Playing With Technology in History

After a brief intro to the Mysteries project eight of us took on four of the mysteries in pairs and tried to solve the mysteries while talking through the process they were using to solve it. In the debriefing afterwards we discussed how people think historically. The project directors Ruth and John learned lessons about how people worked their way through the site with different strategies. The group generated ideas about how to expand this workshop into a fuller research project. The strategy of using a scribe and a researcher recorded a certain level of interaction with the site and was a great way to get people to vocalize their strategies. To observe at a meta level what the researcher was doing may require a trained observer and video technology.

Mysteries Project Home Page

In the “making” session, we spent some time figuring out how to fabricate historical facsimiles from various things we brought with us. Mine was the angry worm graffiti tag I photographed in Vienna a couple of years ago. Bill and I turned the worm into a stencil suitable for tagging (don’t worry, we won’t be tagging). We also made mini laptop stickers from the larger stencil. So what’s the point of all this? What I’m hoping is to use technology like this to turn my students loose on the past–to make things, come up with new ways of representing knowledge that are history in the ways we understand history but that we haven’t thought up ourselves. Like Bill I think that if we do cut them loose to create they’ll be creative…something they only rarely are when writing papers. I chose graffiti because it’s been around since cave art was first created by humans. But it’s also difficult to work with because it’s often transient–here today and gone tomorrow. Asking them to work with graffiti may (I hope) get them to think creatively not only about the past, but also about impermanent historical sources.

I’m about as late posting this as I could possibly be — but just wanted to say that, if anyone is interested in experimenting with some “glass bead” games using Llullian wheels (along the lines of those described in my paper), I have come bearing beads!

Bill kindly tried to print out my CAD model of a 3d game board for “Dr. Kremlin’s Disc” (the half-serious glass bead game from my little supplemental handout), but it’s going to take more work. With that in mind, I brought goofy animal beads and we can sketch our wheels on paper, if we want to test some concepts from Llull-land. See you in the morning!

Hi everyone,

Something that might be fun to take a look at when we’re altogether is The NetherNet, a browser based game using Firefox. It’s got a neat Steampunk aesthetic, too… I know I was supposed to be doing something along the lines of scenario building for Civ, but it strikes me that something a bit more ‘cloud’ like might be easier to pull off.

So – the NetherNet. It allows you to make ‘missions’ through the internet, dodging bombs, opening portals to new locations, etc. You might’ve seen it in Wired some time ago, when it was known as Pmog. I built a couple of ‘puzzle’ missions in it, that required the player to solve riddles in order to progress to the next site. Its creators killed it for a while, but popular demand revived it.

I can imagine some playful historical missions through online databases, libraries, local historical society websites etc… anyone interested?

The corpus of my writings on the Nethernet (excluding a couple of griping/whinging notes)-

I Am the Champions

Pmog is now the Nethernet

Awww Sir….

Ruins on a Distant Planet

Interactive Fiction Passively

Birthing Pmog

Pmog Mission

Pmoging Internet Research Skills

From Kevin, with thanks to Shawn for sending this my way:

Check out yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education “ProfHacker” post (Julie Maloni, “Engaging with the ‘Screwmeneutical Imperative,’ or why I teach humanities students how to code”), which refers to Steve Ramsay’s paper and our symposium…

…”Oh, the “Screwmeneutical Imperative”? That’s from Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books”, a draft essay for the Playing with Technology in History conference, in which Ramsay asks “whether we are ready to accept surfing and stumbling—screwing around, broadly understood—as a research methodology. For to do so would be to countenance the irrefragable complexities of what ‘no one really knows’.” Uh oh!”