DIGITAL HUMANITIES

The Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer empire’s power and influence around 1300. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world, allowing them to view the famous bas-reliefs first hand without leaving their seats, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across the region and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions circulate around the complex. The project has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2019, the Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize from the Medieval Academy of America in 2021 and a Gold Medal from the QS-Wharton Reimagine Education Awards in 2021.

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial focuses on a massively controversial seventeenth century legal case that took place on a remote island in Indonesia but involved a global list of characters including Japanese mercenaries, English officials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia and local polities. Using an interactive trial engine, the site presents the arguments made by both sides, the prosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence, related documents and commentary from legal professionals and historians.

The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial Project received the New South Wales Premiers History Award (Multimedia History Prize) in 2017.

JapanLab aims to reimagine Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and in the process to establish a template that can be replicated at other institutions across the country.

The project will integrate digital dexterities across different aspects of the Japanese Studies curriculum while creating a specialized space, JapanLab, where students can work collaboratively on semester-long projects to develop a wide array of digital resources.

Building on a successful pilot program JapanLab will generate a steady stream of Japan-focused educational video games and other Digital Humanities content that can be used in classrooms across the world.

2020 saw a perfect storm of events, both vast and intimate. It began with the COVID-19 pandemic that swept across the globe, followed by waves of racial unrest, economic distress, and political turbulence even as wildfires, hurricanes and tropical storms tore across the region. Beyond 2020 Living History is a collaborative Public History project created by the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

This project aims to collect the raw materials of History by providing a space to share our collective experience of the Long 2020.

Epoch: History Games Initiative is designed to generate a pipeline of historically based video games for use in high schools, community colleges and universities.

Its first game, Ako: A Tale of Loyalty, was developed in Spring 2020 and is now available for use in the classroom. The creation of the game was constrained by a set of guidelines. First, it had to be built around a specific historical episode, the Akō incident. Second, the game had to have clear educational payoff that could provide a window into the difficult life of a low-ranking samurai family in the eighteenth century. Third, the game had to be developed on zero budget, using only free, publicly available platforms and software without purchasing game assets.