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.

Thoughts on Exhibits

As the last way to really grasp the field of digital humanities Devin Orr and Sean McLaughlin have proposed interesting topics and research to explore.  Devin is exploring the rise of witches, vampires, and zombies in literature. Sean has found research on how social media is affecting people.

This is some of the data Devin was able to come up with on how these words have been used in literature. This is a good representation because when the lines are on their on scale they increase greatly at 2000 but when they are all on the same graph Its easy to see witches are the most talked about. 

Sean was able to take a different route in exploring the field of digital humanities. He studied how social media effects teenager and adults. This was interesting because it focused on both groups not just one. What he found is that social media has an impact on both groups. It is usually painted as only effecting teens but it effects adults just as much if not more. Adults use social media at work just like teens use social media at school.

Both of these topics embrace the field of digital humanities and how it works. Sean is looking how it effects people and Devin is looking through the words used in literature to see how society has changed and how the words have change. Both topics have a lot of use in the field of digital humanities because DHers are interested on how people interact with technology such as the posts on social media. DHers are also interested in how media interacts with the people and how the choose the words the use and  what to write about. Both topics are very different but they only begin to scratch the surface of the very broad field of digital humanities.

Convergence

What if all media was seamlessly streamed through one device? What kind of impacts could this have on everyone's daily life? The idea of all media streaming through one place is the idea known as Technological Convergence. Convergence is the process of everything moving forward to be uniform or one. Convergence is the thought that everyone knows something but no one knows everything.

Technological Convergence is where we come up with the idea of all forms of media and technology reaching us in one way. One example of convergence today could be the smartphone. The smartphone inscapes all forms of technology in one. Technological systems like Television, Communication systems, Gaming, internet and wide variety of other media as well. All of these tasks could take a long time to complete, and require usage of many different equipment. However, because of technological convergence, we are able to perform all of these tasks through just one system. Many people have become reliant on their smartphones for daily tasks along with checking their social media. Technological Convergence is strongly displayed through smartphones with the amount of services that are available through them.

Another example of modern day technological convergence comes from Smart TV’s. Smart TV’s come with internet, along with Netflix, Hulu, etc. With TV’s also come gaming devices, such as Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch, etc. Allowing us to use all these entertainment devices through one device.

In other words, technological convergence allows technological systems to evolve towards performing the same or similar tasks as technology continues to  advance. Technological convergence creates a unique combination of existing media and devices by merging these different technologies together into new forms. Having several different uses on one device has become the most popular and modern way of technology. People rarely buy technological devices that only have one use for them, so technological convergence is becoming more and more popular as the years go on.

Archives

Archives are a way to preserve a collection of work that is hard to find and will be disappearing. Archives serve as a purpose to share with the world so they have access to disappearing works of art. Our idea of an archive is an archival collection of the theme music of shows that were popular in the 90’s.  They would be categorized by network then genre. The theme songs from shows on Fox, MTV, Nickelodeon, Cartoon-Network, Comedy Central, Disney, TV-Land, etc. would be gathered and categorized by the network they are aired on. The home-page of the archive will display the different networks, from there you would be able to click on a network which would take you a list of popular 90’s shows that aired on that station. After clicking on the show of your choice, you will be able to either listen to and download a downloadable audio file of the theme song. There will also be the video of the intro in which the theme song plays. For example, after clicking on MTV, you would see a list of shows that were on MTV in the 90’s. If you were to click on Beavis and Butthead you would then see the audio-file of the theme, which you could also download, and you would also see the video (via YouTube) of the opening sequence of Beavis and Butthead there as well, giving you the option to just listen to the song or to actually see the opening sequence that plays the song.

The reason why this archive can be an important one is because the loss of air time these shows have. More and more shows are being introduced into these networks and are drowning out the older classic TV shows that people still enjoy. Giving the chance to access the intro and theme music can let someone relive childhood memories of sitting down to watch their favorite TV show. This archive also serves as a purpose to demonstrate how TV programming has changed through the years.

Data Mining

What is data mining? How can it be useful to us? Well, data mining is the process of taking large amounts of data from a database and examine it to introduce a new set of information. There are many tools you can use to conclude such information. Google’s Ngram Viewer compares is a data mining tool then can search for the frequencies of words used in books. Ngram Viewer searches through the hundreds of millions books from the 1500s to 2008 that were digitized into Google books.

Before we ran the chart for the frequencies of words used we determined what words we would use from our Previous blog spot “The Power of Digitizing”. To determine this we used another type of a data mining tool called Voyant. Voyant is a web based text reader that can determine common words used, linkages between words, and many other features about a text. Voyant provides new and unique ways to further analyze text. In other words, Voyant gives you a more in-depth look of your text. This tool can also be very helpful in the terms of allowing you to grasp the concept/idea of the text more quickly because it pulls out the most used words in the text and the connections between them and the words that were used less frequently.

Our words of most use did  not come as a surprise to us. Consciousness, humans, life, intelligence are all things we talk a lot about in our blog. These words are used to describe the pieces of literature we read, and the field of digital humanities itself. What did come as a surprise is how the words human and life don’t seem to have any correlation.

Data mining is very useful and helpful. These online tools can help people conduct more thorough research and also make research easier. They also can make reading much more simplistic and dynamic. Data mining is providing us with new and easier ways to conduct research and analyze text.