Trifles: A Game of Social Justice

A game-based exploration of the social life of information
▪ Augusta Rohrbach, English (Washington State University)
▪ Sarah T. Waddle, English (Des Moines Area Community College)

▪ Rohrbach and Waddle began this project while at the NEH-sponsored Digital Humanities High-Performance Computing Collaboratory Institute this summer. Trifles emphasizes the intersection of theory, knowledge production and material history and leverages skills associated with literary studies to teach students how to convert details into facts and finally into key pieces of interpretive evidence
▪ Together with a cohort of DMACC honors students, a WSU graduate student and a team of computer science students lead by JiJun Tang of the University of South Carolina, we are building “Trifles: A Game of Social Justice”—an interactive video game that leverages some of the best practices associated with the teaching of close reading. The game tackles the problem of immersion and education in a work of historical fiction called Trifles by Susan Glaspell, based on the murder of John Hossack at the turn of the 20th century in Iowa.

Click here for a presentation of the project made at ALA 2013: Trifles: A Game of Social Justice

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