CONTACTS:
• Dene Grigar, Digital Technology and Culture program, 360-546-9487, dgrigar@vancouver.wsu.edu
• Brenda Alling, Office of Marketing and Communications, 360-546-9601, brenda_alling@vancouver.wsu.edu
VANCOUVER, Wash. - Washington State University Vancouver Digital Technology and Culture faculty member, John Barber is setting out to prove that one man's play is another man's work. He was just awarded one of 20 fellowships to attend the Humanities Gaming Institute (HGI) June 7 - 25 in Columbia, S.C.
Sponsored by the University of South Carolina's Center for Digital Humanities, the institute will bring together teachers, researchers, faculty and advanced graduate students from across the humanities disciplines to pursue an intensive investigation of how games might concretely advance humanistic teaching and research. Participants will contemplate philosophical and theoretical questions that surface within game play and game design for humanistic research, and engage in hands-on development sessions across a variety of platforms. Their work will expand the language and conventions by which human culture is understood and re-imagine how that knowledge can be made available to and used by different groups of people.
Barber, a scholar known for his work with archiving and curating the writings of Pacific Northwest-born author Richard Brautigan (), will be teamed with Alexander Reid, an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo, and Dawn Spring from the Kentucky Center for Native American Arts and Culture to create mobile educational games that can be used by museums and historical sites for building visitor engagement and interaction with artifacts and environments. Barber is particularly interested in developing a mobile game that can be used in conjunction with the Brautigan Library, which recently moved from Vermont to the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash. He also plans to apply what he learns to digital storytelling games for a Fort Vancouver National Historical Site project led by DTC faculty, Brett Oppegaard.
Barber's project and the HGI fellowship enhance the DTC program's emphasis on research into mobile, GPS and 3D technologies that help better the community and build civic engagement among the program's students and faculty.
The DTC program at Washington State University Vancouver integrates critical thinking, creativity and computing skills with course work in the arts, humanities and social sciences to offer a broad-based, interdisciplinary degree that prepares students for a culturally diverse, technologically complex 21st century.
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