Jachère Journal

Had a walk, found a nice route.

Some thoughts and summaries about my recent grounded theory analysis of my MDM archive.

In this journal entry I attempt to capture the path I've taken so far with my dissertation, as well as prepare for the defense upcoming in a few month.

I'm in Montréal for six weeks by now, but it feels definitely longer.

Or how I'm slowly coming to my senses.

Last month I mapped a working definition of game (ludus) and ludeme (conceptual units of a game and play) in preparation for an upcoming article on ludemes and programming video games.

In the past few months I have been engaging in the exegesis of source code from the 1980ies and -90ies.

I was increasingly unhappy with mypublishing strategy (or the lack thereof), but also increasingly worriedabout the state of the internet, especially the aggressive scrapping ofcontent by AI bots.

I have finally found the time to produce two (extremely dense) abstracts for the next paper (on Source Code and Ludemes).

In which I'm reflecting on critical code studies, distant reading source code and my recent workshop at the DHd 2025.

A few notes on the moment of translation between epistemologies and ontologies in software.

Inspired by the silly inquiries of Any Austin and the concept of relational playworld by Melos Han-Tani I figured I'm going to spend some more time in Alba, after I finished it for the second time.

A few quick notes on thinking theory through metaphors.

I tried to learn assembly, but didn't find the energy.

I was chewing on the concept of ludemes lately and needed to map it out, conceptionally.

Writing this first paper felt grindy.

Inspired by the silly inquiries of Any Austin and the concept of relational playworld by Melos Han-Tani I figured I'm going to spend some more time in Alba, after I finished it for the second time.

This summer I got the feeling, that I'm getting used to do researcherly things as a job

Writing this first paper felt grindy.

Another sketch for a dissertation proposal…

Some thoughts on watching genre movies and observing visual clusters.

A few quick notes on thinking theory through metaphors.

In which I'm reflecting on critical code studies, distant reading source code and my recent workshop at the DHd 2025.

Right now I do feel a bit lost with my dissertation.

I finished readingy The philosophy of software last week and went half through Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality this week.

I've been left with quite some material to think through after the Leisure Electronics conference.

The title is a direct quote from Pierre-Yves Hurrel, one of the organizers of the Leisure electronics Conference in Lausanne conference, which I attended this week.

Next to intensively preparing for a conference talk, I had the chance to attend a preservation-session with people from the Swiss Video Game Archivists association.

I'm interested in video game graphics programming practices.

Although we have a leap year, and were gifted an additional day in February, that month went by rather quickly.

Dealt with Wikidata import, SPARQL queries, and Gephi visualisations.

In the last two weeks, I had the opportunity to speak with some people I trust a lot in terms of metadata and ontologies.

I added programmed in to our Wikidata corpus, but found only 31 games where this statement could be made with some certainty.

This week was important to finalize a second phase of gathering and importing metadata on our video game corpus into Wikidata.

Today was sunny, and it felt like Spring.

I had the chance to talk about my expose with my supervisor.

In which I once more try to organize my life.

Although we have a leap year, and were gifted an additional day in February, that month went by rather quickly.

I was adding thoughts from my paper notebook to the wiki and engaged with a bit of maintenance, making connections, adding bits here and there.

Right now I do feel a bit lost with my dissertation.

Some notes on a first round of doing a formal analysis on Necronom.

I had the chance to discuss my exposé within the context of the IDR colloquium, which is a format where all PhD students of the institute can hand their things.

I talked with Moritz Mähr about how to approach treating a code base as a text corpus, and he recommended to give Voyant Tools a shot.

As the title implies this will be a larger entry.

I had the chance to discuss my exposé within the context of the IDR colloquium, which is a format where all PhD students of the institute can hand their things.

As expected, the study semester is taking a toll on time, energy and focus.

I tried to learn assembly, but didn't find the energy.

I was on a two weeks vacation in August and didn't care much about my journal.

Some thoughts and summaries about my recent grounded theory analysis of my MDM archive.

It's summer and I can finally concentrate on all things related to my dissertation project.