Blog

  • 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…

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  • The Grinnell College Innovation Fund is an internal grant program for fostering and supporting innovative approaches to teaching and research at the institution. Given the growing interest around virtual reality and yet unrealized opportunities provided by other immersive technologies (e.g., 3D digital game-based learning and visualizations), I thought an immersive environments lab would be an especially…

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  • Below are my opening remarks and charge for the Immersive Environments Colloquium at Vanderbilt University. Although the remarks include comments that I have already made on this blog, I thought it would still be useful to publish them here since, I think, they succinctly summarize how video games and digital game-based learning can benefit the humanities, specifically…

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  • While I was enrolled in the Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences Program at Utah State University (2004-2007), I became very interested in the use of digital game-based learning, immersive virtual environments, and instructional simulations as a way to teach humanities topics. At the time this interest fortuitously aligned with the emergence of the “digital humanities”…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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)…

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  •  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…

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  • 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…

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  • 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…

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