Author: Andrew Neal Barker

My print project proposal involves reviewing the new game Ripped Apart: A Civil War Mystery, in order to assess learning goals and outcomes by mainly using the rubric of learning principles as enumerated by James Paul Gee. Though Gee has thirty-six principles of learning that he applies to video games, I propose to use approximately a dozen in order to evaluate how a deeper and more engaged understanding of American history can be learned through the aforementioned game.

Ripped Apart is an Ipad app created by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and produced with a grant from the Verizon foundation. It was released February 18, 2015 to the public, and so other reviews could be scant and participation could be hard to track. Though I am proposing to review the game in terms of learning goals, further considerations could include marketing, development, and usage statistics.

James Paul Gee lays out thirty-six learning principles in his 2007 book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee stresses that literacy should encompass how to read not only text, but also images, symbols, graphs, diagrams, artifacts, and other visual symbols (17). Multi-modal texts (texts that mix words and images) that can be found in video games, Gee argues, can increase literacy creatively and pragmatically.

The link between playing video games and learning a broader application of literacy can be applied productively to assess Ripped Apart. In his book, Gee states and elaborates on learning principles “equally relevant to learning in video games and learning in content areas in classrooms” (41). So, how does this museum video game app address some of those learning principles?

Ripped Apart asks the player to become an intern at the museum to help a curator complete some very important research on American History. By matching carte de visits with historical documents the player can then identify the owner of certain photo albums and let those owners’ spirits rest. There is an element of other worldliness to the game in two senses: you learn about a different time period through historical documents and the spirits of some of these historical people are lingering down in the office / storage space where the player’s work desk is located. The spirits guide the player and so does the curator that the player is working for.

Because the player is working with different types of historical documents and artifacts (photographs, illustrations, letters, newspaper clippings, maps, clothing, and more), the most salient learning principle that can be applied would be the multimodal principle. This principle states that “meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words” (224). The game supplies players with a reference index where they can learn more about the documents and artifact they find at their desk that they takes notes about, and then connect to a selection of portraits to help determine the owner of an album. The diverse portraits include famous people of the period as well unknown people of the time. Political, economic, and geographic clues are also included in the artifact box.

Ron Morris also writes about how video games about American history, specifically the Civil War, can aid classroom curriculum by extending learning into a place where the student can engage with history and make decisions. http://www.playthepast.org/?p=3546

The extension of learning is an important and complex aspect that would be elaborated on in terms of assessing how the museum, the historians, and the teachers present and debrief video game experiences.

I told a costume designer that I was reading this book called Graphs, Maps, Trees and said it’s about visualizing the history and story of literature. She immediately replied that she kind of does that, too—in a costume action plot. Her pragmatic point of entry into a play is tracking how costumes work within the space and time of a play. I told her she might like to read this guy named Moretti.

Visualizing literary history is basically using big data techniques on things you were taught not to think of quantitatively—novels are supposed to be artworks not databases. Right? Franco Moretti, however, has helped me think differently about literary history, and in turn, about how to think about doing public history.

Moretti, who teaches literature at Stanford, focuses on three types of visualizations in his book: graphs, maps, and trees. By elaborating on those methods, Moretti encourages “opening new conceptual possibilities” in the realm of literary history, or how we think about literature through time and space (92). In Moretti’s discourse he lights on evolutionary theory as well as the essence of art; and he looks at centuries of genre and then the physical movement of significant action in a single story. One could argue that his methodology can help expose the dark matter heretofore sensed but not seen in literary history.

“Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.”  –Vera Rubin Young

So, how can this different kind of thinking and seeing help our understanding of literary history, or any other kind of history? Moretti readily acknowledges that this theory and methodology doesn’t work all the time, but when it does, it’s very interesting.

In his first section on graphs he convincingly demonstrates that graphing the publication frequency of different genres next to each other can show literary cycles in history. Explanations on how and why certain patterns emerge are correlated to economic, political, and generational trends, which in turn can be used to help better interpret the time and the literature as well. Sometimes these graphs, maps, and trees create “a fingerprint of history—almost” (57). Furthermore, and most interesting, Moretti’s asserts, “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’” because he is building his case upon materialist conceptions of history (i.e. the belief that we are chiefly shaped by economic and social circumstances and forces). Through the creation of graphs, maps, and trees Moretti argues that when fewer elements surface “a sharper sense of their overall interconnection” will follow (1).

This kind of “distant reading” could be applied to digital public history in ways familiar and new: For example, we have learned that HistoryPin allows for possible multi-dimensional interaction with time and space—a map that stacks photos from different time periods that you could see while standing in that very place with a smart phone. What if we re-imagined how to see a painting? Could we visually deconstruct paintings by graphing drafts? What would it tell us about a painter to map where all their work is currently displayed? What if we graphed or mapped Mark Rothko’s color palette? Or, threw all of Barbara Kruger’s text and images into something like Wordle? Or, threw all of different tweets from all the different UMD Twitter handles into Wordle? Or, what would mapping the geolocations of the majority of Civil War photographs tell us? By applying or riffing off of Moretti’s ideas, what other possibilities conjure innovative, progressive, and/or participatory projects?

Franco Moretti first published this book (which is based on some of his other writings) in 2005. Since then, I am fairly confident in asserting he has influenced peoples’ thinking about “opening new conceptual possibilities”—I know he has at least given me a new framework from which to work and explore.

There are, of course, those who do not necessarily agree with what Moretti is advocating. In Franco Moretti’s “Distant Reading”: A Symposium by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Alexander R. Galloway & James F. English the authors upbraid Moretti in varying degrees for his assertions which can be knocked over easily, or easily trivialized. Each throws solid punches at Moretti and his computational obsessions, but in the end the authors essentially tell him not to go overboard with his theories, and not to forget that the literature is still the thing in which everything revolves around—no matter what kind of data he manages to maniacally mine.