Author: watrall
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Starting my project: Mapping Consumers in the Black South African Press
For the next four months of the CHI Fellowship, I will be building my project, provisionally titled Mapping Consumers in the Black South African Press. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, I’m interested in what we can learn about consumer culture — both the consumption that companies wanted to promote, and the individual values of…
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Tokyo: The Virtual City
In May of 2017 while in Tokyo I visited Meiji shrine in Shinjuku for the Spring Grand Festival, a series of traditional performances including dance, archery and theater. After returning home, I posted a few photos of the event to social media, as people of my generation tend to do. I soon received a comment…
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The LGBTQ Video Game Archive and Visualizing Representation
The nascent field of queer game studies has expanded exponentially in recent years thanks to the work of scholars such as Adrienne Shaw, Bonnie Ruberg, and Edmond Chang. Yet, despite growing scholarly attention to queer characters and players, queer game studies faces a daunting issue: queer representation and gaming communities are recorded largely in ephemeral…
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Queer (World) Making
In my previous posts, I’ve outlined some of the ways making and multimodal composing offer up spaces for people to make in order to make their worlds. In my last post, I articulated what I think are some differences between multimodal composing and making. In this post, I want to discuss the ways in which…
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Supporting Inclusive, Interdisciplinary Game Studies
It’s no secret that gaming cultures and communities—including game studies—have longstanding issues with inclusion, especially inclusion of marginalized and underrepresented peoples. The most apparent example of this is #GamerGate, the thinly veiled, ongoing harassment campaign against game critics, scholars, and developers who are women, people of color, or LGBTQ folk. Game studies has fared somewhat…
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Digital Narratives of The Disappeared
Since I’m a returning CHI Fellow for this school year, I wanted to do something quite different compared to my project from last school year. That previous project is called J-Skel and it is an online juvenile skeletal age estimator. That project focused more on the scientific side of things and was intended to be…
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A captive audience or canny consumers? The stakes in studying advertisements in South African history
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the project I’ll be developing over the next year is about advertising in South Africa’s early-twentieth century black press. But how should scholars and people interested in South African cultural heritage understand the advertisements created by white-owned companies and marketed to black consumers whose consumption choices were, for most…
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Open data and 3D Printing
I’m a Teaching Assistant for an Intro to Physical Anthropology course and during their last week of classes before the final, we have a lab activity set up for them where we bring in fossil hominin casts and ask them to look at the variation between them, their similarities, why they may or may not…
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Visualizing newspapers
This past month in the CHI fellowship, we worked on a practice data visualization project. My group took data about regional sheep and human populations in New Zealand, and showed their differing ratios by region. This got me thinking about the research that I do with South African newspapers, and what sorts of data from…
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HASTAC 2017, Twine, and Empowering Student Voices
The HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) 2017 conference is already starting to feel like a distant memory, but as always it was a fantastic opportunity to meet with many brilliant scholars, teachers, and activists who are committed to transforming pedagogy to meet the challenges of today’s digital world. If you weren’t…