Building Interactive Stories

The integration of interactive stories into digital humanities practice has taken several forms. Interactive stories are certainly an object of study, and the intersection of digital humanities with media and games studies (as well as communities dedicated to making and studying interactive stories, such as the Electronic Literature Organization, which released Electronic Literature Collection 1, 2 and 3, three volumes of interactive narratives) has assisted our understanding of what interactive stories might accomplish. A growing interest in games in the classroom has also focused attention on serious and educational games, which often use interactive storytelling as one means to build an experience. (Significant examples include Jane McGonigal’s Evoke, an alternate reality game encouraging players to collaborate and address world hunger and water shortages, and Play the Past, a non-digital role-playing game system for character-based play in history courses.) By building interactive stories, we can communicate complex ideas that change our relationship to texts and have the potential to serve as textbooks, persuasive works, thought experiments, and personal narratives. In this chapter, I first position and define interactive stories as a medium, placing the form in its contested space in scholarship. Then I survey exemplars, design principles, and platforms for building interactive stories

MOTYWACJA I MEDIA ELEKTRONICZNE W NAUCZANIU TŁUMACZEŃ SPECJALISTYCZNYCH

Expansion of IT-media in every field of human activity is one of the essential characteristics of modern time. This paper aims at presenting the role of electronic media in teaching translation in the field of law at the University of Osijek, Croatia, and analysing their impact on the motivation of the target group of students in the teaching process. The paper endeavours to provide some insight into the modern teaching practice and to analyse the interconnectedness of the use of electronic media and student motivation rather than to present some empirical research in the field. In the first part of the paper, a theoretical approach to teaching legal translation today is offered. In the main part, teaching legal translation by using modern media is presented on the examples of the Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists at the Faculty of Law Osijek, and the course on legal translation within the German Language and Literature Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Osijek. The usage of electronic media in translation teaching is discussed with reference to the courses Introduction to the Theory of Legal Translation and Online Translation Tools and EU Vocabulary. Specific types of online materials, translation tools and sources are discussed from the point of view of student motivation. New media are also discussed from the perspective of their efficiency at different stages of translation teaching. In the concluding part, application of modern technologies in teaching legal translation is compared with other teaching methods, approaches and techniques. Finally, the author questions using IT as motivation tools in the higher education teaching discourse and argues for application of “moderate approach” in the teaching of legal translation.Ekspansja mediów informatycznych w każdej dziedzinie życia jest jedną z podstawowych cech współczesnego życia. Niniejszy artykuł ma na celu przedstawienie roli mediów elektronicznych w nauczaniu przekładu prawniczego na Uniwersytecie w Osijek w Chorwacji oraz przeanalizowanie ich wpływu na motywację grupy docelowej studentów w procesie nauczania. Autorka stara się przedstawić nowoczesną praktykę dydaktyczną i przeanalizować wzajemne powiązania korzystania z mediów elektronicznych i motywację studentów. W pierwszej części artykułu zaproponowano teoretyczne podejście do nauczania tłumaczenia prawniczego. Na przykładach programu „Lifelong Learning Programme for Lawyer-Linguists” na Wydziale Prawa Osijek oraz kursu tłumaczenia prawniczego w ramach „German Language and Literature Studies” na Wydziale Nauk Humanistycznych i Społecznych w Osijek autorka prezentuje nauczanie tłumaczenia prawniczego przy użyciu nowoczesnych mediów. Wykorzystanie mediów elektronicznych w nauczaniu tłumaczeń omawia się w odniesieniu do kursów „Wprowadzenie do teorii tłumaczenia prawniczego i narzędzi tłumaczenia online oraz słownictwa UE”. Konkretne rodzaje materiałów online, narzędzi tłumaczeniowych i źródeł omawia się z punktu widzenia motywacji studentów. Nowe media są również analizowane pod kątem ich skuteczności na różnych etapach nauczania przekładu. Podsumowując, zastosowanie nowoczesnych technologii w nauczaniu tłumaczenia prawniczego porównuje się z innymi metodami, podejściami i technikami nauczania. Na koniec autorka kwestionuje zasadność wykorzystania narzędzi IT jako motywatorów w dyskursie dydaktycznym szkolnictwa wyższego i opowiada się za zastosowaniem „umiarkowanego podejścia” w nauczaniu tłumaczenia prawniczego

