In The New Digital Storytelling, Bryan Alexander examines the narrative potential of “small” video games, including web-browser games.He suggests that historical video games have the opportunity to tell intellectually and emotionally meaningful stories through player participation, sensual immersion, and mystery building.

One great example of the storytelling potential of browser games can be found at the Tenement Museum of New York City’s website. I played the Immigration Game (immediately reminiscent of Oregon Trail), a fun little game with bright graphics, a cheerful voice-over and an abundance of solid history. It allowed me to both imagine myself as an immigrant and also to interact with the museum in interesting ways- encouraging a digitally “hands-on” approach to archived materials.

I played as Bella Pellegrino from Italy. I chose my 3 items to pack in my trunk. I watched a video of an Italian girl telling her own crossing story as my ship progressed across the map. I passed a health inspection and explored my new home- the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I engaged in a panorama of a museum room, digitally adding objects and arranging them how I liked. I tried to find a place to sleep in my crowded new home. I wrote a letter home.

The digital game makes extensive use of physical museum objects- I interacted with primary documents such as health inspection cards as well as the panoramic views of the museum exhibits. It was easy to use, one can run through it in 10 minutes or take more time, try out different characters and “unlock” every option. Engaging in the panoramas did allow for a modicum of “mystery building” by requiring close attention and the suggestion that there was always more to be seen in cluttered rooms layered with t

Over Spring break, I searched for creative ways to avoid comps- one of which was watching foreign soap operas on youtube. One of the things that struck me was the prevelance of gay and lesbian storylines. LGBTQ characters are coming into their own in prime-time TV, as well, yet there is a certain  je nais se quoi to queer daytime that deserves attention.

Rather than describe the characters and plots I’ve been watching, I’ll let wikipedia, that ultimate low-brow knowledge creator, speak:

(On Los Hombres de Paco)  Pepa is a lesbian. She becomes close friends with co-worker Silvia who realizes she has feelings for Pepa. Silvia is straight and Pepa is her exception. In season 8 they get married. On their wedding day Silvia gets shot by the mafia and dies.

(Hollyoaks) Brazil dates Lucy Benson before coming out as gay. Nick is openly gay and had a relationship with Nathan. John Paul and Craig ambark on a complicated relationship, in between John Paul dates Spike and Kieron Hobbs, before leaving with Craig. Ravi’s bisexual who dates Kris, a cross-dressing bisexual. Sarah and Zoë had a drunken liaison together. Gina & Emily had a brief lesbian relationship, encountering homophobia from Darren Osborne when this was revealed. Sarah starts dating Lydia Hart, Charlotte Lau her ex becomes a student and has had flings with Laura and Molly Montgomery. Jasmine Costello then suffers from Gender disaphoria and dresses as a male called Jason. Ste later reveals to Brendan he had feelings for another male whilst in young offenders and they share a kiss, embarking on a violent relationship. Fern is a lesbian who bullies Jason because of his GID. Noah arrives and is openly gay. Esther arrives and comes out as a lesbian. She later has a romance with Tilly, and later her gay friend George Smith arrives in Hollyoaks to start College. After Jodie snogs Texas it doesn´t take very long until lots of feelings start to grow.

(Emmerdale) Paul was openly gay and had several relationships, one with bisexual binman Ivan. In the end Paul married Johnny Foster and left the village.

Aaron was first portrayed as a straight, angry teenager but soon he is revealed to be gay and is very self-loathing, but once he comes out, he entered into a relationship with Jackson, ending when Aaron agrees to Jackson’s wish to euthanize him.

Now, laid out like that, these character seem to suffer from the same over-the-top soap drama as their straight compatriots. But I think that’s the point, and why these storylines are subversive even if (or because?) they’re so outlandish. Also, I’m not gonna lie: I sobbed.

So what does all of this have to do with my Omeka project? Well, these soaps remind me of the gay and lesbian paperback explosion of the 1950s and ’60s. Like soaps, these books were cheaply produced, mass-marketed and decidedly “lowbrow.” And I think, like soaps, it is these very production values that allowed them to be truly subversive, and created a space in which the queer community could identify and express themselves. As one reader remembers upon reading her first lesbian pulp, “it opened the door to my soul and told me who I was.”

