Best Practices in Representation

 

Mural Painting by Diego Rivera of Tinochitlan 1519

Our guest faculty this week is Dr. Ashley Minner. Dr. Minner is a community based visual artist from Baltimore, Maryland and an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She received her MFA (’11) and MA (’07) in Community Arts, and her BFA (’05) in General Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art. She recently earned her PhD ('20) in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. Ashley works as a professor of the practice and folklorist in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she also serves as director of the minor in Public Humanities. She will be working with us on developing best practices in representation.

Here are some links to her work.

ashleyminnerart.com / @ashleyminnerart 

Ashley Minner, Reclaiming Space for the Lumbee Indians of Baltimore - Smithsonian Folklife Magazine

Art AND: Ashley Minner - BmoreArt

 A quest to reconstruct Baltimore's American Indian 'reservation' - The Conversation

 Dr. Minner has asked us to read two texts before coming to class on Tuesday morning.  In addition she has given us a few questions to add to our inventory.  The readings and questions are available on the Activity Page for this week. Please read them.

The Worlds Fair Project

You have completed part one of the Worldbuilding Project for this semester.  The Inventory you have created for your planet/moon has been posted on the Worlds Fair Portfolio Page along with your planet name and a brief selection describing your planet.  It is now time to test your Inventories to see how much they can communicate to someone other than yourself about the nature of life and culture on your world.  If you have created an inventory with a lot of specific detail about your world, you will have likely succeeded.  If you have failed to create an Inventory that communicates in specific detail you will be making someone else's task very difficult when they try to use your inventory to complete their Worlds Fair Pavilion as described below.  You will have to help them to better understand what your ideas are.

The Worldbuilding Questionnaire is not a quiz or a set of propositions to respond to, it is a tool designed to illicit details to help you build a usable world in which stories might unfold.   

The Scenario

Your world is in trouble and you have to help save everyone and everything on it.  If you fail, the world you and your people have come to call home will cease to exist. 

Your scientists have detected serious anomalies in your world's orbit and an increased wobble in its rotation. They have concluded that for some unknown reason your planet has started to break up.  It might be possible for some people to escape before it self-destructs but not everyone and many species native to the planet and its unique ecosystems and environments will be lost.  Fixing the problems is beyond the ability of your world's science. 

But fixing what is wrong with your planet is within the scientific and engineering abilities of  worlds with more sophisticated technologies than yours.  The question is how will your world attract the interest and resources of one of these technology centers?

An opportunity to attract the interest of a planets with the technology that can save you has arisen.  Periodically there is a Worlds Fair, an exhibition of planets and moons that represent a diverse sampling of the Intergalactic Community that celebrates the way in which a variety of worlds have created societies that have implemented The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a summation of humanity's best thinking and best expression of the hopes and aspirations of humans everywhere, and it is linked here for your information. There are currently 30 articles in the Declaration and it is a short and concise document.

Your planet has applied to have a pavilion at the Fair.  Only a limited number of worlds are allowed to have pavilions at the Fair but your world's application has been accepted.  You will be asked to design a pavilion to be constructed at the Fair site that can be visited on the Fairgrounds.  The pavilion will receive both actual and virtual visitors but the technology of the planet that will host the Fair eliminates the difference between actual presence and virtual presence.  All visitors will experience your pavilion as if they were actually there in appropriate bodies that can accept and perceive the experience you have prepared for them.

The purpose of each pavilion is to demonstrate how each world represented has integrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into its society and culture.  The pavilion is a structure that will house an interactive experience that will allow visitors to experience a selection of environments and experiences that present your world in the best possible way, hoping to create interest and affection for your world so that others might be motivated to reach out and help your world in its moment of need.

But you will not be permitted to design the pavilion that will represent your world.  Instead, the Fair wants to present your world as others might see it.  You will be able to interact with the designer of your world's pavilion, but the final responsibility for what is being represented and how it will be presented is the responsibility of whatever designer is selected to design the pavilion for your world.

Instead you will design the pavilion that will present someone else's world. There will be 28 pavilions and 14 pairs of participants.  There are two ways your world might be saved, either by having one of the best pavilions at the Fair, or by designing one of the best pavilions at the Fair. 

The Tools

The Design for the Worlds Fair Pavilion will be executed as an interactive hypertext story in Twine2.  Ideally by now you will have downloaded Twine2 onto your local machine and will have practiced how to program in the Twine2 environment by taking the "Visitor" Tutorial and/or by using some of the video resources linked to the blog.

