Living the Past through Your Controller

Here's a couple of GREAT articles that I've found on history and video games.

http://www.notevenpast.org/discover/“you-have-died-dysentery”-history-according-video-games

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2010/nov/19/assassin-s-creeed-brotherhood-history

Jeremiah McCall has recently put a book out on the uses of and kinds of games that can be used to present history, called Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History. He has lots of other great ideas, early research, and teach methodology on his website.

http://gamingthepast.net

The articles under "Theory and Practice" are great. In one article "Student-designed text-based simulation games for learning history: A practical approach to using Inform 7 in the history classroom," he discusses the use of a program Inform 7 to create AND have students create text based simulation games. In many of the article he focuses and stress that the interactive ability of video games, helps students to work critically with facts to "do" history. He writes,

History students, consequently, are taught most authentically and meaningfully when they learn to study history as a discipline rather than a subject. This entails moving far beyond the rote learning of teacher’s and textbook’s assertions about the past and developing several critical skills:
    * The ability to evaluate and analyze evidence about the past
   * The ability to combine pieces of evidence into a plausible interpretation of the past
   * The ability to discriminate between the critical and trivial parts of a historical event or process
   * The ability to use these skills to develop defensible, coherent, and meaningful interpretations of the past.
 Taught this way, students come to appreciate the discipline of history as a lens through which they can view the world. They learn to “do” history by forming their own justifiable conclusions about the past. In the process, students learn fundamental skills of analysis, interpretation, critique, and synthesis that will serve them well.

In Gaming the Past, McCall includes an appendix, listing different video games, their status, uses, time periods of historic simulation that can be used in a classroom setting. He also has some lesson plans for doing so outlined.  Many of this same information can be found on his website. (As a side note, I actually "checked out" the book for a month through Amazon Kindle App on the iPad. Here's me learning new things!)

In both articles "'You Have Died of Dysentery'-History According to Video Games" by Robert Whitaker and "Assassin's Creed and the Appropriation of History" by Keith Stuart, one of their major focuses is the incredible graphics and the players submersion into a stunning and rich historical environment.

The question is about the validity and value of that kind of history. Do "counterfactual" histories have a validity? 

I feel like I need to do some more research on how historians, view history through film and historical fiction. I have some general ideas about that, but not as much as I would like. I think that the lens through which to begin investigating history in video games, but I also think that there is something more at stake with the history through the video game.

The Changing Mentality of the Reader

Hunting for information and research on the difference between page reading and screen reading, was in and of itself an example of both the brilliant advantages of the internet as well as its labyrinthine experience.

Many of the studies that I easily found were for the early to mid 1990s, as people were just beginning to work off their computer monitors, and the internet was still somewhat a place that you could get to the end of. Twenty year later, with the advent of the tablet devices and e-readers the question is still a relevant one, but the focused has shifted from whether it’s a good idea to read on the screen to how this electronic reading is changing the way we think, and to what we comprehend.

The best article I found on the topic was an editorial piece from the New York Times. There were five contributors, all with incredibly difference backgrounds, education, current research, and each with a different focus on the issue of electronic reading. I want to highlight on a couple and then show the neural roads-less-traveled that I went on as the reader of this article.

Alan Liu, a professor of English and head of Transliteracies, a research group on the nature of online reading, information culture, and literature, focuses on the social aspect that reading online produces. While it can be considered “distracting,” he writes that

"Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment."

I love this idea that Plato thought that writing was going to be bad for the study of philosophy, and that the invention of the newspaper was another doomsday device to the human's intellectual capacity. That's not to say that those inventions didn't change the way that humans interacted with one another, because that is SURELY the case. I find that I actually get my news similarly online, as how I got my news through a paper. I hadn't really thought explicitly about how the newspaper is an entirely different medium of information than a book, and that I get information from it differently (topical, scattered, thesis-sentence only, etc).

Davide Gelernter doesn’t focus on the social interaction that Web 2.0 can have on the book, but rather that a book can now be changed in a meaningful way to help the individual reader.

"I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.

"Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years."

I found a great article on the invention/creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, because I love to use the analogy of the printing press and the mass production of codices to the invention of the internet itself. Certainly, just because the printing press had been invented didn't mean that printers abandoned the earlier technology of writing, or the manuscript, but transformed those tools into something new. The dream that I share with Gelernter is that the book will continue to exist, but perhaps it will be a “Codex 2.0.”

