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In this post, I share an overview of my art practice in 2022 - what I got done, where you can find it, and some of the stuff that happens that doesn't lead to public outputs. Additionally, I share some thoughts on adapting my practice to new disabilities -- in my case this is due to MS, but I feel far from alone in navigating this, as a lot of other people have had to do the same as the COVID-19 pandemic reveals itself to be a mass-disabling event. -
Climate playmakers focus group
I'm involved in a research project supporting the development of an episodic game about climate change, and we are looking for people involved in climate activism, research, and advocacy to participate in a focus group. For more details please see the full call for participants. Purpose of the study The study is designed to understand what experts in climate science, game design and climate activism understand to be the priorities for climate change communication and action, and how these ideas might be brought to life through a live episodic online game. -
Critical Distance Fundraiser
Critical Distance, a non-profit I volunteer for on the board of directors, needs help. We have been archiving and contextualising online games writing for 13 years. We are asking for help to allow us to continue operating, and perhaps even invest in building longer term resilience. I'd be very grateful for any help spreading the word: https://www.gofundme.com/f/critdistance This is one of my favourite organisations in general, not just because I got to be their Senior Curator for a little while. -
Ludonarracon panel April 23rd
Update 26 April: you can now watch this panel here! [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPiJOWAOrIA) I'm very excited to be on a panel at Ludonarracon next week about narrative structure and placemaking in games. Ludonarracon is a digital festival of indie videogame storytelling that I often referred to last year when looking for interesting and inspiring things to play and new ways of thinking about the medium, and you should definitely check it out if you are interested in stories or interactive media. -
Collaboration with Squinky as part of "New Conversations"
I'm delighted to announce that I'm starting a project in collaboration with Dietrich "Squinky" Squinkifer, as part of "New Conversations", a programme funded and delivered by the British Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Farnham Maltings, and the High Commission of Canada in the UK. I'm excited to be part of a cohort of participants thinking about critical issues such as disability, land, gender, and racial justice. Squinky is one of my favourite artists, and also someone I feel incredibly lucky to be able to call a friend. -
30 characters now playable in the Cis Penance WIP update
To go with the launch of Space Studios London's Art + Tech showcase, today I pushed a big update to Cis Penance! Check out the rest of the artworks on display here: https://spacestudios.org.uk/art-technology/deep-play-showcase/ With today's update, there are now 30 characters you can interact with in the work-in-progress build. Each one represents a different person I have interviewed - some going by names they use elsewhere, some going by pseudonyms I've assigned arbitrarily to preserve their anonymity. -
DEEP PLAY: Art + Tech Residency Showcase
I'm updating the Cis Penance work in progress build for next week, when it will be featured as part of the showcase of work created during the Art + Tech residency organised by Space Studios, London. I'll also be on a panel hosted in Mozilla Hubs, which is currently one of my favourite ways to be in online spaces! Showcase: DEEP PLAY 4 – 19 Mar 2021 Launching: Thu 4 Mar, 12pm GMT here -
Event: Social Gold - MONUMENTS & MEMORIAL. Social Art Network, Sheffield
(Featured/header image is from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's Black Trans Archive) Next week I'll be showing a preview of a video essay about monuments and memorials in some recent indie games (Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive; Origame studio, Umurangi Generation; Cardboard Computer, Kentucky Route Zero; Finji, Night in the Woods). Wed, 24 February 2021 18:30 – 20:30 GMT Register online This is part of an online event showing early work created as part of the Social Art Network's " -
Book Launch: Old Land New Waters, Freelands Foundation
I have a chapter in this forthcoming book, which features work by artists selected for the first year of the Freelands Artist Programme. The book launch is being held online on 17th February 2021. Alongside excellent, insightful critical writing by curator Edward Ball, contributors to the book write about, and create visual works reflecting on, topics such as the materiality of media, historical memory, and the performance of identity. Details of the book launch event can be found below. -
More characters added to Cis Penance
I just pushed a new update to Cis Penance, doubling the number of characters. It feels very satisfying to see a "queue" of people begin to form. Play the latest work-in-progress Including the 13 that are now shown in the work-in-progress, I have collected 45 interviews - this is the minimum I planned for, but I think more interviews would better show the scale of the issues that this piece aims to highlight. -
Cis Penance soundtrack out now