Creating a Twine2 story-game will allow you to model how a pavilion will look to a visitor attending the fair providing some of the choices and interactivity that would be part of an actual tour of the pavilion. Over the next few weeks we will provide you with approaches and coaching to help you design this themed environment that is built to embody the world that your work partner has created.  You can consult as frequently as necessary to obtain more and essential details of the world from the person who created it.  The following are the creative partnerships we have assigned for this project.

The Partnerships

The following partnerships have been assigned for this project.  If there is a difficulty or issues that make the pairing impossible or too difficult please consult the instructor immediately.

Aren Agocha and Bridgette Powell
Giovanna Saraiva and Caitlin Griffin
JP Moreno and Jess Lewis
Sarah Benyona and Ashe Mijo
Hailey Ayala and Daleyah Moore
Ray Zhang and Josephine Zhao
Rico Wang and Hanz Ago
Luke Tiday and Leo Zamarripa
Whitney Bryan and Kaelyn Shirley
Kali Brogan and Taylor Stolz
Sydnei Berry and Kara Petzold
Jordyn Buckland and Eve Lindley
Ezra Gaeta and Yasmin Onder
MJ King and Emily Moran

Twine2 Tutorial

Thank you for submitting your Planet Inventories.  We are ready to start the second half of this semester's project.  For this part of the project you need to know how to program a simple hypertext story (game) in Twine2.  We have created some tutorials to help you do this.  

First.  Go to

 https://twinery.org/  

and download the appropriate version (Mac or Windows) for the computer you are using.

When you complete the download the program and install it, it will create a folder called "Twine" in which there will be a folder called "Stories"

Download all the files in the Google Docs Folder linked to the email I have sent to you and put them in the "stories" folder of the "Twine" folder on your computer.

Once these are downloaded make sure you have included the folder for "visitingimages"  and the Visiting storyfile which is an html file.  If you click directly on any html file in this folder it will come up in your browser and you can play it....however

We want to edit the file so start the Twine2 program and on the start page, after you go through some introductory passages which you can read or follow if you like to other resources, the story files will come up in what is you usual start page when you will open the program in the future.

Click on the story called "Visiting" and this is a step by step tutorial for how to code basic interactive passages in Twine2.  The instructions will be in one color and the actual coded sections you will be able to edit are in another color.  Go through the tutorial adding details and learning how to code your passages.   There are several tutorials on line as well and I will link these to the course blog where these instructions will also be listed. 

Fill in the data for Visiting using the information you have assembled for your planet.  Let a potential vistior know something of your planet through the story/game you are creating.  

This "Visiting" tutorial will teach you how to create passages, how to link passages, how to make sure you include return commands to all your passages so no one gets stuck down a dark passage with not way out,  how to add pictures to your passages and how to style text in your passages for different text effects. 

In 48  hours we will issue the second set of instructions for the next tutorial please complete your first tutorial by then.  To help you, Rick Dakan has prepared a cheat sheet of Twine2 basic commands in the file in the stories folder called "Twine basics"  this is not a twine file but a basic text file which you can load into a word processor usually by simply clicking on it.  

Go to the course blog for additional help if you need it.  Email me if you are completely confused...well...you can email me if you are only partially confused but try to figure it out yourself first.

Here are some video tutorials that you might want to look at before you start creating the Visitor story we are asking you to do.  These tutorials cover much of the same ground and even go further as you get acclimated. I recommend looking at the first one first...then doing the Visitor tutorial.  Afterwards you can learn some of the other tricks in the other videos which are short and tweak the look of the text you are creating.

Here are a number of additional tutorials you can access:

This is the most basic work through tutorial for the program to learn its basic function. You may want to go through this tutorial before you do the "Visitor" tutorial although they cover much of the same ground. 
https://twinery.org/wiki/twine2:guide

This is a good tutorial in Twine2 about Twine2

http://selfloud.net/HarloweWorkshop.html

Here are some more advanced tutorials you might want to reference as you get more comfortable with Twine2.

