT Press and Leonardo/ISAST are pleased to announce the launch of ARTECA, a curated space for essential content linking the arts, sciences, and technologies. The platform was built and is developed by the ArtSci Lab at the University of Texas at Dallas. 

With a growing collection of nearly 200 books and 300 journal issues, ARTECA provides scholars and practitioners the resources to bridge the once independent fields of art, science, and technology. The full text of Leonardo, Computer Music Journal, and Leonardo Music Journal are available in ARTECA. Books from MIT Press book series include Game Studies, Leonardo Book Series, Platform Studies, Software Studies, and Technologies of the Lived Abstraction. 

Video games are a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries. Edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Video Games Around the World covers gaming in areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. On National Video Games Day, Mark J. P. Wolf reflects on the ambitious project of bringing together leading experts and game designers to discuss video game history and culture across all the world's continent.

The idea for Video Games Around the World came when I was editing my two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming. Entries about the history of video games in various countries would come in from contributors, usually around a thousand words or so, and they were fascinating, but were so short that you only got a glimpse of what they were describing. I wanted to find out more, and thought there were enough entries on different countries and regions in the encyclopedia, that if I asked the same contributors to write full-length essays on their respective countries, I could have a nice collection of pieces on video game history around the world. So I started with the contributors I had, and decided to try to find more and fill in as much of the world as possible. That’s one of the things that makes an anthology like this more difficult to put together than the usual kind of anthology; besides the size of it, you have a set of topics that you must represent, and even missing one of them becomes noticeable and feels like the gap that it is. You can’t leave out Russia, or Mexico, or Japan, or the Middle East and give the feeling that you have covered the world; even missing one crucial essay would make the book feel incomplete. There had to be essays related to each continent, and each major national industry. (Completist that I am, I felt that in order to advertise that the book covered “every continent” something would have to be said about Antarctica, so I did some research and included a section on it in the Introduction.) So it was a matter of finding someone to write all the essays, and preferably people who were natives of the countries in question, and who understood the national context and culture firsthand, having grown up with it, or at least someone who had studied them in-depth.

Shake off some of that Labor Day rust by checking out the first part of a Q & A with Mike Smith and Rahul Telang who are the authors of Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment. Their book is about how big data is transforming the creative industries, and how those industries can use lessons from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to fight back.

The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. It was, as Sarah Kate Gillespie's book The Early American Daguerreotype shows, something wholly and remarkably new: a product of science and innovative technology that resulted in a visual object. We're celebrating World Photo Day with an excerpt from The Early American Daguerreotype.

Originally a French invention, daguerreotyping—a photographic process that produces extremely detailed images—reached American shores in the fall of 1839. A daguerreotype is a direct-positive image on a silvered copper plate. Historically, the plate was polished until it had a mirror-like surface, then was treated with lightsensitive chemicals. The plate was then fitted into a camera and exposed to the subject. Once exposed, the plate was developed above a box of mercury fumes, and the image was fixed in a bath of hyposulfate of soda. The finished product was then washed and dried. Because the surface remained sensitive, it was placed under a plate of glass and usually put in a case.