Wiki Assignment

The Wiki Assignment is predominantly a group research assignment. You will be assigned to one of six broad topics. You will research the topic and present the results of your research on the class wiki, Nip-eScrawl.

There will be five or six people assigned to each topic. You are free to create, delete, and edit any pages that fall under your topic. Authorship is occluded: you will not assign your name to anything you write as part of the group, though the wiki software will keep track of your work (and others will be able to see the history of your changes to the wiki pages). You should feel free to edit, augment, and even remove material that others in your group have contributed (and they are free to do the same with your material). I recommend you do not get together with other members of your group to plan or even discuss the wiki project: I would prefer the whole project be conducted in this “virtual” environment. You are welcome to set up discussions on the wiki site itself with other members of your group.

The wiki is divided into six namespaces, each representing one of the topics. (Note: the namespace name is the keyword name for the topic preceded by “2010_”.) Only members of a particular group can contribute material to the corresponding namespace. Everyone is welcome to view/read pages of any group/namespace. You can navigate through the namespaces using the menu box in the upper-right part of the screen.

Gaming	An examination of the humanistic perspectives on computer gaming. Topics can include narrative, characterizations, education, identity, and types of interfaces (human to machine).
Google	An examination of the text analysis tools provided by Google. This can include the basic search engine, Google Books, Google Trends, Google News, Google Scholar, Google AdWords, etc.
Hypertext	An examination of hypertext, broadly defined though focused on digital hypertexts. How do we define hypertext? What characterizes hypertext? How do we read hypertext? How do we represent hypertext? What are some important examples? How are we changed based on different reading habits?
Posthuman	An examination of the theory that humanity has evolved beyond the homo sapiens into a species that necessarily incorporates (digital) technology as part of its existence. N. Katherine Hayles is a major theorist in this area. This topic can include a discussion of cyborgs, but should stay away from the transhuman.
TextAnalysis	An examination of the theories, approaches, tools, and results related to text analysis (especially with regards to humanistic enquiry). Anything related to the Google empire should not be included under this topic.
Visualization	An examination of the approaches, tools, and examples of (digitally) visualizing data that is not traditionally visualized. This will include charts, maps, word clouds, and other innovative ways of viewing the written content of a textual document or any data from humanistic equiry. Avoid treating the visualization of scientific data.

You are welcome to write encyclopaedia-style entries for your topic, using Wikipedia as a model for these entries. You are also welcome to rethink the model and create wiki pages in the style you think will best reflect your topic. The pages for each topic need to cover at least three things: definition and history, examples, and relevance to the study of Digital Humanities. Each topic has a main page, and I expect at least three other pages associated with the topic.

There is also a General namespace, to which anyone can contribute. You are welcome to add anything you wish to this namespace, and you are welcome to identify yourself by name as the contributor. Anything you add here may be picked up (without stealing) by another group to include in their own namespace pages.

Your username on the wiki website will be the same as your username for logging on to WebAdvisor. Your initial login password will be the three digits from your Nipissing email address followed (without a space) by 2305. You should change your password to something else, something more personal, to help protect your work.

There is a place in your account profile to request an email notification whenever a page within your namespace is updated or created. I recommend you activate these notifications.

The assignment ends on March 20th, at which point logins to the wiki will be disabled and evaluation will commence. A grade will be assigned to each group, and all members will share the grade. This grade, however, may be raised or lowered for individual students to reflect the inordinate value of the contributions by individuals within the group.

If you have a preference for working on a particular topic, you should email me your preference(s) before 10 a.m. on Friday, December 3rd. Access to the wiki site by login should start around noon on that day.

Virtual-space collaboration is the guiding principle of this assignment.