Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2012 on Journal of Digital Humanities

An Electric Current of the Imagination: What the Digital Humanities Are and What They Might Become

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It is a great honour for me to become head of this academic department devoted to the study of the digital humanities. When I first saw experiments in the digital imaging of books and manuscripts in the British Library twenty years ago, it was impossible to imagine that they would develop into an intellectual activity on a scale warranting an academic department. The fact that King’s College London has led the way in this process is due to the work of many pioneers, and I cannot start this lecture without acknowledging their achievements and saying what a pleasure it is to join them now as a colleague. Above all, it is essential to honour the contribution of Professor Harold Short who is without doubt the father of the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Harold has been an outstanding international pioneer of the digital humanities, and I feel honoured and humbled to follow in his footsteps.

Archives in Context and as Context

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Approaching the field of digital humanities as an outsider is an interesting experience. It is best compared, I think, to being a tourist in a foreign country for which there are no reliable guidebooks. It is a country in which the language is almost the same as the one you speak, and yet words are used to mean somewhat different things. It is also a relatively young country, still trying to define its national identity.

Audience, Substance, and Style

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Digital Humanities. In the introduction to our first issue, we explained how the journal’s content came directly from the writing, coding, and projects of our field’s community of practitioners, without a traditional academic publication’s process of submission. We think it is also useful to share how JDH has been received and used — the demand side as well as the supply side, so to speak. In their open online work, scholars clearly provided a rich supply of high-quality material to choose from; we wondered if the community would in turn provide a large audience for the publication itself.

Games and Historical Narratives

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The academic study of games — from board games of strategy to online multi-player video games — challenges and disrupts epistemologies held dear in the humanities. Traditional scholarly products such as monographs and journal articles, and to a lesser degree blog posts, are meant to be passively read, whereas games are meant to be actively played. Games may present a narrative like the traditional texts studied and written by academics, but player influence on the selection of narrative choices presents unique questions about authority and interpretation.

QRator at the Grant Museum of Zoology

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As you approach University College London’s Grant Museum of Zoology through the streets of Bloomsbury, the first hint that there is something unusual inside the stately Rockefeller Building appears in the banners celebrating its re-opening. The line of silhouetted animals is punctuated with the occasional outline of an iPad, the “screen” revealing the skeleton of an animal and hinting at the role of iPads in the museum experience.

External view, Grant Museum

Playing Through the “Art of Video Games” Exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The new “Art of Video Games” exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is exceptional for its venue, if not its content or interpretation. Although The Strong International Center for the History of Electronic Games and The American Classic Arcade Museum hold collections of video games and offer venues for playable histories of the medium, the exhibition of video games in the Smithsonian marks an institutional endorsement of the medium as art form.

Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

It is my hope that by now few deny that contemporary game series like Civilization_or_Assassin’s Creed constitute history.¹ However, such a broad term does not convey the approach that analysis of these new historical texts requires. At this early stage in the serious study of historical videogames, we must be sure to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the videogame form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral rolein the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives. Simply focusing on the accuracy of the game often re-informs us about popular history rather than recognizing the opportunities for engaging with discourse about the past (and the nature of this discourse) that this new historical form can offer.

The Emergence of Literary Diction

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Literary criticism used to be, in great part, an attempt to define the distinctive character of “literary language.” The project preoccupied Russian Formalists and American New Critics, and dates back to the nineteenth century. In recent years, critics have largely abandoned the attempt to define literary language, since it is now clear that the category of literature itself is historically unstable. But if we could trace the transformation of literary language in a detailed way, this instability might become interesting: we could use the changing characteristics that have marked language as literary to illuminate the transformation of literature as a social category.

Think Talk Make Do: Power and the Digital Humanities

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

How cowardly to begin with a disclaimer! And yet. It seems worth saying that I wrote the original post from which this is derived in a fury at job-market news from friends, as well as the latest statistics from VIDA about women’s representation in magazines and book reviews. I probably would have been more temperate if I’d known what kind of reaction this post would provoke — but then again, who knows? Maybe not.

Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Criticism and Classroom Use

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Part I: Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Some Guidelines for Criticism

The concept of problem space is a highly useful tool for studying historical simulations, teaching history, and using the former to help in the latter. Simulation games are interpretations of the past designed as problem spaces. In this sense, a historical problem space borrows and extends upon two existing concepts. In the field of educational and cognitive research a problem space is a mental map of the options one has to try to reach a goal, the various states. There is no implication of physical space. In contrast work by some scholars of video games, most notably Jenkins and Squire, discuss video games as contested spaces: here there are certainly problems, but the space itself (or rather the representation of it) becomes critical. Extending from these established concepts a historical problem space has the following features:

Transitioning to a Digital World: Art History, its Research Centers, and Digital Scholarship

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The following is excerpted from a report written for The Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. The full report can be found at the Kress Foundation Website (PDF).

Introduction

The increasing use of digital technologies in research, publication and teaching has spurred change in many disciplines. In the field of art history, the transition from teaching with slides to teaching with digital images is often cited as the “tipping point” that moved the field into the digital world. Using digital images for research and teaching requires an understanding of digitization, online searching, and use of presentation software for displaying and manipulating digital images. These activities opened up new opportunities for the field. As art historians Hilary Ballon and Mariët Westermann note:

Going Beyond the Textual in History

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Photo by Andrew Mason

Because of my interest in both history and games, I’m always on the look-out for good writing or new takes on how to bring elements of the gaming world into the framework of historical inquiry. Increasingly, I’m finding my best sources of this kind of reading from my Twitter stream, as was the case when Shawn Graham (@electricarchaeo) pointed me towards an article in the recent edition of the Canadian Game Studies Association journal, Loading…, titled “Beyond the ‘Historical’ Simulation: Using Theories of History to Inform Scholarly Game Design.” Tackling what they call ‘gamic action’, the authors of the paper look to use elements of ‘procedural rhetoric’ combined with ‘valid and scholarly means’ of constructing the past (modeled on the monograph or print article) to produce ‘reasonably justified truths’ compatible with current methodologies in use by many historians.¹

Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring 2012 Articles Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“A new conjunction of scientist, curator, humanist, and artist is what the digital humanities must strive to achieve. It is the only way of ensuring that we do not lose our souls in a world of data.” Andrew Prescott

Yearly ratio of words that entered English before 1150/ words that entered 1150-1699

Vol. 1, No. 2 Spring 2012 Special Section Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Games will likely never produce the same opportunities for discourse as a book, but then why should they?” Adam Chapman

Photo by Caro’s Lines

Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2012 Conversations Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“I believe embedded in the discussion of what constitutes an “archives” is a debate over the importance of authenticity and the preservation of context.” Kate Theimer

“It’s no longer just about coding and gender; it’s about the kinds of conversations we’re willing to have about uncomfortable questions.” Miriam Posner

Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2012, Reviews Featured Excerpts

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Video panels of players during gaming