Digital Humanities

As a game designer or new media storyteller, you know that the story is critical to the success of your project. Telling that story interactively is an even greater challenge, one that involves approaching the story from many angles. Here to help you navigate and open your mind to more creative ways of producing your stories is the authority on interactive design and a longtime game development guru, Chris Crawford. To help you in your quest for the truly interactive story, Crawford provides a solid sampling of what works and doesn't work, and how to apply the lessons to your own storytelling projects. After laying out the fundamental ideas behind interactive storytelling and explaining some of the misconceptions that have crippled past efforts, the book delves into all the major systems that go into interactive storytelling: personality models, actors, props, stages, fate, verbs, history books, and more. Crawford also covers the Storytron technology he has been working on for several years, an engine that runs interactive electonic storyworlds, giving readers a first-hand look into practical storytelling methods.

Stories define how we think, play, and understand our lives. In this comprehensive and readable book -- already a classic statement of the aesthetics of digital media, acclaimed by practitioners and theorists alike -- Janet Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by. Murray discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the dramatic satisfaction of participatory stories and considers what would be necessary to move interactive fiction from the formats of childish games and confusing labyrinths into a mature and compelling art form. Through a blend of imagination and techno-wizardry, Murray provides both readers and writers with a guide to the storytelling of the future.

A stimulating, eclectic account of new media that finds its origins in old media, particularly the cinema. In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries.

How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture-the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

In the nineties, neoliberalism simultaneously provided the context for the InternetOCOs rapid uptake in the United States and discouraged public conversations about racial politics. At the same time many scholars lauded the widespread use of text-driven interfaces as a solution to the problem of racial intolerance. TodayOCOs online world is witnessing text-driven interfaces such as e-mail and instant messaging giving way to far more visually intensive and commercially driven media forms that not only reveal but showcase peopleOCOs racial, ethnic, and gender identity. a Lisa Nakamura, a leading scholar in the examination of race in digital media, uses case studies of popular yet rarely examined uses of the Internet such as pregnancy Web sites, instant messaging, and online petitions and quizzes to look at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures. a While popular media such as Hollywood cinema continue to depict nonwhite nonmales as passive audiences or consumers of digital media rather than as producers, Nakamura argues the contraryOCowith examples ranging from Jennifer Lopez music videos; films including the Matrix trilogy, Gattaca," and Minority Report"; and online joke sitesOCothat users of color and women use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics. a Lisa Nakamura is associate professor of speech communication and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet" and coeditor, with Beth Kolko and Gilbert Rodman, of Race in Cyberspace." "

Collection of essays on non-linear storytelling published with Scalar. Login is required to access full interactivity.

This reader collects the texts, videos, and computer programs--many of them now almost impossible to find -- that chronicle the history and form the foundation of the still-emerging field of new media. General introductions by Janet Murray and Lev Manovich, along with short introductions to each of the texts, place the works in their historical context and explain their significance. The texts were originally published between World War II--when digital computing, cybernetic feedback, and early notions of hypertext and the Internet first appeared--and the emergence of the World Wide Web--when they entered the mainstream of public life. The texts are by computer scientists, artists, architects, literary writers, interface designers, cultural critics, and individuals working across disciplines. The contributors include (chronologically) Jorge Luis Borges, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Ivan Sutherland, William S. Burroughs, Ted Nelson, Italo Calvino, Marshall McLuhan, Billy Kl?Jean Baudrillard, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Bill Viola, Sherry Turkle, Richard Stallman, Brenda Laurel, Langdon Winner, Robert Coover, and Tim Berners-Lee. The CD accompanying the book contains examples of early games, digital art, independent literary efforts, software created at universities, and home-computer commercial software. Also on the CD is digitized video, documenting new media programs and artwork for which no operational version exists. One example is a video record of Douglas Engelbart's first presentation of the mouse, word processor, hyperlink, computer-supported cooperative work, video conferencing, and the dividing up of the screen we now call non-overlapping windows; another is documentation of Lynn Hershman's Lorna, the first interactive video art installation.

Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story--something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play.Second Person--so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told--first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction--for the singular "you"--including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game).In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web provides for the first time a plainspoken and thorough introduction to the web for historians--teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts--who wish to produce online historical work or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium. The book takes the reader step by step through planning a project, understanding the technologies involved and how to choose the appropriate ones, designing a site that is both easy to use and scholarly, digitizing materials in a way that makes them web-friendly while preserving their historical integrity, and reaching and responding to an intended audience effectively. It also explores the repercussions of copyright law and fair use for scholars in a digital age and examines more cutting-edge web techniques involving interactivity, such as sites that use the medium to solicit and collect historical artifacts. Finally, the book provides basic guidance for ensuring that the digital history the reader creates will not disappear in a few years. Throughout, Digital History maintains a realistic sense of the advantages and disadvantages of putting historical documents, interpretations, and discussions online. The authors write in a tone that makes Digital History accessible to those with little knowledge of computers, while including a host of details that more technically savvy readers will find helpful. And although the book focuses particularly on historians, those working in related fields in the humanities and social sciences will also find this to be a useful introduction. Digital History builds upon more than a decade of experience and expertise in creating pioneering and award-winning work by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Just as the explosive growth of digital media has led to ever-expanding narrative possibilities and practices, so these new electronic modes of storytelling have, in their own turn, demanded a rapid and radical rethinking of narrative theory. This timely volume takes up the challenge, deeply and broadly considering the relationship between digital technology and narrative theory in the face of the changing landscape of computer-mediated communication. New Narratives reflects the diversity of its subject by bringing together some of the foremost practitioners and theorists of digital narratives. It extends the range of digital subgenres examined by narrative theorists to include forms that have become increasingly prominent, new examples of experimental hypertext, and contemporary video games. The collection also explicitly draws connections between the development of narrative theory, technological innovation, and the use of narratives in particular social and cultural contexts. Finally, New Narratives focuses on how the tools provided by new technologies may be harnessed to provide new ways of both producing and theorizing narrative. Truly interdisciplinary, the book offers broad coverage of contemporary narrative theory, including frameworks that draw from classical and postclassical narratology, linguistics, and media studies.