HIST3812 Digital History @ Carleton_U

Schedule

The course is divided into three parts, with three interstitial weeks where we build things. We meet Mondays and Wednesdays 13.05-14.25 in TB 208. See below for further details. Mondays are generally days where I set the scene. Wednesdays require your active presence & participation as we try things.

Term Dates

  • Sept 7 - Term begins
  • Sept 20 - Last day for registration & course changes If you join the class late, please contact Prof. Graham.
  • Oct 10 - Holiday
  • Oct 24 - 28 Fall break
  • Nov 11 - Last day for academic withdrawal with full fee adjustment
  • Dec 9 - End of term

Module 1: Storytelling

  • Sept 7: Praelude. Introducing the course, its themes, and how everything works. Follow along here
    • Complete this tutorial level before the Sept 12 meeting
    • OPTIONAL but strongly recommended: Download and install the Obsidian thinking and note-taking environment; open that and explore the ‘help’ vault to get a sense of what’s going on.
      • You can download this course handbook as a vault (ie, folder) for Obsidian. Hit the download button, then unzip it somewhere sensible. Start obsidian or hit the ‘open vault’ button, and select the vault you just downloaded. It contains a number of useful plugins and templates. When it asks you if you trust the author of the notebook, say YES. Then hit the x to close the info box.

An Obsidian-powered template for a ‘game design document’ based on one by Rosa Carbo-Mascarell can be found here. You might wish to adapt this for your Unessay (not all parts will be useful, depending on what you do, and so should be modified as you wish.)

Information about ‘paradata’ can be found here, section 4.6. Look over all the course materials and start thinking now about your unessay. More information is available on the assessment page.

M1.1

  • Sept 12: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Lies, and Counterfactuals. My slides from today.
    • Have read for today:
      • Kelly, T. Mills. 2014. True Facts or False Facts - Which Are More Authentic? in K. Kee, ed. Pastplay. U Michigan Press. Permalink. Incidnetally, and thanks to Hannah and Ryan, the ‘Jane Browning’ blog which was the focus of the Last American Pirate Hoax, can be found via the internet archive
      • Kavanagh, Erin. 2019 ‘Writing wonders - Poetry as archaeological method?’ in Daniël van Helden and Robert Witcher, ed. Research the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives Routledge: London. 184-209 link to volume; scroll down to chapter
      • Saidiya Hartman. 2008. ‘Venus in Two Acts’ Small Axe 12(2): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1 (A version remediated into a zine is available from MoMA here)
  • Sept 14: Tech Check-in; Obsidian; GDD; and we might play some ‘barely’ games, maybe also play ‘Domino City’. What stories might we tell using this system? My slides from today.. See also this new page: Obsidian Extra.

M1.2

  • Sept 19: Storytelling in Museums and other sites of Public History. My slides from today..
    • Have read for today:
      • Evans, Jennifer. 2018. ‘Sound, listening and the queer art of history’ Rethinking History 22.1: 25-43. link
      • Bedford, Leslie. ‘Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums’. Curator: The Museum Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, Jan. 2001, pp. 27–34. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2001.tb00027.x.
      • Sylaiou, & Dafiotis, P. (2020). Storytelling in Virtual Museums: Engaging A Multitude of Voices. In Visual Computing for Cultural Heritage (pp. 369–388). Springer International Publishing. via MacOdrum Library; Chapter 19 (link will get you the whole volume).
  • Sept 21: Visual storytelling on the web with Mural. Download and install prior to class.

M1.3

  • Sept 26: Storytelling in Games (Video, Board, AR, ARGS). Guest visit with Dany Guay-Belanger, Université de Montréal.
    • Have read for today:
      • McCall, Jeremiah. 2019. Playing with the past: history and video games (and why it might matter) Journal of Geek Studies link
      • Copplestone, Tara. 2017. Designing and Developing a Playful Past in Video Games, in Mol et al. eds, The Interactive Pasts. 85-97. link
      • Jayanth, Meghna. 2021. White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design #DIGRA21 Keynote. link
  • Sept 28: We’ll play some Action Castle, and we’ll also try some ‘storytelling’ games. Some slides too

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Interstitial 1

Oct 3 & Oct 5 - We will explore Twine and Ren’Py on these two dates. Twine runs in the browser. Have Ren’Py installed on a computer. If you don’t have one, pair up with someone in the class who does. If access to a machine of some sort presents an obstacle, please let me know before this date and we’ll figure out something together. Ren’Py has quite a steep curve, so maybe we’ll focus on storytelling via a twitterbots (a tutorial by me, in the Programming Historian). (Update - we made a twitterbot with Tracery.io and Cheap Bots Done Quick!.)

