Colloquia: Critical Interactives: Cross-College Collaboration and the Digital Humanities
Date: Friday, February 1, 2013 – 15:30
Location: Manchester Hall, Room 241
Speaker: Heidi Rae Cooley, PhD and Duncan A. Buell, PhD
Duncan A. Buell, PhD
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina
Heidi Rae Cooley, PhD
Assistant Professor of Media Arts in the Department of Art and Film and Media Studies Program, University of South Carolina
Friday, February 1, 2013
3:30—4:30 p.m., Manchester Hall, Room 241
Talk Abstract: For more than the three years, Drs. Duncan Buell (Computer Science and Engineering) and Heidi Rae Cooley (Media Arts/Film and Media Studies) have pursued a unique cross-College collaboration. They team-taught a cross-listed course, called Gaming the Humanities, that brought together students from both the humanities and computer science in order to encourage thinking about how games and play, broadly construed, might provide a means to engage digital humanities. During the course of their collaboration, they have realized that “game” is not the most appropriate designator for the kind of projects they are pursuing. Instead, they propose “critical interactives,” a term that suggests projects that mobilize ludic methods in order to engage participants in socially and politically sensitive subject matter. Their current project, The Ghosts on the Horseshoe, offers a look at how CIs are particularly apt at cultivating empathy in order to effect change in the way people understand and inhabit the histories that make possible their surroundings, shape community, and underpin institutional infrastructure. Featuring the University of South Carolina’s historic Horseshoe, the Ghosts project intends to generate awareness of and questioning about the frequently unacknowledged history of slavery that made materially possible the original physical site of the University of South Carolina. The project mobilizes an augmented reality application in order to make literally visible this history. Ultimately, Buell and Cooley plan to extend the Ghosts project into one that addresses how 1960s policies of urban renewal displaced African American families in an area of Columbia, SC called Ward One and made possible the westward expansion of the University.
Sponsored by the Computer Science Department and the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute
