Tag Archives: humanities

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or A Stab in the Dark?

Academic, Announcements, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, Virtual travel, , , , , , , , ,

The book contract is signed, the chapter authors are completing their chapters, and we have a book cover image from Ubisoft (not this one, this is a screenshot from AC Origins Discovery Tour), I just need to update my own chapter and references.

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or A Stab in the Dark?

Editors: Erik Champion, Juan Hiriart

Publisher: De Gruyter, Video Games and the Humanities series

Section 1: History Through Play

  • Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices,  Marc-André Éthier, David Lefrancois
  • Discovery Tour Curriculum Guides To Improve Teachers’ Adoption of Serious Gaming, Chu Xu, Robin Sharma, Adam K. Dubé
  • Christian Vikings storming Templar Castles: Anachronism as a Teaching Tool, Ylva Grufstedt, Robert Houghton
  • Ludoforming The Past: Mediation Of Play And Mediation Of History Through Videogame Design, Julien Bazil

Section 2: Cultural History, Tours And Tourism

  • Studying Greek Culture Through Historical Characters In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Nathan Looije
  • Empathy and Historical Learning in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Discovery Tour, Juan Hiriart
  • Ubisoft’s Ancient Greece Discovery Tour as a Pedagogical Tool for a School Trip, Kevin Péloquin, Marc-André Éthier
  • Discovering The Past As A Virtual Foreign Country: Assassin’s Creed As Historical Tourism, Angela Schwarz

Section 3: Narration, Creation, and Exhibition

  • Classical Creations in a Modern Medium: Using Story Creator Mode in a University Assignment, Hamish Cameron
  • Assassin’s Creed @ the Carlos: Merging Videogames and Education in the Gallery, Kira Jones
  • From the Sketchbook to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: An Experiment in Architectural Education, Manuel Sanchez Garcia,  Rafael de Lacour
  • Assassin’s Creed As Immersive and Interactive Architectural History, Erik Champion

Challenges in funding Humanities Infrastructure

Digital Humanities, infrastructure, , , ,

I was involved in two failed Humanities applications to the Australian Research Data Commons Platforms initiative so I am no doubt biased (and currently on holiday). But let me follow up this announcement with a remark to myself:

  • Many, if not all successful grants are clearly deserved, but some read like core government functions (not that the govt is already funding these services but they should be).
  • Labelled as part of HASS, it might seem that humanities is funded, but I don’t see any humanities-specific funding there (unless you count drones for archaeology, but frankly, that is funding for drones).
  • It is very difficult to gain Humanities RI funding in Australia but hopefully reading the successful grants may help us in the future.
  • We have a lot of work to do.

Humanities Hack 21st-22nd November 2012 London

Conference, , ,

Title: Humanities Hack
When: 21st-22nd November 2012
Where: Guys Campus, Hodgkin Building, London, SE1 1UL
 
Humanities Hack is the first Digital Humanities hack organised jointly by the Department of Digital Humanities, DARIAH, the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project and the Open Humanities Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
 
The London event is the first of a series of hack days organised for Digital Humanists and intended to target research-driven experimentation with existing Humanities data sets. One of the most exciting recent developments in Digital Humanities include the investigation and analysis of complex data sets that require the close collaboration between Humanities and computing researchers. The aim of the hack day is not to produce complete applications but to experiment with methods and technologies to investigate these data sets so that at the end we can have an understanding of the types of novel techniques that are emerging.
We are providing a few open humanities data sets but we welcome any addition. We are currently collecting data sets here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al6mO9_3Hr2PdFJ2aEFzNTZZMVVDbkJZWXB1YTRkOWc#gid=0
 
Possible themes include but are not limited to
 
–          Research in textual annotation has been a particular strength of Digital Humanities. Where are the next frontiers? How can we bring together insights from other fields and Digital Humanities?
–          How do we provide linking and sharing Humanities data that makes sense of its complex structure, with many internal relationships both structural and semantic. In particular, distributed Humanities research data often includes digital material combining objects in multiple media, and in addition there is diversity of standards for describing the data.
–          Visualisation. How do we develop reasonable visualisations that are practical and help build on overall intuition for the underlying Humanities data set
–          How can we advance the novel Humanities technique of Network Analysis to describe complex relationships of ‘things’ in social-historical systems: people, places, etc.
 
With this hack day we seek to from groups of computing and humanities researchers that will work together to come up with small-scale prototypes that showcase new and novel ways of working with Humanities data.
 
As numbers are limited for this hack, please register at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFp1eExmUVMtWG1YUkNZSnFFd05EWlE6MQ

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Sam Leon (sam.leon@okfn.org) or Tobias Blanke (tobias.blanke@kcl.ac.uk)

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As part of the work on its Digital Transformations theme (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations.aspx), the Arts and Humanities Research Council is organising a Digital Transfomations Moot at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London on Monday 19 November 2012.  Registration for this event is free and those joining the Humanities Hackfest might also enjoy attending the Moot. Further details can be found at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News-and-Events/Events/Pages/Digital-Transformations-Moot.aspx‘

cfp The 3rd U21 Digital Humanities Workshop at Lund University, Lund, Sweden, September 19 – 21, 2012

Academic, Conference, virtual heritage, , , ,

The third U21 Digital Humanities workshop will take place at Lund University from 19 to 21 September 2012

The conference will have Interfaces – Digital studies of culture and cultural studies of the digital as its theme. Provisional sessions titles include Digital heritage and digital preservation and Teaching and learning – the digital classroom. Early Career Researchers and graduate students will be welcome to attend, as well as established academics and practitioners in this area.

The first day of the workshop will be held at the Centre for languages and literature. The Centre opened in 2004 and is the home for language, linguistic and literature disciplines at Lund University. It aims to create an environment where research can interact with both education and applications. The vision is to create an unique multidisciplinary research and education environment.

An important part of the research environment is the Humanities Laboratory. The Humanities Lab is a cross-disciplinary lab-environment for research and education concerning culture, communication and cognition.

The second day will be at Ingvar Kamprad Design Centre where the Department of Design Sciences pursues research and education focusing on the interaction between people, technology and design. Here we will visit the virtual reality lab.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is May 14.

The Humanities and Heritage

virtual heritage, , ,

I have a little personal research project partially on the backburner, my own view of digital humanities. To improve my viewpoint I have been reading articles on the Internet (our library is a bit behind in this area) on definitions of humanities, for I think that is part of the problem in defining “digital humanities”. Lo and behold I found this (interesting if ironic) definition of humanities, with a strong emphasis on heritage:

National Endowment For The Humanities

According to the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.”