From English 194 Wiki
"Toy Chest" collects useful, paradigmatic, and/or fun things that developers in English 194 might want to tap for their projects. This page will grow as the class collectively makes discoveries.
Tools
Tools are things that can actually be used to develop class projects (e.g., downloaded or used online).
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
"The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 14,800 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens and manuscript maps. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history."
Gliffy (Online Diagramming and Flow-Charting Tool)
Online tool for creating diagrams and flow charts. Users work in an online interface that approximates the experience of working in a software program located on one's own computer (i.e., not the older submit info and wait for a screen refresh paradigm of the Web but the newer, so-called "Ajax" paradigm of "Web services"). Also noteworthy is the fact that diagrams produced in Giffy can be either private or shared online. (The basic, free account allows only three private diagrams at a time.) As the Giffy site suggests, Giffy can be used for "Flowcharts, UI wireframes, Floor plans, Network diagrams, UML diagrams, or any other simple drawing or diagrams." Giffy describes its shared, collaborative features as follows: "Collaboration enables others to see and edit your work by simply entering their email address. Publishing creates a read-only, or public, image of your diagram that you can easily embed in a wiki, blog, or other type of web software."
Google Earth historical map (England and Wales in 1790, overlaid on satellite map)
Free, downloadable program that communicates with Google servers to provide interactive fly-over/zoom-in satellite images of the world with superimposable map and location data that can be turned on or off (roads, boundaries, locations of interest, hotels, dining, etc.) Allows users to annotate maps and add placemarks that can be shared online as part of the "Google Earth Community" (e.g., place markers with links relevant to local community interests). Highest resolution images are for high-density urban and other populated areas; lower resolution elsewhere. In some areas of the world, Google allows users to superimpose historical maps from the Rumsey Historical Map collection over current satellite maps (available under "Featured Content" in the Google Earth sidebar.
New tool from Google that allows users to overlay Google maps or satellite images with lines, shapes, and annotations (click on the "My Maps" tab on the page). "Make Google Maps your maps. Create and share personalized, annotated maps of your world.... Mark your favorite places on your map. Draw lines and shapes to highlight paths and areas. Add your own text, photos, and videos. Publish your map to the web. Share your map with friends and family."
Ivanhoe (Online Literary Interpretation "Game")
Screenshot from Ivanhoe Game
Originally created and theorized by Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker of the University of Virginia English Department,
Ivanhoe is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace,
Ivanhoe exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels. While we often refer to
Ivanhoe as a 'game,' it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the
Ivanhoe environment. The “rules” of the game are up to its players and initiators.
Ivanhoe can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching. . . . In simple terms,
Ivanhoe is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a 'discourse field,' the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively." (from Ivanhoe
"About" page) Allows users to create an account and join games or to create new games; runs in Java. (Besides the
current blog-home page of the project, see the
older home site with records and discussion of games played. See the
Demo guide and the [ Full Manual (.pdf)].)
Scratch (Downloadable visual programming environment for animation and game creation)
"Tintern Abbey First-Person Shooter," created by Alan Liu
Scratch is a visual programming environment designed by MIT Media Lab to allow children and other novices to learn programming logic by creating interactive animations or games. Implemented in Java, the program runs on the user's computer. It comes with several pre-made "sprites" (e.g., a cat) that can be programmed to move, make sounds, say things, and interact with other sprites or with mouse/keyboard controls by "snapping together" a variety of program logic "blocks" (like snapping together Lego blocks). Users can also draw/import their own sprites and backgrounds.
TagCrowd (Online Tag Cloud Tool)
Tag cloud of William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" created with TagCrowd
"Create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency." Online tool that allows the user to submit a text (or upload a text file) in order to generate a "tag cloud" visualizing the frequency of words.
