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What's in a Game?
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<p><em>Prototyping texts @UVic:<br>From -isms to indie games</em></p>
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<p>Jentery Sayers | UVic English</p>
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<a href="index.html">WHAT'S IN A GAME?</a>
<small>English 508 | UVic | Fall 2017</small>
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<h3>Questions for Digital Humanities Projects</h3>
<p>Below are some questions to ask while studying, designing, and developing digital humanities projects. This list is certainly not exhaustive. Feel free to let me know what I'm missing or overlooking, and I'll add it.</p>
<p><strong>AIM</strong>: <em>What is the primary aim of the project?</em> To preserve? Disseminate? Communicate? Analyze? Repurpose? Conjecture? Consider how, where, and through what materials the arguments are made. Is the project anchored in an essay or book? Does the scholarship happen in the margins or paratexts? Does it rely on graphs? Metadata? Does it argue through infrastructure? Through quantitative methods? Qualitative methods? Is it multimodal? Does its line of inquiry unfold at the micro-, meso-, or macro-level? Who and what are represented, and through which media and techniques? Is the project trying to share things? Document things? Trace things? Map things? Standardize things? Prove things? Theorize things? Imagine things? Where and how is it generous? Where isn't it?</p>
<p><strong>REPRESENTATION</strong>: <em>Who is involved in the project's production?</em> Determine who contributes to the project, how their contributions are attributed, and how they are compensated for their labour. Which perspectives are necessary for the research questions, issues, and content at hand? Are those perspectives represented in the project? Who does which kind of work? Is "technical work" presented as a service, or is it treated as scholarship? Who is speaking for or about whom? Which disciplines are represented? Which forms of expertise, perspectives, and experiences are missing, and which forms are privileged? Which individuals and institutions stand to benefit most from the project? Determine how/whether the project is funded and by whom. Consider the acknowledgments, including who, what, and which territories are included.</p>
<p><strong>AUDIENCE</strong>: <em>For whom is the project intended? Under what assumptions?</em> Consider how the project addresses or engages its audience, what it assumes about them, what it includes and excludes, and which norms or biases it replicates. Does it talk down? Does it speak with? Does it listen? Also consider the style and language(s) used. Determine how it is published (via a journal, press, lab, centre, university, repository, CMS, or DIY/DIO) and through which forms of review.</p>
<p><strong>COMPOSITION</strong>: <em>What are the core components and formats?</em> Consider everything from media (such as video, image, audio, text, screens, and pages), software, hardware, and platforms to TXT, XML, HTML, JS, MP3, MP4, PY, PDF, DOCX, MD, CSV, GIF, CSS, JSON, and JPG, for instance. Can you access the components as individual files? Wherever possible, examine them both separately and together. If you can't access them, then ask yourself why that is. Also consider whether the formats used are open (i.e., not proprietary) and human readable, and also how the project borrows from existing scripts, libraries, and projects. Does it rely on templates? What other projects does it resemble? Projects are (almost) never built from scratch. How are influences acknowledged, dependencies communicated, and histories shared?</p>
<p><strong>STORAGE</strong>: <em>Where is the project stored?</em> In a library? At a university? With a press? With a specific community? In someone's office? With Amazon, Google, or GitHub? Can you find it in multiple places? If so, then what changes across those locations? When is redundancy an archiving strategy? What can't be, or shouldn't be, archived? Why might a project be found only in one place? In terms of project components, how large are the files? What is used to open them? What are the platform dependencies? To what degree is the data compressed? When is compression strategic?</p>
<p><strong>MAINTENANCE</strong>: <em>Who maintains the project? What's the ten-year plan?</em> Often, the people who imagine, design, or develop a project are not the people who maintain it. Determine how the project is maintained and by whom, including matters of attribution and compensation. Also consider where the project will be in ten years. Who will keep it running? Update it? Moderate it? Version it? Export data? Back it up? When and why does the project value ephemerality? Many digital projects may be purposefully or strategically ephemeral.</p>
<p><strong>PROVENANCE</strong>: <em>How does the project communicate the chronology of its materials?</em> Digital projects frequently rely on (digitized) historical materials, including codices, paintings, sculptures, designs, texts, audio, video, blueprints, photographs, notebooks, playbooks, maps, census data, and code, for instance. In the project's presentation of these materials, is their chronology, creation, stewardship, and ownership clear? Can you follow a trail (e.g., back to original collection)? To what does the project point? What are the indexical relationships? Where are originals or earlier versions housed? How are they licensed? How have they changed or morphed over time? Are the terms of permission clear? Are metadata and captions available? How do cultural institutions who house and maintain originals or earlier versions benefit from the project?</p>
