Blog

 

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!

Aquifer: The Florida Review Online continues to publish digital stories and electronic literature/interactive fiction. Interested in having your story considered for publication? Visit this link: https://lnkd.in/e8WCxiA https://lnkd.in/erE7vKV.

This month’s digital story is a really moving personal narrative about a Korean-American man who reflects on the meaning of his name. Check it out here:

https://floridareview.cah.ucf.edu/article/surnames/

 

The new academic year is starting, and so I’m looking back on my summer. I was grateful to receive a Strong Research Fellowship to study in the extensive video game archives of The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. I was conducting primary research for my book about the history of video games, focusing on The Strong’s collections related to women and people of color as game designers, as well as on documentation related to the creative conceptualization process of video and electronic game design. 

Thanks to The Strong for giving me this opportunity to join a list of past recipients of this fellowship: http://www.museumofplay.org/research-publications/research-fellowships/past-fellowship-recipients. They were great hosts and the collections are inspiring and impressive. I encourage others to consider applying!

I have a new article out in a focus issue of Collections on Storytelling:  Oral Histories, Archives, and Museums edited by Juilee Decker.  The article considers ways that heritage materials can be presented in digital environments in an engaging and useful way.  The goal of the piece is to facilitate dialogue between archivists/curators/heritage professionals on the one hand, and digital media specialists on the other, focusing on affordances and constraints of particular digital storytelling platforms.  It presents a combination of scholarship and example projects to show how these ideas can help museum and archive professionals present heritage materials.  There are a number of interesting articles in this special issue on a timely subject.