Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries (Image courtesy The Library of Congress, 2013)
We are thrilled to announce the first juror of the 2020 MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL: Henry Lowood!
Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima.
Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli. Along with Guins, Lowood is now editing a new series for MIT Press about the history and culture of gaming.
Since 2000, Lowood has headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries. Almost twenty years late it is called How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames. Among the results of this project are courses such as History of Computer Game Design or The Consumer as Creator in Contemporary Media. The main focus of the project is the history and preservation of digital games, virtual worlds and interactive simulations as emerging new media forms. Among other projects, Lowood curated the Machinima Archive for the Internet Archive, which is dedicated to the academic investigation and historical preservation of the emerging art form known as machinima..
From 2008 to 2013, Lowood led the HTGG Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called "Preserving Virtual Worlds." We worked with the University of Illinois, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, Linden Lab, the Internet Archive, and others on this exciting project.
For some twenty years, Lowood was editor of the "Current Bibliography in the History of Technology" of the Society for the History of Technology. This bibliography is one of the components of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine database available through the Libraries' database page.
