Call for Ivanhoe Testers!

This year’s Praxis fellows are in the last couple weeks of programming before our release of the new Ivanhoe Game (rebuilt as a WordPress Theme), and we are looking for people to test the program.

The Ivanhoe Game is a pedagogical and critical tool which enables scholars or students to generate discussion and criticism on a subject through role-play.  The original Ivanhoe Game was conceived in the early 2000s by Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker; they were then joined by Bethany Nowviskie, Nick Laiacona, and others to develop the game in UVa’s SpecLab/ARP–one of several precursors to the Scholars’ Lab.  You can learn more at http://www.ivanhoegame.org/?page_id=21

Potential uses of the Ivanhoe Game WP Theme include:

• Critical back-and-forth game play among scholars interested in applying different theoretical schools of thought to the same work.  For instance, in a game on The Tempest, one scholar might elect to ‘be’ Freud, another a Postcolonialist, and another a feminist critic; and the ‘moves’ might constitute asides written by these players in response to action in the play.

• Students in a course on textual editing or book history might take on roles as different people involved in the publication of a hypothetical or real book: author, editor, compositor, illustrator, printer, binder, bookseller, etc.!

• Law students can take on roles in a digital mock trial, making moves for various motions, documentary evidence, arguments, witness statements, testimony, etc.

• History students in a course on the American Revolution might take on roles as King George II, the Founding Fathers, generals and soldiers in various armies, and others.

This is just to name a few; the possibilities are endless!  Ivanhoe’s construction as a WP Theme means that it can be easily incorporated into already existing WP pages, including course pages.  For a completely bare-bones idea of what Ivanhoe will be, visit our testing app Games page, hosted on Heroku.

We hope to start testing on April 8.  We are looking for varying levels of commitment.  For a larger number of testers, 20-30 minutes a week would be helpful for us.  For a few testers who have the time and interest, we hope for 2-5 hours a week.

If you are interested, please fill out the form below.  I will contact you within a week to make arrangements for testing.