Liz Ryerson has just released the soundtrack that she created for Cis Penance! It's twinkly and warm and stormy and lush. I strongly suggest that you buy it IMMEDIATELY, because it's Bandcamp day, when the platform waives its revenue share and artists get all the money. gogogogogogogogo [bandcamp width=350 height=470 album=2706657088 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false] -
Cis Penance update - seven characters, one world
I pushed a big update to Cis Penance today! Not only is the number of characters now up from 3 to 7, but also, the first hint of the main motif is finally coming through - the long queue of people, representing social and bureaucratic structures such as the waiting lists for Gender Identity Clinics. Also, there are now three different pieces of background music. Please give the new version a play and let me know what you think, especially if something looks wrong. -
Sheffield Creative Mornings talk
On Friday 25th September I'm giving a talk on zoom with Sheffield Creative Mornings, at 08:30am UK time! Registration opens on Monday 21st; be sure to register before 8pm on Thursday, so that they have time to send the zoom link. -
Cis Penance update - RBMicah and Hailey
An update to the Cis Penance preview just launched, with two new characters. Check it out, and get in touch if you are interested in contributing an interview. -
Open City Documentary Festival Expanded Realities Exhibition
The work-in-progress of Cis Penance will be on display online this September as part of an exhibition for the Open City Documentary Festival. We will host a mix of curated and newly commissioned work from artists and practitioners pushing the boundaries of interactive non-fiction storytelling. The exhibition will be free to access and available internationally from 9th – 15th September. A full micro-site that has been specially built to host the exhibition will launch soon. -
Getting started with LED embroidery
As part of the Art + Tech residency with Space Studios, London (which they have kindly allowed me to do while continuing to “reside” in lockdown in Sheffield) I’m getting my head around LED embroidery at the moment, with the view to creating a very large piece this year for the Cis Penance interactive portraits project. I feel like I’ve got my head around the very basics now - what can electroconductive thread do as a material that both makes attractive shapes and also forms part of a system? -
Panel talk at The Artist's Journey #3
I’m excited to be speaking on a panel with Manish Harijan (artist) and Lady Kitt (artist, researcher and drag king) on 13th February as part of a two-day event about art careers at Sheffield Institute of Arts. The theme is “improfessionalism”, which feels fortuitously positioned alongside the “indisciplinarity” theme of the event at King’s College that I got to speak at last year. While ‘professionalisation’ suggests the positive, necessary steps to becoming an artist, there are ‘improfessional’ practices that exist at an off-kilter relation to this imperative. -
Cis Penance workshop in Dundee
This weekend, Jennifer Booth will be facilitating a workshop for the Cis Penance project, as part of NEoN Festival. We did a similar workshop this summer in Sheffield - the goal is to work collaboratively with LGBTQ+ folks to create a piece of visual artwork reflecting queer life paths and our relationship to time. This version of the workshop is going to have an extra element, incorporating tech toys such as a line-following robot or electroconductive ink, to further play with representations of systems, glitches, and discontinuity. -
Interview in Our Favourite Places
Our Favourite Places is a site that reviews cultural stuff in Sheffield, and is an incredibly helpful resource that comprehensively covers all kinds of venues, events, and local businesses. This week they have published a lovely little profile of my work: ourfaveplaces.co.uk/meet-the-… Speaking of interviews, but going in the other direction, where I’m the one asking questions: I’m keen to get more trans interviewees lined up for the next two weeks at Site Gallery. -
Site Gallery platform exhibition
Having returned from a fascinating and disorienting residency in Belfast (I’m still looking for interviewees from Belfast by the way) I’m now back in my own studio preparing work for the forthcoming work in progress show at Site Gallery this August. I’m going to show the interactive portrait cushions as well as some newer work that is still taking shape - a big part of my aim for the show is to start conducting interviews with transgender people in Sheffield, so please get in touch if that aspect interests you. -
Mid docfest update
Docfest is about halfway done, and it’s been so lovely so far. The Interactive Portrait Cushions are hung right of the entrance to the exhibition space, and I’ve had great conversations with people about the unique pleasures and challenges of handmade computers. I just finished a panel discussion with IP Yuk Yiu about his piece, to Call a Horse a Deer, comparing our approaches to simple interface design for conceptually complex works. -
Critaoke
I’m going to embarrass myself this Saturday by performing a Karaoke version of Sara Ahmed’s “Feminist Killjoys” to the tune of Chiquitita (I haven’t called it Critiquita, but gosh that seems like a missed opportunity now). Details below. Description Join us as we mark the closing of Re-collections with Crit-a-Oke – a free cabaret event featuring live performances, projections and karaoke. Crit-a-Oke feels like a late night party lecture. Squashing art criticism, theory and academic texts into a karaoke blender and sipping on the thinky musical smoothie that drips from the other side. -
