Final Essay-Tyler Nigro

For my final essay titled "Video Games and Historical Scholarship" I chose to write about how video games can augment the way history is taught to students in classrooms. Video games are continuously advancing and offering us new methods of educating and engaging students.

Artificial Intelligence In Education

My final on Artificial Intelligence In Education is a topic that is very interesting to me. As an education major at UPJ it is interesting to explore how students learn. Studying artificial intelligence in digital humanities has shown me how teachers can use AI as a tool to improve education.

Kendall Mahony Final Paper

My final paper "Emoji's in our Day to Day Lives" is based on the different uses of emoji's. In this paper, I will discuss different forms of literacy that relate back to emoji's, while also going in depth about the different uses through texting and social media.

Exhibit Blog

I chose to write about Jack Shirk and Devan Orr's exhibits. Jack's exhibit consisted of explaining and giving examples of different celebrities who got their fame from social media. One example that he used was the Paul Brothers, who started their fame from the app "Vine". These two brothers made short videos which were so stupid that they were hilarious, and became famous for them. Jack explained how companies use people such as the Paul Brothers to expand the name of their company.
These companies send them products and have them post of picture of them using the product on their social media; the best part is that if you are ever as lucky as the Paul brothers to have millions of followers, you will get paid... yes, you get paid just for posting a picture on your Instagram account. One example that I know of through my own social media experiences if Diff Eyewear. Diff Eyewear is a sunglasses company, which is also a charitable organization. For every pair of sunglasses sold, Diff Eyewear donates a pair of reading glasses to children in need. I follow many people from MTV, The Bachelorette, etc. on instagram, and several of them are ambassadors for Diff Eyewear. The picture to the left is a picture of Mikala Thomas from MTV's Are You the One? season 4 (133k followers on Instagram), posting a picture to promote Diff Eyewear.

Devan's PowerPoint exhibit was based on data mining by using the M-gram and Google Trends. The M-gram shows you how often words appear in books, while Google Trends shows you how many times a word is typed into Google. Devan was researching Vampires, Zombies and Witches, and how often they were seen in literature throughout different time periods. Devan had a graph of a time line which showed how often the word "witches"
was stated in books; the interesting thing is that this time line included the time of the Salem witch trials where the use of the word "witch" in literature was practically nonexistent. Between the three monsters which were displayed in her presentation, witches was most commonly used in books, while zombies was the most searched word on Google worldwide. I believe that the word "witches" is popular because of books such as Harry Potter, while Zombies could be searched more because of shows such as The Walking Dead.

Kendall Mahony

Exhibit Blog - Tyler Nigro

The final essay exhibits were an interesting alternative to the traditional presentation style in college. Rather than nervously standing in front of the class to present our work, exhibiting it the way we did encouraged more personal connection with the person presenting their exhibit. I believe that presenting to a smaller group allows more time for questions and feedback.

I found it to be helpful to present the work we had done for our final project in the way we did. The feedback I had received helped me build on to my final paper. Connecting with the other students about the projects is nice because you can see how other people are doing it, which helped me find my footing in beginning this project.

All of the presentations were interesting and unique in their own way. Dom’s presentation about narratives in video-games provided a unique argument on the way we view the stories being told in video games. After discussing arguments on why video-games can’t have narrative story line, he established a counter argument, attempting to prove that video-games can have narrative development. After providing several examples of games that include a narrative tale, he continued his argument by discussing how people look forward to sequels to games not only for the gameplay itself, but for the continuation of the story. In my opinion, this proved the point that video-games can be narrative.

Another presentation that interested me was Brendan’s presentation which discussed how video games can help people. He made interesting points by explaining how video-games can improve/teach teamwork strategies. He continued by explaining how they can help us connect with others, and even create friendships. Brendan also discussed how video-games can create more beneficial teaching strategies. His exhibit interested me because I am also writing my paper about how video-games can enhance or augment the way history is taught.

Zerbee Final Paper

For my final I decided to research about the implementation for VR and AI. In my paper I discuss what improvements their can be on VR to make it beneficial to the everyday user.

Evolving Virtual Reality

Exhibit Blog

In the last weeks of class, everyone presented an exhibit on what their final papers would be about. This was a eye opening experience to learn about all sorts of technical and cultural experiences. There were exhibits from video game studies, archiving, data mining, and many more. The one I am going to be focusing on is Devin’s on the correlation of Vampires, Witches, and Zombies from the the 1500’s to today. The other one is Brendan’s video games and how they can help us.

Devin’s exhibited the correlation of the words Witches, Vampires and Zombies using Google's Ngram Viewer. This stuck me as interesting because of how far back in history you could see when the most words were used. You can see a large spike in the word, “Witches” and you can see times when there was no mention of this word at all. If you use the word, “Zombies”, there was no mention of it until recent years. She also used Google Trends to distinguish what words were the most popular in certain areas around the world. These two tools can show you how people thought and lived their lives back then and now. Since it shows which words are used the most often, you can tell what people were worried about in a certain time period.

The next exhibit I thought was very intriguing was Brendans exhibit on how videogames can help us. In his essay he talk about how video games can be used as a way to help teach but also be about bringing people closer together and teaching them teamwork strategies. This essay topic interested me because in my paper I was using virtual reality in a way to help people overcome many problems. I had not thought of Virtual Reality as a way to help people come closer together.