Digital humanities

Instructional goal and supporting contexts

Cross posted: https://unclesam.sites.grinnell.edu/uncategorized/instructional-goal-and-supporting-contexts After carefully thinking about what we would like to do with the Uncle Sam Plantation simulation, the types of open educational resources that we would like to develop, and the manner in which these resources could potentially be used in a class, the dev team has come up with the following instructional goal…Read more Instructional goal and supporting contexts

Defining instructional goals in virtual reality

Cross posted: http://unclesam.sites.grinnell.edu/uncategorized/defining-instructional-goals-in-virtual-reality The Uncle Sam plantation project is beginning to gear up and, with the return of Sam Nakahira from archival research in the Louisiana State University special collections, we are presented with a mountain of archival material that needs to be assembled into a virtual reality experience. What does a receipt for $12 issued…Read more Defining instructional goals in virtual reality

Summer Faculty Workshop Report: Stories for the Eye and Mind

Executive Summary The summer faculty workshop, Stories for the Eye and Mind: Immersive Environments for Teaching and Learning, was held in the Digital Liberal Arts Lab (DLAB) on Grinnell College 26-29 June 2017. Workshop participants included David Neville (GCIEL project lead and workshop facilitator), Damian Kelty-Stephen (Assistant Professor of Psychology and workshop co-facilitator), Charles Cunningham…Read more Summer Faculty Workshop Report: Stories for the Eye and Mind

The spatial humanities, proper scale, and making reference images in 3ds Max

In preparing for my upcoming faculty summer workshop on immersive environments, I have become more interested in ways that technology enhances the examination of how space – understood to be a certain point situated at the intersection of the physical world (geography) and time (history) – is constructed. Specifically, how technology can reveal sociopolitical forces…Read more The spatial humanities, proper scale, and making reference images in 3ds Max

GCIEL activity, community, and HASTAC 2017

Since October I have been working hard to establish an immersive environments lab at Grinnell College and have been making some significant headway toward getting this project off the ground. With the launch last week of the Grinnell College Immersive Experiences Lab (GCIEL) website and the delivery of some VR-capable desktops and associated hardware, it…Read more GCIEL activity, community, and HASTAC 2017

Stories for the eye and mind: Immersive environments for teaching, learning, and research

Summer 2016 Faculty Workshop Title Stories for the Eye and Mind: Immersive Environments for Teaching, Learning, and Research Time 26-29 June, 9 AM to 12 PM; Optional lab 2 to 5 PM Description The liberal arts have rich stories to tell and immersive environments can be a powerful way of transmitting and experiencing these stories. In…Read more Stories for the eye and mind: Immersive environments for teaching, learning, and research

Machine clustering and “The Flowing Light of the Godhead”

In Chapter 11 of Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature, Matthew Jockers introduces machine clustering through an authorship attribution problem. That is, by comparing different usages of high frequency words in an ingested corpus and calculating the Euclidean metric between them, the distance between different books in the corpus can be determined. Books closer…Read more Machine clustering and “The Flowing Light of the Godhead”

Promoting information and digital literacy

A few months ago I had the opportunity to interview for an educational technology director position at a highly selective liberal arts college in the Southeast. The position was unusual for me at the time in that it would be housed completely in the library and would be in charge of library staff, in addition to…Read more Promoting information and digital literacy

Using R to analyze “The Flowing Light of the Godhead”

A few weeks ago I started learning the R programming language for use in quantitative and computational approaches to textual analysis. Although my areas of expertise are in 3D visualization and simulation, it seemed to me that a lot of work in the digital humanities is in textual analysis (e.g., text mining and topic modeling)…Read more Using R to analyze “The Flowing Light of the Godhead”

Unity C# Quest Scripts

 Introduction The C# Unity scripts I wrote for the Uncle Sam Plantation project create a basic quest structure that guides players through a 3D game or simulation. My research into 3D digital game-based language learning environments show that goal-directed player activity in these environments provide learners of a second language and culture with a more…Read more Unity C# Quest Scripts

Why the digital humanities could benefit from digital game-based learning

My presentation at the NEH Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) on 3D modeling of cultural heritage sites detailed the work I have been doing on a digital recreation of the Uncle Sam Plantation. During the presentation I also made a case for using the 3D models I have developed as the basis for an instructional…Read more Why the digital humanities could benefit from digital game-based learning

3D modeling of cultural heritage: Where are the Americans?

On 20-23 June 2016 I attended a NEH Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) exploring the theory and practice of 3D modeling of cultural heritage sites. Held this year at UCLA, the institute was a follow-up to one held the year prior at the University of Massachusetts -Amherst. I found the institute…Read more 3D modeling of cultural heritage: Where are the Americans?