Fall 2018 Teaching With Technology Fair

This course has introduced students to methods used in the digital humanities, with a special emphasis on applications to historical studies. Students create projects and study existing digital projects, with a special focus on U.S. History in a global context. Readings include primary sources as well as recent contributions to theory in digital humanities. Students learn general principles of working with humanistic data as well as techniques such as digital storytelling, digital mapping, and computational analysis of text. Along the way, the class has pondered how to do good history. What makes a good historical question? How can we use digital tools to analyze primary and secondary sources to help us answer historical questions? How do digital technologies change or help the communication of historical narratives and interpretations?

This web-based tool takes an unusual approach to mapping as it charts absent elements in Shakespeare’s plays. It thus acknowledges the role of referenced but unseen figures and objects on the stage action. Visualizing such elements, in turn, allows us to see the scope of Shakespeare’s global imagination.

This project is based around a special topics class where groups of students implement a game in Unity3D over the course of the semester. The game must include evolution as a central mechanic but is otherwise up to the students. This semester the projects are: 1) a real-time strategy game where evolution controls the behavior of attacking zombies, 2) a farming simulation where the crops evolve in response to environmental conditions and pests, 3) a god simulation where the player guides a society that are under evolutionary pressure, and 4) a rogue-like dungeon crawling game where evolution controls the stats of the creatures the player can take with them to fight in the dungeon.

Our project aims to digitally map character movements, locations, and key events from contemporary Spanish detective novels onto real, interactive digital maps of major Spanish cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville. Our goal is to question and interrogate the spatial layouts of these novels as well as how these spaces are presented and critiqued in fiction and in the actual built environment. We are currently working with ArcGIS and their web-based platform for building the maps. These maps and database templates will be made available to students in SPN 314 and SPN 385 as models for their own digital mapping projects. We also hope to create a public facing website with interactive maps where anyone can contribute comments or spatial data.

“Lighting the Page” is an English course developed as a pilot project for a potential Digital Studies concentration. Created in collaboration between Erik Simpson and Christina Brewer ’18, the course included modules on electronic literature, literary mapping and geocriticism, and computational text analysis. Our station at the Teaching Fair will feature a site created by the whole class as a companion to Edward P. Jones’s story collection _Lost in the City_ as well as examples of electronic literature and text analysis created by students in the course.

This project brings together resources related to indigenous history to empower secondary school teachers to teach Native Histories as American history.

Founded by Celeste Miller (Theatre and Dance, Grinnell), Digital Bridges to Dance is a project devoted to building synchronous and asynchronous online digital practices in two ways: first, as vital and irreplaceable components of the collaborative process for the creation of choreography; and second, as models for coalition building through intentional arts-based collaboration. Digital Bridges to Dance launched in the summer of 2017, with Grinnell undergraduate Charlotte Richardson-Deppe supported by a Digital Bridges award for a faculty-student pedagogical partnership. In the summer of 2018, through a MAP, Miller worked with undergraduates Naomi Worob and Obuchi Adikema to further the work, focusing on developing online curriculum for “Embodied Experiences in the Environment.” Currently, Obuchi is a Vivero fellow working on the Digital Bridges to Dance website.

Data from the first Grinnell College National Poll is now available to students, faculty, and staff of Grinnell College. See how data analysis and visualization tools can help us better understand polling data gathered through the GCNP.

Tableau is one of the leading tools for interactive data visualization. Learn how data available through DASIL is being used in the classroom to teach students data analysis and visualization.

Leveraging immersive VR experiences for language learning and cultural awareness, this project creates three open-source VR games with supporting instructional materials. These games will teach sustainability, conservation, and environmental protection within the linguistic and sociocultural contexts of France, Germany, and Spain.