Final Essay - Hunter Rose Myers

In my final essay, I chose the topic of data mining. My essay is titled Covertly Clandestine because data mining is a form of unraveling hidden secrets. I begin my essay by providing background information on the subject of data mining, as well as discussing researchers who have made both negative and positive comments about data mining. For the empirical research section, I chose to data mine song lyrics written by Beatles members John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I did this in order to compare the two artists and find out what word frequencies can reveal about popular music. Enjoy.

Final Essay - Rachel Heming

My final essay is titled Exploring Multiple Endings in Video Games. It discusses the different ways developers implement multiple endings and the reasons for doing so.

RPG's

Role Playing Video Games: Traversing through an Alternate Universe

For my final project, I wanted to focus on a topic near and dear to my heart: Role Playing Video Games. RPG's always appealed to me, and for my paper, I wanted to answer a few questions about them: What they are, how we interact inside and out the video game, what relationships and bonds do we develop from the games, and what positive mental, physical, and social benefits we can receive from playing RPGs.

The title of my final essay is Video Games and Books; A More Immersive Narrative. This essay talks about video games being a more immersive narrative since they capitalize on the benefits of the digital world.

Essay Exhibits

This semester, our class has learned a great amount about digital humanities. The essay exhibits that we created demonstrated not only the diversity of the field, but also how much we've learned. No two exhibits that I viewed were about the same thing, and I'm sure there were many other topics we could have covered. It is truly amazing to think about how expansive digital humanities is and how much we're still learning about it.

One exhibit that I found especially interesting was The Intersection of "Video Games and Religion" by Hunter Graham. His exhibit detailed that lack of attention video games get regarding religious reference and why this should not be the case. He cited examples such as the Zelda series's focus on three goddesses and how it was initially going to have elements of Christianity in it. The Game Journey was also included, and how the journey through the game is similar to someone traversing through life to reach a destination. His exhibit made me realize just how little attention is paid to religious references in games compared to other media.

Another exhibit that I  viewed was Caitee Baird's "Electronic Literature: New and Improved English?" It discussed the benefits of integrating electronic literature into classroom settings. One of the key benefits was that it appeals to students that have different learning styles, such as kinetic poems to hands-on learners and art-based pieces for visual learners. She even gave some exam
ples of types of e-lit that would be appropriate for each age level: literacy apps for elementary school, Google maps essays for middle school, and various kinds for high school. In a world that is advancing technologically very quickly, her essay addressed topics that many schools will likely have to discuss in the coming years.

All of the exhibits explored topics and asked questions that exemplify what our class has learned this semester. It was interesting to see each person's specific areas of interest in this diverse and expaniding field.

Essay Exhibits

     Over the course of this semester, I have gained an abundance of information, tools, and techniques involving digital culture which can help me in all areas of life. Whether I am creating a presentation for a job, researching materials, or fiddling around with technology in my leisure time, this Digital Humanities course has provided me with amateur experience, as well as highlighting new interests.
     Our final class project is creating an essay comprised of researched materials exploring multimedia in digital humanities. As an insider to what other students are writing about, our class exhibited a brief presentation of our individual essay ideas, and our classmates provided feedback about our projects.
     One of the projects I viewed in detail was about Virtual Reality and how it could affect job training. It begins by defining Virtual Reality (VR) a 3D world, created digitally, that allows the user to interact and manipulate objects within the world while stimulating each one of their senses. Next, there is a short video explaining VR more in depth. Then, career fields that are adopting VR practices are listed, including: Healthcare, Education, Advertising, Military, etc. Finally, it tells how a few of these careers use VR in their job training programs. I thought this exhibit was interesting because it demonstrates how growing digital technologies are being used in every day life, and could possibly affect us in our future jobs.

     Another project that I viewed in detail was about Video Games in the Education System. First, it defines gamification as the process of taking something that already exists and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation and engagement. Next, the presentation explains how video games are already implemented into the education system and what ways they can benefit students. For example, changes in cognitive development and socialization skills are detailed as improving children's' visual processes, attention span, relationship readiness. Finally, it closes with a brief video outlining the basics of gamification in school programs. I appreciated this exhibit because I would have liked being exposed to this type of teaching technique while in high school. However, maybe my children can benefit from this type of learning in the future.

Essay Exhibits

Walking around and viewing many of my classmates final presentations, it truly illustrates how massive the field of Digital Humanities is. Throughout the exhibits, it was very interesting to come across all of the different topics that so many people found interest in, such as video games, technological convergence, data-mining, and even Google Maps essays. One of my favorite essay exhibits I viewed was by Dominique Marini. Dom covered the idea of the benefits from playing video games, from a Social, Emotional, and Physical perspective. I could personally relate to Dom's project, which I believe is why I enjoyed learning about what he had to say. Growing up playing video games my whole life, I found it interesting to make connections between Dom's research and my own personal experience with video games, especially when the topic of Skyrim came up: a game I have spent many many hours playing myself. Dom's presentation was well informed and brought up many thought provoking ideas.

A second presentation I viewed and enjoyed was Jon Dicey's presentation of the prevalence of video games in modern-day society. Dicey used a wide variety of data to determine who are today's "video gamers," and what video games are most commonly played and how they have changed. He also added into his project of how the majority of these people playing video games are affected by playing them.


