Interfacing Data and Power: Serious Gaming in the Experimental Humanities

As a teaching fellow of the Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities I will be collaborating with scholars in the digital and experimental humanities to co-lead a methodologically-focused, experimental workshop to produce and publicly stage a ‘serious game’ related to this year’s lab theme, Data & Power. Serious games are a genre of applied gaming where entertainment is subservient to a pedagogical motivation. Drawing inspiration from the open source movement and gaming subcultures, this proposed workshop will be user-driven and in part user-designed. Interfacing social theory and practice in and as the elaboration of an interactive gamespace, the experiment aims at involving participants as gamers whose embodied interactions within the gamespace generate real-time data feedback that actively shapes the parameters of that space as a domain of collaborative knowledge production. Conceived through the interfaces and pedagogical genres of online and offline gaming, this research project aims to bridge divisions between public and academic forums and ‘hegemonic’ and ‘peripheral’ sites of knowledge production by engaging members from the public as active players/collaborators rather than as a standing reserve of passive research participants, offering interactive tools with which to understand data as a cultural force in everyday life.

Faculty Supervisor:

Naisargi Dave

Student:

Partner:

University of Thessaly

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: