Exhibit Design Update

I have updated my exhibit design website with a few more class exercises. Also, my project documentation has been updated.

We have learned a great deal of basic tools so far in Exhibit Design. I am really excited to start applying these skills on my project. I will learn how to control servos to a great degree of precision. In class we have already used servos to a limited degree. The best part is that it is now up to me to develop these skills to the degree that suits my project. A great general once said you should always tell you troops what to do, but never how to do it. Allowing people to use their own ingenuity and problem solving skills gives them a greater sense of satisfaction in completing their tasks. In Exhibit Design, we are the troops being left to our own devices to produce a project. Historians are great puzzle solvers. We like mysteries and being the detective to crack the case. This project is just a different challenge to meet, another puzzle to solve. Harnessing the words of that general, I am looking forward to using my own skills to solve a problem I am not at all sure how to solve.

The play of the century

As the Canadians and Americans prepare to battle for Olympic supremacy in a few hours time, I felt compelled to reveal my project aspiration for me Interactive Exhibit Design Course. I have mentioned previously that it revolves around hockey, but specifically it centers on the greatest defining moment in Canadian hockey history: Paul Henderson's game winning goal in game 8 of the Summit Series between Canada and the USSR. For those who are unaware with the play itself, or the importance this goal has to Canadians there is an excellent clip provided to me by Heritage Hockey.

My project will be to recreate the final 5-10 seconds of this play on a tabletop hockey game. I cannot recreate the exact motions and movements because of the circumscribed paths of the player, but I can recreate the goal to the best of my abilities. I am going to control 4 players using an Arduino Microcontroller and the accompanying programming code. I will need to control three Canadian forwards and one USSR defencemen. The right winger will throw a pass to the centreman who will miss the shot. The defencemen and left winger will both skate by the puck as it misses the centreman as well. The left winger will then retrieve the puck, and centre it for a shot on net by the centreman which will hit the goaltender once then a rebound shot will score the historic goal. My plan in to co-ordinate as best as possible the audio call with the movements of the table top players.

In order to make this project work, I need to first identify what mechanical components I will need to operate the table top game. The second order is to learn how to control these components using an Arduino Microcontroller and the Arduino software to program them. One I have these basics, I must then experiment with the programming language and using trial and error figure out how to co-ordinate each player's movement's with the audio track. This is a very complicated attempt at mechanical programming but I am very excited to try it out! The basics we have learned in class already give me confidence that I can learn new components and languages. What better way to experiment in the digital humanities than to recreate the most defining cultural moment in our proud nation's history.

Updated Website

Hello Friends

I have just updated my Interactive Exhibit Design Website with some of the course work that we have been doing over the first six weeks of class. I will be adding more in the upcoming days as well as the unveiling of my intended exhibit for my project. As I said in my previous post, hockey fans will definitely want to keep abreast of these posts. The website can be accessed through this link.

Interactive Exhibit Design Update

Hello Friends

It has been a little while since I have shared my course progress and it now being reading week, I figured I would catch everybody up on what I have been up to. For our Interactive Exhibit Design Course, my fellow historians and I have become immersed in a world that is very foreign to us. Instead of trolling through musty archives and searching for that ever elusive long lost manuscript, my classmates and I have been exploring the world of Processing and becoming best friends with the little Arduino microcomputer. How might this technical knowledge aid us in the historical field?

For one, I am not sure if this technical information will ever be directly related to our work in the historical field. However I am positive that this course has forced all of us to think creatively, to try and understand information alien to our subject and in general made us stronger thinkers overall. One can never know what surprises (pleasant or not) lay ahead in our professional careers. The only positive assurance is that we will always need to adapt to our environment around us. For the 21st century, this means constantly keeping up with technology. Historians are always slow movers and shakers (it's our nature not to look forward after all!) but we cannot afford to be for any longer. Controlling a LED light on a breadboard using Arduino code will not transform me into the next Foucault. But my ability not only to adapt to changing environments, but to tackle unknown problems head on without reserve will serve me greatly in the world within and beyond academia. It provides my classmates and I with real world skills that cannot be developed in the archives. Troubleshooting, critical and creative thinking and the ability to try something new and different are what is being taught weekly in this course!