Before class on October 3rd, read Interactive Fiction in the Humanities Classroom, a Programming Historian tutorial by Gabi Kiriloff. I will also share with you some graduate work in history that revolves around making games (Emslie’s and Cronkite’s.)

Take a Wikipedia article for some historic event that captures your imagination. We’ll storyboard and consider how to express the story via these two different platforms (taking into account what we’ve discussed in prior meetings).

Your Reflection will include your thoughts on all of the work in this module; tie what you’ve read and heard to what you’ve done. Some questions to help kick-start your reflection (you don’t have to answer these in order; they’re meant to show you the direction your thoughts ought to take)

  • What is the main message of this module?
  • What themes connect the various lectures/presentations/activities in module 1?
  • How does Belanger’s vision of what a game is, affect or intersect with the ideas we’ve discussed with regard to ‘storytelling’?
  • What is the one most surprising thing about this module that has changed how you think about how we ‘do’ history?
  • How does it connect with your ideas for your Unessay?

Your Log will be your record of your digital work in this module (including any Unessay work) - hiccups, successes, help found, help given. Ephemera is anything else you want to keep a record of, files created, screenshots, whatever.

Upload your Reflection, Log, and Ephemera for Interstitial Work 1 to your Github Repository by the end of this week (Sunday night); notify me that you have done so using the form at this link.

Module 2: Playfulness

M2.1

by the way Came across this radio program from the CBC which intersects with today’s talk. Nb, some questions in that talk to kickstart your thinking re Interlude 2’s reflection.

M2.2

  • Oct 17 - History is a Remix
    • Have read for today:
      • Kelly, M. 2011. ‘“But Mine’s Better”: Teaching History in a Remix Culture’ The History Teacher 44.3 369-377. link
      • Perry, S. 2019. ‘The Enchantment of the Archaeological Record.’ European Journal of Archaeology 22.3 link
      • Watch: Ferguson, Kirby. 2015. Everyting is a Remix (remastered). youtube.
    • slides for today are here.
  • Oct 19 - In this session, I want you to teach me something new, something enchanting, something that remixes ‘history’ (broadly conceived) via a medium or technology that you know well. Come prepared to collaborate with your peers to create and teach. Or we might do some Augmented Reality using MindAR and github pages.

FALL BREAK Week of Oct 24

M2.3

Interstitial Interlude 2

Nov 7 & Nov 9

Why ‘interlude’? Because ‘interstitial’ doesn’t capture the spirit of what I want this week to be. I want it to be about playing around with things. A literal play within the middle.

Before class, visit Songs of the Ottawa, explore the site and its sonifications, and read ‘Introduction’ and ‘Why Sonification’ in Wood’s MRE.

In these two sessions, you will engage in some playful computing. We’ll try some sonification. We’ll work on our reflections together.

Look, I changed my mind. Each week in module 2, I closed with some questions. On these two days, I want you to start crafting your reflection in the context of those questions, and by analyzing your ideas for your unessays within the HPS framework. Bounce ideas off each other. Work together. Maybe even select a game or playful experience (video, board, whatever) that you find on the web - Atuel, maybe; maybe something else - and drop it through the framework, see what emerges.

Where are these questions, I hear you say? Again, if you check the final slides for Oct 12, Oct 17, Oct 31, and the section on ‘HPS’ here, you’ll find a plethora of questions to get you going. Remember, you’re not necessarily meant to answer all of those questions in turn: they are merely meant to guide your thinking in the channel(s) I want you to follow.

Something we might do- Maybe we’ll try Inky & Ink from Inkle. Try the tutorial, explore the demo game. Do we need to adjust HPS framework to account for a game like this?

Your Reflection will include your thoughts on all of the work in this module; tie what you’ve read and heard to what you’ve done. What is the main message of this module? How does it connect with your ideas for your Unessay? Your Log will be your record of your digital work in this module (including any Unessay work) - hiccups, successes, help found, help given. Ephemera is anything else you want to keep a record of, files created, screenshots, whatever.

Upload your Reflection, Log, and Ephemera for Interstitial Interlude Work 2 to your Github Repository by the end of this week; if you work on it during the work week (rather than leaving it for the last minute on the weekend) I can help you if you have any issues. Notify me that you have done so using the form at this link.