Interactive portraits at Doc/Fest
Interactive Portraits has been selected for the Sheffield Doc/Fest Alternate Realities exhibition at the Site Gallery! Check out the other pieces in the show here: sheffdocfest.com/films/int… [gallery ids=“3335,3336,3337” type=“rectangular” link=“none”] Mine isn’t the only piece portraying LGBT issues. My Mother’s Kitchen by Maeve Marsde and Tea Uglow is an interactive documentary based on interviews with eight LGBTQI+ people, that takes shape around domestic spaces. Through the Wardrobe by Rob Eagle is an augmented reality installation centering on clothes and gender expression. -
Video: Collecting games at UC Irvine
vimeo.com/331049055 This is a short documentary that I made a while ago but never published, about a collection of videogames that has come to be used to teach students at UC Irvine. Back in 2017, I recorded a load of footage for a series of short documentaries about people who curate and archive games. I have a page for the whole series here. Some stuff got published on sites that briefly had a budget for freelance video, but there were multiple issues that led to the series never finishing. -
Now Play This 2019
Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan is going to Now Play This festival at Somerset House in London this April! It’s going to be shown alongside work by absolutely incredible artists including Brenda Romero, Tale of Tales, Harry Josephine Giles, and Sokpop Collective - an overwhelming thing to contemplate, so I’m trying not to think about it. Check out the website to see the whole list of beautiful artgames and book tickets. -
Talk for LGBT+ History Month this week
I’m giving a talk this week as part of Sheffield Uni’s LGBT+ history month events. I’ll be looking at queer games in a very messy and vulnerable way, so I’m kind of hoping it’ll only be a small crowd, but if you do happen to be around and want to come along I’d love to see you there. Details below. Lunchtime talk - Zoyander Street 'Exploring the recent history of " -
How gaming nostalgia can open up conversations about trans rights – Just Geek Stuff
Stephanie Farnsworth was kind enough to interview me about the interactive portraits project. Check it out here: https://justgeekstuffhub.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/how-gaming-nostalgia-can-open-up-conversations-about-trans-rights/ -
Rotherham display of interactive portraits: transgender people in Japan
Today is the first day of a three-week display of my transgender interactive portraits installation at Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance! More information here: Interactive Portraits Show in Rotherham I’m particularly keen to get groups in to have discussions about the work, so let me know (Zoyander at Gmail) if you have a group that would like to come see this. -
Pattern Swatches for Pico-8
A while ago I made myself a kind of digital haberdashery for Pico-8, that allows me to sample randomly-generated patterns and colour combinations. It is very simple, and mostly just looks like this: This is a useful tool when making other things in Pico-8, as it lets me choose from “ready-made” fill patterns and colour combinations, rather than designing them myself from scratch or having them be randomly generated in whatever cart I’m building. -
Mozilla Festival
My work is being displayed at Mozilla festival, for the Art + Data exhibition. The Art+Data experience — part of the Mozilla Artists Open Web project — engages artists, designers, technologists, and researchers in an artistic exploration of a healthy web. With an online gallery (https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/artists-open-web) and an exhibition during MozFest, Art+Data will also feature artists in residencies (on site and online) and creative, interactive sessions. Thirty-six art projects will be showcased, and all (including digital and analogue processes) will focus on data knowledge and usage. -
Freelands Artist Programme
In an amazing piece of good news, I’ve been selected for a new programme supporting artists in the UK! It’s a two-year residency that includes some financial support as well as mentoring, access to archive collections, and exhibition space in London as well as at the Site Gallery in Sheffield. twitter.com/site_gall… The other artists selected in Sheffield this year are Alison J Carr, Yuen Fong Ling, Sian Williams and Lucy Vann. -
Rainbow Arcade Kickstarter
This winter, some of my work is going to be shown in the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the oldest and largest LGBTQ-related museum in the world! The show is really important, as it not only puts videogames in the context of queer history, but also is (if I have this right) the first time that Adrienne Shaw’s LGBTQ games archive will manifest in a public, physical space. Today they launched a crowdfunding campaign for the exhibition catalogue, which would include essays by the contemporary queer games creators included in the exhibition, so that’s me, and some of my favourite games folks: Squinky, Robert Yang, and Naomi Clark. -
Creator Ikusei Residency for International Creators with Exploratory Projects in Tokyo, Japan
