Tag Archives: Sheffield

Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2014 NOW online

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The Proceedings of 2014 are now live!! Finally!!

http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/book/dhc2014

My article:Ludic Literature: Evaluating Skyrim for Humanities Modding
Related slides of presentation are on slideshare.net

This article evaluates the practical limitations and dramatic possibilities of modding (which means modifying) the commercial role-playing game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the visualization and exploration of literature. The latest version of a 20 year-old game franchise, Skyrim has inspired various writings and musings on its relation to Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has moved to a more immersive, participative, tool-making medium, a recent report on digital archives has proposed digital tools integrate with history curricula (Sampo, 2014) and that “digital history may narrow the gap between academic and popular history”. Can games also be used to promote traditional literary mediums as well as experiential and immersive archives?

EDIT: They have the wrong version uploaded on the Sheffield website. I will add the correct version here:

This is an open access publication with a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. As such, PDF versions can be deposited in institutional repositories. Our specific copyright statement is as follows:
“Copyright of all content is retained by the individual authors who are permitted to re-publish their work elsewhere. Likewise, other sites and media are permitted to re-use the works of authors on condition that they include a citation that references the content’s original publication by HRI OpenBook and an accurate attribution of the author’s IP and copyright.”
Finally, there is a new Call for Papers out for DHC2016, available here: http://hridigital.shef.ac.uk/dhc2016

abstract for “Digital Humanities Congress 2012” @ Sheffield UK accepted

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I wrote the below abstract for Digital Humanities Congress 2012 at the University of Sheffield, 6th – 8th September 2012
http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/dhc2012

Title: Research As Infrastructure
Abstract:
In the edited book Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold, the chapter “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism” by Dave Parry raised the controversial question as to whether Digital Humanities should be the application of computing, or an inquiry as to how digital media has irrevocably changed the Humanities. While this may appear to be a very theoretical issue, the debate has major practical consequences. For example, I have been entrusted with managing the development of a national research infrastructure for the Digital Humanities. This task may seem to involve logistics, technical details, and general funding issues. However, before we even get to that stage we have major fundamental, political and theoretical challenges.
We currently have four universities as partners, the national library (or libraries) should be joining soon, and hopefully the major museums will follow. Our government has asked that we include as many as possible, a noble goal, but in practice we have hit a major roadblock. How does one create a national focus while allowing academics and other researchers to pursue their own specific goals? This also raises a deeper question, what are the boundaries of the Digital Humanities pertinent to our researchers, beyond which we should not tread? Having discovered our niche, or niches, how can we focus on key research areas important to our country in particular, without becoming cut off from international networks?
Of course there are perennial questions such as how can one develop an infrastructure five years ahead, based on catering for technology that we are not yet using? How can a distributed network allow for unified identity and individual planning? This leads us to a more pragmatic issue of which resources are best managed centrally, and which are best distributed. These more technical issues do however return us to a central problem: how one create a centre for something that has no physical centre, unifying traditionally disparate and sceptical disciplines, without restricting them or discriminating between them?

So now my task is to solve the problems so I can deliver the paper!