We continue on our journey through the horrors. Is there anything more terrifying than the realization that you have been going about this all wrong? That you are not as well guarded from the monsters than you thought? That something has been lurking in the shadows this whole time…

That you’ve done stuff in a weird order?

“What do you MEAN most people actually have a plan for their terrifying quests and don’t just roll up to a haunted house they find to look around and go from there?”

Let’s take a step back for a moment and get into the context. Last semester’s Intro to Digital Humanities class ended with a final project – to create a proposal for a larger project that we could then build on further this semester. Alternatively, we could just write a paper instead, and then just jump on someone else’s project when the time came. Pretty simple, right? Except- well, last semester, for the first time ever, there was a secret third option – the dataset. Last semester, people had the option to put together a dataset, along with some documentation, with the idea that this data could be used for future research. The dataset wasn’t a formal project proposal but it was still a piece of a project – a piece of many potential projects, even, considering that the same dataset can be used for numerous purposes.

This new option ended up getting a lot of mileage – two out of the three teams this semester, including the team I’m on, have started not with a proposal, but with a dataset. We’re in brand new territory for this methods and practices class.

Usually, I would imagine, with a project starting from a proposal, you have a pretty exact idea of what you’re creating. Natalia’s Lunfardo dictionary for example, this semester’s one project that did emerge from a proposal, has a clearly defined output: an online dictionary to serve as a learning resource. My own project proposal from last semester was similar: its planned output would have been a digital timeline of a particular historical event. Based on my experience last semester, the “pre-work” for proposal-based projects mostly consisted of doing just enough research to refine your initial idea into something that you could be sure would work, then focusing the rest of your energy on planning out the process, on how exactly you will get it to work. Once you actually do the project, you’re filling the empty vessel you created, by doing further research, creating the content you planned to create, and presenting that to your audience.

But what happens when you start with the filling but don’t have the structure to contain it yet? Well, I guess what happens is what I described in last week’s post. But it did take me until this week to realize that wasn’t actually the intended progression. Which was admittedly a little alarming. Sometimes horror is about establishing clear rules… and then punishing even the people who follow them perfectly. In those cases, the fear comes from this idea that you can’t escape the terrible thing no matter what you do. But other times, horror establishes the rules so that when someone breaks them…

You immediately know they’re doomed.

Thankfully, this is not the case for digital humanities projects. In fact, one of the main ideas I took away from last semester’s class was that everything is worth questioning, including the rules themselves, and the conventional wisdom that goes with them. Breaking a rule may cause a few headaches – in our case having to put together a proposal relatively quickly when we would have already had one had we gone down the traditional path – but it’s still completely workable. And things also balance out down the line- for example, later on, we won’t need to compile a dataset for our project since we already have one.

It seems like this is the way our project will continue, diverging from the prescribed path in places, sometimes requiring more work, sometimes giving us more breathing room. From the technical side, this is already something I’m thinking about as I plan my work. Because we’re still figuring out the exact form of our output, any digital tools I start setting up at this stage would need to be flexible enough to support a range of final products, until we pare things down and decide the details of our project more firmly. Which means right now my best bet is preliminary research for the basic structure and hosting of the site. Thankfully, I already had a lead on this. I’ve been wanting to look into Jekyll since I first learned about it in a discussion of minimal computing in my first class in this program. And this is finally my chance. A data vis project that doesn’t require a lot of social networking seems a perfect use case for creating a static webpage that can stand on its own. This is way easier to preserve in the long term, and also allows us to retain control over our project – we can keep our own copies of it so as to not be at the mercy of whether some faraway server shuts down.

Also, it’s called Jekyll, and we’re doing a project about horror, so that’s fun!

Getting familiar with some options for a basic framework for this project by looking into tools like Jekyll and GitHub Pages is a technical step I can take now. But beyond that, anything more specific will have to wait. Maybe as our ideas about the exact nature of our data visualization solidify, I can take a look at what data visualization tools exist for things like graph theory and network analysis, since that looks like the direction things may be headed, based on our discussion around seeing how themes in the games link to each other.

So hey, we aren’t doomed or cursed or anything like that, we just… entered the haunted house through the back door, I guess! Doesn’t mean we can’t still explore it just as well as if we’d come the conventional way. The flexibility of being able to break the rules to some extent and not be punished for it is something I really appreciate about DH.

Of course, when doing something official like filling out grant proposals… well, if you break the rules there, you really are doomed. Good luck! 🙂

You are in a dark haunted mansion, the kind that seems like it may be full of endless branching hallways. You don’t know yet if it is though, you’re only in its lobby. Lighting illuminates the room as a storm rages outside. You can see torn wallpaper barely covering patches of mold. The floor is decaying in places, so you’ll have to watch where you step. You have the distinct feeling that somewhere in this strange place, something strange is lurking, and that you should really try and find it… before it finds you.

This could be the setup to a horror game, but isn’t it also kind of like the beginning of an academic project? The dark twisting mansion of a dataset to comb through, the pitfalls like: expanding your scope too much, running into technical difficulties, or being unable to display your data well. And the fact that really, you don’t know what you’ll find. If you start your project knowing exactly where it will end, then you aren’t really learning anything from what you’re doing, you’re just cherry-picking facts to support your own conclusions. This may be digital humanities, but the scientific method is a good model for looking at a project here too – you may start with a question to focus your research, and a hypothesis to test, but you can’t know what you’ll conclude at the end until you do your experiment – or in this case, your research and data visualization.

All that to say – these first few weeks of the project weren’t about diving into the horrifying halls of our dataset – not yet. We each took our own small peeks into a few rooms, but for the most part we stayed in the big menacing lobby to… hold a strategy meeting. We talked about our ideas, agreed on a general approach for moving forward, and then got on our computers (because miraculously, there’s wifi in this metaphorical storm drenched haunted house) to get some wisdom from our predecessors. After all, we’re not the first people to look at feminism, horror, video games, or even all three combined. But as our goal is to create something new and add to an under-analyzed area of media, we have to see what’s out there so we can build on it instead of just doing what’s been done already or worse, struggling around in the dark with no way to even start. I know that soon we’re going to have to hit the ground running, but I like that we have a moment to take stock of the dataset we mean to explore as well as do some research, not necessarily to include in the project directly, but to give ourselves a direction for our research and technological approach. And looking at various sources about the frameworks others have used around horror and feminism has given me a promising place to start hypothesizing. For example, reading an article about gothic literature got me thinking about what keywords from the dataset would most exemplify that subgenre – probably “domesticity” and “captivity”, with “violence” and “trauma and mental illness” potentially present as well. In addition, looking at Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine, which was one of Naila’s original inspirations for this, can also yield some archetypical combinations of keywords. For instance, the Archaic Mother concept could be expressed with keywords “motherhood” and “woman as monster” with “violence” and “sexualized violence” also maybe showing up. From looking at these existing frameworks then, we can hypothesize what combinations of themes may show up most commonly together in the dataset. And if we see something different than we expect, we can investigate why horror games might clump these themes together differently than what we see in other forms of media like novels and films. Finally, this might be out of scope of this project, but looking at what themes aren’t very commonly linked together seems like a good way to get some creative energy flowing. What would it look like for a story to connect themes that aren’t usually linked together, and how might that play with and subvert expectations? I’m excited to explore this data further, to make a project around it, and to just see what kind of cool thoughts it can inspire.

So how do you get through a haunted house without succumbing to The Horrors? Use the knowledge you can get access to as a jumping off point. Take the old map, scratched out on a rotting board by the previous survivors of this scary endeavor, and find new forbidden secrets where it leads.

You’ll need every bit of help you can to make it to the end.