This is a little last-minute, but the residency programme in Tokyo that I took part in at the start of this year is taking applications until September 10th. You can learn more and apply here: https://creatorikusei.jp/en/application-guide-for-overseas-creators/ It’s not particularly common for me to come out of a creative development experience feeling positive and ready to recommend it to others, as I’m kind of sensitive to institutional inequities and the cult-like insider-group bullshit that surrounds creative fields. -
Vanishing Point listed in BFI's best video essays of 2017
The online version of BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine asked 30-odd video essayists to list their favourite video essays of the past year. Astonishingly, video artist Nelson Carvajal very kindly included something of mine on his list! Vanishing Point is actually the only video essay I’ve made so far; I made it early in the year for visual essay jam, and at first my goal was to adapt the video essay format by using visual language more and almost eliminating narration entirely - but then, I threw in a lot of primary source quotes, and it got very discursive in its own way. -
Skeleton in a Beret at Whose Body, Whose Space?
[su_note note_color="#ffffff" text_color="#032938"]On November 6th, I’ll be speaking on a panel at the Showroom Workstation event Whose Body, Whose Space? Skeleton in a Beret will be screening, alongside films about disability arts, public toilets, and airplane seating. This event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, which takes place across the UK from 4-11 November 2017.[/su_note] [su_row][su_column size=“1/3”][su_button url=“https://www.facebook.com/events/133272400738084/” background="#3b5998" size=“6” center=“yes” icon=“icon: facebook”]Facebook event[/su_button][/su_column] [su_column size=“1/3”][su_button url=“https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whose-body-whose-space-film-screening-and-discussion-tickets-35889210595?aff=efbneb” background="#ff8000" size=“6” center=“yes” icon=“icon: ticket”]Eventbrite page[/su_button][/su_column] -
Queer Game Studies is out now!
I have a chapter on community histories in this book edited by the excellent Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw. I’m very excited to get my copies through, there are some really amazing contributors featured in the volume including Jack Halberstam, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Katherine Cross, and Robert Yang. The book mainly came out of the early Queerness and Games Conferences, which had a profound impact on the work I’m now doing in my PhD. -
Abstract Games with Raph Koster
Here’s a documentary short I made during my trip down the West Coast of North America in January-February 2017. First Person Scholar very kindly commissioned the video, in which game designer Raph Koster talks to me about the expressive qualities of abstract game systems, and why he collects old folk games. Check out the full post for more detail on Koster’s work. www.youtube.com/watch www.firstpersonscholar.com/abstract-… -
Site relocated
head over to zoyander.cc -
BFI Flare festival screening Skeleton in a Beret
Great news! The short film I made with a team as part of Transforming Cinema, Skeleton in a Beret, is being screened at the prestigious British Film Institute in London for the Flare LGBT festival. Details of the screening for this and a bunch of other fantastic films (I’ve seen Alice and Ayla and they’re both great) can be found on the BFI Flare website. -
Vanishing Point: a visual essay
I made a video for Visual Essay Jam about linear perspective, video games that position the player character towards a vanishing point that they cannot turn away from, and the general feeling of being pulled irrevocably toward the end of an era. [su_vimeo url=“https://vimeo.com/203545268”] -
The making of Portal 2: The Musical
I made a video about nerdy Vancouver, BC cabaret group The Geekenders for ZAM! Check out the full post here or the video below: [youtube www.youtube.com/watch This is the first of a series of videos I’m making during my trip down the Pacific Coast of North America. I’m interviewing various people working in and around videogames, learning about the work people do and the values that guide their projects. The videos are going up on a few different sites, so if you want to keep up with everything I’m doing, you should subscribe to the email list using the form at the top of this page so that you get the weekly list of links to everything I do in every medium. -
Check out this behind-the-scenes footage from Skeleton in a Beret and other Eden shorts
[su_vimeo url=“https://vimeo.com/191379223”] I’m really looking forward to being able to show my short documentary film, ‘Skeleton in a Beret’, to more people soon. At the moment it’s still making its way through festivals and isn’t available online, but you can still learn more about it if you’re curious. This behind-the-scenes video, made by other participants in the Eden Shorts project, shows how much work went into the film, and discusses the importance of trans people working together to create our own media representations. -
A film I made, 'Skeleton in a Beret', is up for an award this Sunday
Update: it won! My short documentary film about trans people and videogame avatars, ‘Skeleton in a Beret’, screens for the first time tomorrow in Sheffield, at the Transforming Cinema festival. It is nominated for a Rising Star award! Also at the festival will be the inimitable Fox Fisher, and the remarkable organisation Trans Media Watch. Please go and check it out if you can! -
One Day Jam this Sunday!
