Digital Humanities Commons^™

Machine Co-Authorship(S) Via Translative Creative Writing, Aaron Tucker

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper argues that machine translation and a symbiotic ecosystem of authorship are central to the poetic works of Aaron Tucker and reveal larger ethical paths for machine-human relationships. In particular, the elements of chance alongside the intersemiotic translative acts that are the nature of human-computer relationships give space to a potential futurity that challenges a human-centric understanding of “reading” and “writing” and generates a type of literature that encourages a reader to better understand their own interactions within their daily digital environments.

The Many Authors Of The Several Houses Of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, And Alex: Authorship, Agency, And Appropriation, Zach Whalen

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is a computer-generated children’s book of 53,651 words and 350 unique illustrations arranged over 800 pages. The text is a cumulative poem in the style of the nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built,” but with a house for each of the eponymous seven individuals, and with each of their houses containing many more types of things. These houses, these things, and these words were chosen by a Python script that I wrote, and the resulting novel--which can be viewed on my Github repository--is …

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja., Piotr Marecki

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One …

Digital Participatory Poetics And Civic Engagement In The Creative Writing Classroom, Liza D. Flum, Emily Oliver

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article explores the ways a team-taught course, “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” supported community-building through participatory action and digital creative making. Using digital texts responding to current events, this course fostered students’ civic imagination and invited them to make connections among their own lives, their communities and poetic civic media. This class facilitated critical community engagement through digital pedagogy and final projects in which students performed public scholarship. Ultimately, this course serves as a case study of how teaching born-digital texts with digital tools can expand the capacity of the creative writing classroom.

Toward Disruptive Creation In Digital Literature Instruction, Michael D. Clark

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Given the multimodal and collaborative nature of digital literature along with the ways it often embodies the theories informing its artistic production, approaches to exploring both the creation and study of the form must abandon legacy pedagogies in favor of disruptive, student-driven course experiences. This work must further include explorations of digital culture, means of production, multimodal literacies, and connections with various definitions of literature ranging from print to auditory to visual forms. To accomplish this, instructors must move from more traditional hierarchical roles to those of facilitator and participant, committing consistently to returning decision-making work to the students.

Creative Writing Across Mediums And Modes: A Pedagogical Model, Saul B. Lemerond Phd

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This is a creative practice (pedagogy) paper outlining the current formulation of my multimodal introduction to creative writing course. In this paper, I describe the course in detail, address the tensions, tradeoffs, and workarounds inherent in abandoning the traditional workshop model, describe instances of student engagement and success to illuminate this process, and endeavor to explain why high amounts of engagement and enthusiasm I get from my students concerning the content of my course is justified. My multimodal course is a generative course where my students are required to produce work in different creative modes on a near weekly basis. …

Introduction: What Is “Creative Making As Creative Writing”?, Kathi Berens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests that creative writing methods have long been procedural and technologic.

There are many forms of creative making. This special issue features creative writers that

• Write code to output novels
• Redefine how we think of writing’s “container”
• Demonstrate aspects of the digital-first, multimodal writing classroom
• Modify or remix existing artworks

Berens supplies three …

Publication And Evaluation Challenges In Games & Interactive Media, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Presentations and other scholarship

Faculty in the fields of games and interactive media face significant challenges in publishing and documenting their scholarly work for evaluation in the tenure and promotion process. These challenges include selecting appropriate publication venues and assigning authorship for works spanning multiple disciplines; archiving and accurately citing collaborative digital projects; and redefining “peer review,” impact, and dissemination in the context of creative digital works. In this paper I describe many of these challenges, and suggest several potential solutions.

Transatlantic Détournement? An Institutional Perspective On François Bon’S Reception Of Kenneth Goldsmith’S Uncreative Writing, Gert-Jan Meyntjens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article investigates the ambivalent reception of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing by the French author and writing workshop facilitator François Bon. Although admiring Goldsmith’s radical poetics, Bon hesitates when it comes to integrating digitally-driven uncreative writing methods in his own workshop. In one entry on his personal website, Bon proposes a détournement of Goldsmith’s experimental practices in the form of a return to the novel. To account for this ambivalence on the part of Bon, this article takes the contexts of American creative writing and the French atelier d’écriture into account. It argues that the novelty of Goldsmith’s project can …

Pheon: Practicing Problem Solving And Gaining Museum Literacy From Transmedia And Alternate Reality Games In Museums, Jes A. Koepfler, K. Tierney Sneeringer, Georgina Bath Goodlander