Basic RPG Tutorial 

Part One:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/02/using-twine-for-games-research-part-ii.html?q=twine

Part Two:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-twine-for-games-research-part-iii.html?q=Twine

How to Create a Space Exploration Game in Twine 2 (This is a good relevant Tutorial to what we are going to do)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvOPqJzXWgo

How to Have a Character ask they Player their name

http://twinery.org/questions/1453/how-could-i-have-a-character-ask-the-player-their-name

Tutorial for Macros

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/2620/a-tutorial-to-twine-macros-if-set-and-click-for-twine-2-0-harlowe

How to link passages in If statements

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/5166/how-to-link-passages-in-if-statements

How to make a combination lock in Twine2

https://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Combination-Lock-in-Twine-2-Harlowe-2/

Building an Inventory System in Twine 2

https://gersande.com/blog/designing-inventories-in-twine-2-with-the-built-in-harlowe-macros/

Twine Cheat Sheet

https://blogs.stockton.edu/textscape/files/2015/04/A-Twine-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

And is a list of Youtube tutorials by Dan Cox that seem useful

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTWJzxNdsIDHiYzGh-2Fd1w

And here is a longer list of Youtube tutorials for the most recent version of Twine 2.3 (Most of us will probably use Harlowe as the story format, it is the default)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=twine+2.3

Mid-Term Submission

 

It is approaching the time for the submission of your mid-term documents.  To submit your documents, make a folder in Google Drive with your name and Worldbuilding in the title.  In the folder put the following items:

1. A copy of your distant planet image 275px by 275px saved as a png file. (See image assignment parameters below.
2. A copy of your 5:3 image of life on your planet sized 500px. wide by 300px. high.
3. A Pdf file of your Planet inventory including the recent material on Gender and Sexuality.  You pdf file should also incorporate your 500px by 300px. image. Below are the parameters for the Inventory PDF file and the image file parameters.

Submit these documents and place them in your Google Docs folder in such a way as I can download the entire folder.  Email me a link to the folder so I can download it by midnight on Friday, October 16.

Inventory PDF Parameters

Make sure you write your Inventory so that it can be understood by someone other than yourself.  Try to be as clear as you can about the various aspects of your planet so someone else can get as clear an idea as they can about the physical and cultural aspects of your planet. This is a process document that someone else will need to use, so give as much information as you can in the way you would want to receive that information from someone else.

At the top of the page include your name and the name of the planet/moon you are creating. It will help if you organize your inventory in the same topic subdivisions we have used from week to week during the first half of the semester. If you have any confusion over what to do, I will hold a question session after zoom class next Tuesday.

Image Assignment Parameters:

Although much of what we will do in this class this semester is based on writing and the creation of process documents (like a World Inventory) we would like you to create two images to assist our visualization of your planet and its human inhabited ecosystem.

One image will be put at the top of your inventory which will be submitted as a pdf.

This image should be in an aspect ration of 5:3.  Besides using this image to illustrate your inventory, you will need to create a version of the image 500 px. wide by 300 px. high saved as a .png file.  This image should be a wide-view of a place where humans live on your planet incorporating as much of the local ecology as you can show.  

The second image will be a picture of your planet or moon from a distance that will fit in a transparent square 275px by 275 px.  This picture may also be included in your Inventory PDF but will need to be submitted with the Inventory.  This image should be a .png executed on a transparent canvas.  The size of the canvas should be 275 x 275, the image can be round within the square of the canvas.

These images will be due in two weeks when you submit the first versions of your Planet/Moon Inventories in pdf form. The images can be constructed in photoshop, illustrator, or other program you feel comfortable with.  The output for submission is .png.  

Representing Gender and Sexuality

 

This week's presenters are Dr. Helis Sikk and Dr. Lindsay Garcia.

Dr. Lindsay Garcia is a visiting instructor of literature and media studies at Ringling College of Art and Design. She is also a socially engaged artist who works in video, performance, social practice, poetry, and scholarly intervention. Her scholarhsip and artwork engages with anti-racist, interspecies, queer, and feminist materialisms. www.lindsaygarcia.com

Dr. Helis Sikk is a visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of South Florida Tampa. 

Before coming to class they are asking you to do the following:

Read: Judith Lorber, “Night to His Day”

Link to article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LBK6CxUXTwqpk_KmksYwIB67DtUxQ53Q/view?usp=sharing (please use this link instead of one found online)

Read: Adri T., “Myths About Asexuality”

Link to comic: https://adriofthedead.tumblr.com/post/65540442968/okay-i-realize-this-hilariously-late-for

Watch: “5 Non-Binary People Explain What “Non-Binary” Means To Them” 

Bring a gendered object to class and be prepared to describe the ways in which it is gendered (see immediately below for instructions)

Choose an object or group of objects that you see as “gendered” and bring it to our Zoom meeting. This could be an object that is personal to you or something you have picked up from the material environment that you inhabit and experience in your everyday life. Reflect on how this object is used and suggest possibilities for creative uses that may trouble cultural assumptions about what it represents.  