Each presentation I viewed intriguingly and uniquely captured the area of the Digital Humanities field that they were covering. However, some of the most interesting projects I viewed were all centered around video games because I could both learn and provide input for these presentations. My final project is centered around video games, so all these exhibits also provided some inspiration for my own project as well.

Essay Exhibits

The field of Digital Humanities covers a wide range of topics that were all displayed by students in their essay exhibits. From literature and video games to music and data mining Digital Humanities is relevant almost everywhere. It was surprising to see that nearly everyone had a different topic that they were talking about. The exhibits that were put on display in class highlighted many different things and all showed the keypoints of the final essay very well. After going through each exhibit I felt like I actually learned something about that specific topic. One exhibit that I looked at was Jon Dicey’s exhibit on How Video Games Affect Society. This presentation provided a lot of good information on who today’s gamers are and what they play. Statistically information was provided to see the age range of today's gamers. A lot of information on how video games affect people in today’s society was also provided. This exhibit relates to my own essay and it was helpful to see another person’s perspective on a similar topic to mine. Another exhibit that I was able to look at was Emily Sasso’s exhibit on Datamining Boy Bands. This presentation highlighted a lot of key points about data mining and what she found as she datamined information and statistics about the bands. Finding trends throughout different boy bands was interesting to see since you don’t pick up on those things when listening to their music. Every presentation that I was able to look at had some interesting aspect to it that displayed what Digital Humanities is about. I realized when looking at both of these presentations that they exhibit two completely different things that are still encompassed in Digital Humanities. These exhibits are a good representation of the digital humanities not just for the reason that they are about the digital humanities but they represent the areas of study that it covers.

Convergence

Henry Jenkins is the author of "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide." It is a book that conceptualizes how humans' consumption of media is a collective process also known as collective intelligence (coined by French cyber theorist Pierre Levy). It highlights the idea that none of us can know everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.

Jenkins writes that convergence starts and ends with what he calls the "Black Box Fallacy." This means that sooner or later, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms. These black boxes include VCR, digital cable boxes, DVD players, digital recorders, sound systems, gaming consoles, videotapes, DVDs, CDs, game cartridges, controllers, and TV.  He goes on to explain that a pull toward more specialized media appliances coexists with a push toward more generic devices. The proliferation of black boxes is a symptomatic moment of convergence where we are being forced to buy a range of specialized and incompatible appliances. An example of this is the iPhone 7. This iPhone requires one to either purchase wireless headphones or buy an adapter because there is no headphone jack on the phone.


The idea of convergence means that all the technology we have today, will continue to exponentially expand until we have an ultimate, even possibly artificially intelligent, device through the process of a technological convergence. Through applications, or through other forms of media, this merging of technology would significantly change our day-to-day lives.

Media convergence impacts the way people consume media. For example, as young adults who grew up with technology, we have experienced this first hand. Sometimes we find ourselves doing homework while surfing the web or online shopping, while listening to music and searching for new music, all at the same time we are texting friends, responding to emails, and much more. This picture of the iPhone as a tool with many different function (i.e. an umbrella, knife, cork screw, hammer, etc). More and more, convergence is requiring media companies to rethink old programming and marketing assumptions about what it means to consume media.

Blog Post 8

The Art of the Video Game: The Evolution of Video Game Illustration

Video Game Art Archive

Since the birth of the Digital Humanities field, archiving has been used as a way of creating and preserving works of electronic literature. Archiving in the digital world means that many different works of literature, ranging from centuries ago, are digitized into a thematic collection.

To create an archive like this, the primary source of materials would be the games themselves. Screenshots would be taken from classically iconic scenes from games and used on the timeline. By clicking these images, the user would be taken to a page containing more images from the game, such as character art and world maps.

As some gaming consoles have become obsolete, the video games once played on them have as well. For example, video games in the 1970s were simple, child-like arcade games. One would have to hop on their bike, ride to the arcade and use quarters to play these games. Some of the more popular arcade games of the time include: Space Invaders (one of the earliest space shooting games), Pong (one of the first sports arcade games to reach mainstream popularity), or Galaxian (another popular space shooting game). An archive of their artwork is a great example of a way to preserve the memory and existence of these games. Having open access to these records can allow people to come together and connect with one another and reflect on the changes of video games over the past 40-50 years.

Video games are no different than any other technology in terms of their exponential levels of growth, and this is seen in a single decade of video game graphics. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, video games visually developed from pixelated characters and GIF-like animations to the user controlled. They further expanded into more immersive graphics like of those in the mid 1980s: for example, the famous Super Mario Bros. Archiving these transformations allows people to view the changes within the artistic values of video games, and as with any other form of history, these video games are important preserve. The art in video games are always going to evolve, and without archiving these classic, original, and fundamental games they would fall into extinction.

Organizing the content chronologically can give viewers a sense of how far technology has come since its creation and a greater appreciation for the realistic graphics present in many games today. While it is impossible to play every video game that has ever been released, people will still be able to get a feeling of what these games were like by viewing the artwork from them. The following images are both from the Final Fantasy franchise. The first image is from the original game Final Fantasy, released in 1987, and the most recent Final Fantasy XV, released in 2016 (about 30 years later).

Throughout these archives, one can see the graphics of the game as well as the artwork that the game designers implemented into the scenery for players to experience. For example, there are paintings that are archived that come directly from the walls of the castle in “Castlevania”. Many times these pieces of art are put throughout the scenery to highlight important characters, places, or events. Archiving this artwork saves important parts of games throughout history.