One of the reasons I wanted to work for 7 Generation Games is that its mission embodies the goal of the digital humanities. In my last intern diary post, I talk about how I use my English major skills at 7 Generation Games in ways people may not expect. This post is dedicated to my minor: digital humanities.
So what is digital humanities, you might be wondering? Digital humanities uses technological tools, such as website creation and design, data cleaning, data visualization, audio and visual, to answer humanities questions. It is an up-and-coming field that universities, like UCLA, are starting to create programs for. Since the humanities are often attacked for only being subjective, digital humanities seeks to apply objective strategies and quantification methods to the humanities. Some of my favorite classes that I have taken for my minor are “Literary Texts and Literary Languages: Strategies of Analysis and Digital Tools,” where I learned how to use computer algorithms to analyze how texts change over time and “Internet and Society,” where I got to create my own websites and made my own remix videos to study how people interpret information on the internet. I am looking forward to taking a class called “Metadata” in the spring where I will learn how to design and apply metadata for digitized and other electronic information resources.
7 Generation Games is essentially a digital humanities project. We use digital tools and interventions, including our actual games as well as our teacher resource videos, to answer two central humanities questions:
1.) How can we teach students math so they both enjoy learning and improve their test scores 2.) How can we teach students Native American history when it is too often left out of mainstream classrooms? As our president, AnnMaria, has been working abroad in Chile, and some of our games are available in Spanish, we also use technological approaches to answer the question of how we can better educate English second language learners. The results have been remarkable as our games and videos have not only made parents and teachers lives easier by making learning fun for kids, but they are actually improving the math scores of students, particularly those who were previously performing below grade level.Ā
One of my favorite aspects of working at 7 generation games is that I get to apply what I’m learning in school, outside of the classroom. Thank you 7 Generation Games for giving me this opportunity!
Beautifully put- clear and concise.
I think this is a smart idea, because outward rights metadata is usually linked to internal, backend metadata fields. Since there is little consensus between libraries and archives about metadata to begin with, starting with a subset of rights metadata is a good place to start, and could result in actual recommendations. I think they have a good mix of people, but they should also add a couple of museum groups in there as well, to round out the cultural heritage space.