Episode 56 – Past Play
7 May, 2010 3 comments
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While sitting in our offices and wishing we were outside in the beautiful spring weather, Tom, Dan, and Mills took a virtual journey north of the border to talk to Kevin Kee and Bill Turkel about their recent conference Playing With Technology in History at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Kevin is the director of the Simulating History Lab at Brock University and Bill is the guru of the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication. In addition to discussing the conference and Kevin’s and Bill’s work on the cutting edge–perhaps even bleeding edge–of digital humanities, we also debated the pros and cons of the unconference model for academic meetings and whether we thought that “play” was an appropriate objective for history teachers. Kevin also gave us a sneak preview of the mobile history app he and his team are developing to coincide with the bicentennial of the War of 1812. If you don’t have any idea what “humanistic fabrication” is or if you’ve never pondered whether or not you need a MakerBot, you definitely need to listen to the podcast.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
History Education Network/Histoire et Éducation en Réseau
CraftRobo
Arduinos
Rob MacDougall on Barely Games
Running time: 50:01
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Mills Kelly
Derek Bruff : 10th May, 2010
Thanks for sharing your #pastplay experiences. I particularly liked hearing about the mobile app developed for exploring the War of 1812. I’m teaching a first-year writing seminar on the history and math of cryptography this fall, and I’ve been thinking about using smart phones as part of an end-of-semester cryptography hunt around campus, perhaps using scvngr or BlockChalk. After hearing about Kevin’s app, I’m even more enthusiastic about doing something along these lines!
Where’s the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions? : Found History : 12th May, 2010
[...] but only in the back of its mind and only for later. We need time to experiment and even—as we discussed recently with Bill Turkel and Kevin Kee on Digital Campus—time to [...]
weblog.histnet.ch » Blog Archive » Playing With History : 13th May, 2010
[...] Perhaps the most interesting paper draft delivered at the conference came not from a historian, but from a professor English–Steve Ramsey of the University of Nebraska. Ramsey’s paper, “What do you do with a million books?” proposes: “There are so many books. There is so little time. Your ethical obligation is neither to read them all nor to pretend that you have read them all, but to understand each path through the vast archive as an important moment in the world’s duration—as an invitation to community, relationship, and play.” Focusing on the path rather than the destination is certainly a challenge for those of us trained in more traditional research methods, but given the swelling flood of humanities content online, we may well have to heed Ramsey’s argument. All the drafts of the papers, which one day soon will appear in a book tentatively titled Past Play, are available on the conference website. A discussion with the conference organizers can be heard on the Digital Campus podcast. [...]