Digital Storytelling

Indiecade Jamming the Curve

brittenhouse6 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 15:17:32 +0000

Indiecade Jamming the Curve

In the summer of 2020, DILAC began a collaboration with the independent games organization Indiecade and the National Academy of sciences to organize a game jam in which participants made science-games about the COVID pandemic. The jam was held in September 2020. The projects can be found on itch.io. DILAC also funded graduate and undergraduate student researchers to build two games. Dinostore was about proper public health behavior, while Essential Workers demonstrated the difficult decisions facing essential workers during the pandemic. Essential Workers was awarded "Most Potential" at the INDCOR Complexity Jam in 2020 and its epidemiological model, adapted for both html and Unity, was provided for free on the Lab's Github.

brittenhouse6 Wed, 03/02/2022 - 10:17

Project Year

2019-20

Project Leads

Janet Murray

Brad Rittenhouse

Students

Terra Gasque

Jordan Graves

Colin Stricklin

Kevin Tang

Aditya Anupam

Genre Tags

Digital Media

Digital Storytelling

Project Site

Game Jam Website

Contact Email

jmurray@gatech.edu

Southern Trails and Digital Early American History

brittenhouse6 — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 14:50:35 +0000

Southern Trails and Digital Early American History

“Southern Trails” is a digital portal for Georgia Tech students to present work that explores early American history through the lens of digital technologies. Our goal is to create learning spaces for students to explore the history of the South, while using new software to collect, read, map, visualize, describe, and analyze historical records.

The United States, the South, and Georgia have a rich, if troubled, early history. Georgians participated and experienced European settlement, the Institution of Slavery, and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples; indeed, Georgia and Georgia Tech stand on former Creek and Cherokee lands. Georgians also helped develop novel forms of government as they participated in the creation of new states during the Colonial, Revolutionary, Republican, Civil War and Reconstruction Periods. This portal provides a space for students to examine this rich and complicated history with digital technologies that provide new pathways to reframe the past.

For our first inaugural project in Fall 2021 students explored American Revolutions using StoryMaps, analyzing four distinct primary sources. In addition, the “Southern Trails” team created a portal map to search for projects by place and added previous exhibits about women during the American Revolution and Atlanta City History.

In Spring 2022 we will continue to work with digital mapping and create a podcast to coincide with an exhibit about Oakland Cemetery’s early history.

Play Video

brittenhouse6 Tue, 07/13/2021 - 10:50

Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Carla Gerona

Students

Ashley Cain

Alejandra Ruiz-León

Elise Li Zheng

Surabhi Shetty

Genre Tags

Digital History

Digital Storytelling

GIS

Project Site

Contact Email

carla.gerona@hsoc.gatech.edu

The Aesthetics of Data Settings

brittenhouse6 — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 15:01:55 +0000

The Aesthetics of Data Settings

What characterizes our aesthetic experiences of data? We are exploring what data can do to us, beyond what it does for us. When do data inspire feelings of curiosity, empowerment, anxiety, or resilience? The focus of our work is on data settings, rather than data sets. The term data set suggests something that is complete, discrete, and effortlessly transferable. But data are none of those things. We use the term data setting (first introduced in All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data Driven Society) to describe a broader context in which data are meant to be fully understood. Our current work explores the role of place and space in the creation of new data settings. We take a creative approach to questions about how data settings might work on an aesthetic level. In 2021, we made expressive use of painted rubber ducks to explore the aesthetics of cute and grotesque data in a physicalization of turbidity data from Intrenchment Creek in Southeast Atlanta (link). This summer, we are designing a new data physicalization for the Georgia Tech EcoCommons, which is described by its creators as “80 acres of green space across campus that follow what were the original naturally occurring stream paths” (link). We believe that data can transform the aesthetic experience of the EcoCommons, with implications for how visitors relate to the broader ecology in which our campus is situated.

brittenhouse6 Thu, 06/03/2021 - 11:01

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Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Yanni Loukissas

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

yanni.loukissas@lmc.gatech.edu

Computing: History, Society, and Ethics

brittenhouse6 — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 19:34:37 +0000

Computing: History, Society, and Ethics

We are developing a course module for LMC 3304: Science, Technology, and Gender that includes readings and assignments promoting student learning about historical, social, and ethical dimensions of computer technology and computing, with particular emphasis on gender and race issues. In addition to accessing library digital archival materials, students will read and discuss scholarship in the history of science and technology, the social sciences, science and technology studies (STS), and media studies to analyze computer science practice, education, and product development and reception through a gendered lens. A gendered lens includes a focus not only on gender, but on race, sexuality, (dis)ability, economic structures, citizenship status, and any other categories resulting in marginalization. Students will examine the historical exclusion of women from computational fields, as well as the ways that masculinity and femininity are performed with and through design and use of computational and digital technology.

