The Collaborative Learning Center was pleased to host Yale’s first digital humanities student poster session in Bass Library room L01 as the penultimate Teaching with Technology Tuesday of the spring 2011 semester. Robin Ladouceur of ITG gave a brief introduction of our convener, Kristjiana Gong (CLC intern and American Studies major).

After some brief remarks, Kristjiana first introduced Laura Wexler (Professor of American Studies; Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Co-Chair of the Women Faculty Forum at Yale). Wexler noted that she was speaking on behalf of herself and Inderpal Grewal (Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies) as teachers in the fall 2010 course WGSS 380, “Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture”, the source of some of the projects shown. She thanked Yianni Yessios of ITG for his presence in the course as a digital artist and teacher of the humanities lab portion of the course. The projects shown represented the completion of an assignment to create a digital street “somewhere other than here, some time other than now,” with an emphasis on using Yale University Library resources and on primary sources in particular. In particular, Wexler highlighted that the students brought an inspiring, impressive, and energizing “force of creativity” to their projects.

Our next panelist was Jessica Pressman (Assistant Profesor of English), introduced by Kristjiana. Pressman stated that she was pleased to show the positive results of teaching with technology, and echoed Wexler’s comment about students’ force of creativity and imagination. Her courses often center on, as she describes it on her website, “how technologies affect our understanding of literature, both in terms of aesthetics and reading practices.” Students in Pressman’s fall 2010 ENGL 391, “Digital Literature“ course were assigned the challenge of creating a web-based analytical essay. This avant-garde format extended her teaching about form and how form and content are inextricable. Put another way, student projects needed to embody and to discuss how content is presented and the reasons for presentational choices.

Finally, Kristjiana introduced Julie Dorsey (Professor of Computer Science). Dorsey is one of the founders of the Computing and the Arts major at Yale as well as of Creative Consilience of Computing and the Arts. In the Computing and the arts major, students take all the required courses for the Computer Science major and select a track in the arts (e.g. music or theater) to weave into their computing scholarship. Student projects showcased today were from senior class majors, demonstrating an interdisciplinary fusion researched, learned, and forged over their tenure at Yale.

Student projects showcased were very impressive. Among those featured:

• A multimedia walk down a street in Pontochō district of Kyoto in 1958.
• A hypertext with Blue Hyacinth as its starting point, composed of two sets of four paragraphs that can be shown independently and with integrity, or remixed on the fly in mousing over it.
• An interactive map of Jamaica during emancipation (1834/1863), set in Google Earth and drawing heavily on images from Yale’s digital collections. Included a guided tour through the created world.
• A complex game and game platform, “The Groov Cosmos,” involving elements of strategy gaming, combat gaming, puzzle gaming, and in-play musical adjustments, created in C#.
• A web-based digital essay analyzing and building on the work of The Jew’s Daughter and Blue Hyacinth to create a destabilized text locating meaning in chunks below the discourse level. Added a game aspect by allowing user to re-arrange text in apparently the correct order (or, rather, the original order), but this is a mirage.
• A close reading of the use of sound in three works of digital literature: Sooth, Nippon, and Project for Tachistoscope. The project also incorporates the tactic of close-writing, borrowed from the aesthetics of Sydney’s Siberia by inserting sound into a piece that was originally silent.
• “All Roads Lead to Toads,” an interactive fiction that tries to capture the feeling of a branching structured game, taking the emphasis off of the completion of either puzzles or the game and placing it on exploring actions, environments, and characters.