This portfolio contains artifacts that meet the requirements for DH@MSU’s graduate certificate program, including work from Digital Humanities seminars, along with pedagogy and research artifacts.
Digital Humanities Seminar
Seminar: DH 865, Spring 2018
This section contains the final presentation from DH 865. The work, research, and tools from this course ended up finding new life below in the artifacts from my presentations at DH Locus 2018 (Week 11’s project planning led to a 2018 DH Summer Seed Grant and Global DH Symposium 2019 (distant reading from Week 5’s guest lecture from Devin Higgins).
One primary outcome is this website itself, as I have endeavored to build out my Digital Presence (and am still working to build this out).
Digital Humanities Pedagogy Artifacts
Seminar: AL 891, Fall 2018
This section contains several artifacts related to my engagements with Digital Humanities and Pedagogy, including a proposed syllabus that was one final outcome from AL 891, pedagogical outcomes from my experiences attending the Data Visualization Summer Institute from 2019 and 2020, and forms related to my ongoing dissertation work: a digital video game designed for use within the humanities classroom.
My dissertation, Level 101: A Video Game About Video Games has spun out of work I completed throughout my time in the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, beginning with nascent work in AL 891, continuing through to DH 865, and most recently as a result of DH fellowships & grants. My abstract can be found below.
For my dissertation, I developed a serious game entitled Level 101: A Video Game About Video Games, a playable video game for entry-level college courses that explores, explains, and interrogates the video game in order to understand the medium through a methodology of play. In doing so, Level 101 will also put disparate elements of Game Studies theory into practice due to its branching paths, introducing players to three distinct frameworks for understanding video games: 1) history, 2) design, and 3) play. Each of these three branches features five stages (for a total of fifteen different 10-20 minute modules) designed to educate players about the video game medium, as well as encourage critical reflection on video games and the process of playing through them. The primary audiences are twofold: college instructors who will use and assign the video game as a lecture supplement, and college students who would play through the video game. This is accompanied by a traditional dissertation component that addresses several issues: 1) historical and cultural contextualization; 2) theoretical investments; 3) a summation of the project’s critical contributions; and 4) a reflection of the development process. Level 101 seeks to begin filling in a crucial and overlooked pedagogical gap in Game Studies through uniting play and learning via digital means, but only in conjunction with other aspects of traditional learning. As such, Level 101 sits at the intersection of three distinct areas of inquiry: Game Studies, Pedagogy, and Digital Humanities. By drawing not just from Game Studies, but from other corollaries in such disparate fields as comic studies, literary studies, film studies, among others, Level 101 also holds the potential for further experimentations with playable methods of academic engagement.
Digital Humanities Summer Seed Grant 2020 Report: Funding awarded, report forthcoming.
Digital Humanities Research Artifacts
This section contains several artifacts related to my research utilizing Digital Humanities. Rather than listing/including every artifact (particularly those tied to my dissertation), I have uploaded those artifacts from public conferences where I shared out my Digital Humanities work.