Digital Humanities Commons^™

When Technology Is Too Hot, Too Cold Or Just Right, Jonathan Howell

The Emerging Learning Design Journal

Many instructors acknowledge the importance of quantitative literacy in non-STEM fields and may themselves use advanced tools for data analysis, statistics and visualization. But how, if at all, does an instructor introduce quantitative methods into the classroom without overwhelming and disengaging students who may have been drawn to the field precisely because it has not traditionally required any skill or interest in science, technology, engineering or math? I present a model of iterative assignment design illustrated by the evolution of a phonetic exercise in which students are asked to measure vowels from their own speech and to plot their measurements …

Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. As an alternative, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored "digital surrealism" that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-five feature-length films …

Blown To Bits Project, David Schmidt

Informatics Open Educational Resources

The book, Blown to Bits, uncovers the many ways that the new digital world has changed and is changing our whole environment. Some changes are incremental but others are more revolutionary. Some of the changes that we welcome are slowly eroding our privacy and are changing the rules of ownership. This book illuminates the complexities of these changes. I have attempted to capture the central points in selected chapters, and in some cases I have added new material or new examples to replace dated material. I picked chapters to summarize that address the following topics (and more). There are many …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

Preserving The Vernacular Postindustrial Landscape: Big Data Geospatial Approaches To Heritage Management And Interpretation, John D. M. Arnold

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Redundant historical industrial sites, or postindustrial landscapes, face numerous preservation challenges. Functionally obsolete, and often derelict and decaying, these cultural landscapes often retain only a fraction of their original infrastructure. With their historical interconnections made indistinct by their physical separation and obscured by the passage of time, surviving remnants are isolated and disjunct, confounding both their legibility and their consideration for formal historic preservation. Nevertheless, they persist. This dissertation presents a theoretical understanding of the nature of postindustrial landscape preservation, and argues that the material persistence of its historical constituents is the result of previously overlooked processes of informal material …

Oceans Of Space, Stephanie Steinbrecher '16

EnviroLab Asia

"Oceans of Space" relates my observations of the 2016 EnviroLab Asia Clinic Trip to Singapore and Sarawak, Malaysia. In this meditation, the concept of space serves as a lens to examine assumptions of geopolitical, historical, and philosophical positioning—regionally and globally. At the center of my inquiry is EnviroLab's connection to the Dayak communities in Baram, Sarawak. This region is experiencing dramatic social and ecological change as a result of industrial development. By triangulating my subjective impressions of this space, various knowledge systems, and the qualitative data EnviroLab gathered in Southeast Asia, I aim to untangle some paradoxes that complicate the …

Book Review: Making Media Studies By David Gauntlett, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Making Media Studies is a collection of previously published and updated works by David Gauntlett, including his infamous essay, “Media Studies 2.0.” It explores ways in which the traditional media studies paradigm has been disrupted by prosumers and the practices of everyday people and DIY “makers” who are using the internet to learn, make things and share ideas. He argues that media studies practitioners need to learn from the makers movement to encourage more creativity, design thinking and conversation. Gauntlett positions himself as an optimist and criticizes overly negative approaches to internet culture that he sees as common among media …

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

December 4, 2016: Kazoo Books Open House, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

Local authors including Grace Tiffany and Andy Mozina will be hanging out at Kazoo Books on Sat., December 10th, 2:30 to 4:00.

Orpheus, Winter 2016-17, University Of Dayton

Orpheus: UD's Literary and Artistic Magazine

No abstract provided.

A Dollar A Day: Child Sponsorship And The Marketization Of Human Development, Taylor Hallett

Capstone Collection

Child sponsorship as a method of international development offers child sponsors a personal connection to the process of alleviating poverty in the global South. As a form of human development, child sponsorship is constituted by neoliberal principles of marketization and social entrepreneurship. How does child sponsorship, in this context, require us to rethink the ethics of international development in light of ongoing debates about neoliberalism? In this research, I argue that child sponsorship reifies the binary of the “developed” and “undeveloped” worlds. Through undertaking a content analysis of three organizations (Compassion International, World Vision, and UNICEF) and applying post-structural critique …

Preface To Ssl 42:2, Patrick G. Scott, Tony Jarrells

Studies in Scottish Literature

Preface articulating the purpose of the SSL symposium series and the symposium on Spatial Humanities, and a brief introduction to the other articles in the issue.

Introduction: Spatial Humanities And Scottish Studies, Eric Gidal, Michael Gavin

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the 2016 SSL Symposium on Spatial Humanities and Scottish Studies, reviewing recent discussion on the spatial understanding of Scottish history and culture and providing extensive references to relevant geographical and digital humanities scholarship.

Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant And The Welsh And Scottish Tour (1760-1820), Alex Deans, Nigel Leask

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the digital mapping element in a collaborative AHRC-funded project Curious Travellers, that combines the editing and critical interpretation of early Romantic-period travel writing with cartographical work involving digitized historic maps, especially in the correspondence and manuscript and published travel journals of the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and provides examples of the issues involved in matching texts and maps, particularly for Gaelic place-names.

Digital Literary Geography And The Difficulties Of Locating 'Redgauntlet Country', Christopher Donaldson, Sally Bushell, Ian N. Gregory, Joanna E. Taylor, Paul Rayson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents a case study about Sir Walter Scott's Jacobite novel Redgauntlet (1824), drawn from larger grant-funded projects in historical geographical information systems based at Lancaster University, reviewing a variety of other historic literary mapping projects, describing the text corpus of Lake District sources and models used in the larger projects, and contrasting the location of Scott's fictional geography and places in the Solway Firth area of South-West Scotland with the historic places, largely across the border in North-West England, to which he also refers.

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

Spatial Humanities And Memory Studies: Mapping Edinburgh In The First Age Of The Enlightenment, Murray Pittock, Craig Lamont

Studies in Scottish Literature

Describes the first phase of a digital project mapping social and cultural relationships in early 18th century Edinburgh, Scotland, part of a larger AHRC grant-funded study Allan Ramsay and Edinburgh in the First Age of the Enlightenment; explores interrelations between urban history, digital mapping, and emerging interest in the field of memory studies; and suggests links between the heterogeneous and cosmopolitan nature of housing in early 18th century Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment culture of innovation.

Contributors To Ssl 42:2

Studies in Scottish Literature

Brief biographical notes on the literary scholars and digital humanists contributing to the volume.

Media Literacy As Mindful Practice For Democratic Education. A Response To “Transaction Circles With Digital Texts As A Foundation For Democratic Practices”, Theresa Redmond

Democracy & Education

This essay is a response to Brown’s (2015) article describing her strategy of transaction circles as a student-centered, culturally responsive, and democratic literacy practice. In my response, I provide further evidence from the field of media literacy education (MLE) that serves to enhance Brown’s argument for using transaction circles in order to promote democratic discourse, specifically augmenting her ideas by connecting the purposes and processes of transaction circles with key implications of media literacy pedagogy. I invite Brown to consider how her concept of transaction circles may be extended in three ways: (a) through acknowledging the indispensable role of the …