If you look closely at my avatar, you’ll notice some trees in the background. That’s because the picture was taken on the Texas A&M University campus, where I worked before coming to MITH almost two years ago. If you ever visit TAMU, you’ll notice people saying “Howdy!” to each other.

I grew up in Texas around San Antonio. Summers were hot. Winters weren’t all that cold. If snow fell, school was let out for the day because everyone was afraid the roads would close. Hard to imagine with the winters we have around here.

We didn’t have air conditioning. In the summer, when temperatures would rise above 95 degrees, the operating limit for computers back in the ’80s, we’d plop down in front of a fan and read a book. I tried to imagine a world where books were available on-line and on-demand, computers had gigabytes of memory (and would fit in my hand), and computer screens were as good as a laser printer. It’s taken twenty years or so, but we’re almost there.

I was fortunate in high school to have an internship at Southwest Research Institute where I explored chaos theory by building a digital model of a dripping faucet to explore energy transfer patterns between the solar wind and the earth’s magnetosphere. It was fun and challenging. I later used that experience in a math modeling class to see how well I could predict stock prices. The trick in life is to use what we learn in new and interesting ways.

Around the same time, I became interested in text adventure games, both the single and multi player varieties. I’ve played around with LPMuds and played MMORPGs like EverQuest for the Mac and World of Warcraft. Over the course of the semester, we’ll explore how these games work as stories. If you have an interest in text game development, planet mud-dev is a good place to check out.

My background is in Physics, Math, and English, so don’t be surprised if I bring in some science or math into our discussions. I’ve asked you to view a wide range of TED talks and read a lot of stuff about writing and story telling for the second week. Some of it is academic, but there are also a few pieces that aren’t all that scholarly. Communication happens in many ways.

Hi everyone. My name is Porter Olsen and I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the English department working on a dissertation exploring the relationships between digital culture and postcolonial literature. What does that mean? It means that I’m interested in how authors in the global south (the preferred term to “third world countries”) think about, represent, and integrate cell phones, computers, GPS devices, etc. in the stories they tell.

For this class, I’m interested in how space and place figure into stories, especially in our digital world of 3D video games and virtual worlds (such as Second Life). We’re going to talk about how humans have been “virtualizing” spaces and places through writing long before we started making 3D worlds with computers, and then we’ll apply what we learn by creating our own machinima (machine + cinema) videos, paying special attention to the importance of space in our story telling. Just to give you a sense of what machinima is and how it’s been used in the past to tell stories, here are two examples. (The first is somewhat less serious than the latter, but it does include a pretty interesting discussion of the importance of space. See if you can spot it.)

Red vs. Blue (using Halo 2)

History Channel Decisive Battles: Attila The Hun (using Rome: Total War)

I look forward to studying digital storytelling with you this semester, and if you have a favorite machinima, feel free to link it in the comments section!

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.

 

 

Hey, everyone! My name is Amanda Visconti, and I’m one of your four course instructors for Digital Storytelling. My background is in both literature and technology–I’m a web developer at MITH and am also working on a doctorate in literature here at UMD. I chose to teach this course because I spend a lot of time thinking about how the material design of literary forms–physical and visual stuff, like the layout of books, hardware of the SNES, or the technological constraints on the code behind web pages–influences what a narrative can do, and there’s a much wider, weirder frontier of unexplored possibilities for stories in the digital realm then there is for book form (though artists’ books are also really neat!).

I never encountered anything digital in my college English classes ( : / ) and I felt more mentally and creatively challenged in my undergrad digital art courses, crafting stories through 3D animation or building websites to teach other people cool stuff I’d learned (an ongoing project is making websites that help people enjoy James Joyce’s amazingly complex, rewards-you-on-multiple-readings novel Ulysses, like this and this). Figuring out that I could combine my passions for the geeky (code, design, 3d animation) and nerdy (wacky Modernist novels and the visual design of books) was an important moment for me, so I’ve tried to pass that awareness on by teaching literature that includes the digital and hypertextual, from multilinear print stories to web comics and digital games.

Speaking of games as something you can study: I ran a digital humanities unconference earlier this year where we built and discussed digital and analog games, and strongly recommend you check out the next version (in Cleveland this February) if you’re thinking about studying games seriously. I’m also part of a UMD research team that builds, runs, and studies alternate reality games (real-world and digital games where you play yourself, but the world is slightly augmented, more dramatic, more challenging).

I’d love to swap recommendations for graphic novels, video/computer games, and any other type of new media you’re into. Looking forward to reading your introductory blog posts and getting to work with you!

We’re looking forward to the first day of class this week! Please email guiliano@umd.edu with any general course questions about the course. We’ll see you at Hornbake Library 0301 (in the basement; look for the “MITH” sign) on Thursday.

During our third class, we’ll be building a basic webpage in class using HTML (we’ll also be eating astronaut ice cream, because why do one awesome thing when you can do two?). To help me get a sense of your backgrounds and structure the class appropriately, please answer this quick poll now (you’ll need to log in first).

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