Here are some questions to help you guide your thinking:

What do you see in the object? Write down everything you can about it - color, texture, shape, and style. Who created the object? When? What was the purpose? What does the purpose tell us about the object? How do you use it? Who was the object intended for? What does the intended use tell us about the object? 

In this week's Zoom class we will do the following: 

• Definitions: Gender & Sexuality, in various forms using the attraction dragon & genderbread person
• Breakout Room Activity: Gendered Objects
• Translating this activity into world building
• Best Practice Tips: for considering identities that you do not embody, when it comes to sexuality & gender - plus other intersections (race, ethnicity, disability, species).

This week's questions have been added to the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.  Please begin answering this week's questions to add to your inventory. 

This week's questions are also on the Activity Page for this week along with additional resources.  We look forward to discussing these questions with you on Tuesday morning.

Week 5: Power, Conformity, Authority, Obedience

 This week we will be visited by Dr. Iva Pekova, our full-time professor of Sociology and Social Science who will look at some of the aspects of way societies are organized and function. We will be working out some of the details of how our societies define conformity and deviance, learning how societies treat these issues is what defines patterns of power and authority. 

Dr. Pekova has asked that this week you watch the following 3 videos before coming to class.  All three offer very intriguing insights into human social behavior.  

Dr. Petkova has added a few questions to the Worldbuilding Questionnaire that you should begin to answer about the society you are creating on your world. Go here for this week's Activity Page where you can find some more videos to watch and some questions with which to develop your society.

Colonialism and Disability

 

·       

This week's guest presenter is Dr. Jessica Cowing, a teacher and scholar of colonialism and disability studies. Dr. Cowing attended SUNY Oneonta, received an M.A. from the California State University at Long Beach and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary.

In recent years it has been a custom at many gatherings of people in North America who wish to acknowledge the history of colonialism by which many us have come to be resident on this land, to introduce themselves with respectful citation of the indigenous people who once occupied the land where they currently reside or meet. Dr. Cowing suggests students might begin this week by considering what native peoples lived on the land before them, wherever you might be from or where you currently reside.

Dr.   Dr Cowing says to take a look at Native Land, and if you don’t already know, locate the tribal homelands for where you currently live or stay. Whose lands does your college occupy?

Watch this 4 minute Video that explains the concepts of Disability Justice and Transformative Justice.

Dr. Cowing also suggests we consider The Cogewea Project a Twine2 text game that adapts the novel Cogewea by the indigenous novelist, Mourning Dove.  The novel was written in 1912 and finally published in 1927.  It is a revision of the "western" genre from an indigenous and female point of view icorporating storytelling traditions of the Okanagan people.  Because this game is in the Twine2 programming platform which we will be using this semester, this is great way to see how the platform can work to activate story and worldbuilding.  The project uses game thinking as a means to bring interactivity to the text of the novel.  In the sample below only two chapters have been completed. Please play this game before coming to class. It is available here:

The Cogewea Project Twine2 Game

There is an academic paper by Sara Humphreys, the leader of the project, that describes the team's approach to adapting the story here:

 

Creating a Playable Academic Edition of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea or How Games can Decolonize

For More Information and Resources Please Go to the Activity Page for this Week where you can see this week's additional questions for the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.

Those questions have also been added to the Questionnaire Page on this Blog.

Harmony with Environment

In this project we are asking you to model cultures that live in harmony with environment.  We optimistically assume that humans in the future will have survived because they will have learned and adapted better practices so that they can live in reasonable harmony with their environment instead of regarding it as an enemy or as an endless source to exploit.  This week we want to consider some specific questions about how people on your planet interact with your planet.  What practices do they follow to sustain their relationship with their ecology.

Invasive Species

There were some questions about the impact of introduced species at the end of last class, so I have included 3 short videos (Asian Carp, lifesense and Lionfish).

Introduced species generally fall into one of three categories. They become

established in the new environment but are not population controlled and become

an “invasive species.” The second category is that the introduced species becomes

established but has its population controlled to various extents. The third category

are the invasive species that come, struggle to become established, fail in that

process and become extinct in just a few generations.

