What do the game Battleship, carnival clowns, patriotic country music, and gender in the Oregon Trail computer game have in common? They all were represented at the session I spoke at in Rochester, NY for the MAASA/GLASA conference on play at Strong Museum. This eclectic group of presenters approached play in many different [...]
Last month I set up a blog for the American Studies Crossroads Project as a way to keep people up to date with changes made to the site. Since 1995, Crossroads has provided a comprehensive and integrated platform for pedagogical, scholarly, and institutional information for the international American Studies Community. New content is being [...]
I’m reposting this call for papers for an upcoming ASA conference on Play that many of my readers may be interested in. It’s also going to be in Rochester, my hometown — well worth a visit if you can make the trip. This was originally posted by Simon J Bronner on the H-AMSTDY [...]
I’d like to propose a tag that Americanists mutually use to find related and new websites. From now on, if you have something related to American Studies that you’d like to tag on del.icio.us, tag it AMST in addition to your other tags. Some others have already been doing this, but recently that [...]
November’s issue of The Atlantic marks its 150th anniversary of publication - originally founded by writers including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It features a contemporary lineup of literary all-stars focused on describing the future and greatest challenges to the American Idea in 300 words or less. And while 300 words [...]
Following the recent indexing of Cliopatria’s History Blogroll, it’s worth offering a side-by-side comparison of two different approaches to academic blog directories. This follows several months of experimentation of approaching my goal to establish an American Studies blog directory as part of the Crossroads Project. The two fundamental differences between the directories I’ve seen [...]
The New York Times website is featuring an “interactive graphic” - visualizing the wealthiest Americans in history when wealth is measured as a percentage of the economy. Not only are these men ordered by wealth, but their lifespan is visualized vertically. The resulting graphic is both easy to use and understand.
I’m reminded of [...]
On Friday the American Studies Association launched their new website and moved to a new server. Make sure your bookmarks point to www.theasa.net. The site is based on a networking and blogging model to foster the development of “communities†within the site, be that regional chapters or specific projects. It’ll be interesting [...]
Lucy Maddox’s Locating American Studies: the Evolution of a Discipline is commonly required reading in American Studies theory and methods courses because of its breadth and analysis of the evolution of the discipline. What if we could visualize that disciplinary evolution? What ways could we see the shifting theoretical perspectives of scholars, [...]
Last semester I had the privilege of working under the auspices of Randy Bass at Georgetown University’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship on the American Studies Crossroads Project – an instrumental disciplinary vehicle on the web for American Studies. My most notable contribution to the site was the recreation of a [...]
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and Omeka community liaison for the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Finding America is my professional blog, and an amalgamation of the many hats I wear ranging from theorist to practitioner. I explore the confluence of American Culture and information technology in the archives, the classroom, and our digital lives.