Digital Humanities – Spring 2018

For this assignment, I created an aura for “The Prioress”. At the beginning of this assignment, I didn’t believe I would find it to be interesting; I also thought it would be difficult and time-consuming. However, I found creating an aura to be super interesting and also came up with ways that the aura could help in a classroom environment. As a future educator, I was intrigued by the way this could benefit my students.

I started off by choosing an aura and then began to choose an image from google that would essentiate “The Prioress” image. I settled for an image of a nun with a young girl from the Canterbury Tales.  The image I felt further explained the depth of the prioress’ importance and significance during the nineteenth century.

I then included my trigger image over my aura. I decided that I wanted to make the assignment have a connection to a learning or academic experience, and so I created a link that further explained what the prioress was and the structure of the nineteenth century. After a summary, the link then has questions that could easily stimulate a class discussion.

This assignment was interesting because I could not, at first, find the educational connection. However, I found that it was an educational tool than an education concept. I could use this to interest many students in many ways, and that was enough for me. I enjoyed creating this aura!

-Brianna M.

This assignment started off on a piece of paper with Dr. Harbin showing us on her phone, an app that made the picture give you a description of what it was. This app was part of a site called Aurasma. Using Aurasma we were all assigned a picture and put it on the site and uploaded an overlay image. The overlaid image was the key to the definition of the picture popping up. This was very interesting because not many people were expecting this picture to bring you to a completely different site. This is a great example of Augmented Reality.

My example was a Manciple from Medieval times. I didn’t know what a manciple was until doing this assignment. Augmented Reality is a very interactive way to learn and stay involved in the activity. This can be used in many different aspects of peoples lives and we will see more of this as technology advances.

Since I added this class late, I missed the first session. Nevertheless, I would like to express my hopes and fears for the course. When my advisor and I were looking for something to satisfy an upper level english for my Humanities concentration, we were stumped. We met multiple times, and emailed back and forth constantly trying to find something that I would be interested in, and that would fit into my busy schedule. We didn’t know what Digital Humanities meant, but she said it was fairly new. She also said that Professor Harbin was very nice and one of her other advisees had her and loved her. So now I knew that there was a great professor, but no one that I asked knew what the course was about. However, I like to take risks into the unknown because you never know what’ll come of it, so I decided to add the course. So far I really like it. I was afraid to take this course because although our generation is the first to really grow up with advanced technology, I am not computer savvy whatsoever. I quickly realized though that this class was not about me sitting behind a computer. I’ve gotten to experience things that I probably never would have outside of this course, and they’re really cool. I honestly probably wouldn’t have given AR a chance, so I’m happy that I did by taking this course. Moving forward, I want to learn about even more things that I have never heard of. I may not be good at it, but I’m willing to give it a try. I’m very excited to see what this class has in store!

Megan Bender

When Pokemon Go first came out, I remember walking/ driving all over with my friends trying to catch as many as we could. I would even stop places on my way home at night from my friends house’s just to try and catch some! The objective is pretty simple, you just walk or drive to all different places and wherever you see a Pokemon, you can click on it. Then it brings you to the Pokemon, zoomed in and it gives you the opportunity to try and “throw” (swipe with your finger) a Pokeball at it to capture it. It was fun for a little while, but after a few weeks I deleted the app. I got bored, and just put the thought of it completely on the back burner. That is, until I took this course. However when I played, I wouldn’t use the AR feature. When I played a few years ago, my screen looked like the image below.

Now when I play, I use the AR feature, like in the image below. I like it better because it makes the game feel more realistic. As you can see, it looks as if a Pokemon is sitting right on my laptop as I’m watching Netflix. It’s pretty awesome to have a game that actually uses your surroundings, and also makes you go outside quite a bit.

Though I don’t really see an educational benefit to this app, I don’t think that was what it was meant for. It was meant to entertain, however the option for the AR feature does expose people to AR, which is a great way to do it and get people interested.

Megan Bender