The three videos are about invasive species – Asian carp, rabbits and lionfish. These essentially have no, or too few, predators in the area and thus see rapid population growth. These species tend to out eat the original species causing those species to be displaced, or die off. The problem becomes that the invasive species is not as efficient in the local ecosystem, and tends to downgrade the overall viability of the area. Frequently causing a boom-bust in the local environment as plants are overgrazed or prey is overhunted, which also subjects the area to more physical stress.

Here is a video that shows the impact of an invasive species in Florida:

Remember for this project humans are considered an invasive species.  As an invasive species the humans must be aware of their impacts and how to manage them.

The video linked below explores the question of how humans do and don't live in harmony with their environment and how they could model their interactions based on what they see around them.

Lifesense video is too large to embed but here is the link.

Bio-mimicry

In the next short video the next King of England tries to get people to consider how biomimicry is the source of strategies to insure the better health of the planet and the better health of in occupants...especially us.  Given our current state of pandemic we need to consider how restoring what balance we can to the planet is a matter of our immediate health and survival.

Please Go to this week's Activity Page for more information about approaches to living in a better arrangement with your local ecology and with the ecology of the planet as a whole.

Tim Rumage recommends the following book to you which was just released last week.  It is an account of how specific indigenous cultures interact specifically with the ecosystems that house their cultures. 

"The belief that all life-forms are interconnected and share the same breath— known in the Rarámuri tribe as iwígara— has resulted in a treasury of knowledge about the natural world, passed down for millennia by native cultures."

Here is a link where you can read the preview for this book.

Image Assignment:

Although much of what we will do in this class this semester is based on writing and the creation of process documents (like a World Inventory) we would like you to create two images to assist our visualization of your planet and its human inhabited ecosystem.

One image will be put at the top of your inventory which will be submitted as a pdf.

This image should be in an aspect ration of 5:3.  Besides using this image to illustrate your inventory, you will need to create a version of the image 500 px. wide by 300 px. high saved as a .png file.  This image should be a wide-view of a place where humans live on your planet incorporating as much of the local ecology as you can show.  

The second image will be a picture of your planet or moon from a distance that will fit in a transparent square 275px by 275 px.  This picture may also be included in your Inventory PDF but will need to be submitted with the Inventory.  This image should be a .png executed on a transparent canvas.  The size of the canvas should be 275 x 275, the image can be round within the square of the canvas.

These images will be due in two weeks when you submit the first versions of your Planet/Moon Inventories in pdf form. The images can be constructed in photoshop, illustrator, or other program you feel comfortable with.  The output for submission is .png.  

This assignment is due in two weeks.

Ecosystems and Cultures

Tim Rumage our full-time Environmental Scientist, returns this week to introduce us to the concepts of human interactions with planetary ecosystems.  Currently on Earth we are experiencing a number of negative impacts from the ways in which humans have failed to integrate with our ecosystems.  Large impacts like human-caused climate change and failures to control population growth have become impacts that threaten the continued existence of humans on this planet.

In our Worldbuilding Course we are attempting a project that we hope will encourage you to think of ways to interact with natural systems and the range of ecologies that would have more positive outcomes than on earth.

There are two aspects of this week's development of your Inventory.

First, you want to consider what types of lifeforms and ecologies have formed on your planer.  You will want to describe life on your planet/moon before humans arrived.  You will want to describe some of the major ecosystems of your world and you will probably want to focus on the locations on your world where humans have taken up habitation.

Second, you want to describe some of the ways in which humans on your world are interacting with the ecology of your planet/moon and the specific ways they are managing those interactions in harmony with the local ecology instead of disrupting it.

One of the current models that humans are using as a tool to think about these issues is the Ecosystem Services model.  Tim has provided two readings that describe that model, which is recommended as an approach you might use to envision how humans might engage more positively with the ecologies in which they live. These are brief, fact-filled and very useful.

What are Ecosystem Services?
The Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity

Please read these two brief fact sheets.

Tim has also provided two brief fact papers on the impacts we are currently facing from inadequate Ecosystem Servicing. Please read these as well. Both are also linked on this week's Activity Page.

Wildlife in Catastrophic Decline
More Than One Billion People Face Displacement By 2050

Here is a link to the Activity Page for this week where there are more details and questions to ask to help develop you planet/moon inventory document.

This week's checklist:

1. Read the 4 fact sheets Tim Rumage has prepared for us.
2. Read the Activity Page and provide some long and detailed answers to the questions Tim asks.  These questions are repeated and some additional questions added to the Worldbuilding Questionnaire. 
3. Make sure you have answered as many questions you can on the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.
4. Come to Zoom Class prepared to relate and discuss your answers to the questions as well as to ask any question you have about the ideas or concepts for this week.

