Kits for Cultural History

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Nina Belojevic provides an introduction and rationale for the Kits for Cultural History project at the University of Victoria’s Maker Lab in the Humanities. These kits help humanists explore questions and topics related to history and culture. They are not intended to be simple instruction manuals, with step-by-step instructions to complete, but rather serve as examples, encouraging inquiry, modification, and reflection. Kits include the Early Wearables Kit, which explores nineteenth-century wearables, and Tennis for Two, which looks at the first video game. The kits suggest that praxis goes deeper than simple problem-solving. One obvious way to integrate these kits into the classroom is to attempt a group project recreating or extending one. From there, students could be asked to create their own kits and to write rationales documenting the process through which they researched and designed them

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012-2013 a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), University of Victoria, in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of social knowledge creation. The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the iNKE team and well beyond, iincluding at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013)

Social Knowledge Creation: Three Annotated Bibliographies

In 2012–2013, a team led by Ray Siemens at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), in collaboration with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), developed three annotated bibliographies under the rubric of “social knowledge creation.” The items for the bibliographies were gathered and annotated by members of the Electric Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) to form this tripartite document as a resource for students and researchers involved in the INKE team and well beyond, including at digital humanities seminars in Bern (June 2013) and Leipzig (July 2013). Gathered here, the result of this initiative might best be approached as an expeditious environmental scan, a necessarily partial snapshot of scholarship coalescing around an emerging area of critical interest. The project did not seek to establish a canon, but instead to provide a transient representation of interrelational research areas through a process of collaborative aggregation. The annotated bibliography is purposefully focused on the active, present, and future “social knowledge creation” instead of the passive and past “social construction of knowledge,” in which its roots lie. The difference in emphasis signals a newfound concern with (re)shaping processes that produce knowledge, and doing so in ways that productively reposition sociological and historical approaches. Taken together, the three parts of the bibliography connect contemporary thinking about new knowledge production with a range of Web 2.0 digital tools and game-design models for redesigning knowledge processes to better facilitate collaboration

Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies

This article raises a number of questions: Where do the parts on gaming circuit boards come from? Whose hands made them? Under what conditions? What happens to the materials in a device once we discard it? Perhaps predictably, these questions do not commonly come up when videogames are studied diegetically, based solely on what is expressed on the screen (Montfort; Kirschenbaum 27-28). However, the material study of hardware offers an approach that highlights material traces that may otherwise go unnoticed by gamers and scholars alike. Furthermore, it prompts an important question in the context of game studies: What do gamers and scholars tend to ignore when they are at once enthralled and distracted by the experiences afforded by the video, audio, and textual elements of games? As I argue below, circuit bending encourages a deep engagement with hardware that offers a materials-first approach and brings awareness to issues of exploitation not commonly raised and recorded by screen-centric analysis alone