Readings and graded assignments will raise awareness of ethical social justice issues such as disparate impacts of algorithms, the digital divide, social media disinformation, and electronic waste and will ask students to consider these in relation to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and to principles of anti-racism. A digital assignment rubric will be developed over the summer that will ask students to create a visualization regarding issues of equity in computing. The digital assignment will call for each team of students to collaborate on developing a website component such as a timeline with dates of computing achievements significant for marginalized groups, a map outlining how e-waste moves around the world, Wikipedia-type entries related to equity issues in computing, a mind map presenting unethical social media interventions in politics, or an e-children’s book about diverse figures in computing history. Course resources and projects will be archived as a model for other instructors.

brittenhouse6 Wed, 06/02/2021 - 15:34

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Project Year

2021-22

Project Leads

Carol Colatrella

Students

Kera Allen

Genre Tags

Project Site

Contact Email

carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.edu

Global Science Fiction: A Digital Publication

mmoattari3 — Mon, 11 May 2020 17:43:22 +0000

Global Science Fiction: A Digital Publication

Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction is a Georgia Tech student and faculty-run digital magazine of global speculative fiction. We publish science fiction and fantasy—broadly defined— on the themes of language, culture, and communication. We are also interested in multimedia and interactive stories that push the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Hivemind is based out of the School of Modern Languages and is led by an editorial board staffed by graduate students in the new M.S. in Global Media and Cultures. Each issue centers on one unifying concept or theme connected to our overarching focus on global SF. Our content includes original short fiction, reprints, translations, interviews, and articles. By spotlighting and celebrating diverse speculative traditions, Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction seeks to expand our understanding of worlds both real and imagined.

Over 2020-2021, we developed the prototype of Hivemind, an online multimedia magazine that explores global speculative fiction through language and culture. We also published our first issue, “The Future of Translation.” As we developed the site, Sofi became our visual assistant editor, focusing primarily on developing the look of the site and its gorgeous visualizations. Will became our literary assistant editor, focusing on editing website content and conducting interviews for our Non-Fiction section. We published Hivemind Vol 1 Issue 1 (“The Future of Translation”) in April 2021 and are currently developing Vol 1 Issue 2 (Japan x Future) for August 2021.

“The Future of Translation” features five fiction stories and six non-fiction articles, including reprints of Ursula K. Le Guin, original translations of Japanese proto-SF, and interviews with Game of Thrones conlanger David J. Peterson and Chinese/English science fiction translator and writer Andy Dudak. We also published two multimedia stories, one interactive article, and a collection of six multimedia folktales that “translate” culture. Two pieces in our inaugural issue by undergraduate Natalie Mueller (“Race to the Lunar World” and “Human vs. Machine Translation”) won 2nd Place in the 2021 VIP Innovation Competition (Human and Environment Track). We received funding from the School of Modern Languages for Issue 1.2 (“Japan x Future,” coming out in August 2021) and are planning to apply for small internal grants to fund Volume 2 (“Anthropocene”).

mmoattari3 Mon, 05/11/2020 - 13:43

Play Video

Project Year

2020-21

Project Leads

Amanda Weiss

Students

Will Sanders

Sofi Sanders

Project Format

Site

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

Project Site

Contact Email

amanda.weiss@modlangs.gatech.edu

Building Memories Podcast

kkim733 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 19:50:23 +0000

Building Memories Podcast

In the spirit of Mayor Allen’s abiding love for Atlanta, we offer the podcast “Building Memories” as a venue for telling stories about iconic places of Atlanta and the people who have occupied them. With the ever-changing cityscape of Atlanta, our commitment is to document the people and places whose stories should not be lost from public memory amidst Atlanta’s continual drive for redevelopment. The mission of “Building Memories” is to preserve and share community stories from Atlanta’s past in order to remember a more diversely rendered citizenry, those – famous and not so famous – who, like Ivan Allen, Jr., helped lay the foundation for what Atlanta is today.

The podcast is organized around thematic threads and is prepared by teams of faculty, students, and community members.

Topics of current and future podcasts:

Herndon Home
Herren’s Restaurant and The Balzer Theater
Auburn Avenue Research Library
Atlanta Daily World
Friendship Baptist Church
Fountain Hall – Morris Brown College
Carrie Steele-Pitts Home
Phyllis Wheatley YWCA
Booker T Washington High
McClendon Hospital
Southview Cemetery
The Royal Peacock
Paschal’s Restaurant
Prince Hall

Initial work on Building Memories (through mid-Fall 2017) focused on developing the theme and processes for the podcast; this phase was primarily the work of faculty and other professionals.

