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.
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