Hello, my name is Emmy and I’m a Computer Science major and Digital Arts and Humanities minor contributing to the Spring 2023 iteration of this course. I am originally from Davidson, North Carolina (which is far warmer than Northfield and a bit less flat). Outside of my academic interests, I work in the theater and Kracum Performance Hall doing AV work, draw both traditionally and digitally, and play video games (the most relevant to this project being Disco Elysium, a game which has one of the most realistic and compelling depictions of place I have ever experienced, particularly due to a certain mechanic in the game known as “Shivers”, which speaks to the player from the perspective of the city and the world itself).

Most of my work within the Digital Arts and Humanities minor has sought to answer the questions of how the mediums in which stories are told impact the stories and even become part of them. While answering this question, I have worked with the mapping tool ArcGIS a few times, and am looking forward to learning more about the unique qualifications of maps as a form of storytelling and doing some of that storytelling myself. I am also thinking a lot about how fictional world-building and storytelling can benefit from an understanding of deep mapping and what makes a place feel “alive” and “real”, which is often drawn from more personal stories and the details that only come from experiencing a place first hand rather than the sort of “objective” histories found in textbooks.