In late Fall 2017, the team identified three student interns who will learn the art of podcasting: writing, interviewing, and producing the content. The goal for Spring 2017 is for our student crew to gain sufficient skill in these techniques to produce the final episode of the semester on their own. Tentatively, the subject of this episode will be Friendship Baptist Church, Atlanta's first autonomous black Baptist congregation; founded in 1862, the church has played a significant role in the founding of institutions of higher education and has been at the center of African American political power in Atlanta for many decades.

kkim733 Mon, 01/22/2018 - 14:50

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

2019-20

Project Leads

Faculty: Peter Brecke (PI), Jacqueline Royster (Executive Producer), Steve Hodges (Advisor)

Community Partners: Gene Kansas (Creative Partner and Host) and Stephen Key (Technical Producer)

Students

Charles Cardot

Maura Currie

Prachi Mehta

Genre Tags

Podcast

Digital Storytelling

Digital Archive

Project Site

Building Memories Project Site

Contact Email

building-memories@iac.gatech.edu

The Digital Story Structure Project

morangi3 — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 15:54:43 +0000

The Digital Story Structure Project

The Digital Story Structure Project uses interactive digital formats to model complex narrative structures. We start from the premise that the new affordances of digital representation offer the possibility for creating and experiencing more complex story forms, including multi-sequential stories, stories with multiple protagonists, and parameterized narrative scenarios with multiple potential outcomes. We seek to contribute to the collective process of inventing a more expressive and complex storytelling medium by identifying the underlying story structures that allow viewers to experience sustained narrative immersion within cognitively challenging story worlds with multiple characters, multiple points of view, and multiple possible instantiations of the same scenario.

Starting in Fall 2017 the Digital Story Structure Project is focusing on the multiple dramatic character arcs developed in HBO’s multi-season television series Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s series of novels, and featuring over 100 memorable characters. We are exploring ways of representing this complexity as an interactive application that could also serve as a means of navigating the entire series archive following single characters or focusing on the intersections between key characters. The project builds on previous projects of the etv lab (such as this one: http://etv.gatech.edu/2014/11/18/game-of-thrones-companion-app/ ), and on the theoretical framework set out in Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (updated edition, MIT Press, 2017).

Future work will examine other structural elements that support narrative comprehension in complex storyworlds, such as formulaic scene construction and the ultimate goal of the project is to apply this structural knowledge to the creation of born-digital storyworlds that exploit the intersection of computational affordances with cultural traditions of narrative abstraction to expand human expressivity and the boundaries of shared understanding.

morangi3 Tue, 01/16/2018 - 10:54

Project Year

2017-18

Project Leads

Prof. Janet Murray

Students

Henry Kyeungbum Kim

Vikas Luthra

Hayden Russell

William Martin

Michael Vogel

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

Contact Email

jmurray@gatech.edu

Talking Craft

morangi3 — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 16:19:02 +0000

Talking Craft

“Talking Craft” explores the creative practices of crafting and making. We target two events in the Spring term 2018 that feature an invited guest speaker, panel discussions, and connections to local creative communities. Each event will center around one material and one practice to allow students and faculty to recognize connections between particular practices, personal stories and technique, as well as material conditions.

Leah Buechley, the first speaker, is a designer, engineer, and educator. Her work explores integrations of electronics, computing, art, craft, and design. She has done foundational work in paper and fabric-based electronics. Her inventions include the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit for sew-able electronics.

Craft as a material practice with long-standing social-economic traditions that are part of their cultural spheres are an ever-more relevant reference in the discussion of how technology and human development intersect. It allows a focus on material conditions that might be sidelined in a purely technological product-focused view and it asks questions about sustainability, creativity, and critical material practices.

The goal of “Talking Craft” is to provide an opportunity to discuss these questions. The events are centered around invited crafters/ designers to emphasize the interconnections between the practices of making, personal stories, and history. Next to the invited speaker, we will provide a discussion format with local crafters and scholars to widen the discussion. Where feasible, events will also include a practical component, such as a workshop, a lab tour, or a performance, to allow direct hands on engagement for participants.

Organized by Michael Nitsche in collaboration with Darien Oliver Arikoski-Johnson (GSU)

morangi3 Mon, 10/30/2017 - 12:19

Project Year

2017-18

Project Leads

Michael Nitsche

Genre Tags

Digital Arts

Digital Storytelling

Project Site

Talking Craft Project Site

Contact Email

michael.nitsche@gatech.edu

The Shape of History

morangi3 — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 14:04:55 +0000

The Shape of History

What is the story we tell about the origins of modern data visualization? What alternate histories might emerge, what new forms might we imagine, and what new arguments might we make, if we told that story differently?

