Next month CBS premiers a primetime reality television show called “Kid Nation“, blending references to the frontier with what amounts to a social experiment – letting 40 kids (or as CBS refers to them, pioneers..) fend for themselves for 40 days without adults. Today’s New York Times reported that that CBS producers possibly violated [...]
Following the recent indexing of Cliopatria’s History Blogroll, it’s worth offering a side-by-side comparison of two different approaches to academic blog directories. This follows several months of experimentation of approaching my goal to establish an American Studies blog directory as part of the Crossroads Project. The two fundamental differences between the directories I’ve seen [...]
I’ve recently become aware of Old West muds and moos that predate the historical roleplaying I’ve observed in Second Life by five years. Moos and muds are text-based virtual worlds that became popular in the early 90’s; Second Life is sometimes referred to as a “graphical mud.” So far I’m aware of two different [...]
The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, [...]
Japanese firm NTT has unveiled a system that makes three-dimensional images solid enough to grasp. The system combines a 3D display with a “haptic glove,†with no special glasses required. They’ve suggested two interesting uses for the device:
business people could shake hands from across the globe
allow museum visitors to feel precious exhibits that [...]
Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative [...]
Virtual Powwow was a living museum in Second Life, proposed as a final project in Bernie Dodge’s graduate-level Exploratory Learning through Simulation and Games class. By recreating a powwow, the simulation visualized an environment hosted by Native Americans where students could experience Native American culture and dance.
Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and [...]
Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, [...]
If you’re not already familiar with it, explore Google’s new experimental search – it augments search results by visualizing them as a timeline or map. I’m interested to see how refined this tool becomes, potentially being an incredible place to start when beginning research. An example search they suggest is Thomas Jefferson [...]
In her 2005 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Karen Halttunen delivered a speech that would be published in American Quarterly the following year, entitled “Groundwork: American Studies in Place.” She discussed the “disneyfication” of American place-making; the replacement of reality with an idealized vision that engenders racism and sexism. What occurs [...]