PeruDigital is a digital ethnography project that presents Peruvian festivals on the Internet through an immersive and interactive environment. Explore the website on your own, or play along by learning as a festival sponsor, a performer or an ethnographer.
PeruDigital WebsiteThe PeruDigital project presents and interprets Peruvian festivals and folklore through the medium of the Internet. Based primarily on archive materials from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru-Lima’s (PUCP) Institute of Ethnomusicology (IDE) as well as fieldwork conducted by the PeruDigital team, the project is a collaboration between individual faculty and students in the fields of Digital Media (including Character Animation), Anthropology, and Modern Languages and Literatures (Spanish).
The project has been supported over the years by internal UCF funding and logistical support from multiple departments and offices (see “Support” tab under “About Us” on PeruDigital’s website) as well as by the PUCP, and has produced a pilot project website which has been through one cycle of iterative development and has produced to date eleven publications and conference presentations. In addition, the project was used as a model in teaching graduate Visual Anthropology coursework in 2012 at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru-Lima.
The most recent addition to the website has been the addition of a curriculum and quiz based on the website materials and organized according to three social roles: ethnographer-as-researcher, the artist-as-performer, and the sponsor-as-community builder. This curriculum is designed to encourage website users to adopt these points of view as they move through the digital environment. We have recently completed an internal seed funding grant to study the acquisition of cultural learning within the interactive environment, and are seeking external funding for an exploratory project to integrate educational game mechanics into the website, which will be available in English, Spanish, and Quechua (the latter translation is made possible by UCF Spanish Instructor Norma Ledesma).
Background of PeruDigital
PeruDigital began in 2007-2008 as a partnership between folklorist and digital media scholar Natalie Underberg-Goode and the late anthropologist and Andean Studies scholar Elayne Zorn. Partnership-building and research trips in 2007-2008 set the foundation for collaboration between UCF and PUCP, and allowed for the selection of archive materials to be used in the project.
The next couple of years involved initial prototype development, including consultations with advisors and working with a largely student-led production team. With the completion of a prototype of two interactive environments, each featuring a limited number of scenes, characters, and objects, we were able to show the project to our international, interdisciplinary advisory board for evaluation. In the following years we have focused our efforts on redesigning portions of the website based on advisory board and student designer feedback and designs (the latter was the subject of a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or SoTL project co-led by PeruDigital Art Director and Character Animation Instructor Jo Anne Adams and Underberg-Goode), and creating and evaluating a curriculum for the website (completed in collaboration with UCF Education Instructor Carolyn Hopp and PUCP Anthropology associate professor María Eugenia Ulfe).
Publications Related to PeruDigital
- Underberg-Goode, Natalie. (2015) “PeruDigital: Ethnographic Storytelling through Iterative Design.” In A. Gubrium, K. Harper, and M. Otañez (Eds.), Participatory Visual and Digital Methods in Action (pp. 213-226). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
- Underberg-Goode, Natalie, and Jo Anne Adams. (2014) “Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peruvian Culture through Visual Design and website Development.” Media Education Research Journal, 5(1): 60-72.
- Underberg, Natalie, and Elayne Zorn. (2013) Digital Ethnography: Anthropology, Narrative, and New Media. University of Texas Press.
- Underberg, Natalie, and Elayne Zorn. (2012) “Exploring Peruvian Culture through Multimedia Ethnography.” Visual Anthropology 26(1): 1-17.
Conference Presentations about PeruDigital
- Underberg-Goode, Natalie. “PeruDigital: Iterative Design in Cultural Heritage.” American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, December 3-7, 2014.
- Underberg-Goode, Natalie. “Ethnographic Storytelling and New Media.” Society for Applied Anthropology Conference, Albuquerque, NM, March 18-22, 2014.
- Kim, Si-Jung, and Natalie Underberg. “PeruDigital: Cultural Storytelling through Digital Ethnography, HCI, and Digital Media.” HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) International, Summer 2011, Orlando, FL.
- Underberg, Natalie, Jo Anne Adams, and Norma Ledesma. “Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peruvian Culture through Visual Design and website Development.” Society for Amazonian and Andean Studies, Gainesville, FL.
- Saverino, Joan, Bert Lyons, and Nicole Sayer. “Digital Experiments, Hypermedia, and Community Participation.” American Folklore Society, October 2010, Nashville, TN.
- Underberg, Natalie, and Elayne Zorn. “Experiencing Peruvian Culture through Online Interactive Environments.” American Anthropological Society, December 2009, Philadelphia, PA.
- Underberg, Natalie. “PeruVine/PeruDigital: Public Anthropology in Digital Environments.” American Anthropological Society, November 2008, San Francisco, CA.
- Zorn, Elayne, and Natalie Underberg. “From the Coast to the Sierra to Cyberspace: The PeruVine/PeruDigital Project.” Southeast Conference on Andean and Amazonian Studies, September 2008, Boca Raton, FL.