A quick note that this Sunday is the One Day Jam, a little event to raise money for Action for Trans Health that I’m holding on the anniversary of the day I started HRT. Details here. -
Zoyander Street
I am a critical historical practitioner working with games and technology. My work looks at play, labour and games within material and symbolic systems of every scale: from the tiny emotional loops of caring for a virtual pet, to the massive macro network of meaning making in late capitalism. I work at the intersection between games and art in both digital and analogue media, creating writing, video, and interactive pieces. -
Language services for games
[su_note note_color="#fafafa"] Announcement On 20th October I will be back in the UK after almost three years working in the games industry in the San Francisco Bay Area and Vancouver. I’ll be continuing to do the work I’ve been doing for the past year: running Memory Insufficient, writing a history of mobile games for my PhD and my backers, and providing language services for games. I want to talk a little bit here about that last category of work. -
I've left Gamesbrief: here's how you can hire me and/or support my work
I just finished my final week at Gamesbrief, where I was Deputy Editor (here’s the announcement post). Aside from continued work on my PhD, my work is going to take two directions from now on: 1) Translation for games, digital art and new media I've been studying Japanese culture for almost a decade now, including four years study at Cambridge University and two years at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. -
Happy 9th September, Dreamcast fans!
Today is the anniversary of the Dreamcast's 9/9/99 launch in the US! Fifteen years ago people were excitedly opening their Dreamcasts for the first time. It was one of the most successful console launches in history, for a device that most people agree was far ahead of its time; it came with a modem for online play, the VMU enabled portable mini-games for multi-sited play, and it was home to all kinds of groundbreaking experiments in game design, graphics and storytelling. -
Conversations between languages
Some time last year I stopped blogging here and started using Medium instead. More recently, I’ve started writing more ‘interlingual’ pieces. That means trying to write in response to pieces written in languages other than English, to try and break out of the usual circle of English-language critically-minded games writers. These pieces have been getting a lot of traffic, and it’s been exciting to see people get enthusiastic about them. -
Meet me at GDC
Hey. I’m going to GDC this year on a press pass, and the emails from PR companies are starting to come through. It’s always great to meet new people and learn about new things, but I tend to be limited to only getting to spend time one-on-one with people who are spending lots of money trying to get their name out there. I don’t think this is right, and it feels like a missed opportunity for me. -
13 things I wrote in 2013
It’s been a good year. Here are thirteen of the things that were in it: 1. Silliness I shifted most of my ad-hoc blogging to Medium.com. One of the most popular posts there has been What do you think of when you think of Batman? It was a very silly write-up of a totally unreliable survey, refuting something foolish that a games publisher said in an interview. 2. Schadenfreude What has EA done now? -
2012 in writing
A Borderhouse post arguing that a camp video game character is not necessarily gay The latest piece in my series on PocketGamer about IAP design A post I wrote on Gamesbrief called 'How to crowdfund when nobody knows who you are' Effluent praise for indie game Lim A Borderhouse post on PTSD triggers in games. A well-liked piece about how I'm approaching design history in my book about the Dreamcast An extract from an early draft of that book about materials in Skies of Arcadia I'm expecting to hit a big milestone for Dreamcast Worlds in the next week or so, so detailed updates and lots of extracts should be on the way soon. -
Don't leave me in a ditch: why you should self-censor the em-dash
[caption id=“attachment_905” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”]
CC Paul de los Reyes[/caption]When I’m editing prose, my main concern is readability. Normally the entire process is mostly made up of adding subheadings, breaking up long sentences, and removing parentheses.
