Final Project grades have now been made available via ELMS. Projects were graded according to the rubric established in the syllabus:

understanding and use of narrative elements

appropriateness of the platform for your narration

use of the technology

quality of the overall project.

There were four specific factors we looked for within these criteria:

That the product used storytelling devices correctly (plot, character, narrative arc)

That there was a clear persuasive element to the product (a story with no point of view or claims to be made didn’t cut it)

That the visual and audio elements were consistent with the storytelling elements and that there was a specific point to their use

That the digital elements enriched the product and were carefully selected

The instructors met in person and discussed each project individually for these elements, provided their own verbal assessments, and collaboratively graded the final product. The grade you earned represented the groups’ assessment of the product.

The four highest scoring projects received almost perfect marks by doing the following:

Building out their technical platform beyond perfunctory linking

Moved beyond a simple storytelling arc to allow the viewer to engage story elements independently of the narrative

Used the visual and audio elements to enrich the storytelling arc

Provided clear character motivations and persuasive tactics

For examples of these successes, please check out:

Dani and Tyreese’s http://reeseag14.wix.com/business-or-pleasure which not only used the story site but leveraged other platforms to create character depth and engagement

Kelsey’s http://mith.umd.edu/digitalstorytelling/2012/12/14/secret-storytelling/ which used classification as a way to create story elements

Jason’s careful use of sound and visual elements to enrich his machinama

Alexis’ interesting use of textual and video materials that rebuilt the mentor’s program into a story of community http://dccmentors.wordpress.com/

The Presentation Winner Is…..drumroll please.

For thursday’s assignment, you are being asked to give a 3-5 minute presentation on your class project. You should explain what your project is and explain how you are going address the theme of the class: persuasive storytelling.

But, you can’t just get up and give a boring presentation. We want to see you at your most creative and persuasive. A song, a dance, a video, you could create an ad, anything is within limits. Be your most creative!

At the end of class, we will vote on the most effective, creative presentation and that person will win a special prize.

I know you are all super sad that the semester is ending….but cheer up. You now get to complete your official University of Maryland course evaluations.

We’ve been asked to communicate the following things:

the CourseEvalUM website (https://CourseEvalUM.umd.edu) is open from today through Wednesday, December 12.

all evaluations are confidential.

you can find the summarized results at the same location once those are released.

the system does not identify to any of the instructors whether or not you submitted an evaluation.

We ask the following things of you:

1) You complete the evaluation so that we can improve the class the next time it is offered.

2) That your feedback be constructive. If you don’t like things, be specific about what you don’t like, why you don’t like it, and how it could be improved for next time. If you like things, be specific about what things you like, why you like it, and whether it could be improved.

3) That you try to offer feedback on the class as a whole as well as individual lessons where possible.

If you have any questions, let me or one of the other instructors know. Otherwise, we are looking forward to reading your rough drafts…due this thursday!

Below is the Final Project Proposal Guidelines and Worksheet that was passed out in class yesterday. Let one of the instructors know if you have questions.

Your final project for this course is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your understanding of narrative elements, digital technologies, its potential benefits and constraints, and your ability to construct a narrative.

As part of your final project, we are asking for a two page project proposal that outlines exactly what you plan to do for your final project. Your final project will be evaluated based on four criteria: understanding and use of narrative elements, appropriateness of platform for your narration, use of the technology, and quality of the overall project. The total point value available for the final project is 70 points. This proposal is worth an additional 20 points. It is due:

either by email (to guiliano@umd.edu) or by paper copy to Jen’s MITH desk by 4:00pm EST on November 29th.

To aid you in writing your proposal, here are potential questions that we expect you to answer in your written proposal:

Statement of Significance: explain–in terms comprehensible to a general audience- the significance of your proposed project. What will your project contribute to your understanding of persuasive storytelling? What type of audience might be interested in your project? How would you reach out to your potential audience?

Statement of Objectives: what specific objectives or deliverables will this project offer (e.g. an X page long story, X pages of html code, X visualizations, X graphics, etc. where X is the amount/length of material)? You must itemize your objectives. We are looking for an outline that accounts for the components of your project and gives a clear statement on what final product will be. It is not sufficient, for example, to say that you will write an e-lit story that is 10 html pages long. You should outline the elements of the story—character, motivations, climax, etc–and how your links will be integrated in that story.