To check out some of the projects me and my classmates have worked on please refer to my Interactive Exhibit Design Website. There have been some pitfalls in learning new skills, new technology and its languages. Historians again are not the most tech savvy but with the help of our instructor Bill Turkel, we are getting much more comfortable with potentiometers, servos, arduinos and so much more. Tune into the next blog where I let you in on my idea for my exhibit. If there are any hockey fans, I suggest you play close attention because this is going to be great!

Updated exhibit design website

This blog is short and sweet. I have recently updated my exhibit design website to include my preliminary ideas for projects. One idea is a visualization of US Civil data, specifically contrasting European immigration and settlement with the interstate migration of Slave Labour in the decades leading up to the civil war. My other project is turning an old tabletop hockey game into an interactive history machine. I am still unsure of how to model this metamorphosis but I am excited for this work! Check out the site for more detail, a more substantive blog is on the way! http://sites.google.com/site/jordanuwoexhibitdesign/home

Processing - drawing is fun

I have just finished my first ever all digital drawing using open source software Processing. I am not much of an artist but this software is relatively easy to get a handle on. The online tutorials and suggestions from other users really allow to dive right into the application and begin fiddling around. I started by drawing simple shapes: lines, rectangles and ellipses. When these simple shapes are combined in an artistically creative way they can produce complex picture. I instantly remember the lessons of Mr. Lombardo, the art teacher played by Jon Lovitz on The Simpsons. When instructing Marge on painting, he explains that objects, people and animals are no more than an interconnected series of polygons. I feel as though Processing really allows an amateur, or in my case novice, artist a chance to experiment with simple shapes to produce ever more complex pictures. For the public historian skills such as digital drawing may not seem all too important, however when creating a website or online exhibit the ability to create original graphics can become very important indeed. Whether it be creating a logo for a particular institution or exhibit or even creating an entire landscape image to represent a physical reality, public historians ought to be able to use creative outlets for the production of historically relevant material. Although this takes some time, open source software and networks such as Processing make this type of education accessible for anyone with the motivation to learn.

Here is the source code for my first drawing done in Processing. Unfortunately at this time I am unsure of how to transfer my picture to a viewable form, but rest assured I will find this out soon and share my art with you!

size(200,200);

rectMode(CENTER);

rect(100,100,18,90);

ellipse (100,70,50,50);

ellipse (91,65,8,5);

ellipse (109,65,8,5);

ellipse (100,85,6,3);

ellipse (74,71,4,6);

ellipse(126,71,4,6);

line (90,145,80,160);

line (110,145,120,160);

line (90,115,70,110);

line (110,115,130,110);

line (100,73,98,77);

line (98,77,101,77);

ellipse(68,109,4,4);

ellipse (132,109,4,4);

ellipseMode(CORNERS);

ellipse(120,160,130,163);

ellipseMode(CORNERS);

ellipse(70,160,80,163);

line (100,45,95,40);

line (100,45,105,40);

line (95,46,90,41);

line (95,46,100,41);

line (90,47,85,42);

line (90,47,95,42);

line (105,46,100,41);

line (105,46,110,41);

line (110,47,105,42);

line (110,47,115,42);

line (85,48,80,43);

line (85,48,90,43);

line (115,49,110,43);

line (115,49,120,43);

New Website (another one!)

I just wanted to share my new website documenting my involvement in my Interactive Exhibit Design Course with Bill Turkel at UWO. This course is going to be challenging and exciting as me and my fellow classmates will be creating and producing physical and digital exhibits linking technology and history together. The goal is to create something informative, interactive and novel. Every sketch, idea and blueprint that I come up with will be located on this site so please feel free to follow along here. For now my ideas are pretty basic but hopefully they evolve into something truly extraordinary!