These novels, like today’s soaps, mixed serious social issues with salacious details of lust and sex. Thankfully, soaps today have largely abandonded the faux moralizing that lent early pulps a veneer of dissaproval for the sake of obscenity laws. Both soaps and pulps are inherently “over the top,” in ways that both dimishes their impact yet paradoxically allows for edgy storylines to be a natural part of the landscape.

These media allow us to explore assumptions about the conservative nature of low-brow entertainment. My question today is ‘how can Omeka help me do that?’ Frankly, the salacious covers of pulp novels means that any google image search brings up hundereds of results for those with a casual interest, so how can archiving and tagging improve that perusal? I think tagging can help clarify important changes over time, for one thing. Susan Stryker notes that the loosening in obscenity laws preceded a shift in gay pulp presentation, from a didactic moral tone and themes of social realism to “sheer sexual wish fulfillment fantasies.” This is an important shift that deserves acknowledgment, and can illustrate the diversity of pulp. For lesbian pulp novels, it is important in tags and metadata to focus on the author: both nomme de plume and real name when available. This information can help readers sort out the identity of authors: they range from homosexual men, straight men writing for prurient or financial reasons, nominally straight women, closeted women, and out lesbians. The broader readership for lesbian novels and gender imbalances in published tell a fascinating story in the evolution of lesbian novels. We’ll see how much of that story can be told through dublincore.

Sticking with the Frick theme- a historical composite of the Homestead Strike and Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick.

The Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh is an historical house with big pretensions.

Its website features sumptous images of the house’s exterior and interior as well as several images of the fine art on display. It is easy to navigate, with frequent hotlinks to toher areas of the site as well as off-site information. The Car and Carriage Museum features a history of transportation that goes beyond the years of Frick’s life, and  The Frick House serves as the venue for visiting exhibitions of art, such as Rembrandt.

The Website offers a history of the Frick family as well as a detailed timeline that extends from 1849 to the present. It is only in this timeline that visitors to the site can get ahint of the more troubling aspects of Frick’s business politics- “July 23, anarchist Alexander Berkman attempts to assassinate Henry Clay Frick at his office in the Frick Building.” There is little on the site to suggest that the Frick house is inextricably linked to the history of Homestead. Frick’s Homestead factory across the river, however, is now “The Waterfront.” A massive shopping and entertainment complex whose history has been largely overwritten. The act of overwriting the history of labor in Pittsburgh continues with the Frick house and its website, which has missed an opportunity to digitally unify the histories of capital and labor in the person of henry Clay Frick. One missed opportunity-The Frick House does not display the dagger Alexander Berkman stabbed Frick with during the 1892 Homestead strike. That honor goes to the Heinz History Center.

The Frick House also does not acknowledge Henry Clay Frick’s little known Robot Brain. Historians have not paid enough attention to the role of this mechanical cerebellum in Frick’s lifelong competition with both Andrew Carnegie and his own workers. Luckily, one intrepid Pittsburgh artist has endeavored to publicize the truth of Frick’s success. We can only hope that The Frick House wills soon add this image to its online collection.

Overall Grades for the Site:

Usability- A, good hotlinks, a simple menu with related dropdowns.

Aesthetic- B+, use of beautiful images of the house, grounds, and art make this website pretty, but verging on pretty-dull.

Accessibility- B- links to twitter and facebook but with significant redundancy.

“Share your Life in Photos.” Pretty sweet idea, Flickr. Most of us have gotten used to sharing ourselves- our digital selves, anyway. Creating a Flickr account means a Flickr persona, as well. If I sign up (and more on that below), am I signing up as a fun friend (I’ve tried to keep those pictures from Andersonville off the net, but to no avail) as a mom (and how many bragging pictures of Max reading The Communist Manifesto can my acquaintances suffer?). Or am I someone new?

