Very often one sees the words “games” or “gaming” in phrases along with the words “learning” and “education.” Gaming is no longer a synonym to entertainment (or least, no longer one of the synonyms) but an area that has become a significant tool in (digital) pedagogy. Teachers, scholars, and practitioners of gaming who use it as a scholarly instrument typically are affiliated with English departments, Media studies, Communication studies, or Journalism. (Apparently, one can also get a Ph.D. in gaming now, too.) It’s fascinating to observe how and which games might be used in the classroom, library, or school programs–useful books are written on this topic including, for instance, the recently published volume Learning, Education and Games (2019), edited by Karen Schrier. It’s already the third book in the series and is available in open access here.

With that in mind, I registered for the workshop “Intro to Educational Game Design” facilitated by Zachary Loyd and offered by GC Digital Initiatives at CUNY. The workshop was based on several main goals. First, it was decided to discuss how games can lead to new learning outcomes; (2) explore some of the foundational concepts of game design for educational purposes and its implementation; and (3) provide an overview of the game design landscape–meaning, tools and software used for this.

One of the first questions discussed gaming is its relation vis-a-vis education and entertainment. Apparently, even when one plays for entertainment, one is still learning to do things–i.e., learning how to play and also develops a sense that allows one to retry, keep making efforts, and not to give up immediately (almost like a famous Samuel Beckett motto: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”). Another important component is that one is also learning to navigate and use skills in one system (for instance, video games) that can have a beneficial effect on one’s learning in other areas, like history, literature, or science. 

When discussing the approaches to education game design, two significant areas were pointed out: gamification and game-based learning. The key conceptual differences between the two are the following. Gamification is about adding to a scenario that can be called a non-game; game-like elements are there to improve a lesson. Whereas game-based learning makes use of games to construct the course from the very beginning. In other words, with gamification, as summed up by Michael J. Cripps elsewhere, one establishes Experience Points (XPs), badges/levels, and leaderboards whereas game-based learning usually embeds learning with game-like structures. While teaching and choosing a particular direction, both approaches might be considered and could be fruitful; things to think about in advance include one’s interest in the students’ specific learning outcomes as well as how an assessment can be incorporated. Not to forget: accessibility — are all students able to find tools, access, and work with them? 

In 2013, James Gee published a piece “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” In it, the author pointed out sixteen principles of game-based learning: identity; interaction; production; risk taking; customization; agency; well-ordered problems; “just in time” or “on demand”; situated meanings; pleasantly frustrating; explore, think literally, rethink goals; smart tools and distributed knowledge; cross-functional teams; and performance before competence. 

While talking about tools and software, the following are suggested for interactive stories (both have pros and cons): 

— Ren’Py

— Twine

As for virtual spaces:

— Mozilla Hubs

— Second Life

Computer games: 

— GameMaker Studio

— Unity

— PyGame

I’m finalizing our readings in Sound Studies/DH for next week, and I just received (as did many of you, I’m sure) a list of upcoming meetings of groups hosted by the GCDI. Among them is a “sound studies” group that may interest some of you, so I’m throwing it out there:

Sound Studies + DARC

Working on a Sound or Digital Archiving project? Come to the upcoming joint Sound Studies + Digital Archives Working Group meeting on Wednesday Nov 10 at 12pm! This is an opportunity to build community and learn together about designing a variety of different kinds of projects including audio production, oral history recording, podcasting, digital archiving and curation, web design, database management, and so much more!  Please join the Sound Studies and Digital Archives commons group to find out more  and get the zoom link for the meeting.

I recently listened to a podcast which highlighted the prevalence of Link Rot in websites. A member of the Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab mentioned in the podcast examining more than two million links in New York Times articles found that

“25% of all links that were used on the New York Times were completely inaccessible”.

I wonder if there is some connection, perhaps racial, between the care and maintenance of websites and the prevalence of Link Rot? The problem with this question is that it is my assumption that individuals typically maintain websites and not Institutions. The question of an unbalanced maintenance of websites which deal with non-white content and then choking it up to Institutional bias is difficult to pinpoint. My initial guess is that if Link Rot happens to a website it is because the author/creator of the site has deemed it defunct and moved on to other things. But not always.

I think it still would be interesting though if the Harvard U team filtered down to which websites had higher rates of Link Rot based on the subject matter/author. Perhaps they would find out that articles on Race/Gender issues were relegated to a certain server which didn’t receive the same amount of care as other articles. Perhaps it would be the Opinion pieces? I wonder if there isn’t some bias that could be identified in the storehouse of large Institutional websites.

