Shao-Chi Ou
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Research Mentor(s): Christi Merrill
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Comparative Literature/Asian L &C / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 5 (2:40pm – 3:30pm)
Authors: Nabeel El-amir, Shao-Chi Ou, Ali Bolcakan, Christi Merrill
Abstract
“Playing with Beta Translation Research†is a multipart project that attempts to develop digital tools that will allow their users to make connections between texts that are seemingly distant but close to each other. The methods our lab implements to create these products are nontraditional for a lab setting. Our process is adaptive to our needs at the time, but we generally follow a protocol of researching information and developing applications simultaneously. One of these subprojects is an educational video game called “Tower of Babel,†which we work on as UROP students. Gamification has recently taken on a significant role in certain fields of education. Examples of this deployment include language learning applications, such as Duolingo and Memrise, or memorization tools, such as Quizlet. “Tower of Babel†embodies an intention to gamify the process of archival research while promoting multilingualism. We helped test the game, rewrote the game tutorial so that it’s more inviting and easier to comprehend, and worked on the User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) design of this game to make it more visually attractive and user friendly. In order to collect quantitative and qualitative user feedback, we also developed and executed a UI/UX survey targeted to college students of various game fluencies and language abilities. Due to the active development of our Digital Humanities research projects, there is still a lot we hope to uncover.