As a teen, staging, developing, and showcasing pictures was an important part of my friendish community. We scrapbooked- before it became a trending hobby for our mothers- and shared our books around, evaluating and commenting on them. Recently, a friend was visiting me, and she saw my -now ragged- scrapbook from 1995. We pulled it out and spent the evening with a bottle of wine, telling stories and cracking up.

Flickr makes it easy to share, but I wonder if that ease takes something away. My friend could not have pulled my Flickr account off my bookshelf, and with the wealth of images and info available on the internet, how much impact would my silly pictures really have?

But what if I needed a space to show pictures that maybe I wouldn’t want my mother to see? Or pictures that RL friends might not care about. As I poked around Flickr, I saw a lot of pictures of everyday life, some impressive photography, and of course…kittens. Digging a little deeper, I found a wealth of internet silliness- hot guys with “artistically” wet pants, families cosplaying My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and impassioned photo-journals outlining who Harry Potter really should have ended up with (and that one’s, well, not really NSFW but maybe NSF opening around people you want to respect you).

These images illustrate one of the interesting divergences of Flickr. This is not just a medium in which individuals share the same analog pictures with the same RL people. Fannish personas build image-based communities that are not a digital version of family albums but function more like digital ‘zines.

So no, I’m not signing up for Flickr. I don’t really want a Yahoo account, and signing in via FB allows Yahoo to post “as you” (as if!). I will, however, delight in the quirky ways that people have found to Share their Lives in Photos.

The “Republic of Letters,” so important in the formation of the public sphere, was marked by a proliferation of printed materials. In “Zograscopes and the Mapping of Polite Society,” Erin C. Blake builds on Habermas’ ideas of an emerging eighteenth century “public sphere constituted by private people” as a “polite society,” one engaged not only with verbal mediums but with the visual.

Blake describes the 1740s and 50s “3-D gadget craze” of the zograscopes. These devices (shown left) projected 3-D images to a single viewer, creating a virtual reality. Blake’s research of hundreds of advertisements illustrates that these images were overwhelmingly concerned with urban and other public spaces. It is this confluence of private viewers and public images that bolsters Blake’s assertions of the place of these devices in the formation of a “polite” subjectivity.

Through the zagrascope, a limited number of middle and upper class Britons imagined themselves as part of a “polite society” which was mapped and bounded by zagrascopic imagery. 3-D projections of place, Blake suggests, allowed for a representation of “intersections of mobile elements” to create a knowable space.

Zagrascoping only trended for a decade. It was limited in time and, ironically, scope. Blake acknowledges that this technology does not mark a paradigm shift of viewing practices, since the devices were not widely owned. It’s timing is critical, however. The specifically public images conveyed standards of polite society to viewers; they can be seen as a private crash course in the new “public sphere.” There existed layers of instruction embedded in this technology- the images themselves were coded with visual cues for proper public behaviors, as well as signifying a list of appropriate public places to visit. The devices themselves required instructions, which began in their advertisements. People had to be informed of the need for such a viewing experience.

Blake’s work not only re-imagines the history of 3-D technology, it also adds to conversations begun by Habermas. The primacy of the written word in the history of enlightenment and modernity is complicated by assessments of old “new” media which captured the zeitgeist of the age.

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

As I’m nearing the end of my PhD coursework and contemplating leaping (Indiana Jones like) across the precipitous chasm of dissertation research, this quote haunts my waking hours. Semester after semester, I have earnestly hit the books, written the reviews, faithfully lauded Foucault and Marx. I have learned the lingo- problematized the hegemony, analyzed the materiality and deconstructed the binary. Sometimes I was so bold as to posit the signifigance of things that happened…in the past.

Those halcyon days are passed. Clever historiographical arguments have gotten me this far, and in a pinch I could always reposition the discourse with a simple query of “sure…but what about gender?” No more.

As I research and re-write ongoing work on Southern Women’s Civil War journals, and plan for proposing a dissertation with unlikely and obscure hobo subjects, this blog will expose the terrifying inner workings of my research process, my paralyzing fear of archivists, debilitating depth of secondary sources, and crippling self-doubt.

Welcome to Grad School!