Still, the analogy of care for websites and the “A Pedagogical Search for Home and Care” article is a bit thin. When is a website dead? When does it require care? I identify Link Rot in this analogy because it the most obvious form of decay that websites endure. It is also the most revolting to our senses. We shudder at outdated websites in the same way facing death agitates us. But yet, wouldn’t it be better to define these websites as dying, and isn’t there a place for dead sites: https://archive.org/?

How would we go about thinking of a thanatology of websites?

This week, I was struck by Ryan Cordell’s piece “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” given its approach to questioning basically the structure of our own DH Intro course. I have been finding some DH readings difficult, especially those that play “inside baseball” and position entry-level scholars to save a field they have yet to enter (a trap that Cordell falls into himself). I have been asking myself, outside from the academic context, why is DH important?

Risam offers a few ideas, particularly when around with DH x Postcolonial education:

• Understand the politics of knowledge production and how print, and now digital, cultures marginalize communities outside the Global North
• Become critical tech consumers, which can help transform into skepticism into action
• Engage with the “core concepts that undergird modernity and alternative perspectives on community formation by considering instantiations in the digital cultural record”

In terms of a pedagogical approach, Cordell gives a few reasons as to why readers like me tend to not be engaged; a lack of attention to case studies in class, teaching DH to DH (rather than to a specific discipline that could benefit from digital tools/theories), and general undergraduate technological skepticism. All of these resonated, and made me question: Where was the digital in my undergraduate liberal arts degree? Should I now just be studying Art or History and use digital tools rather than studying DH itself? Cordell lends a few suggestions that I particularly agreed with (and wish had been shared with me, especially at the undergraduate level):

1. “You do not need an entire DH curriculum, or even a designated DH course, to introduce substantial digital pedagogy into your classes: Teach distant reading alongside close reading and do not worry about proving how revolutionary the former is.”
2. “Teach new technological tools as a development in the range of human technology: By contextualizing our moment of digital remediation historically, as but the latest phase in a long history of textual reinvention, help students understand why assignments ask them to experiment across modalities [and] consider the medium as well as the message of their own research and arguments.“

However, beyond pedagogical suggestions Cordell leaves us at a dead end. He writes that once the DH mania is over, there must be “more productive rapprochement with the larger humanities fields.” Where is that? Is the DH mania over? If so, what are these rapprochements, and how can I, as a new student, start from these rapprochements rather than helping to define a field that may one day eclipse itself? I tend to think that this answer lies in practice, and so I look forward to continuing these thoughts and questions as I work on my text analysis project, and into my final work for the course.

It is believed that Franco Moretti, a philologist, and literary scholar, came up with the term “distant reading” sometime around 2000 when he published a piece in one of the academic journals. “Distant reading” is an antonym to “close reading.” If you need to provide a very brief definition of both phrases and underline their difference, it is probably safe to say that “close reading” means one deal directly with a book, they attentively (closely) read the book to figure out the meanings of a literary text, define its metaphors, unearth hidden linguistic riddles, decipher the key idea—anything while working on, or with, a text. “Distant reading,” on the other hand, can be defined as a process of working with a text without reading the text. You don’t need to read the actual text, all kinds of digital toolkits and software will do that for you.

After Moretti’s published his initial article, he kept developing his ideas, first and foremost, in Graphs, Maps, Trees and, after a few years later, in Distant Reading—these works have been regarded by some as path-breaking as well as widely used and discussed in the scholarly fields other than DH. In addition to Moretti, another significant volume on “distant reading,” titled Macroanalysis by Matthew Jockers. On the other hand, there are scholars who have a different take on the history and timeline of “distant reading” and question its inception just some two decades ago advocating that earlier models of “distant reading” were created in the past, but of course not called that way yet.

In his piece, Ted Underwood discusses the history and trajectory of the term “distant reading” and—while relying on some previously published scholarship—poses questions about when the studies of “distant reading” really began. The scholar also asks what parallel, related fields were—and mentions the concepts spearheaded by others: “textual interpretation (reading)”; “sociology of literature”; or “cultural analytics.” Underwood points out that Moretti’s works are important, “not because they invented the idea of macroscopic literary inquiry, but because they galvanized an existing project by infusing it with a new sense of possibility and a new polemical rationale.” Indeed, Moretti’s concepts and approaches to a history of British novel and its classification and division into subgenres, in one of the chapters in Graphs, Maps, Trees, seemed novel. The question some scholars keep asking is related to Moretti’s dataset—all details about datasets (most likely, the most important part of any DH project)—their origin, fullness, etc.—were not shared or revealed. In general, it seems that the question of researching, aggregating, composing, editing, and sharing datasets is yet another fundamental point as we discuss “distant reading”. What also seems especially appealing is that this whole concept of “distant reading” is being discussed from various standpoints, it’s interesting to observe that its pre-history may be dated before the year it was actually coined, it’s being discussed as well—which only means that the field keeps breathing and is far from being fully understood.

