History Games

I may have spent too much time playing some of these games, but hey, games are fun! For this post I will dissect the games available from the McCord Museum. There are plenty of popular games that employ, whether appropriately or not, historical time periods, characters and themes. The McCord Museum’s games provide a solid platform to discuss the pros and cons of a museum integrating games into their educational outreach efforts.

The McCord Museum offers a variety of games, from role-playing social customs to trivia. All of them are relatively short, taking from 3-10 minutes. The length and variety of games allows visitors get a taste of history without making a huge time commitment. This leads me to believe that their target audience is casual visitors to the website who have an interest in the museum. The games would be fun for students, but I do not get the feeling playing them that the game creators had a specific K-12 educational agenda.

Even though I do not believe students were the only audience, I was impressed that a few of the games contained the right level of snarkiness popular with the 10-14 year age range. When my character got ran over by a horse and carriage then flew off the screen, I was surprised. I was also interested and kept playing enjoying the experience of both choosing period-correct etiquette and watching the ridiculous things that happened when I did not.

One aspect of the McCord Museum games that could be a turn off for some people is that they are specific to Montreal. (I did not realize this until I got stuck on a question that involved liquor laws in the 1920s – not the same in Canada.) This may be where a museum need to question what their purpose is in putting games on their website and who are the games for. Should they have games for people unfamiliar with the institution? Assuming that a website will get non-local traffic, how much background should the game designers assume players have? I did not get frustrated in not knowing much Canadian history because the McCord Museum offered a number of quick games to play, yet I could see how I would in a longer game.

In general I like the aesthetic of these games, but looks also highlight how quickly the technology becomes out of date. The images in almost all of the games were too small for me to really see on my computer. For some of the games this did not matter, but when it was a quiz and I had to answer a question about the image, the game became problematic. Another problematic situation occurred when a scene change notified me of a “Plug-in Failure,” in ‘Mind Your Manners.’ Eventually, the game started working again, but the only reason I stayed long enough to see that happen was because I am writing this post. Games can be great ways for institutions to move their message forward, but they also need constant supervision and updating to stay relevant. Even with their kinks, the games add a needed sense of humor and play to history that historians sometimes leave out of their academic lives.

Omeka Site!

Here is my Omeka site!

The concept for the site was to annotate the children's book Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton. First published in 1903, the book is a great platform to talk about how people reacted to industrialization, the conservation movement, the technical education movement, and the popular depiction of American Indians.

Currently, only content from Part 1 of the book is up (I wanted to digitize the illustrations myself because I did not like the ones online). There are still some little things that I would like to add and expand on, particularly uploading more historic content and expanding each section of the exhibit and, of course, digitizing and uploading content from the rest of the book. With more time I would also probably experiment with the Simple Pages plugin and see if I could customize a page where a digitized copy of the book would be available directly on the website.

In any case this is it so far.

Two Little Savages, full page illustration, page 22 (Header: page 36, cropped)

Historic Philadelphia Schools (Playing with Google Maps Engine)

(If that map is uncooperative the original from Google Maps Engine is here.)

The initial idea for this map was to chart the construction of Philadelphia schools throughout the city’s history.

I went to the School District’s website which has well organized data sets available through their Open Data Initiative. Unfortunately for the historian, this data only has schools which are still, or at least until recently, opened. It does not contain all the schools that were opened in the past.

Luckily, I remembered that few months ago researching the centralization of the school district I came across the School District of Philadelphia’s Nomination Form for the National Register of Historic Places. (The Form) The form nominated sixty-four school buildings constructed between 1825 and 1937. The school district also periodized its buildings to align with major school laws, the most influential of which was the centralization of the school district in 1905.

Going to the National Register's website and filtering their data on enabled me to acquire a decent list of historic schools in Philadelphia. Because this data does not contain when the schools opened I had to search each school individually to get the dates. (This is why there’s not more schools on the map.) Another problem with the National Register is that it largely contains the schools that were architecturally significant and well preserved. It is not a list of all the schools that the district built throughout its history.

Importing the data to Google Maps Engine did not involve any hiccups, yet I did spend a good amount of time playing with the design specifications. I decided to use simple circles to make the locations of the schools and a gradiated fill color to signify when the school was built. Because I only imported twenty schools, I broke the dates into three ranges, 1848 to 1905 (pre-centralization), 1906 to 1929 (centralization plus time for the city to acquire land/architect/contractor/construct the school), and 1930 to 1938. With a full data set I would pick more specific periods to account for other historical events such as the increases in population in the late nineteenth century.

What I like about this map (or more accurately, what this map would look like with all the data) is that it simultaneously displays where and when the city built schools. While this map is only a sampling of the schools that were built, a map with a more complete data source would be an effective research tool to study how administrative laws affect schools. How quickly did newer schools come to areas which were experiencing population growth? What does that say about the city government? It would also be a good tool to study population growth and the city’s responses to population growth.

The last addition to make the map complete would be to layer it with a map of school closings. A map of school closings would give a more complete history. Schools close for a variety of reasons: population loss, outdated buildings and outdated function are only a few reasons why schools close. For example, many of the schools, especially ones from the thirties were constructed over older schools. Having a layered map would highlight population shifts and also which neighborhoods the city is invested in.