Workplan: once you’ve outlined what you are going to do and what you want to deliver, we would like a timeline of how you are going to complete your project by NOON on December 14th. You might break down a to-do list into days or by how many hours it will take you. At minimum, you must set a week by week plan of what you will accomplish. Make sure to describe the specific tasks that will be accomplished, identify the computer technology to be employed and where specific areas where you might need help in accomplishing a to-do item (e.g. I need help building x tech feature). We will provide feedback on this workplan.

REMEMBER THAT THIS PROJECT SHOULD REPRESENT TWO WEEKS OF CLASS TIME PLUS THE TIME YOU WOULD HAVE SPENT PREPARING FOR A FINAL EXAM (PER PERSON INVOLVED IN THE PROJECT). In our estimation based on the mid-semester evaluations you completed, we are expecting your project to represent at least 14 hours of effort (2 weeks x 3 hours of class preparation per week + 5 hours of class time + 3 hours for your final exam).

Final Product Plans: How do you intend to disseminate your final project? Is this a website that you are hosting? Do you plan to turn in files? How will you point your classmates to your final project?

For projects where you have a classmate/partner working with you, you should also include a section outlining who is responsible for what and showing that this work adds up to twice the amount of a single-person project’s hours.

We will provide you with comments on the proposal. You will then be expected to do a short presentation for class on December 6th. That presentation is worth 10 points.

Your final project:

Instead of a final exam, your final project is due in by December 14, 2012 at noon EST.
Please do both of the following:

1. Email guiliano@umd.edu either the files constituting your project (if applicable) or a link to your final project (if published online).

2. Publish a blog post on this course site that links your classmates to your final project (if it’s online) or contains screenshots, an explanation, and/or downloadable files for your project (if it isn’t online).

When everyone rolls into class today, you are going to see that MITH transformed in the short seven days since you were here last. After much wrangling and pain with construction folk, the MITH display spline (courtesy Matt Kirschenbaum’s photo) has been installed. The spline was conceptualized as a way for MITH to provide physical space to display research artifacts we use for e-literature, gaming, and born-digital research. We have one of the foremost collections of this stuff in the US and having it all stacked away in closets is a bit like hiding diamonds in a bag of rock salt—you know it is there but trying to find it is a pain in the rear. Our spline is stocked with items from the Deena Larsen and Bill Bly Collections as well as MITH’s antique/vintage computing collection.Last night, we had an open house and without a doubt, the spline (and Testudo) were the hit of the evening. Everyone seemed to use the display as an opportunity to reminisce about their own experiences with the various computing systems on display. Stories abounded of people’s first encounter with Nintendo, Apple II’s, wordprocessors, etc.

Last night, as I was trying to wind down from the event and simultaneously shoving copious amounts of pizza down my gullet (how come I never get around to eating at these types of things?), I kept thinking of how different the event would have been had the physical objects not been part of the space. What if instead of the Apple II physical computer you had an Apple II emulator? Would people still have begun telling stories or would their recollections have been tempered by the fact that they weren’t able to physically experience the computers? In some ways, we tested this premise at last year’s Maryland Day….we loaded up a couple of computers with emulators (because having historical artifacts sitting outside in the rain on the quad isn’t good archival practice) and made them available for people to play. Without the recognizable Apple II computer, fewer people stopped than we anticipated and while those who stopped did navigate the emulator, only a couple stayed more than a few minutes to play or chat. Almost no one stopped and also used the time to reminisce about their own use of the technology.

I was reading Kelsey’s post and she was talking about how she’d never move to an e-reader. That has been a hot topic of discussion among writers and publishers…whether the experience of reading a book has been destroyed by kindle/e-readers. I made the switch to an e-reader (a Kindle first and now kindle app for iPad) almost three years ago. I’m a huge reader…usually around a 1000 to 1500 pages a week of pleasure reading (fiction, mystery, romance, sci-fi—anything but biographies really) and another 200 or so for academic reading. It’s what I do on the bus, between appointments, nights/weekends. I used to buy on order of 15-20 physical books a month…now I’m buying/renting 3-5 physical books and another 10-15 e-books. What’s been interesting about all of this (and what relates to the spline) is that I used to share books way more frequently than I do now that I’ve moved to e-books. I used to loan out books to friends and family, academic books to students and colleagues, and now that happens much more rarely. I continue to invest in physical books for my scholarly reading but when it comes to fun reading, it’s all about the e-book. I can get them on the day they are released, from any wi-fi network. I even downloaded a new book on an international flight this summer while winging my way to germany. But I can’t loan them out the way I do with physical books…and there is no used e-book market the way there is for physical books. I’m paying full price on a book even if it is 5 or 6 years old….and that’s a problem.

