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.

People and Participants

JapanLab is a collaboration between the Department of History and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  It is generously funded by the Japan Foundation with matching support from the College of Liberal Arts. It is directed by Adam Clulow, Kirsten Cather and Mark Ravina and operates under the umbrella of the Center for East Asian Studies. The program also works closely with leading industry professionals including the Narrative Director at Xbox Games, Clay Carmouche.  The project is initially funded for three years from 2022 to 2025.

Rationale

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the educational and employment landscape with breathtaking speed. Changes that might have taken decades were compressed into just a few months. JapanLab responds to two key needs.  First, undergraduate and graduate students today require a suite of digital skills, often labelled as digital dexterities, to compete in a modern labor market in which they will be called upon to move between different platforms while engaging in frequent upskilling.  We must enable our students to feel confident picking up new skills and switching easily between different platforms, rather than teaching a single technology that might soon be rendered obsolete. These dexterities should be merged with the traditional skills taught in a humanities classroom. JapanLab will facilitate this transformation by integrating Digital Humanities across the Japanese Studies curriculum while also creating a specialized space for Humanities students to work on expansive collaborative projects. Our undergraduate and graduate students will also gain valuable hands-on experience by becoming employed through this grant to help to mentor and support future team projects.

Second, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced educators to reimagine their classrooms almost overnight, there has been an unprecedented demand for free digital teaching resources vetted by scholars. The pandemic set in motion an educational revolution that shifted the parameters of the traditional lecture/seminar model. There is a clear and expanding need to engage students with high-quality, interactive digital content.  JapanLab will produce a range of stand-alone digital content developed via semester-long collaborative student projects that can be distributed for free using the JapanLab portal.

Pilot Program

JapanLab builds off a highly successful pilot program that saw a team of four students create a historically accurate, Japan-focused video game across the course of a single semester. In Spring 2020, the Department of History asked four undergraduate History majors with no specialized games design background to develop a fully functional video game built around a specific historical topic and using only freely available platforms. The game had to draw from the latest scholarship and to incorporate a series of teaching points, allowing it to be deployed in high-school or college level classrooms. The result was impressive: a deep learning experience and a fully functional game, Akō: A Tale of Loyalty, that is linked to contemporary scholarship. The game puts the player in Japan in 1701 in the role of a young samurai born into a low-ranking family that is struggling to survive. The game exposes players to the realities of samurai life, the economic structures of early modern Japan, the role of women and family, the commercialization of religion, and the nature of samurai ideologies in an age of peace. The program and the resultant game demonstrated clearly how digital resources could be harnessed to drive learning outcomes. The game has now been used in classrooms across the country.

JapanLab Units

Digital Projects - Directed by Dr. Mark Ravina

The Digital Projects unit will produce a wider array of dashboards that will advance student learning while providing tools and content for wider distribution. The shift to distance learning has highlighted the need for instructional tools that support active learning. Dashboards allow end users to explore a dataset through search boxes and pulldown menus and graphically display results. Dashboards are best known as a component of “business intelligence” (BI), which is a multibillion-dollar industry, but they are equally suited to a range of Japanese Studies topics, including the analysis of literary and historical texts, as well as social, economic, and demographic data.

Language, Literature and Technology - Directed by Dr. Kirsten Cather 

This unit will give students the opportunity to digitally explore and model the fictional worlds and languages of Japanese literature and film. Projects may include the creation of digital maps of literary landscapes (whether the 10th century court culture of Genji or the futuristic settings of Murakami Haruki’s IQ84); developing interactive timelines that map texts in terms of both their production/reception contexts and their real or imagined historical contexts (for example, tracing Godzilla across its many transnational adaptations); or creating language games that tackle the linguistic and technological challenges of working with and translating Japanese grammatical structures and scripts.

Historical Games Design - Directed by Dr. Adam Clulow

The process of designing a game produces a level of familiarity with material that is not duplicated in typical college-level assignments. Crafting believable central characters, designing branching storylines, conceptualizing different choices for players and creating associated artwork all represent significant challenges that combine to drive student learning forward while giving them ownership over the final product. Games produced in this unit will explore key moments in Japanese history while developing content that can be used in a range of different classrooms.