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.

Blog Post - Response to Bots and Self-Generating Texts

I found that this blog post was comprised of the topics of bots, text, creation, and generating because those are the top 4 most used words within the blog. This was interesting because the words bots and generating are in the title as well as most commonly used within the body of the text. When looking at the world snippet (below), I was not surprised to see the words bots, create, human, generating, and text in the biggest font and having the greatest connection with one another. If I had not written/read the blog post “Response to Bots and Self-Generating Texts,” I could still hypothesize what the genre of the text would be from the key words and phrases provided by the Voyant technology data-mining website.

    When I plugged in the top 4 most commonly used words from our blog into Google’s Ngram viewer, the results were not in strong correlation with one another. The words “text” and “create” follow the same linear pattern, with a slight upwards spike in the 1940s and a downward shift closer to the 2000s. The words text and create have a steep upwards slope in the 1980s-90s which is important to note because that was when the Internet was becoming a prevalent part in everyone’s lives. The word “bots” seems to have little to no data, while the word “generating” has very little to no data until the the 1900s with a small jump near the 1970s. With such little data, I cannot hypothesize much.

Blog Post - Response to E-Lit - 75 most common words

This post was a response to electronic literature, and we focused on a piece titled “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge” by Dinty Moore. His name was the word used most commonly. This makes sense, as we frequently referenced his work. The most common words all make sense within the context of the post: moore, story, literature, electronic, plimpton, etc. 

When plugging the three most common terms into an Ngram viewer, I disregarded ‘Moore’ and ‘Plimpton’ as they are names and are unlikely to wield results. When using the words ‘story,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘electronic,’ the result was the following:

The word ‘story’ has always had fluctuating popularity. There is a correlation between a rise in the frequency of both ‘literature’ and electronic’ from around 1940 to 2000. During that time, there was a rise in the number of digital products being researched and made available, and before this time they were almost unheard of. ‘Literature’ has always had some popularity, and it is steadily increasing over time (with a few dips here and there). If the Ngram viewer could show up to this year, I would be curious to see if there was an even greater correlation between them because of the rise in popularity of electronic literature.

Serendip-o-matic Run of a CNN News Article

Rachel Heming - Original Work of E-Lit

The title of my original work of electronic literature is Impractical Magic, It is a "choose your own adventure" story made with Twine where you play as a wizard's apprentice making potions.

Devon Cuda Original Work of E-Lit

My Final Season is the title of my DH original work of E-Literature. This is a google maps essay that tells the story of my senior year of high school wrestling. It highlights the areas in Pennsylvania where I trained and had my biggest tournaments.

Hunter Rose Myers DH Media Project

The title of my DH Media project is DH Original Media Project with my name and 12:00 as the description. It is about my spring break excursions and includes my personal ideas and pictures.