Archives pour la catégorie dh

#PokémonSaS Project at the CSDH/SCHN 2020 Conference

I will be presenting the text mining project on the Pokémon Sword and Shield Twitter community that I previously introduced a few weeks ago at this year’s CSDH/SCHN conference on June 5th. Academic associations are facing the challenge of quickly adapting their summer conferences to a format suitable for online exchanges in the context of the ongoing epidemic. This involves, amongst other things, less time dedicated to formal presentations and more emphasis on questions, which is, in my opinion, the most beneficiary part of the whole process. I am looking forward to hearing about new developments in digital scholarship, and discussing future avenues for the analysis of our database.

Meanwhile, you can access the conference paper on Humanities Commons, and a visualization of our Twitter corpus on Tableau public.

New Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UQÀM

I have once again been neglecting this outlet for quite a while now despite a few major changes to my situation as a researcher. My last blog post was dedicated to announcing the successful defence of my PhD dissertation. However, at around the same time, I had received news that my funding application to secure a postdoctoral research fellowship position at UQÀM to the Fonds de recherche du Québec was approved by the agency. I forgot to officially announce the good news here, so I wanted to take some time to properly introduce the orientation of my second major research project.

Since my arrival in Montréal two years ago, I have been working closely with the Homo Ludens research group on a variety of projects, but with no clear agenda of my own beyond adapting to a new research environment and agenda. However, Prof. Maude Bonenfant and I made plans to make my presence in the research group more concrete with tangible research outcomes by supporting a research fellowship application at UQÀM though which I could further my specialization in data-driven game analysis, as well as share my expertise with the group. Fast forward a year or so, and a successful funding application for a two-year research position, and I now have my own office and the chance to spend a considerable amount of time research text mining applications to game studies projects and, excitingly, make use of them for a concrete long-term project with fellow graduate students.

The core objective of my research fellowship is to provide a comprehensive overview of the different text mining tools and methods that can be used in the machine-assisted study of video games and video game culture. This is somewhat of a fresh subfield as data-driven work in game studies is as prominent as it has the potential to be considering to extent to which digital game is made of primarily born-digital texts and database structures. The main project in which our methodology will be tested will be an analysis of the reception of the upcoming Pokémon Sword and Shield games for Nintendo Switch based on data gathered from Twitter from the perspective of gameplay mechanics, a topic aligned with this year’s overall theme of the Homo Ludens research group.

pokemonstream-22d7

One of the promotional events for the release of Pokémon Sword and Shield

I started the position in June, but a mix of conference travel, institutional strike, and the need tie up a few loose ends prevented me from starting to dedicate most of my time to furthering the objectives of my mandate. Consequently, the project is still in its early phase, but I plan to share information about it in a more timely fashion from now on.

As a final note, I just want to reach out to all text mining researchers out there who might want to share ideas or insights about the specifics on conducting research that bridges between game studies and digital humanities. I would like to report on the progress of the project on this platform as often as possible, and possibly use it as a way to discuss issues and the various roadblocks that we will run into. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you feel that any aspects explored here speak to you!

Creative projects using Twine for C LIT 243: Fairy Tales and Folk Tales

 

 

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was introducing a special assignment for the summer version of the course C LIT:243 – Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. The term is almost over, and now is the time to share the works of some of my students with the internet at large.

These stories are meant to be contemporary reinterpretations of classic fairy tales themes, characters or storylines. Student integrated both the themes we analyzed in class, as well as some coding techniques allowing them to join story passages together, create branching paths (either arborescent, axial or networked narratives), as well as integrating some amount of macros and variables. We analyzes a few fairy tales-inspired Twine stories as part the in-class time dedicated to this project, and perhaps these stories could be used by other instructors in classes with a similar interest on interactive reinterpretations of classic fairy tales.

 

The Big Bad Wolf

Written by Ashley Bray, Breana Walsh and Steeven Jobin

 

Miss-education of Snow White

Written by Aaron Brown, Todd Pelan and Janina Graham

 

Hannan Takes New York

Written by Anonymous

 

Grandpa’s Fireplace

Written by Lynsey Stewart and Iliana Pappas

 

Out of the Cind

Written by Anonymous

 

Day of DH 2016

On a whim, I decided to join the Day of DH movement yesterday. I created a small blog that you can access here. The time difference with Japan made it a little challenging to figure out the logistics, but I believe that the experiment was worthwhile.

Day of DH is a global event where DH scholars create a blog associated with the official Day of DH homepage and share whatever they do on that specific day with the community. This year, Day of DH was on April 8th.

As a DH scholar, I often get asked what DH is all about. This event is an attempt to answer that question by tapping into the large diversity of DH scholars to provide an answer that is both crowdsourced and can be further analyzed with text mining techniques. I expect some word clouds and other interesting things to be generated after the results of this year’s event; I am very much looking forward to look at all of it.