Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology

Contributors

Timothy Compeau is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Western Ontario. He studies honor culture and loyalism in Revolutionary North America; his work in public history has focused on how small museums and heritage sites can maximize their potential with digital media.

Dr. Peter Dawson is an Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary. He has conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic for more than twenty years. His research interests include the visualization of archaeological data using 3D computer modeling (with Richard Levy) and using social networking sites to record traditional Inuit knowledge such as place names.

Dr. Patrick Dunae is a Research Associate at Vancouver Island University and Adjunct Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Victoria. He has worked as a public historian at the BC Archives and the State Archives of Western Australia. He is the editor of the digital archive of Vancouver Island history, vi.History.

Devon Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Western Ontario. His dissertation project focuses on magic tricks and illusions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses digital fabrication and physical computing to explore the technology of illusions, as well as to create interactive exhibits. He also applies data mining and textual analysis to study the cultural history of magicians. His website is http://devonelliott.net.

Dr. Sean Gouglas is Senior Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Faculty of Arts and an Associate Professor in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. His research interests include the Canadian video game industry and the role of women in computer games as players, designers, and characters. He is also a Network Investigator and Research Management Committee member for the Graphics, Animation, and New Media (GRAND) Networks of Centres of Excellence.

Dr. Shawn Graham is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Carleton University. Shawn is a Roman archaeologist who uses agent-based modeling and network analyses to explore ancient history. He has taught at all levels from high school to adult continuing education, which sparked his interest in public history and public archaeology. His publications have brought together digital media for teaching and learning, and research in history and archaeology.

Mihaela Ilovan has an MA in Classical Archaeology and is currently completing a joint master’s degree in Humanities Computing and Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. Her thesis focuses on citation analysis, digital libraries, and humanities visualization.

Dr. Kevin Kee is Associate Vice-President, Research (Social Sciences and Humanities), and the Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at Brock University. He has been a Director and Project Director of History New Media at the National Film Board of Canada, and an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Programs in education at McGill University. He has developed several software projects, led numerous research programs, and published widely on the use of computer simulations and “serious games” for history. He is a recipient of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Prize, an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and a Brock University Faculty Teaching Award.

Dr. T. Mills Kelly is Professor of History and an Associate Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He is the author of Teaching History in the Digital Age (2013), as well as numerous articles and book chapters about the intersection of historical pedagogy and digital media. His other historical work focuses on modern East Central Europe, especially Czech, Slovak, and Habsburg history. In 2005 he received the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award, the Commonwealth’s highest recogniztion of faculty excellence. He was the inaugural winner in the category “Teaching with Technology.”

Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). A longtime “grognard” or conflict simulation gamer, he is a contributor to the Play the Past group blog and specializes in digital humanities, electronic literature, textual studies, and archives. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, published by MIT Press (2008), won the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA), among other awards. He is currently completing work on a second book entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Kirschenbaum is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

Dr. Stéphane Lévesque is Associate Professor of History Education and Director of the Virtual History Lab at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on students’ historical thinking, Canadian history, and new media and technology in education. Author of Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the 21st Century (University of Toronto Press, 2008), Dr. Lévesque has also published numerous book chapters and articles in professional and scholarly journals. Very active in the national history community, he is a board member of Canada’s History Society, the Virtual Museum of Canada, and the History Education Network/Histoire et education en réseau. He is the inventor of The Virtual Historian©, a computer program to teach Canadian history online. He served as educational expert for the advisory committee on the establishment of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as well as curriculum expert for the Ontario Ministry of Education. In 2006, he was nominated by the Council of Ontario Universities for the Award for Excellence in Teaching with Technology.

Dr. Richard Levy is Professor of Urban Planning and Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science, at the University of Calgary. Dr. Levy is a founding member of the Virtual Reality Lab and is a co-director of the Computational Media Design Program at the University of Calgary. Dr. Levy’s research focuses on urban planning, archaeology, GIS, virtual reality, serious games, education, and new media. His published work has appeared in journals including the Journal of Archaeological Science, Internet Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science, the Journal of Visual Studies, Environment and Planning, Plan Canada, VSMM, the Canadian Games Association Journal, and the IEEE Journal.

