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Linn: “The Early Years” Revisited by Sarah and Julia

December 9, 2016 by Sarah Rosecky

For our final project, we, Julia and Sarah, worked on previously transcribed diary entries from James Merrill Linn’s 1850 diary. Using Oxygen XML editor, we were able to mark-up the diary entries with TEI. Sarah marked up the first half of the diary, while Julia marked up the second half of the diary. This was an interesting choice because in this class and HUMN 100 we focused on Linn’s diaries and letters from his time in the Civil War. There was so much to mark up in just the diaries we chose, but we decided to focus on the people. We chose to do this because in his letters and diaries about the Civil War, he did not write about many people very often.

Our work is an interesting addition to the Linn project that the whole class is working on. The majority of the project is on his time fighting in the Civil War, but we wanted to add a different aspect to it. People who look at our website need to realize that this man is not just a Civil War veteran! He grew up in Lewisburg, and graduated from Bucknell. He had a life before he fought in the Civil War. Some people may think that his life during the war was much more interesting, but his life before was intriguing as well.

We extensively marked up his diary of 1850, while also becoming more and more interested as we dug deeper into the analysis. We noticed a couple disturbing stories that Linn wrote about, including a murder of a baby. Also, Linn documented much of his social life, which was an amazing opportunity to learn more about the social life of people our age during the 1850’s. One of the recurrent themes that Linn wrote about that was similar to his Civil War diary is his meticulous attention to the weather and its documentation in the diary. Linn never fails to write about the weather happening wherever he is. Another aspect that we became more aware of was Linn’s preoccupation with other religions. We are not exactly sure what religion, if any, that Linn identifies with; however, Linn writes about his experiences at many different religious affiliations, including Methodist and Presbyterian meetings.

Blurry text showing Thursday 7th
Blurry text showing Thursday 7th
Readable text showing Wednesday 27th
Readable text showing Wednesday 27th

Of course, subsequent “7” became easier to identify. Another aspect of the project that posed some difficulty to us was that the original transcribers failed to produce dates for the entries. After some digging up into the original documents, we were able to identify the dates for the diary entries. Shown in the image, we were originally using transcribed material that was lacking in dates and line breaks.

Space indicates where diary entry/ date started
Space indicates where diary entry/ date started

We seemed to work really well on this project. We are both familiar with James Merrill Linn through our first DH class and each of our independent study projects. We tended to agree on the types of semantic markup that we wanted to do, and our interest level in Linn is very similar. We think that our joint markup of Linn’s 1850 diary was a success.

Filed Under: Prompt, Reflections Tagged With: DH, James, james merrill linn, Julia, Linn, markup, Merrill, Oxygen, Sarah, transcribe, XML

Literary Gaming: Questioning Traditional Agency in Game-Play

September 20, 2016 by Maureen Maclean

My group (me, Iris Fu, and Matt Fay) is creating a superhero game in which the player can choose between three superpowers: super-strength, the power of flight, and invisibility. With the limitations of their ability, the player must navigate one of three different scenarios assigned to them by probability/chance. All three scenarios feature the player (superhero) confronting and trying to defeat a villainous force. Each scenario is written to favor one power, thus limiting success by chance and ability (superpower). Even though certain scenarios are more adventitious for a certain power, the outcome of any run of the game is not as clear as win or lose. For example, the player might be successful in saving the day but still end up in jail; life isn’t black or white, but it’s messy and gray.

The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.
The Netflix hit show Jessica Jones inspired my scenario in which the player is an investigative journalist trying to get at the bottom of a government conspiracy. Unlike a lot of superhero narratives, Jessica Jones questions traditional concepts of agency and morality. At the end of the season, viewers are not rewarded clear winners or losers and conflicts still remain at large.

In the introduction of Literary Gaming (2014), Ensslin states that literary games are “designed to make players reflect on conventional aspects of games such as fast-paced action, rule-governed kinetic behavior, goal-directedness, and simplistic friend-and-foe binary thought ”(7). Indeed, our game fits within this framework of literary gaming as our game delineates from traditional aspects of fairness. For example, many traditional games start with players on equal level fields; regardless of the race you choose in Skyrim-whether Breton or Argonian- you will get the same quests. In our game, however, players are assigned scenarios that are easier or harder depending on their power. Even beyond the realms of game or narrative, our game asks players to question their experience of life in terms of the choices awarded to them by chance and/or ability. How does privilege affect your circumstance? What abilities or lack thereof affect what you can do or accomplish? How much “luck” do you reward to your current situation in life?

Like many literary games or really games in general, our game is a collaborative effort. Using Rettberg’s definition, each team member is a conscious participator- we all know the restraints, nature, and our role in the project (137). For instance, each of us is writing one scenario that favors one superpower: Iris is doing super-strength, Matt is doing flying, and I am doing invisibility. Even though we each write a scenario, we have to be mindful to balance our stories in terms of length and difficulty with each other’s. Additionally, we have to be mindful not to make our scenarios to similar to each other. One challenge or difficulty of working in a group of three is that we can’t read each other’s minds; we have to continually communicate about how our scenario is evolving. Also, in terms of the division of labor, our method (we all write and code) is inefficient. It delineates from traditional group work that assigns a role to one person, such as one person coding and another writing the story. On the other hand, our method offers a greater variety of game-play and lets each of us participate in storytelling process. If I were to create the game alone, I would not have the time to create 3 scenarios much less have the creativity to ensure that they each represent different points of view.

My narrative outline of the game. WARNING: contains spoilers.

Filed Under: Reflection #1, Reflections Tagged With: agency, choice, DH, Game, Iris Fu, Matt Fay, maureen, python, reflection, super powers

HUMN 271

Bertrand 012
TR 9:30-11:20am
Dr. Diane Jakacki

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