So, we are talking about storytelling and digital spaces and I’m wondering what happens to stories when they die….where do stories go? is there a story heaven somewhere for those stories people no longer read? and if stories only exist in one medium (physical or digital but not both) how do understand the limits of their survival? What’s the lifecycle of a digital story?

The official story of how I ended up here is this (stolen from my usual venue at MITH): Jennifer Guiliano received a Bachelors of Arts in English and History from Miami University (2000), a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois (2010). She has served as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2008-2010) and as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (2010-2011) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. Her post-doctoral work contributes to the growing discipline of digital humanities through her explorations of how computing transforms both the questions humanists can ask as well as the answers that can be generated with digital tools, methods, and pedagogies. Her day to day responsibilities at MITH focus on project development including grant writing, project management, staff supervision, and aiding the MITH team in their digital humanities endeavors. Lots of words that really just point to a bunch of degrees and a host of former jobs….all of which boils down to the fact that I’m a historian who works at a digital humanities center.

so why am I blogging here: When I was 10 years old, I was bored to death one summer and my mother challenged me to read every book in our public library about Abraham Lincoln. If I read everything by the end of summer, she’d take me and my younger brother to visit Lincoln sites in Illinois. Probably doesn’t sound like a cool summer to most but for a kid stuck in Ohio in the middle of summer who was fascinated with history and particularly the history of the 19th century, the idea of getting to go visit the places I read about in books was awesome. So fast forward 10 plus weeks ( all 6 volumes of the Carl Sandburg biography of Lincoln and over 3000 pages), and I was loaded into the car with my mom and my brother to go spend a long weekend visiting the places I’d been reading about. Between my love of reading and my love of talking, I decided that summer that I wanted a career where I could tell stories that mattered. Stories of the past that could help us remember and stories that could transform our understanding of the future. Since unpaid know it all was taken, I decided being an academic would have to be second best.

So where does the digital play into this? I was a lucky kid in the 1980s. My mom loved technology so we were the first family in our group to have an Apple computer, an Atari, and a whole host of other 1980s tech. I was the only seven year old obsessed with answering every question on Jeopardy (1986, Apple IIe), and playing every possible permutation of the Oregon Trail (which we’ll play in class). When my brothers were fighting over the atari, I was memorizing every play sequence possible. All of this translated into a summer in a program run by my local college for kids interested in technology—we toured state of the art (for 1989/1990) facilities for robotics and computing and even got to build our own robot. Geeky I know but it was seriously fun at the time and kicked off a decades long fascination with technology that has only grown. And when the graphical browser moved us from green screens and terminals to visual interfaces, it was like an entirely new world for me. I lived through CompuNet, Compuserve, AOL, dial-up….each something built on an older technology that we now call obsolete. I learned to build CPU’s from scratch in the basement of a friends’ house and how to solder circuit boards into place on laptops. Hardware, software, didn’t matter. I love the notion that technology constantly evolves and challenges not just how we communicate but what we know and how we know it.

I trained in one of the most conservative disciplines…history. Three different times when I was in graduate school I was told by a faculty member that the type of research I wanted to do wasn’t “historical” enough. It was too contemporary, too cultural, or too interdisciplinary. So, I became a digital humanist. Where I could tell the types of stories I wanted to tell, with technologies that would not just let me tell the stories but became essential modes of how I got to the answers. So, when DCC proposed I teach a course, I thought about all the things I would want to know when it comes to digital culture and creativity and then I turned to the people I work with…who are experts in their particular fields…and we brainstormed. What united our work as a historian, two literature scholars, and a physicist/computer scientist? What types of things would we want to learn in a class on digital culture and creativity? And how could we make this course interesting? If we were going to spend 16 weeks together, where would we want to end up?

So, each of you ended up here because you chose to take the class….I’m here because I want to see what stories each of you want to tell. They can be personal, public, private, political, apolitical, historical, ahistorical, I don’t care. I just want, by the end, for each of you to understand what is narration, how it plays into the modern digital world, and how storytelling forms an integral part of everyday experiences. Along the way, I want each of you to think about how digital spaces and platforms enable and limit you in telling stories. And if I get to sneak in all the cool stuff I love (like oregon trail), all the better.

Now for the avatar portion: the avatar is my standard professional avatar representing how I work best…on my couch, in my pajamas, at home.