Language is a very crude way of expressing yourself. As a writer, you can only say one thing at a time. Film directors have full use of a two-dimensional image plane and sound, and can pack in lots of carriers of meaning at the same time. Lighting, music, script, acting, body language, mise en scene, setting… all of these things and more are actively communicating to the viewer all the time. Game designers have all that, plus haptic response and input, range of movement, rules systems, and space design. Multiple things can be communicated at different levels of explicitness at the same time.
Written language has to struggle with putting three-dimensional ideas into one-dimensional form. Readers have to be able to walk in a straight line, looking straight ahead with blinkers on, and still see everything they came to see and understand why they should keep on walking.
This is why I hate the em-dash.
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The science behind non-virality
[caption id=“attachment_1024” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]
FlickrCC, Gideon[/caption]When I’m in London, my favourite hobby is to go to cafes and eavesdrop. I particularly enjoy it when a boy speaking in flawless RP is telling someone else his brilliant ideas that will make them all famous and successful. “Facebook is the future,” he declaims over a soy chai latte, “it’s all about advertising.” He takes a sip, nods and pretend to listen while the other person speaks, and then announces, “what we need to do is make a viral video.”
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Landlords are arseholes: on Steam Greenlight
For a much better post on this issue, go here.
Remember that theory that the internet is morphing from anarchic communitarianism into restrictive cyber-serfdom?Valve’s crowd curation platform for video games, Steam Greenlight, has only been around for a week or so, and already it’s managed to annoy almost everyone. Users who want to review games have to wade through piles and piles of crap before finding anything of interest. Erotic content has been summarily taken down out of fear that it might cause offence, regardless of how artful or interesting it might be, putting an early question mark over how far Valve are handing over gatekeeping responsibilities to the crowd.
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The Marooning of Thirsty Ann
To thank people for supporting Dreamcast Worlds and sharing it on their social networks, I published a story about pirates that I wrote when I was about 7 or 8 years old (I’m not really sure, it could have been later). The Marooning of Thirsty Ann is included here in the photographs below. -
I love YouTube comments
It’s so nice when people clear up complicated issues in a single paragraph. Show’s over folks, I don’t need to write a book anymore!
Good idea about release book for the history of Dreamcast.But everybody knows the story,so if you want know the real story what happen to Dreamcast,you should ask Peter Moore,Bern Stollar and another ex supervisors of Sega.First,I will tell you what happen before of downfall of Dreamcast. It was Microsoft plan from the beginning,the Dreamcast it was an experimental console.End. ;)
Video is below the cut, go join the YouTube comments here. Oh, and for the record, I already cite more than one Bernie Stolar interview in the book, and I interviewed design and planning leads for Skies of Arcadia at Sega headquarters last summer. -
"How frustrating this whole business of studying is"
I’m wading through Bruno Latour and finishing my dissertation this month, feeling ever more terrified and hopeless. There is so much to do, and too little time in which to give the material the quality of treatment it deserves. But in the middle of my despair, Latour presented me with an encouraging rant part-way through Reassembling the social. Paragraph breaks have been added, because Latour’s overflowing, impassioned verbiage does not translate well into blog format.
What is an account? It is typically a text, a small ream of paper a few millimetres thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000 words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by half a dozen people (if you are lucky, ever your Ph.D advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say ‘read’, it does not mean ‘understood’, ‘put to use’, ‘acknowledged’, but rather ‘perused’, ‘glanced at’, alluded to', ‘quoted’, ‘shelved somewhere in a pile’. At best, we add an account to all those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying.
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How to use Wikipedia
I’ve kept putting off writing this article, because I go on believing that one day people will realise that Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and a huge bunch of ongoing discussions, and should be treated as both of these things. In fact, only a select number of librarians seem to be aware of this seemingly obvious fact. Instead, I hear endless wailing about how terrible Wikipedia is and how no self-respected academic should even think about using it for research.
No, you shouldn’t cite Wikipedia. You shouldn’t cite encyclopedia Brittanica either. That by no means implies that Wikipedia is useless as a research tool. Not only is it as useful as any other encyclopedia; it teaches you far more, because of its transparency. So, I’m getting it off my chest: five things that Wikipedia is good for, and how to make best use of them.