As a child, I was obsessed with Penny’s, Inspector Gadget’s daughter, “computer book.” I often carried around the “H” or the “U” Encyclopedia Brittanica.  How do those two things relate, you might ask. Rightly so, the answer is not obvious. In the “H” encyclopedia, one could find the entry “Human Anatomy” and the “U” Encyclopedia include the entry on the “United States.” Clever book designers had used a handful of transparent sheets in each entry. For anatomy, there was a skeleton sheet, arteries and veins, organs, musculature, and a skin sheet. The “United States” transparencies included the land purchases and development of North America to the present size/state of the United States. I’m still not seeing the connection, you say. Oh right, still not apparent, is it? To an eight year old, these encyclopedias were Penny’s computer book. The transparencies allowed me to change and enter “data,” while my “screen” constantly updated to reflect my queries. It was the best!

Why don’t I have one of those yet?! That was 1988!! No, I’m not buying that my iPad is that thing. I want a tangible book. That I open up. And has pages. A durable, leather cover, lovingly created. Maybe if I tied to iPads together that would get me closer. I love books. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that I want to buy the book, but get a digital copy of the book at the same time. Put a code or a chip in the back! I don’t get why it’s not done.  That’s probably not fair. I know that there are authors who do offer that as an option.  Maybe the technology is on the way. This is a flexible phone/flexible display!  There’s still a chance for me to be Penny!

Introduction: Boons and Banes of Being a Historian in the Digital Age

*static* Come in, Amanda. Can you hear us? Over. *static*

*static* Loud and clear. I'm here...again. Over and out. *static*

I know, I know. It's been a while since I've posted, but now! Now, I am earning a grade posting on this blog. My hope is that habits are formed; I become hooked. And as far as addictions can go, history blogging certainly is on the mild side.

I am currently taking a topics course: Digital History with Dr. Charles Evans at Northern Virginia Community College. Obviously since I have already tried to start a history blog, I was somewhat aware of what I needed to be doing to keep up with this growing part of the industry. One week in and Dr. Evans, the syllabus, and the readings have been a wealth of information. I feel like I have more information, links, articles, and projects at my finger tips than I can possibly get through in the remainder of the semester.

I just finished the "Introduction" from our course textbook, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. The introduction is a smart assessment of both the boons and banes that the web offers to historians working in the digital age.

The Boons

"Quantitative Advantages"

• capacity - We carry around libraries in our pockets! Oooh boy!
• accessibility - Our audiences can grow from Mom and Dad and friend who listens to your ramblings to much, much larger and more diverse readership.
• flexibility - The past can reveal itself with all of its many masks. An oral historian can write analysis of traditional village stories, but also share the voices of the storyteller.
• diversity - More readers, but also more writers!

"Additive or Expressive Advantages"

• manipulability - How do I get to touch, move, shape, see, represent the past differently than reading/viewing it in a textbook?
• interactivity - A relationship between the author, a text, and the reader has always been at the heart of "reading a text," but now a more concrete (concrete and occasionally less physical) relationship between the author, text, and reader appears.
• hypertextuality (or nonlinearity) - The Wikipedia Wormhole, as I call it. You're there to look up hypertext and you end up reading the page on Nietzsche. (hypertext--> metafiction--> presentational theatre--> mimesis--> Theodor W. Adorno--> Nietzsche)

The Banes

• quality - Back in the day, when I was in school, and you had to walk uphill in the snow, barefoot to get there, Wikipedia was NOT a serious place to get information. We were told only to get information from .gov and .edu pages, and then to find and use their references.
• durability - Backup your backup? And then back it up again? When it's gone from the net, it's gone.
• readability - Do you read and comprehend as well on the web? A future post will be coming on that. But that also changes the game for the writer as well! How does a writer/historian present the past in the way best to one's end game? Will your readers understand you?
• passivity - Create or consume? Comprehend?
• inaccessibility - Inaccessibility has certainly been brought into the spotlight, with the recent news of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a young man about to be tried to the hacking and distribution of JSTOR articles. Swartz and many with him, say the information should be free to the public, not controlled by a large conglomerate, charging the universities (and ultimately students, faculty, etc) for access to information that they created.

I often read science fiction stories, and my favorite examples are often apocalypse stories. I am particularly enchanted by the idea of the utopian dystopia (or the dystopian utopia, I suppose). Cohen and Rosenzweig create that same tension about the digital future, and history's place in the digital future. The disadvantages are often arguable and have their own silver linings, while every advantage can be taken advantage of.