First Assignment Before Class: Planetbuidling

The Checklist
Here is the checklist for what you need to do before you come to the first class.

1. Watch or listen to Worldbuilding 101 by N.K. Jemisin those links are in the previous post or on the activity page for the first week of the course.
2. Go to the activity page for this week and watch the video on exoplanets.
3. Pick one of the three exo-planet/moon scenarios on which you want to base the creation of your world. The three are listed and linked on the activity page.
4. Create an Inventory for the planet/moon you will be creating.  Transfer the planet/moon data to this page.  Give your planet/moon a name and add to your inventory the answers to Part One of the questions on the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.
5. Come to Zoom class on Tuesday morning prepared to discuss your version of the planet/moon you are creating and prepared to ask the guest presenter any questions you would like answered about your scenario.  

Course Schedule: Here is a direct link to the Course Schedule which gives the most current information for each week of the semester.  The icons and descriptions for each week will link to the activity page for that week.  Currently only the first week has a link to the activity page.  The Course Schedule is also linked in the Course Links Box of this blog.

Activity Page for this Week:  Here is a link to this week's Activity Page which describes what you need to do before coming to Zoom class for that week.  The assignment is expected to be done before you come to class. This week's Activity Page links to three Planet Scenarios from which to choose the one you will base the creation of your own world this semester.

The Three Planet Scenarios
You must choose one of these scenarios for a habitable planet or moon on which to base the development of your world.  Here are direct links to each scenario.

World 1:  Epsilon Eridani A2 is a rocky planet with a silica/Iron mantle/core, a breathable atmosphere but a gravity effect nearly twice that of earth's.  The planet is subject to frequent tectonic and volcanic activity with water forming into lakes, small seas, and channels that criss-cross the most habitable zones of the planet.   Much of the planet's water is locked up in the form of ice in large polar caps.

World 2:  Lyra Aquilae A1 D (4th moon) orbits a gas giant in a red dwarf binary star system.  The surface of the moon is 90% liquid water.  There is a volcanic chain of islands that forms several mini-continents.  Super strong tides wash regularly through these island chains in complicated patterns of innundation.  Gravity is 90% of earth's gravity effect.


World 3:  Maytar A2 is the most earthlike of the three planet scenarios, very similar to a younger earth with a large supercontinent.  The planet maintains a Mars-like orbit around a sun-like star.  The orbital period is nealy two years but the planet rotation is close to the earth's 24 hour period.  With a similar axial tilt, the seasons are pretty close to earth's in climate variation but last twice as long.
  
The Ringling Worldbuilding Questionnaire
After you have selected your basic planet scenario from the choices above development a more detailed Inventory that describe its salient characteristics by using the questions on the Worldbuilding Questionnaire.  Be prepared to attend Zoom class on Tuesday morning able to discuss and ask questions to help develop your specific Inventory.  The guest presenter, Howard Hochhalter, Manager of the Planetarium at the Bishop Museum of Science will be available to help you develop your description.

Before the Semester Starts: A Preview to Worldbuilding

N.K. Jemisin illustration from Entertainment Weekly

Character is informed by culture and culture is informed by environment…N.K. Jemisin

Welcome to Worldbuilding LIBA 230  for the Fall of 2020.  

Before you come to the first Zoom class on the morning of Sept. 8, I am asking you to complete two specific assignments.

The first assignment is to watch or listen to the fantasy novelist, N.K. Jemisin conduct a short workshop in Worldbuilding.  There are two versions of this workshop available, one in video of the session she did for Wired magazine,  and the second she did in an audio for a popular podcast.  Here are the links:

https://www.wired.com/video/watch/n-k-jemisin-speaks-at-wired25

Audio Podcast about Worldbuilding with N.K. Jemisin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6xyFQhbsjQ

Nora Jemisin, one of the most significant writers of speculative fiction in the last 20 years, outlines in her workshop a process that is pretty much an overview of  what we will undertake in this course during this semester.  We will be taking a step-by-step development of a secondary world beginning, this week, with the basic astrophysics of your world. In the second assignment before the first class we will begin by shaping the planet or moon on which the culture and society you will be inventing resides.  We will do this in the next assignment which will be posted on Wednesday, Sept. 2.  Meanwhile, please watch or listen to Jemisin's workshop.  The video, is of course, more visual but I think the audio version of the workshop is more satisfying. 