NetLogo (Downloadable Software for Agent-Based Simulations)
NetLogo "Rebellion" simulation of a subjugated population rising against a central authority
"NetLogo is a programmable modeling environment for simulating natural and social phenomena. . . . NetLogo is particularly well suited for modeling complex systems developing over time. Modelers can give instructions to hundreds or thousands of independent "agents" all operating concurrently. This makes it possible to explore the connection between the micro-level behavior of individuals and the macro-level patterns that emerge from the interaction of many individuals. NetLogo lets students open simulations and "play" with them, exploring their behavior under various conditions. It is also an authoring environment which enables students, teachers and curriculum developers to create their own models. NetLogo is simple enough that students and teachers can easily run simulations or even build their own. And, it is advanced enough to serve as a powerful tool for researchers in many fields. NetLogo has extensive documentation and tutorials. It also comes with a Models Library, which is a large collection of pre-written simulations that can be used and modified. These simulations address many content areas in the natural and social sciences, including biology and medicine, physics and chemistry, mathematics and computer science, and economics and social psychology" (from
"What is NetLogo?" on the NetLogo site).
WordsEye (Online 3-D Graphics Modelling Tool)
3D scene rendered in WordsEye from text description
"WordsEye is a text-to-scene conversion tool that allows users to construct a computer modeled scene through the use of simple text. Users describe an environment, objects, actions and images, and WordsEye parses and conducts a syntactic and semantic analysis of these written statements. The program assigns depictors for each semantic element and its characteristics and then assembles a three-dimensional scene that approximates the user’s written description. This scene can then be modified and rendered as a static two-dimensional image."
Paradigms
Paradigms serve as a idea bank of suggestive examples. They are not directly usable tools but books, essays, maps, proprietary interfaces, non-downloadable or proprietary software, etc. that show what might be done.
Atlas of the European Novel Predecessor book to Moretti's
Graphs, Maps, Trees book. The opening paragraph: "An atlas of the novel. Behind these words, lies a very simple idea: that geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history 'happens,' but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth. Making the connection between geography and literature explicit, then--mapping it: because a map is precisely that, a connection made visible--will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us." And from p. 6: "The idea for th is work came to my be sheer chance, from a sentence in Braudel's
Mediterranean [Fernand Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II] that kept coming to my mind during a long car journey in the summer of 1991: we don't have artistic atlases, we don't have
literary atlases . . . So--why not try to make one?" Example of maps included: "Jane Austen's Britain" and "Movements of Four Dickens heroes."
Shawn Graham is a Classics graduate student who uses the
NetLogo agent-based simulation program to build simulations of social organization in ancient Rome. "Using a computer, we instruct autonomous agents in the rules by which to behave. These rules are the behaviours that we observe in the archaeology, in the traces of individual interactions that we find. Then, we set the agents loose, and let them interact with each other as per the rules. From all of these countless interactions, iterated over and over again, larger-scale behaviour (society) begins to emerge. Thanks to the computer, we can study these large scale behaviours (what in human terms is social science) and compare our artificial society with what we know or believe about the ancient society. If we have deduced correctly the behaviours behind the individual interactions found archaeologically, then our artificial society should be an excellent analogue to the ancient society. History runs only once. But in the computer, it can run over and over again. We can explore (by altering the variables) the entire
possible range of outcomes for different behaviours. We can compare what
did happen with the parameters of its closest silicon analogue, and know the ancient society better than ever before" (from Graham's
web site). (See the models on the site; Web pages include embedded Java applets running the NetLogo simulations.)
Can reading a poem
backward or using a scanner + optical character recognition program (OCR) on an art work
badly or
perversely yield unexpected new knowledge? Can "deformance" supplement aesthetic interpretation? Find out in chapters 4 and 5 of this award-winning book by Jerome McGann, a leader in the field of humanities computing. (Chap. 4, co-written with Lisa Daniels, is titled "Deformancce and Interpretation"; chap. 5 is titled "Rethinking Textuality.")
Fun
Zesty and loosely relevant, but not exactly a tool or paradigm.
- [Content to be entered here]
