This week’s Digital Humanities topic focused on video game narratives. As someone who does not typically play video games, I had not realized how powerful they can be as interactive storytelling tools or how many different kinds of games exist beyond action games. I especially enjoyed exploring two educational games: The Oregon Trail and When …
This week’s focus on how data functions within humanities research has been eye-opening for me. I’ve never felt particularly drawn to data or quantitative methods, but I’ve had some prior experience with creating datasets for a bibliometric project and with reporting annual statistics to the IMLS in my previous public library role. These experiences gave …
Community histories can be a powerful tool for bringing people together and contributing to a more inclusive historical record. For my Digital Humanities Pedagogy Project, I chose to focus on the digital tool Historypin.com for its digital storytelling potential. I first encountered this tool in one of our class readings, where it was discussed in …
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The overarching lesson I took from this week’s readings is the importance of considering all factors when deciding whether to digitize an item or collection, especially the perspectives of creators, subjects, and communities represented. Accessibility and preservation are often the goals of digitization, but it is not a worthy pursuit if privacy, consent, and ethics …
Museums, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions house collections that tell stories about our past, but many of these collections were created through exploitation and colonization. Because of this history, it is essential for institutions today to center empathy, community partnerships, and ethics when working with cultural heritage materials. Digitization offers new opportunities to reconnect with …
According to our reading for this week, text analysis has its roots in literary history and criticism. Whereas close reading involves the careful study of a single text, distant reading refers to the large-scale analysis of many texts or collected works. The goal of distant reading is to uncover overarching trends, patterns, and concepts that …
Historically, maps have never been neutral. Cartographers, often employed by colonizing nations, steeped ethnocentric views into their work. These maps frequently claimed land for the empire, erased Indigenous territories, and replaced local names with those preferred by European nations. When studying these historical maps today, it is important to consider the larger influences and history …
I recently had the chance to experiment with Matterport, and the experience was enjoyable and surprisingly intuitive. For my assignment, I chose to scan the Medicine Wheel Garden. Inspired by attending the garden’s twentieth-anniversary celebration just a few weeks ago, I thought it would be interesting to produce a virtual tour of the space. Nestled …
Creating an “archive” in a digital context means creating a virtual representation of an archival collection online. This is often done to make materials more accessible and to preserve physical items by reducing handling. Digital archives can include born-digital materials or digitized versions of physical items, such as photographs, newspapers, letters, artifacts, and paintings. In …