Module 3: Computation

M3.1

  • Nov 14 Procedural Generation (static version of the interactive mind map for today’s speaking notes here)
    • Have read for today:
      • Reed, Aaron. 2021. ‘2017: The Oregon Trail’ 50 Years of Text Games link
      • Reed, Aaron. 2021. ‘2019: A.I. Dungeon’ 50 Years of Text Games link
      • Dzieza, Josh. 2022. ‘The Great Fiction of AI - The strange world of high-speed semi-automated genre fiction’ The Verge link
  • Nov 16 Raising the Dead with GPT-2
    • Blog post & Google Colab notebook by Max Woolf here. We’ll raise the dead.
    • We’ll also play some AI Dungeon. Can we co-create with the machine an interesting historical experience?
    • We might try some worldbuilding.

M3.2

  • Nov 21 Archaeogaming

Change of plans We dove into sonification today. Concepts mapped here. We might integrate some of what was originally imagined (below) into next week.

  • Have read for today:
    • Graham, Shawn. 2020 An Approach to the Ethics of Archaeogaming, Internet Archaeology 55. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.55.2
    • Nicholls, Florence Smith, and Michael Cook. ‘The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring’ arxiv.org link

M3.3

  • Nov 28 - Games that Play Themselves

    • Have read for today:
      • Graham, S. 2017.‘On Games that Play Themselves: Agent based models, archaeogaming, and the useful deaths of digital Romans’ in Mol et al., eds. The Immersive Past, 123-132. link.
      • CSzczepanska, T., Angourakis, A., Graham, S., Borit, M. 2022. Quantum Leaper: A Methodology Journey From a Model in NetLogo to a Game in Unity. In: Czupryna, M., Kamiński, B. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. link
      • optional: read this if you’re interested in an example moving from an agent based model to a board game

  • Nov 30 - Netlogo and its demo models: where is the story?

Slides from Monday are here; we worked through chapter 1. You’ll need the map from the chapter 1 repo, and you’ll need to have netlogo installed. You can make it work with netlogo web version but you’ll have to modify the code somewhat (see this gist from me; to add buttons or modify the interface window, you also need to click on the ‘unlock’ icon in netlogo web). READ CAREFULLY Don’t just randomly type in code because the authors are discussing something - they explicitly say when to type, what to type, and why to type. Consider also the Parable of the Polygons for its model of how to integrate simulation with explanation and communication of tricky concepts.

https://santafeinstitute.github.io/ABMA/

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Interstitial Interlude 3

Dec 5 & Dec 7

At this point, you should have made significant progress on your Unessays. During these two sessions, we will break into smaller groups where people who are working on similar projects can collaborate and help troubleshoot each other’s work. We will work together December 5th on your Game Design Documents, while on December 7th we will consider your Paradata. Both are necessary for your final Unessay.

Failing that, you can use these two sessions to get your final reflection/log complete and submitted.

Your Reflection will include your thoughts on all of the work in this module; tie what you’ve read and heard to what you’ve done.

  • What is the main message of this module?
  • How does it connect with your ideas for your Unessay?
  • What does it mean to ‘do history’ when the machine is a co-creator of the experience working on its own
    • that is, you haven’t explicitly coded particular elements or experiences, they emerge on their own: what’s the role of the historian here?
  • How does this intersect with things you saw in module 1, module 2? BE EXPLICIT.
    • revamp the HPS framework: what is the ‘problem space’ when you’re trying to simulate some phenomenon in the past?
    • what is the ‘problem space’ when you are ‘raising the dead’, and creating some kind of simulacrum of a historical figure?
    • how does this feed into my question about what it means to do history in such a world? You might want to reflect/draw connections, analogies with, this piece by Alan Liu, “Theses on Large Language Models and ‘Good’ Writing”.

Your Log will be your record of your digital work in this module (including any Unessay work) - hiccups, successes, help found, help given. Ephemera is anything else you want to keep a record of, files created, screenshots, whatever.

Upload your Reflection, Log, and Ephemera for Interstitial Interlude Work 3 to your Github Repository by the end of this week (Sunday night); notify me that you have done so using the form at this link.

Dec 9th: This is a Friday, last one of the year and so follows a Monday schedule. We’ll keep this date in reserve in case of interruptions or other necessities; I will let you know what is happening on this day as we get closer to it.

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Take Home Exam

There is no take home exam in the sense of a bunch of questions to answer. But we’ll say that there is; that way, you can submit your Unessay during the Examination period.

Due December 22nd.

Upload all materials to your Github Repo or elsewhere as appropriate to the format of your Unessay, and notify me that you have done so using the form at this link.

HIST 3812 @ Carleton_U

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