Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Response: In And Out Of The Game, As Usual, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

In this response article, I revisit the idea of paratext in video games. I start, however, with the example of a book by Tolstoy, and the textual studies work of McKenzie and McGann, in order to make the point that paratextuality has never been limited to Genette’s rigid definition, even in the case of print texts. Video games foreground what has always been the case: the dynamic, volatile, multidirectional nature of paratexts, which can take you into but also out of the enclosure of the main text (or “game itself”) in unexpected ways. Illustrations include Animal Crossing: New Horizons and …

Reverse Engineering The First Humanities Computing Center, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, is often called the founder of humanities computing. In fact, starting as early as 1949, he collaborated with IBM to perform experiments using suites of punched-card machines. These punched-card data systems—with their plug-board setups, clacking machinery, and flurries of perforated rectangular cards—were developed for business accounting and tabulating, and adapted for government censuses, defense calculations, archival management, and information processing of all kinds. The first decade of humanities computing can more accurately be described as an era of humanities data processing—in the historically specific and contextually rich sense of the term. This essay describes an …

The Emergence Of The Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The past decade has seen a profound shift in our collective understanding of the digital network. What was once understood to be a transcendent virtual reality is now experienced as a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through and interact with every day, raising new questions about the social, locative, embodied, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world.

In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones examines this shift in our relationship to digital technology and the ways that it has affected humanities scholarship and the academy more broadly. Based on the premise …