I wasn’t happy with my original idea, so I decided to take it and multiply it.
I liked socials classes while I was in high school. I know this wasn’t the case for everyone; don’t get me wrong, staring at the same content over and over can get quite boring (I had to do all these countries manually, so I would know.) I decided with my project I wanted to take my original idea of an interactive map of a single location (I had said Prince George) but make it much better. I wanted to create something that could help people learn about not just one location, but many locations. I started messing around with some of the digital humanities we used throughout the semester, and the lightbulb in my head flipped as soon as I opened Twine.
Twine was one of my favourite digital humanities we learned throughout this course; not only is it versatile, I like writing and telling stories making it a perfect fit. For that reason, I chose to make it the base of my project. This is the first digital humanity I used.
The second one I used is the first thing that shows up the second the application starts; a photo. Each country on this game has a photo of a flag, a city and a food. I had to reference these photos using a bit of HTML. the code <img src=”(photo link)” pulls a photo from wherever it is stored on the internet, meaning (almost) none of these files are stored locally.
I realized after I started that I accidentally made this program using five digital humanities instead of two. The third would be a map, which is included in each country as well. Not entirely sure if this counts as it is just a picture, it is not interactive, but I included it anyway to make me feel better about myself. All maps used were taken from geography.com.
The fourth digital humanity was the distant reading included with every country. For this, I copied each country’s entire Wikipedia page before pasting it into Voyant. Distant reading lead me into my fifth digital humanity.
The first country I did in this program was Canada; as soon as I made it to the distant reading part, I knew I had run into an issue. As I stated with the photos, I used the img src HTML code to reference photos from anywhere on the internet. The problem? These photos weren’t on the internet. I knew I wanted distant reading in this project, so I was going to have to find a workaround. This is where the 5th digital humanity came in; Omeka. I needed a place to store these picture files on the internet so I could reference to them; Omeka was just that place. I screenshotted each digital humanity, saved it to Omeka, copied the link, and referenced to it in Twine. All the files used can be found at the button below. The only thing I didn’t do was add metadata to these images; This project became far more time consuming than I planned on it being, so that was a corner I chose to cut.
My big idea with this project was to make learning basic geography fun. The unfortunate part is that it is quite difficult to fit much info into such a small amount of room; A future plan for this project could be expanding upon it, adding not just more countries, but more information to each, such as big historical events, main industries, forms of government, and even more. Another way to expand would be making the application run a little bit cleaner; some simple CSS to change the colours of the application, as well as proper formatting of photos would be helpful, as I’m not super impressed with how the photos are situated. They are too large and out of frame.
I learned quite a lot building this project and had fun doing it. Hopefully you do too.
