paj:The Journal of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture

Teaching with TypeWright: An English Class in the Computer Lab

2015-09-11T21:07:55+00:00

This article offers a teaching reflection about using the digital tool TypeWright in an undergraduate classroom. It outlines how the tool was used and the resulting learning outcomes; it ultimately suggests that TypeWright can be integrated effectively into non-specialist undergraduate courses.

“Select the Type of Experience You Would Like to Have”: Exploring Player Roles and Role Affordance in Video Games

2015-09-11T21:07:55+00:00

This paper focuses on the concepts of player roles and role affordance, drawing its examples from role-playing video games (RPGs). RPGs present a useful test case for exploring how player role analysis adds a more fluid, dynamic perspective to existing possibility space and player type analytical approaches. Within possibility spaces, players negotiate the enactment of designed, afforded, and constrained roles. Game designers can take these concepts of possibility spaces and possible roles into account in future designs, and the resulting combinations of spaces and roles are crucial to games’ procedural rhetorics, popular appeal, and aesthetic interest. We can better understand video games as a medium by attending to player roles in relation to possibility spaces and player types. The roles that games afford and players adopt are key to why games have become such an important cultural force in our society, and further exploration of the concept will advance our understanding of why players play, how designers design, and what meanings and pleasures emerge from players' experiences of games. This approach to analyzing character and player roles integrates the player-centric insights of player types and the game-centric insights of possibilty space analysis while addressing leading RPGs such as Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Final Fantasy XIII.

Digital Day Thoughts and the Interpretive Edition as Dataset

2015-09-11T21:07:55+00:00

Through a case study of encoding and representing The Relief; or, Day Thoughts (1754), a critique of graveyard poetry by bricklayer-turned-poet Henry Jones, this article explores a model of interpretive digital edition as close-reading dataset.

Visualizing Poetry: Tools for Critical Analysis

2015-09-11T21:07:55+00:00

Although digital media allegedly privileges “distant reading”, we can develop tools
and methods to close-read and analyze documents. Moreover, these analyses can be
visualized before being discussed by readers. We have developed a set of visualization tools that aim to help scholars carry out thecritical analysis of poetry. More specifically, the purpose of the visualization tools is to help synthesize and bring forward the key elements found in poems.

As results, we found that the tools we developed bring forward the graphical
elements of poetry. Additionally, our tools place special emphasis in viewing the poems from different perspectives and visualizing the textual representation of the poetic texts in their formal structure.