Digital Humanities Commons^™

Investigating Virtual Worlds, Patricia D. Sobczak

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

The global phenomena of online gaming engages millions of people, some playing over 45 hours a week - the equivalent of a second full-time job. Our children are logging over 10,000 hours of gaming time before they are 21 years old; the equivalent of the time children spend in formal classrooms from grades five through 12. Players in one of the most popular online games have logged over 5.3 million years of play time since 2004.

These statistics show that virtual worlds, including online games, have become an important component of modern culture, but their impact on society has yet …

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

The Black And The White Bride: Dualism, Gender, And Bodies In European Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Fairy tales are one of the most important folklore genres in Western culture, spanning literary and oral cultures, folk and elite cultures, and print and mass media forms. As Jack Zipes observes: ‘The cultural evolution of the fairy tale is closely bound historically to all kinds of storytelling and different civilizing processes that have undergirded the formation of nation-states.’¹⁴³ Studying fairy tales thus opens a window onto European history and cultures, ideologies, and aesthetics.

Geospatial Virtual Heritage: A Gesture-Based 3d Gis To Engage The Public With Ancient Maya Archaeology, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Jim Robertsson, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Giorgio Agugario, Fabio Remondino, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper presents our research to develop a gesture-based 3D GIS system to engage the public in cultural heritage. It compares two types of interaction—device-based vs. natural interaction— and summarizes the beta-testing results of a 3D GIS tool for archaeology, called QueryArch3D, in which participants used device-based interaction (i.e. mouse and keyboard). It follows with a description of the gesture-based system—that we developed in response to these beta-tests. The system uses QueryArch3D and Microsoft’s Kinect to enable people use body movements (in lieu of keyboard or mouse) to navigate a virtual reality landscape, query 3D objects, and call up photos, …

Placing My Bets On Youtube Futures (For New Media Writing And Publishing), Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The work of media scholar, artist, and activist Alexandra Juhasz directly addresses many of the concerns that Lovink and Rossiter raise in the previous two chapters. In this chapter, Juhasz repurposes blog posts about her undergraduate media studies course and “video-book” Learning from YouTube to consider the future of new media scholarship: how academics might write and publish about and in new media. By moving her writing from screen to page, the chapter itself enacts the concerns of circulation, vernacular, standards, and publication at the heart of new media studies projects and the work of writing about them. Juhasz demonstrates …

Youtube Stylo: Writing And Teaching With Digital Video, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The impact of YouTube on media production and distribution has been breakneck, immense, and seemingly irreversible. In this chapter I argue that media production professors need to embrace, and not to avoid YouTube, as if it was what the French calla stylo: a pen. To do so, we need to better understand YouTube and YouTube videos. I impart here some of the lessons I have learned from teaching an experimental course. Learning from YouTube, in which all the course work has been about, but also on, the site. These lessons illustrate the genres, contents, and styles of …

Introduction: A Game's Study Manifesto, Jason C. Thompson, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

In the epigraph to this collection, we return to a foundational text of the western literary canon, Homer’s Odyssey, and see in Penelope’s “bow contest” an illustrative moment in the history of game culture. Having fought in the Trojan War and having survived his ten-year trek home, the weary Odysseus cannot simply show up—the returning hero must rout the odious suitors whom Penelope has forestalled. In order to buy more time for vengeance, Odysseus disguises himself as an old beggar; in order to buy more time for deferral, Penelope creates an unwinnable game: she will marry the suitor able …

Gay For Play: Theorizing Lgbtq Characters In Game Studies, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Despite, and perhaps because of, popular press reactions to stereotypical depictions of beefy boys and busty babes in video games, the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality remains a lacuna in the emerging field of game studies. Of particular interest is the notion of performance and the ways this impacts both on gender and on game play. The combination might be expected to offer a very interesting way of approaching LGBTQ characters in digital games, especially given the recent inclusion of such characters in some popular and well-studied game franchises, including Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar 1997-present), Jade Empire (BioWare 2005-08) …

From Mounds To Maps To Models: Visualizing Ancient Architecture Across Landscapes, Heather Richards-Rissetto

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Since the onset of settlement pattern studies in the 1950s, landscape mapping projects have become an archaeological mainstay. Remote sensing technologies such as lidar, photogrammetry, and SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) steadily reveal new archaeological sites. For landscape archaeology, the detection and mapping of small architectural complexes and households offers important data to contextualize larger (often already known) sites and perform regional analyses. However, because the majority of sites remain unexcavated, analysis is limited, and yet Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and 3D Visualization are expanding the possible uses for older and newly-acquired data on unexcavated mounds. This paper describes a GIS …

Coptic Scriptorium, Caroline T. Schroeder, Amir Zeldes

Department of Religious Studies Faculty Digital Projects

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in texts in the Coptic language, particularly the Sahidic dialect. As an open-source, open-access initiative, our technologies and corpus facilitate a collaborative environment for digital research for all scholars working in Coptic. We provide:

• tools to process Coptic texts
• a searchable, richly-annotated corpus of texts using the ANNIS search and visualization architecture
• visualizations of Coptic texts
• a collaborative platform for scholars to use and contribute to the project research results generated from the tools and corpus

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM is a collaborative, digital project created by Caroline T. Schroeder (University of …

December 14, 2012: Jeffrey Masten History Of The Book Lecture @ Newberry (1/11/13), Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

December 13, 2012: Premodern Foucault At The Newberry, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

December 9, 2012: Brimhall Wins Nea Award, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

December 1, 2012: Gwen Frostic Reading Series: Fiction Writer Emma Straub, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 21, 2012: Devoney Looser Visiting Lecture, Thurs., 11/29, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 17, 2012: Cfp: Essay Collection On Heroines: Images Of Women In Literature & Pop Culture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 15, 2012: Sigma Tau Delta To Hold 13th Induction On December 1, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 12, 2012: Fall 2012 Gwen Frostic Reading Series: Alumni Reading, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

When The Virtual Meets The Real: An Assessment Of The Benefits And "Costs" Of Open Access Texts For First Year Writing Courses At Cuny, Johannah Rodgers

Publications and Research

An assessment of the advantages, drawbacks, and costs of Open Access / OER texts for First Year Writing courses at CUNY.

November 10, 2012: Cfp: Memes In Visual Culture (Jan.15, 2013), Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 8, 2012: Grace Tiffany To Help Edit Cymbeline, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 4, 2012: Gwen Frostic Reading Series: Playwright Julie Jensen, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

November 3, 2012: Grad Student Fellowship Opportunity In 17th/18th Century Studies, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

October 30, 2012: Praise For Special Issue Of Comparative Drama, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

October 29, 2012: Special Issue Of Comparative Drama, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

October 12, 2012: Ania Loomba/Comparative Drama Distinguished Lecture/Nov. 1, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

October 6, 2012: Newberry Grad Student Conference Cfp (10/15 Deadline), Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

September 30, 2012: Nate Powell, Eisner Award Winner, Gives Talk At Wmu On October 4, 2012, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

September 25, 2012: Gazette And Mlive Feature Philip Levine Visit, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

September 24, 2012 Eagleton Lecture At Notre Dame (9/28), Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.