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

Evaluating Digital Libraries: A Longitudinal and Multifaceted View

published or submitted for publicatio

Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

Computer-Aided Palaeography, Present and Future

The field of digital palaeography has received increasing attention in recent years, partly because palaeographers often seem subjective in their views and do not or cannot articulate their reasoning, thereby creating a field of authorities whose opinions are closed to debate. One response to this is to make palaeographical arguments more quantitative, although this approach is by no means accepted by the wider humanities community, with some arguing that handwriting is inherently unquantifiable. This paper therefore asks how palaeographical method might be made more objective and therefore more widely accepted by non-palaeographers while still answering critics within the field. Previous suggestions for objective methods before computing are considered first, and some of their shortcomings are discussed. Similar discussion in forensic document analysis is then introduced and is found relevant to palaeography, though with some reservations. New techniques of "digital" palaeography are then introduced; these have proven successful in forensic analysis and are becoming increasingly accepted there, but they have not yet found acceptance in the humanities communities. The reasons why are discussed, and some suggestions are made for how the software might be designed differently to achieve greater acceptance. Finally, a prototype framework is introduced which is designed to provide a common basis for experiments in "digital" palaeography, ideally enabling scholars to exchange quantitative data about scribal hands, exchange processes for generating this data, articulate both the results themselves and the processes used to produce them, and therefore to ground their arguments more firmly and perhaps find greater acceptance

Codes and Hypertext: the Intertextuality of International and Comparative Law

The field of information studies reveals gaps in the literature of international and comparative law as part of interdisciplinary and textual studies. To illustrate the kind of theoretical and text-based work that could be done, this essay provides an example of such a study. Religious law texts, civil law codes, treaties and constitutional texts may provide a means to reveal the nature of hypertext as the new format for commentary. Margins used to be used for commentary, and now this can be done with hypertext and links in footnotes. Scholarly communication in general is now intertextual, and texts derive value and meaning from being related to other texts. This paper draws upon examples chosen after observing relationships between text presentation and hypertext as well as detailing similar observations by scholars to date. However, this essay attempts to go beyond a descriptive level to argue that this intertextuality, and the hypertext nature of the web, bring together texts and traditions in a manner conducive to the study of legal systems and their points of convergence

Putting the Text back into Context: A Codicological Approach to Manuscript Transcription

Textual scholars have tended to produce editions which present the text without its manuscript context. Even though digital editions now often present single-witness editions with facsimiles of the manuscripts, nevertheless the text itself is still transcribed and represented as a linguistic object rather than a physical one. Indeed, this is explicitly stated as the theoretical basis for the de facto standard of markup for digital texts: the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). These explicitly treat texts as semantic units such as paragraphs, sentences, verses and so on, rather than physical elements such as pages, openings, or surfaces, and some scholars have argued that this is the only viable model for representing texts. In contrast, this chapter presents arguments for considering the document as a physical object in the markup of texts. The theoretical arguments of what constitutes a text are first reviewed, with emphasis on those used by the TEI and other theoreticians of digital markup. A series of cases is then given in which a document-centric approach may be desirable, with both modern and medieval examples. Finally a step forward in this direction is raised, namely the results of the Genetic Edition Working Group in the Manuscript Special Interest Group of the TEI: this includes a proposed standard for documentary markup, whereby aspects of codicology and mise en page can be included in digital editions, putting the text back into its manuscript context

"Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and limits of computing technologies in philosophy and religion

Computing technologies like other technological innovations in the modern West are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution". Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes— changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.\ud These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s�—in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept—as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities only have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do