<p><strong>DESIGN</strong>: <em>How is the project designed? What does it afford?</em> All digital projects are designed in some way. Their interfaces may inhibit and invite particular types of input, output, and interactions. These issues are simultaneously political and aesthetic. Of a project, ask how it politicizes aesthetics, or how it aestheticizes politics. Which design choices are deliberate? Which are part of a template? Would you call the design minimalist? Maximalist? Is design the last step in the project? Or is it integrated from the beginning? How does input become output? What can you see? What's invisible? What kinds of experiences and traversals are encouraged? When do you want to bounce? What does the project assume about people's abilities and embodied behaviours? Which histories or legacies does it evoke (consciously or not)? Which typeface(s) does it use? Can it be searched? What is controlled by a machine? What happens offline? What is WYSIWYGed? What is done in the command line? What is considered to be "raw" (e.g., claims for "raw data")? Is the design responsive? Does it include ads? A key thing to remember is that design is much more than "polish." It is inquiry.</p>
<p><strong>ACCESSIBILITY</strong>: <em>Who can access the project, and how?</em> Among academics, questions of access are frequently grounded in "open access," or freeing research and publications from restrictions such as access tolls or subscriptions. However, access is also about accessibility. Is the project accessible for disabled people? For instance, can you easily navigate it with a screen reader or without a mouse? Is alternative text provided for images and other media? Does it pass W3C accessibility standards? Additionally, we might think of access in other social, political, cultural, and economic terms. How is the project found online and off? Using which mechanisms? How is the research communicated? What types of expertise are performed through language and word choice? Is the project intended only for particular people? What are the protocols for access, editing, and moderation? Protocols are cultural, and thus there are many compelling reasons to create levels of access for particular projects.</p>
<p><strong>PROCESSING</strong>: <em>How is the project's content processed? By whom or what?</em> Digital projects combine interpretation by people with interpretation by machines. Some projects may strike people as very "computational" or "technical." How much does the project trust the tools and algorithms it uses? How much faith in the machine is required? What is automated? How much should people (including researchers, designers, developers, and audiences) know about the technical bits? When are programming and technical matters overrated? If the project converts or remediates historical materials, how are they scanned, described, and reconstructed by computers? For instance, when does <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/may/01/scanner-ebook-arms-anus-optical-character-recognition" target="_blank">"arms" become "anus"</a>? In the project, are the pre-processed and processed materials provided alongside their interpretation and analysis? These questions underscore how decisions are made and through what sort of negotiations, including but not limited to negotiations with computers and new media.</p>
<p><strong>VALUES</strong>: <em>How is technology described and valued?</em> Digital projects are shaped by the values of technocutlure. Does the project locate change in technology? Or is technology an effect or product of social and cultural conditions? Perhaps technology and culture are entwined? How does the project use words such as "new" or "critical"? What produces novelty or critical perspectives, how are they situated, and why are they important to the argument? How does the project speak to technology's relation to power, privilege, control, vulnerability, desire, labour, war, governmentality, oppression, play, health, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, class, and/or colonialism? Is technology an instrument? An automated technique? A negotiation? A social construction? An agent? A system of subjectification? An archive? An infrastructure? A specific mechanism? What, if anything, does it determine? To what degree do technical practice and critical theories of technology matter for the project? Which values does the project foreground or invest in? Which are ignored? Which strike you as additive or secondary? For what is the project responsible and accountable? Does it need the term "digital humanities" to be meaningful?</p>
<p><strong>PARTICULARS</strong>: <em>Where is the project precise? Which details matter most?</em> Projects invest variously in detail. Perhaps dates, locations, or names matter most. Or maybe code or design is the focus. Whatever the particulars, determine why that precision matters for the project and also recognize why it can't be precise about all the things. Scope creep is real in project design, and it is very easy to take on too much content, too many methods, and too many features.</p>
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