Comments on: sketching ivanhoe

By: "Aesthetic Provocations": Reading Speclab toward Reader-Focused Digital Text Design | Literature Geek

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 06:33:16 +0000

[...] rigidly grid-based interface to a more stacked, realistic version before reaching its final layout (Bethany Nowviskie’s website has some pretty Ivanhoe design sketches, though not the same ones as in the book). Given [...]

By: Bethany Nowviskie

Bethany Nowviskie — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:34:26 +0000

@Jason: I’ve been racking my brain and wracking my old email folders to try to find a reference to a book we discovered long after the Ivanhoe design process, in which a British professor of English describes similar offline ludic exercises. I’ll ask Jerry for the name and post it. My husband is the Chandler Sansing who has published on using Ivanhoe concepts in his middle-school English classroom. There was at one time a rash of Ivanhoe-playing in the local school system here — all pen-and-paper games.

@Steve: Let me know if you ever see it happening somewhere again, so I can pack my bags. (Honestly, though — I think UVA’s about to get its groove back.)

@Sterling: Youngster, get off my lawn! Actually, that SpecLab episode was just *yesterday* in the history of the digital humanities. I’m happy Johanna has taken the time to document it while it’s fresh in our minds — and before I tossed out all my working notes (like I trashed all my early Rossetti Archive-building emails). If I turn up any other sketches or notes of interest, I’ll post them.

Johanna has written to say we weren’t the lunatic fringe, but rather the lunatic core.

By: Sterling Fluharty

Sterling Fluharty — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:59:09 +0000

It is easy for me to forget that the digital humanities does indeed have a history. I guess I am still in wonder over the newness of it all. Thank you for giving us some small glimpse of what it was like in the early years. I think it is telling that historians really have no social histories of their own profession. Perhaps things will work out differently this time around.

By: Steve Ramsay

Steve Ramsay — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:24:44 +0000

I remember Jerry McGann pulling me aside, back when I was working at IATH, and saying something like, “Enjoy this, Steve. I’ve been in this business a long time, and you can take it from me. You may never be a part of anything so intellectually invigorating again.”

He was talking about the whole scene at UVA back in the late nineties and early aughties, but the SpecLab was a particularly striking example of what he was talking about. I’ve had the great pleasure to work with a lot of very talented, brilliant people, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a part of anything so cool and intellectually energizing as the Ivanhoe Working Group.

So much of it had to do with the time. The Web still felt really *new* (I remember Nathan Piazza showing me this thing called a “wiki,” before there was such a thing as Wikipedia), and so there was a sense that we were on the verge of an enormous revolution. The result was a “meeting” that was more like the brainstorming sessions of some kind of art collective. I’ll never forget it.

Thanks for this, Beth. Those pictures are making me nostalgic.

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:19:06 +0000

Thanks for posting these! Ivanhoe is such an interesting game, and one of its great features is that you can play it almost with any interface.

I’m getting ready to start some students on a stripped-down version of the game this summer.