Week Fourteen: Project Work Session

Today in class we will be working on project proposals for the Enchanted Forest Pop-Up Theme Park.  The project proposals are due before next week's class.  Here are the latest proposal parameters.  They have changed, so please review them.  The project scope document has also been revised to include these parameters.  You should review the project scope document to make sure you understand the larger context for what you are proposing.  You can see the scope documents on the Intergalactic Pinterest Page in the Course Links box on this blog.

Proposal Form
Proposals should take the form of a video pitch no more than 7 minutes long. The video should be accompanied by a one paragraph summary that begins with the one sentence elevator pitch.  The video must be submitted by the final day of class, Dec. 10.  The summary and links to your video should be posted on your blog. If there is an external reviewer, they should be emailed the summary and a link to the video as well before the final class date. Videos will be shown and commented on during the last day of class. In the video the following topics should be covered:

The Big Idea:  What do you want guests to get out of your designed space.  This is the guiding concept and should be reasonably concrete in expression and affective in nature.  It is not enough to want guests to “feel good;” the overall goal should be more specific.

The Story: What’s your story. How does your story intersect the narrative of the Enchanted Forest?  There should be a story arc, no matter how simple or small, that unifies your proposal to the space.  

The Experience:  Explain how the guest will be immersed in the idea you have.  The event/attraction you create might be either virtual or actual, but it should be as immersive as possible.

The Design:  Here are the details of construction, fabrication, engineering, programming, material culture, technology, lighting, performance, script….whatever you need to create the experience for the guest.

The Takeaway:  The material souvenir, the immaterial memory and the aspiration. What should the guest takeaway from your design?

Projects can be proposed by teams or individuals.

Week Thirteen: Building Sustainable Worlds

This week's class will feature a performance by Professor DeWitt's Punch and Judy Show.  A micro-scaled theatrical production, the Punch and Judy, like the Flea Circus, is a compact entertainment that has been a feature of fairgrounds and themed entertainment zones like Pleasure Piers and seaside resorts for over 350 years.  The Punch and Judy is an exemplar of how sustainable live entertainment has adapted and retained traditional elements in its history and is an opportunity to reflect on what makes a succesful immersive theatrical experience.

Tim Rumage will also be back to talk about sustainability and its relation to your theme park project.  In preparation for your work in-class this week you should have formed a "Big Idea" and its possibilities to develop as the heart of your project. 

Two Hour Workshop in Worldbuilding conducted by important Fantasy writer N.K. Jemison is here.  This is very worth watching. 

Week Eleven: Building Worlds Around Characters

In our first class for this semester we developed mapped a basic concept for an Oz space.  Oz is a transmedia world that is built to house magical characters of various magnitudes and sorts. This week we will be looking at the development of characters or character pieces that fit our concept of an Enchanted Forest.Costume Designer and Fabric Sculptor Sheryl Haler will be our guest presenter along with Keith Nielsen, Ringling College 2015 graduate, who is a New York City-based costume designer. 

Keith is working in film, television and theater, Keith maintains a strong sense of individuality supported with in-depth research and development that directly relates to character experiences within a script. Keith has been recognized by Ringling College with the honor of Distinguished Alumni. 

Some of Keith's film/television credits include:  TOMMY (currently in pre-production), THE VILLAGE, FRIENDS FROM COLLEGE, QUANTICO, WEST 40'S, MOZART IN THE JUNGLE, Untitled UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT (TV movie in post-production).   Theater credits for the Westchester Broadway Theatre include:  Anything Goes, Phantom, Man of La Mancha, and Mamma Mia.Keith has led various teams in a variety of client-focused tasks including branding, advertising, promotion and experience design.  Collaborators include:  Cirque du Solel, Hasbro, Explora Caribe and Microsoft Game Studios.Keith will be giving a presentation, followed by a Q & A, in the Morganroth Auditorium on Monday, November 11th, from 7 to 8:30 pm.  

It is recommended you attend his talk on Monday night.

To prepare for class this week, you might make a map of that you think should be in an Enchanted Forest.  There is no need to stick to conventional ideas about what that might be, but consider what is enchanting to you and how you would like to enchant others. Put some of these things on the map.

You can read the scope document for the Enchanted Forest Project on the InterGalactic Pinterest Page.