The Shape of History presents one such story, drawing from the understudied visualization work of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The project combines original archival research with interactive visualizations in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques of data visualization carry very specific assumptions about how knowledge is produced and perceived.

In Spring 2017, the project team launched shapeofhistory.net, an interactive website that guides viewers through Peabody's images and ideas. The team is also working to recreate Peabody's lost "floor charts" using physical computing materials. The floor charts were rug-sized versions of her images that she designed for classroom use. Follow the progress of this project on the DH Lab research blog.

“This project has been instrumental for me as an undergraduate student. Not only did it build me into a better web developer, it also taught me an invaluable lesson about working on real-world projects. The Shape of History [the funded project] was the first DH Lab project at Georgia Tech utilizing both graduates and undergraduates, and now every member of that project is connected to the following: a published paper, a completed website, and a peer-reviewed journal article… Programs like [DILAC] create success stories like mine. We need more programs like this-- programs which bring college freshman into the research community. I now have a lasting connection to research, in fact, next week I will be continuing work on our next DH Lab project. I could not be more grateful for this opportunity.”

- Adam Hayward, second-year computational media student, quoted in remarks delivered at the Digital Humanities annual conference, held in Montreal, Canada, in August 2017

Play Video

morangi3 Sat, 07/22/2017 - 10:04

Project Year

2016-17

Project Leads

Lauren Klein

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

Info viz

Digital Humanities

Project Site

Shape of History Project Site

Contact Email

lauren.klein@lmc.gatech.edu

Understanding the Syrian Refugee Crisis

morangi3 — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 02:04:42 +0000

Understanding the Syrian Refugee Crisis

This grant aims to use the Syrian refugee crisis as a case study to both educate Tech students about a particular global problem and to empower them as producers (rather than consumers) of pedagogy and scholarship by generating projects about the Syrian refugee crisis using the tools and innovations of digital humanities. Ultimately, these projects will be made available as resources that can be used as lesson plans about the Syrian refugee crisis in Georgia public middle school classrooms. Additionally, lessons learned from this early start up phase of the project can hopefully be leveraged into a larger grant to develop a comprehensive resource on the Syrian refugee crisis for educators.

Results of Phase I

The first part of the project was implemented in July as part of HTS 2041 History of the Modern Middle East. We devoted the last week of class to the Syrian refugee crisis, including bringing in guest speakers from New American Pathways, a refugee resettlement group headquartered in Atlanta and an Iraqi refugee who now works helping to resettle more recent Syrian arrivals. The initial assignment was to complete group timeline project on the Syrian refugee crisis using JS Timeline, an open source tool for creating multi-media timelines. However, some of the groups wanted to pursue topics we had covered during earlier parts of the course and I allowed them to do that.

I also asked each group to write a short essay reflecting on the process of constructing their timeline including an evaluation of the JS Timeline tool. In many respects, this proved the most interesting part of the assignment as it showed students grappling critically with the challenges and possibilities of using Timeline JS and provided a window on the analytical choices they made in order to construct a historical narrative. Here are some of their comments:

“Timeline JS was an interesting medium for portraying information, but it limits the amount of resources that can be used to support the arguments or information. Timeline JS only allowed for one media source to be used per slide, and it also made it difficult to use interactive sources or statistics tables in tandem with media. The timeline also forces the events to be described in a brief, concise manner, which can be disadvantageous when reviewing important and in-depth events or figures that require context or analysis along with basic descriptions.”

“When using Timeline JS, we found that it was fairly easy to use, and the setup of the spreadsheet made it clear where all of our information was supposed to be placed. Timeline JS is a very useful software due to its capabilities of creating the timeline for you. For the most part we had no troubles with the program…Overall, our experience with Timeline JS was a very good experience as the program was easy to use, and it definitely helped make this project a lot easier than it could have been.”

“We found we could have done a lot with this project given more time and a different format in which to present it….The issue of the timeline was having to put everything in with a specific date…..We also felt the use of a timeline for this project hindered our ability to talk about the more interesting points of this conflict and the varying opinions on what happened, which side was more legitimate in their fight, and other points of historical disagreement surrounding the conflict. By using the JS timeline, we had to abide to a set of instructions that restricted our choices. Therefore, our narrative ended up being fairly broad, simply outlining the conflict more than analyzing it instead of including more information on differences.”

morangi3 Wed, 10/05/2016 - 22:04

Play Video

Project Year

2016-17

Project Leads

Laura Bier

Genre Tags

Digital Storytelling

GIS

Contact Email

laura.bier@hsoc.gatech.edu