Journal of Interactive Humanities

The Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum ran a transmedia game, called PHEON, as an in-museum scavenger hunt-style game from October 2010 through September 2011. Players took on missions that sent them throughout the Museum's collections. From a summative evaluation of the game, we learned that PHEON supported problem solving skills, increased museum literacy, and help players connect with the Museum and its resources. Players also identified opportunities for improvement related to the game materials and its narrative. The paper offers a summary of lessons learned for others hoping to deploy an ARG or transmedia game …

Your Iphone Cannot Escape History, And Neither Can You: Self-Reflexive Design For A Mobile History Learning Game, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter focuses on the design approach used in the self-reflexive finale of the mobile augmented reality history game Jewish Time Jump: New York. In the finale, the iOS device itself and the player using it are implicated in the historical moment and theme of the game. The author-designer-researcher drew from self-reflexive traditions in theater, cinema, and nonmobile games to craft the reveal of the connection between the mobile device and the history that the learners were studying. Through centering on this particular design element, the author demonstrates how self-reflexivity can be deployed in a mobile learning experience to …

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

New Design Principles For Mobile History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Presentations and other scholarship

This study draws on design-based research on an ARIS–based mobile augmented reality game for teaching early 20th century history. New design principles derived from the study include the use of supra-reveals, and bias mirroring. Supra-reveals are a kind of foreshadowing event in order to ground historical happenings in the wider enduring historical understanding. Bias mirroring refers to a nonplayer character echoing back a player’s biased behavior, in order to open the player to listening to alternative perspectives. Supra-reveals engendered discussion of historical themes early in the game experience. The results showed that use of a cluster of NPC bias mirroring …

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

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 …

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 …

Ingress Well-Played: City As Mmo, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Articles

This paper describes player experience for Ingress, a geo-local, mobile augmented reality game created by Google’s Niantic Labs. Ingress incorporates aspects of both pervasive, alternate reality (ARG) and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. However, unlike many ARGs, Ingress is not focused on a specific time-limited period, or linked to a single real-world event or location. And unlike a typical MMO, play in Ingress is geo-spatially limited; players must be physically proximate to game elements in order to interact with them. Using game mechanics similar to those of many MMOs, Ingress provides for a range of gameplay, based both on …

Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, And The Public Sphere, Ayala Fader, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides an analysis of Occupy Judaism, an explicitly religious expression of Jewish protest, which occurred simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, the direct-democracy movement of 2011. Occupy Judaism, like Occupy Wall Street, took place both in physical spaces of protest in New York City and digitally, through mobilizing and circulating debate. The article focuses on the words and actions of Daniel Sieradski, the public face and one of the key founders of Occupy Judaism, supplemented by the experiences of others in Occupy Judaism, Occupy Wall Street, and Occupy Faith (a Protestant clergy-led initiative). We investigate what qualified as religion …

Jewish Games For Learning: Renewing Heritage Traditions In The Digital Age, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Rather than a discontinuity from traditional modes of learning, new explorations of digital and strategic games in Jewish learning are markedly continuous with ancient practices. An explication of the close connections between traditional modes of Jewish learning, interpretive practice, and gaming culture can help to explain how Jews of the Digital Age can adopt and are adapting modern Games for Learning practices for contemporary purposes. The chapter opens by contextualizing a notion of Jewish Games and the field of Games for Learning. Next, the chapter explains the connections between game systems and Jewish traditions. It closes with a case study …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …

Nurturing Play-Makers & Active Investigative Agents: Schwartz Tag, Good Video Games And Futures Of Jewish Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can an experiential approach to education, in combination with a games-based orientation, help us reach often-elusive educational goals? In many ways the study of games and game design bring us back to tenets of education that we have long known, including the benefits of self-directed learning and project-based work. Games-based design and learning may provide a way to shift the discussion from “What should an educated Jew know?” to “How does a learner develop a taste for Jewish learning and living?”

Reviewing The Author-Function In The Age Of Wikipedia, Amit Ray, Erhardt Graeff

Articles

In "Reviewing the Author-Function in the Age of Wikipedia," Amit Ray and Erhardt Graeff examine how wiki technology challenges traditional concepts of authorship and authority in knowledge production. The authors build on poststructuralist theory, particularly Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author" and Michel Foucault's concept of the "author-function," to analyze how wikis destabilize individual authorship in favor of collaborative, community-driven content creation.

The essay argues that wikis represent a fundamental shift from the Romantic notion of the solitary author-genius to what they term the "wiki writing process"—a dynamic system where traditional roles of reader, writer, and editor blur into a …