"Thrilling Wonder Stories of Cyberculture", NEH 2010

2010 Digital Humanities Start-Up GrantsProject Directors Meeting

Thrilling Wonder

Stories of Cyberculture

National Endowment for the Humanities2010 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

Project Directors MeetingSeptember 28, 2010

I: Tour d'horizon

1. Boom time and generics

2. Some emergent trends

II: Killer themes that knit these together

• Openness• Storytelling• Mystery • Critical

literacies

2010 edition

2011 being built now

Emergent?

Practices: years of edublogging

Selected, documented practices:

• Publish syllabus• Publish student

papers• Discussion• Journaling• Project blogs• Public scholarship

• Creative writing• Distributed seminars• Campus organizations• Prospective students• Library collections• Alumni relations• Project management• Liveblogging

Blog as courseware

Blogs for public intellectuals

Blogging community involvement

The specter of Wikipedia

“Assignments – A bit of tinkering led us to the conclusion that a minimalist approach is best. After asking the students to read five forensics articles related to the historical case and send two tweets about each, we all agreed this was counter-productive and too hard to track…”

“…After that barrage, the typical assignment involved posting one comment and one question to classmates. After a while, one question OR comment seemed enough.”

Mike Winiski, Furman University

“I could look inside the minds of motivated peers to learn about the new projects they were undertaking, the research reports they were studying, and Web sites they were exploring...”

William M. Ferriter, 6th grade teacher

“…As my comfort with Twitter grew—a process that took a few months, as is typical for new users—I became an active contributor to this knowledge network.”

William M. Ferriter, 6th grade teacher

Teaching Facebook

George H. Williams, assistant professor of English, University of South Carolina Upstate

Practice: tag clouds

Folksonomies mainstreamed

George H. Williams, assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate.

(

The Call of the API

Social images

• accessCeramics, Lewis and Clark College

• 1000 images milestone, February 2009 (http://accessceramics.blogspot.com/2009/02/today-is-big-milestone-as-weve-reached.html)

Teaching with and about YouTube

Classic forms mutating

Aggregations

DiY PLE• Self-created• Consumer products• Personalization

• Small pieces, loosely joined• Variable levels of presence

Did the world just change?

Gaming as part of mainstream culture

• Median age of gamers shoots past 30• Industry size comparable to music• Impacts on hardware, software,

interfaces, other industries• Large and growing diversity of

platforms, topics, genres, niches, players

• “Almost all teens play games.” • 20% of the entire United States

population over age 6 had played browser-based social media games by 2010 (example: Farmville). • The average age of a game player has

risen from 33 in 2007 to 34 in 2010. • “The most frequent game purchaser

is 40 -- old enough to remember the early days of Atari.”

Gaming as part of mainstream culture

Anecdata: Number of Facebook FarmVille players: 62,326,412 (as of Sept 2010, http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/leaderboard/, )

(Casual games are more mainstream than most heavy-duty games)

Diversity of game genres American teenagers, Pew Internet, 2008

Games serious, public, and political

• Oiligarchy, Molle Industries• Jetset, Persuasive Games• The Great Shakeout, California• DimensionM, Tabula Digita

Classroom and courses• Curriculum content• Delivery mechanism• Creating games

Peacemaker, Impact Games

Revolution (via Jason Mittell)

•Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds, Handbook of Computer Game Studies (MIT, 2005)•Frans Mayra, An Introduction to Game Studies (Sage, 2008)•Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT, 2009)

Game studies as academic field

How is gaming used now?

HP has ambitions

How long, oh mouse?

Ubiquitous computingMark Weiser, 1988ff: “The most profound technologies

are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

"The Computer for the Twenty-First Century" (1991)

That’s all so pre-

2011.

The breakthrough move: Amazon Kindle

AR: first, the light stuff

• Museum tours• GPS navigators (Garmin)• Location services (Yelp)

Then the mark of the beast

• Living antecedent: bar codes

•QR•Microsoft Tag

Marking the world

Layaring the world

AR art

Rise of the spime

"the great

challenge of the age“

(Google CEO Eric Schmidt, 2009)

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FSsztwbRW0

“"open" refers to granting of copyright permissions above and beyond those offered by standard copyright law. "Open content," then, is content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses than those normally permitted under the law - at no cost to the user.”

http://www.opencontent.org/definition/

“Open content, a neologism coined by analogy with open source, describes any kind of creative work, or content, published under a license that explicitly allows copying and modifying of its information by anyone, not exclusively by a closed organization, firm or individual.”

(Wikipedia, as of 9/27/2010)

Flickr: 5 billion photos, as of September 2010

Creative Commons licensed?Attribution License: 21,544,225 photosAttribution-NoDerivs: 7,232,602 photosAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: 47,224,259

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona; http://www.freesound.org/

How much open content do we produce through social media?

$2 million ->Khan Academy

New forms

for stories

Republish content via blog

• Pedagogy• Social

feedback• Publicity

• Pepys Diary

• Dracula Blogged

• Ulysses and da Vinci per day

Bookblogging

Extended networks

• Support wikis (example: Pynchon)

• William Gibson lost his Node

Wikistorytelling

(http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

Can a collective create a believable fictional voice? How does a plot find any sort of coherent trajectory when different people have a different idea about how a story should end – or even begin? And, perhaps most importantly, can writers really leave their egos at the door?

“About”,http://www.amillionpenguins.com/wiki/index.php/About

Embedded within Slideshare Web platform apparatus

Embedded within blog

Social photo stories

Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group

Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories

Social photo stories

Social photo stories

Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/)

Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories

Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Digital storytelling in stories

-Bruce Sterling, Wired, 2007

But wait, what's storytelling?

But wait, what's storytelling?

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room.”

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

(Fredric Brown, “Knock”, 1948)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

The information landscape changes“Among the entire population (internet users and

non-users alike) the internet is now equal to newspapers and roughly twice as important as radio as a source of election news and information. Among internet users and young adults, these differences are even more magnified.”

-Pew Internet and American Life, "The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008", April 2009

Bryan Alexander

http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander

http://blogs.nitle.org/ and http://blogs.nitle.org/archive/

bryan.alexander@nitle.org