Shannon Lucky is currently completing a joint master’s degree in Humanities Computing and Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. Her thesis focuses on real-world ludic spaces.

Dr. John Sutton Lutz is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. He is co-director, with Ruth Sandwell and Peter Gossage, of the award-winning Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project (www.canadianmysteries.ca), and Director/Curator of a number of scholarly websites including the Colonial Despatches (www.bcgenesis.uvic.ca), The Governor’s Letters (www.govlet.ca), Victoria’s Victoria (www.victoriasvictoria.ca), Fort Victoria Journal (fortvictoriajounral.ca), and Auto(mobile) Biographies (www.autobio.ca). He is the author of Makuk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations, which won the 2010 Harold Adam’s Innis Prize, and the 2009 Clio Award for British Columbia.

Dr. Robert MacDougall is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario and an Associate Director of Western’s Centre for American Studies. He studies the history of information, communication, and technology; he is the author of The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a longtime player and sometime designer of tabletop board and role-playing games, and is interested in all varieties of playful historical thinking.

Dr. Jeremiah McCall has taught high school history for more than a decade, mostly at Cincinnati Country Day School. His first professional love is high school teaching, especially designing instructional approaches that will guide students to think as experts in disciplines. He is also a researcher/designer of learning environments that incorporate simulation games to encourage critical inquiry, and recently published Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (Routledge, 2011). He has an MA and PhD in ancient history from Ohio State University and has also published two books on Roman history, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (Routledge, 2001) and The Sword of the Republic: A Biography of Marcellus (Pen and Sword, 2012).

Dr. Bethany Nowviskie is President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, Director of the Scholars’ Lab and Digital Research & Scholarship Services at the University of Virginia Library, and Associate Director of the Mellon Scholarly Communication Institute. Her research and development work rests at the intersection of algorithmic or procedural method with traditional humanities interpretation. Among her past digital projects and publications are NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship; Neatline, a tool for geo-temporal interpretation of archival collections; and #Alt-Academy, an open access collection of essays by scholar-practitioners in hybrid and nontraditional academic careers.

Dr. Stephen Ramsay is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate University Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Lincoln–Nebraska. He splits his time between pontificating about digital humanities, teaching humanities majors to program, undertaking analysis and visualization of text corpora, and designing and building text technologies for humanist scholars. He is the author of Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 2011).

Silvia Russell is currently completing a master’s degree in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Her thesis focuses on territoriality in cyberspace and cyber-warfare.

Dr. Ruth Sandwell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. In addition to being a social historian of rural Canada, the family, and fossil fuels, she is interested in the intersection of history education and public memory in contemporary Canada. Her most recent book relating to history education is To The Past: History Education, Public Memory and Citizenship in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006). She is co-editor with Amy von Heyking of an edited collection forthcoming from University of Toronto Press, Becoming a History Teacher in Canada: Sustaining Practices in Historical Thinking. She is co-director, with John Sutton Lutz and Peter Gossage, and Educational Director of the history education website series, Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History.

Dr. Brenda Trofanenko is the Canada Research Chair in Education, Culture and Community at Acadia University. Her research program spans the disciplines of education, museum studies, and critical pedagogy. She has established an international reputation as a scholar addressing issues of culture, identity formation, and disciplinary knowledge in order to develop a better understanding of the relationships, the intellectual processes, and the material practices and cultural associations that appear in public heritage institutions. She continues to commute between the cornfields of Illinois and the ocean beaches of Nova Scotia.

Dr. William J. Turkel is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and Director of Digital Infrastructure for NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. He is the author of The Archive of Place (University of British Columbia Press, 2007) and Spark from the Deep (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). His current research includes computational history; Big History; Science, Technology & Society; desktop fabrication; electronics, and physical computing—the design of computer-based systems that interact with people by sensing and controlling the physical world. His research website is http://williamjturkel.net.