2010 Digital Humanities Start-Up GrantsProject Directors Meeting
Thrilling Wonder
Stories of Cyberculture
National Endowment for the Humanities2010 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Directors MeetingSeptember 28, 2010
I: Tour d'horizon
1. Boom time and generics
2. Some emergent trends
II: Killer themes that knit these together
• Openness• Storytelling• Mystery • Critical
literacies
2010 edition
2011 being built now
Emergent?
Practices: years of edublogging
Selected, documented practices:
• Publish syllabus• Publish student
papers• Discussion• Journaling• Project blogs• Public scholarship
• Creative writing• Distributed seminars• Campus organizations• Prospective students• Library collections• Alumni relations• Project management• Liveblogging
Blog as courseware
Blogs for public intellectuals
Blogging community involvement
The specter of Wikipedia
“Assignments – A bit of tinkering led us to the conclusion that a minimalist approach is best. After asking the students to read five forensics articles related to the historical case and send two tweets about each, we all agreed this was counter-productive and too hard to track…”
“…After that barrage, the typical assignment involved posting one comment and one question to classmates. After a while, one question OR comment seemed enough.”
Mike Winiski, Furman University
“I could look inside the minds of motivated peers to learn about the new projects they were undertaking, the research reports they were studying, and Web sites they were exploring...”
William M. Ferriter, 6th grade teacher
“…As my comfort with Twitter grew—a process that took a few months, as is typical for new users—I became an active contributor to this knowledge network.”
William M. Ferriter, 6th grade teacher
Teaching Facebook
George H. Williams, assistant professor of English, University of South Carolina Upstate
Practice: tag clouds
Folksonomies mainstreamed
George H. Williams, assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate.
(
The Call of the API
Social images
• accessCeramics, Lewis and Clark College
• 1000 images milestone, February 2009 (http://accessceramics.blogspot.com/2009/02/today-is-big-milestone-as-weve-reached.html)
Teaching with and about YouTube
Classic forms mutating
Aggregations
DiY PLE• Self-created• Consumer products• Personalization
• Small pieces, loosely joined• Variable levels of presence
Did the world just change?
Gaming as part of mainstream culture
• Median age of gamers shoots past 30• Industry size comparable to music• Impacts on hardware, software,
interfaces, other industries• Large and growing diversity of
platforms, topics, genres, niches, players
• “Almost all teens play games.” • 20% of the entire United States
population over age 6 had played browser-based social media games by 2010 (example: Farmville). • The average age of a game player has
risen from 33 in 2007 to 34 in 2010. • “The most frequent game purchaser
is 40 -- old enough to remember the early days of Atari.”
Gaming as part of mainstream culture
Anecdata: Number of Facebook FarmVille players: 62,326,412 (as of Sept 2010, http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/leaderboard/, )
(Casual games are more mainstream than most heavy-duty games)
Diversity of game genres American teenagers, Pew Internet, 2008
Games serious, public, and political
• Oiligarchy, Molle Industries• Jetset, Persuasive Games• The Great Shakeout, California• DimensionM, Tabula Digita
Classroom and courses• Curriculum content• Delivery mechanism• Creating games
Peacemaker, Impact Games
Revolution (via Jason Mittell)
•Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds, Handbook of Computer Game Studies (MIT, 2005)•Frans Mayra, An Introduction to Game Studies (Sage, 2008)•Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT, 2009)
Game studies as academic field
How is gaming used now?
HP has ambitions
How long, oh mouse?
Ubiquitous computingMark Weiser, 1988ff: “The most profound technologies
are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
"The Computer for the Twenty-First Century" (1991)
That’s all so pre-
2011.
The breakthrough move: Amazon Kindle
AR: first, the light stuff
• Museum tours• GPS navigators (Garmin)• Location services (Yelp)
Then the mark of the beast
• Living antecedent: bar codes
•QR•Microsoft Tag
Marking the world
Layaring the world
AR art
Rise of the spime
"the great
challenge of the age“
(Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 2009)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FSsztwbRW0
“"open" refers to granting of copyright permissions above and beyond those offered by standard copyright law. "Open content," then, is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law - at no cost to the user.”
http://www.opencontent.org/definition/
“Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with open source, describes any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual.”
(Wikipedia, as of 9/27/2010)
Flickr: 5 billion photos, as of September 2010
Creative Commons licensed?Attribution License: 21,544,225 photosAttribution-NoDerivs: 7,232,602 photosAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: 47,224,259
Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona; http://www.freesound.org/
How much open content do we produce through social media?
$2 million ->Khan Academy
New forms
for stories
Republish content via blog
• Pedagogy• Social
feedback• Publicity
• Pepys Diary
• Dracula Blogged
• Ulysses and da Vinci per day
Bookblogging
Extended networks
• Support wikis (example: Pynchon)
• William Gibson lost his Node
Wikistorytelling
(http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)
Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door?
“About”,http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/About
Embedded within Slideshare Web platform apparatus
Embedded within blog
Social photo stories
Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo stories
Social photo stories
Social photo stories
Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/)
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Social photo stories
Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)
Digital storytelling in stories
-Bruce Sterling, Wired, 2007
But wait, what's storytelling?
But wait, what's storytelling?
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.”
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
(Fredric Brown, “Knock”, 1948)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
The information landscape changes“Among the entire population (internet users and
non-users alike) the internet is now equal to newspapers and roughly twice as important as radio as a source of election news and information. Among internet users and young adults, these differences are even more magnified.”
-Pew Internet and American Life, "The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008", April 2009
Bryan Alexander
http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander
http://blogs.nitle.org/ and http://blogs.nitle.org/archive/