As you know, your second Praxis Project is due next week at class time. All students have chosen this option, so we’ll have a nice cluster of projects to talk about. First, here’s the procedure with a few tips:

• read this overview of text-mining.
• choose a text or set of texts (you might start with a pre-prepped corpus like the CCC corpus we looked at earlier or the EEBO corpus Witmore co-created and discusses), and explore with Voyant, Google N-Gram, J-Stor Text Analyzer, Bookworm, MALLET, or another text-mining tool.
• Third, explore! Even more than with the mapping project, this can be an exercise in playing around with a tool or tools and reflecting on “what happens” rather than the production of some kind of finished “project”: if you don’t believe me, look at the blog posts from prior students below
• Fourth, blog about your experiences. Here are some examples to guide you from prior students in 700:

• Matt Rubin’s comparison of Voyant, N-Gram, and J-Stor Text Analyzer. The mapping of different folkloric beasts in N-Grams
• Kevin Pham’s comparison of the same text (Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) in English and French, to analyze the work of translation.
• Amanda Filchock on relationships within Alcott’s Little Women (using Voyant) and on the intensity of interest in the novel over time (Ngrams).
• Brianna Casatt’s project on transcripts from TV’s Buffy: the Vampire Slayer and Faihaa Khan’s on the Harry Potter series: somewhat similar attempts to explore verbal relationships within a single fictional “world.”

Yesterday I attended the Asynchronous Interaction in Course Design workshop, facilitated by Seth Graves, a Carnegie Educational Technology Fellow at the GC. The workshop explored integrations of asynchronous engagement into online and offline course design. While the workshop was geared towards educators in undergraduate and graduate teaching and students who have engaged in online learning, I attended this workshop with hopes of learning about strategies that I could share with colleagues from my professional role. I do not teach, however I work for a non profit organization that develops and offers music theory curriculum and courses focussed on Conjunto music to our community. These music theory courses were scheduled to launch when the pandemic first hit, so the courses were re-formatted to be executed entirely online. With this unexpected teaching format, we have encountered some frustrations, so I plan to share some of the ideas and methods I learned in this workshop with my team as we continue to develop our music education programs online and, eventually, in-person.

Much of the focus throughout the workshop surrounded methods of increasing thoughtful engagement in an online classroom setting, however, many if the ideas can be applied to offline, in-person classroom settings as well. Some of the most helpful takeaways I noted are below:

Low-Stakes Communication:

• Generating asynchronous check-in spaces and deadlines to foster an environment wherein students can share ideas, feedback, and questions about each other’s ideas and work freely, that is, in a mostly informal setting. For example, a forum, shared document, or discussion board. Some useful tools are Slack, Google Docs, and Discord.
• Introduce flexible modalities through which students can engage. Some plugins like Talk and Comment and tools such as Voicethread allow students to share video and audio responses with each other.

Readiness:

• Ensure that students have all of the information and tools needed to participate in the class. Consider providing tutorials and helpful documentation if there is a learning curve with any of the integrations used in the classroom.
• Provide appropriate contact information if students should reach out to specific personnel for technical assistance.

Break Up The Content:

• Outline the material in sections to avoid presenting an overwhelming amount of information to students at one time. Depending on the course platform, the instructor may be able to break up the content into smaller sections. For example, a different WordPress for every week or section of content. The workshop facilitator, Seth, shared his own example that I found very helpful — as a student, it certainly feels easily digestable and not overwhleming to see the content broken up into different pages on a course website. I also want to call attention to the clarification and outlining of all tools needed for the course — an example of ensuring students have all of the information needed to participate in an asynchronous class.

Interrelating Course Material:

• Blog post assignments about the material (i.e. our posts in this course!).
• Brief comment-based prompts surrounding the class content.

