Blog

I just returned from a wonderful research trip to Arkansas to give talks on digital heritage and the topic of my most recent book project, shapeshifters in video games. I’m grateful to the Heritage Studies program at Arkansas State University Jonesboro, who hosted my talk on digital heritage, and to the Arkansas State University Beebe campus for inviting me to present on shapeshifters in video games. In particular, my dear colleague Dr. Gregory Hansen was a fantastic host throughout my brief trip, and thanks to him I was also able to meet some of his graduate students and visit several heritage sites in the area and see their students at work interpreting local heritage for visitors. You can read more about the talk at Arkansas State University Jonesboro here: https://www.astate.edu/news/speaker-to-address-digital-heritage-design

The book I edited with my wonderful colleague Marty Otañez has just been published, entitled Exploring Digital Ethnography: From Principles to Practice. As explained in the book description, the work “places digital ethnography within the context of the production of multimedia, multisensory ‘research-creation’ pieces using a variety of methods, tools, and techniques.” Individual chapters focus on case studies including digital and interactive storytelling, digital photography/video, worldbuilding, autoethnographic cartooning and beyond. You can check out more information here:

https://www.routledge.com/Exploring-Digital-Ethnography-From-Principles-to-Practice/Underberg-Goode-Otanez/p/book/9781032436982?

The book also features a companion website, which contains curated resources and materials designed to introduce readers to the methods, tools, and techniques discussed in the individual chapters:

https://clas.ucdenver.edu/anthropology/exploring-digital-ethnography

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with some really thoughtful and creative scholars on this project!

The new special issue of Contemporary Legend has been published! It is available here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/cl/index

This special issue, which I guest edited, focuses on Creepy Pasta, Digital Horror, and Legend Formation. It includes articles that began as papers written by my students in a graduate Contemporary Topics seminar I taught focused on folklore and mythology in games and interactive media. The issue includes articles by these students as well as other scholars. The special issue covers creepypasta and related digital horror topics including The Backrooms, Herobrine, and Siren Head, among others, and focuses on themes including nostalgia, fear, and anxiety in creepypasta; ostension and legend-tripping in digital spaces; and the role of new platforms and shifting subjectivities in our understanding and experience of creepypasta, digital horror, and legend formation online.

 

Our article on the Life/Ways project came out recently in the journal Storytelling Self Society. It was written with Digital Media MA graduate student Alex Boyd. In the article we focused on the experience of teaching students how to design and develop digital stories and visual novel games based on their personal narratives. Focused on the question “What if I had made a different decision at a key moment in my life?”, the project allowed them, and us, to explore the relationship between fiction and reality in personal storytelling. You can find the article here: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/vol15/iss2/5/

I am happy to have joined the great new editorial team at the Journal of American Folklore as Digital Resources Editor, working with my colleague and former graduate school classmate Lisa Gilman who begins her term as Editor-in-Chief. The position provides a really valuable opportunity to help promote recognition of folklore-oriented digital projects.

You can read more about the new editorial team here: https://www.afsnet.org/news/477338/New-JAF-Editors-Ready-for-Submissions

If you have an idea for a digital resource you would like to review, or have a digital resource review suggestion, please reach out to me at Natalie.Underberg-Goode@ucf.edu so I can share our submission guidelines.

 

 

This Fall I had the honor of being inducted into UCF’s Scroll & Quill Society, an honor society that recognizes faculty contributions in research and creative work. My fellow colleague from Nicholson School of Communication and Media, Ann Miller, was inducted as well.

 

You can read more about the award and our work here:

https://communication.ucf.edu/two-from-nscm-enter-scroll-quill-society/

I haven’t had the time to update my blog for a while now (2018 was my last post!). A while back I had the chance to be interviewed about the Portal to Peru digital heritage project (https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/portaltoperu). You can see the interview here:

It was a good opportunity to briefly share some of the main project goals and objectives, and I think it serves as a helpful introduction to the website. Thanks to my colleague Barry Mauer for doing the interview.

A new article is out written with my colleague Peter Smith on our Andean culture-themed board game project. The project is called Proceso de Lana and allows players to role-play as members of an Andean village as they process wool, weave it into textiles, and sell at the market. It conveys, through the game mechanics and thematic content, Andean ideas about reciprocity and cooperative labor. Check out the journal announcement here:

https://catalanjournal.wordpress.com/2018/11/12/game-studies-today-special-issue-online/

We just published a new digital story at Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. Check it out:

And send us your story!

 

I’m recently back from beautiful Zakynthos, Greece where I presented two papers at the international digital storytelling conference. The first, “Rewind: Unpacking the Media Ecology of Today’s University Students,” was co-authored with former student and now Assistant Professor Amanda Hill. For this paper, we analyzed nearly 50 digital stories that had been created as part of the I am UCF digital storytelling project (iamucf.cah.ucf.edu) to identify media aesthetics, assets, and editing choices. The second paper, “Curating Digital Stories for a Literary Magazine: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches,” was co-authored with my colleague Lisa Roney who is editor of Aquifer: The Florida Review.

I am happy to work with such great colleagues and former students on interdisciplinary digital storytelling projects and research, and to have the opportunity to meet more scholars and practitioners in this area!