Humanistic informatics is one of several names chosen for the study of the relationship between human culture and technology. The term is fairly common in Europe, but is little known in the English-speaking world, though digital humanities (also known as humanities computing) is in many cases roughly equivalent.
Humanistic informatics departments were generally started in the 1990s when universities rarely taught humanities-based approaches to the rapidly developing computerized society. For this reason, the field was quite broadly defined, and included courses in humanities computing, basic introductions to how computers work, historical developments of technology, technology and learning, digital art and literature and digital culture. Today several departments have declared more specialized areas of research, such as digital arts and culture at the University of Bergen, and socio-cultural communication with and without technology at the University of Aalborg.
Digital humanities is a primary topic, and there are several universities in the US and the UK that have digital arts and humanities research and development centers. One aspect of digital humanities that will grow will be the intersection of new digital media and the humanities, particularly in the gaming industry which has developed both casual and serious gaming and game design strategies to foster learning in the humanities and all other academic disciplines. A key principle in all digital interactive media or games is the storyline; the narrative or quest or goal of the game is primary to both literary works and games. Characters and players go on the quest, and playing the game becomes the narrative. Game design principles, also relevant in literature and the fine arts, include visual literacy and empowering players/learners to align with great artists and writers who believe in the creative process.
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently defined as any fields of study outside of professional training, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences.
An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge, taught and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is commonly defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which they belong and the academic journals in which they publish research.
Interactive storytelling is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user experiences a unique story based on their interactions with the story world. The architecture of an interactive storytelling program includes a drama manager, user model, and agent model to control, respectively, aspects of narrative production, player uniqueness, and character knowledge and behavior. Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.
Dundalk Institute of Technology is an institute of technology based in Dundalk within County Louth, Ireland. Created as Dundalk Regional Technical College, students were first enrolled in the college in 1971 and was later re-defined as an institute of technology in January, 1998.
Janet Murray is an American professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT, where she taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects since 1971. She is well known as an early developer of humanities computing applications, a seminal theorist of digital media, and an advocate of new educational programs in digital media.
Katie Salen Tekinbas is a game designer, animator, and educator. She is a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media, Parsons The New School for Design the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has an MFA in graphic design from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Mizuko Itō or Mizuko Ito or Mimi Ito is a Japanese cultural anthropologist who is a Professor in Residence at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine. Her main professional interest is young people's use of media technology. She has explored the ways in which digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities.
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
The University of MichiganSchool of Information (UMSI) or iSchool in Ann Arbor is a graduate school offering baccalaureate, magisterial, and doctoral degrees in informatics and information science.
The School of Information Sciences, also The iSchool at Illinois, is an undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Its Master of Science in Library and Information Science is currently accredited in full good standing by the American Library Association. The school is a charter member of the iSchool initiative.
The terms design computing and other relevant terms including design and computation and computational design refer to the study and practice of design activities through the application and development of novel ideas and techniques in computing. One of the early groups to coin this term was the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney in Australia, which for nearly fifty years pioneered the research, teaching, and consulting of design and computational technologies. This group organised the academic conference series "Artificial Intelligence in Design (AID)" published by Springer during that period. AID was later renamed "Design Computing and Cognition (DCC)" and is currently a leading biannual conference in the field. Other notable groups in this area are the Design and Computation group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture + Planning and the Computational Design group at Georgia Tech.
Quest Atlantis (QA) was a 3D multiuser, computer graphics learning environment that utilized a narrative programming toolkit to immerse children, ages 9–16, in meaningful inquiry tasks. Quest Atlantis combined strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. The project was unique in its goals to combine the best aspects of learning, playing, and helping, as a means to motivate and engage students. It allowed users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. The project was intended to engage children ages 9–16 in a form of transformational play comprising both online and off-line learning activities, with a storyline inspiring a disposition towards social action. More than sugar-coating content to coerce dis-empowered students into caring about disciplinary knowledge, the goal of Quest Atlantis was to establish educational worlds where children become empowered scientists, doctors, reporters, and mathematicians who have to understand disciplinary content to accomplish desired ends.
Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.
The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) is a professional school within the New Brunswick Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The school was created in 1982 as a result of a merger between the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, the School of Communication Studies, and the Livingston Department of Urban Journalism. The school has about 2,500 students at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, and about 60 full-time faculty.
The Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) is an academic department and research centre in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King's College London. DDH counts amongst the "most visible" digital humanities centres worldwide. Its research activities cover themes such as digital cultures, past and present; technology, media and participation; data worlds; digital economy and society; and digital epistemology and methods.
Terry Flew is an Australian media and communications scholar who from 2021 works in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was formerly the Professor and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He has produced award-winning research in creative industries, media and communications, and online journalism. He is primarily known for his publication, New Media: An Introduction, which is currently in its fourth edition. His research interests includes digital media, global media, media policy, creative industries, media economics, and the future of journalism.
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is an internationally recognized, rapidly growing research center that is helping to transform the humanities in an era of new media and global information. It counts among the "most visible" in the field. A collaboration among the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology, MITH cultivates innovative research agendas clustered around digital tools, text mining and visualization, and the creation and preservation of electronic literature, digital games, virtual worlds.
A transreality game, sometimes written as trans-reality game, describes a type of video game or a mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. Alongside the rising trend of gamification, the application of game mechanics to tasks that are not traditionally associated with play, a transreality approach to gaming incorporates mechanics that extend over time and space, effectively playing through a players day-to-day interactions.
The School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) is one of six units in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The School focuses primarily on interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities, social sciences, and science/technology to provide "Humanistic Perspectives in a Technological World."
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