Bastille Day Parade 1989 designed by Jean-Paul Goude

Jean-Paul Goude's Designs for the Parade

Visual Anthropology Review by Peter Redfield of Celebrations of the French Bicentennial

"In modern spectacle then, we might see a corollary to traditional visual ritual, a transitory moment of separation and reintegration, a glimpse of an underlying social framework and the sacred edges of the profane. Ritual in traditional societies, spectacle in modern societies, each are portrayed as important events. Their importance is recognized by their audience and explicated by their interpreter. " ...Redfield

Week 7: Basics of the Built Environment

The order of visiting presenters has changed, you can consult the Course Schedule for the updated order.  This week we welcome guest presenter, architect and art historian Dr. Christopher Wilson.  We expect to make use of the map you made of your planet location by taking your player to visit several structures around the area you have designed. Dr. Wilson will provide us some assistance in describing those structures and infrastructure as we learn a few basics of architecture applied to the creation of built environments.

Writing Assignment from Last Week: If you missed last week's class you need to put some time in to catch-up because you missed the in-class instruction for making a hypertext game in Twine2.  Luckily for you, most of the basic instruction is available in the Tutorial on the Intergalactic Pinterest Link. You should read the "Visiting" Concept Document first and then do the "Visiting" Game Tutorial.

Assignment for this Week: Complete one of the options at the end of the Tutorial--go to a job, go to a sporting event, go to a ceremony, go to a family gathering on your planet--and describe it in detail.  Remember to come to class with your laptop or tablet charged and ready, we will be writing extensively in-class. 

Also, this week, you need to send me an image from your planet in the size of 200 px high by 400 px wide.  This could easily be a section of your planet panorama reduced in size and cropped. Also send me the name of your planet and the description of it you wrote for the planetarium show. Please email me these items before next class. 

Xtra Credit: There is a possibility for extra credit if someone wants to create an illustration of me (headshot 233px wide by 155px high) as a person of the intergalactic future to use on the Intergalactic Pinterest page.  If I use it, you get extra credit. Email me if you are interested.

Next week we will look to how objects and culture interact in a visit from Dr. Genevieve Hill-Thomas our art historian who specializes in global art. 

Week Six: Creating a Hypertext World

This week we will be setting up a hypertext game environment in Twine2 and learning how to manage some of the possibilities of choice in the program.

I am asking you to prepare for this week's session in two ways.  First to make a map of the location on your planet that you intend to represent in your Twine game.  You should pick a location on your planet that has landscape features that enables a community to sustain itself at that place.  The community you will be visiting will be human or human-like.  On your map include natural features and geographic elements that show why the community you will be visiting is located where it is.  Include on your map important natural features and any structures that are significant to the community you will be visiting.  

Second I would like you to undertake at least one of the tutorials below to learn the basics of Twine2. We will be working in this environment during class so please bring your laptops or tablets to class on Tuesday. Twine 2 is programmed in your browser.

Here is links to useful tutorials:

This is the most basic work through tutorial for the program to learn its basic function.  We will step through some of these basic functions in-class, this tutorial will help you understand those steps.

https://twinery.org/wiki/twine2:guide

This is a good tutorial in Twine2 about Twine2

http://selfloud.net/HarloweWorkshop.html

Basic RPG Tutorial 

Part One:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/02/using-twine-for-games-research-part-ii.html?q=twine

Part Two:
http://lambdamaphone.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-twine-for-games-research-part-iii.html?q=Twine

How to Create a Space Exploration Game in Twine 2 (This is a good relevant Tutorial to what we are going to do)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvOPqJzXWgo

How to Have a Character ask they Player their name

http://twinery.org/questions/1453/how-could-i-have-a-character-ask-the-player-their-name

Tutorial for Macros

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/2620/a-tutorial-to-twine-macros-if-set-and-click-for-twine-2-0-harlowe

How to link passages in If statements

https://twinery.org/forum/discussion/5166/how-to-link-passages-in-if-statements

How to make a combination lock in Twine2

https://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Combination-Lock-in-Twine-2-Harlowe-2/

Building an Inventory System in Twine 2

https://gersande.com/blog/designing-inventories-in-twine-2-with-the-built-in-harlowe-macros/

Twine Cheat Sheet

https://blogs.stockton.edu/textscape/files/2015/04/A-Twine-Cheat-Sheet.pdf

And is a list of Youtube tutorials by Dan Cox that seem useful

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTWJzxNdsIDHiYzGh-2Fd1w

And here is a longer list of Youtube tutorials for the most recent version of Twine 2.3 (Most of us will probably use Harlowe as the story format, it is the default)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=twine+2.3


 Please watch and work through the program as much as you can before you come to class.