Additionally, we discussed some common concerns of educators in online teaching environments. Most of the attendees shared frustrations surrounding assessment in asynchronous work. Below are some helpful tips provided by the workshop facilitator, Seth:

• Organize how you will assess your students by the stakes of the assignment.
• Avoid over-grading. Was it more important that the student practice?
• Avoid over-commenting. Can you organize your feedback into key ideas or revision tasks?
• Try rubrics. How can a rubric help you provide the right balance of feedback while helping with your time management?
• Try peer review. How can you incentivize quality feedback? (try this: give them guided peer review instructions)
• Seconding this: Offer short comment-based prompts about the content they just read.

Lastly, I wanted to share some of the other course platforms we discussed. Below are some of platforms and tools most commonly used amongst the workshop attendees, including myself (we use Google Classroom in my professional work):

Course Platforms:

• Hosting course site: WordPress (ex: CUNY Academic Commons), Blackboard, Google Classroom
• Hosting longform student writing: WordPress, Manifold

One of the hallmarks of Johanna Druckers’ scholarship is an interest in how knowledge is produced. In SpecLab, her experiments at the titular laboratory centered on “reconceptualization of premises and parameters, not a reassessment of means and outcomes.” This sentiment gives a generous acknowledgment of the benefits computer-assisted quantitive methods made in humanities research, while also recognizing the “invisible” constraints orthodox methodologies inherit from the disciplines and industries of origin (Drucker, 27). Recent publications build on some of her earlier experiments to demonstrate that what is presented to us as self-explanatory artifacts actually require more thought, context and interpretation than we’re trained to deploy in our every day encounters with, say, data visualizations. Along similar lines, Drucker draws our attention to the hidden costs of the transition away from physical media to digital media for academic publication this week. One small nuance present in Pixel Dust caused me to reflect on why I’m prone to accepting Drucker’s lines of augment.

Drucker demonstrates an understanding of relevant digital technologies outside of an academic context which views the “back-end” as cruical to the frontend. The thoroughness of comprehension merges in the specificity of one example used when description some misunderstandings of the transition to digital media for academic publication. The company named in “the misperception…that everything digital is available on Google” strikes a chord with me given the origin PageRank, the key algorithm in that companies competitive advantage in the 1990s IT tech ecosystem. I would argue that Drucker knowingly references Google because of the influence of citation analysis on this algorithm, borne out of finding a quantitative method of evaluating the importance of published scientific articles. As Google put describes the logic:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites (citation courtesy of the Wayback Machine)

Much like her example of the codex, Drucker emphases the continuities in the backend logic between older forms of media and their descendants. In this case, leaving discovery up to Google search results likely reinvigorates the same forces that constricted traditional academic publishing, both financial and institutional, through backlinking other SEO strategies that favor

Drucker’s implication of the backend as critical subject matter to understand the transition to digital formats reflects the true costs, rather that the price. One misconception has to do with the distribution of costs over the lifetime of an academic product. Whereas physical books and journals had large upfront costs, the cost of digital publication goes beyond licensing fees, or even the “author-pays” model mentioned in Fitzpatrick’s chapter in Generous Thinking. Drucker also counts the cost of maintaining the digital medium itself, often not appended to price tags. To draw the analogy using a physical book, it’s as if there were occasions where the pigments in ink stopped rendering, and someone needed to jostle them to recompose as letters and text on a page. Or the pages would occasionally fall out of the binding, become disordered on the ground.

I think there are reasonable responses to these problems offered in the motivations behind Gil’s Ed. And in general, the reading from this week and last about infrastructure shows a gradual movement towards systems thinking. As someone who’s being propelled rapidly into a more “backend position” in a professionally, I find a lot of sympathy with Drucker’s instinct to scrutinize the complex tradeoffs in the “invisible work” required to create and maintain digital platforms.

I’ve been thinking about our conversation last night about the arguably willful blindness to “invisible” infrastructure and logistical processes that characterizes our period. The brief conversation about history made me think of the “commodity” section of Emerson’s famous essay on Nature. There, Emerson celebrates the rise of new technologies that mirror and are consonant with natural forces–the steam engines that improve upon windpower and so on–and whose benefits are widely distributed for the general welfare.

Needless to say, now that it has dawned on us that we’re in the Anthropocene and that the benefits of tech don’t generally trickle evenly through the population, we find ourselves in very different place…

In a bit of kismet, the NYTs Wirecutter department featured an article on the Framework laptop, an attempt to build an eminently repairable laptop designed to last 10+ years. Dig in: it’s fascinating in an era dominated by Apple’s utterly opposite approach.