Identifying a DH Project
By: Austin Jewett
Akinator
 Akinator is a web-based game that claims to correctly
guess any and every character you can think of,
whether real or fictional.
 en.akinator.com
 Created by a French company by the name of
Elokence.
How Does Akinator Work?
 The game begins by asking the user their age, this is
presumably to get a rough estimate on the time frame
of characters the player may think of.
 Akinator begins asking yes or no questions, and the
player may answer “yes,” “no,” “I don’t know,”
“Probably,” or “Probably not.”
 As the game progresses, a unique engine processes the
answers and narrows the list of characters in its
database until it reaches the character it believes you
are thinking of.
Database, you say??
 Yes, Akinator runs on a collaborative database that can
be contributed to by anyone with access to the website.
 So it IS a digital humanities project?
Maybe?
 Moderators screen submissions to be sure they are not
too obscure to be considered “public figures.”
 This prevents an overflow of characters that makes it too
easy to fool the game.
It IS a DH project
 Burdick says that the digital humanities “[redraw] the boundary lines
among the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the natural
sciences; expanding the audience and social impact of scholarship in the
humanities…” (Burdick 124).
 This description envelops the Akinator website quite well, as the game very
clearly invites a new audience to interact with others in their same generation, as
well as those in older generations.
 Burdick’s next point in the same paragraph is that a digital humanities
project “develops new forms of inquiry and reinvigorates ones that have
fallen by the wayside…” (Burdick 124).
 This point also helps push the Akinator game as a DH project because it has a
useful purpose of exploring how the general public thinks, and the data it
produces would be helpful to identify the cultural differences in age groups, and
what they watch or read.
Or is it??
 All things considered, Akinator is still just a game, and was created purely
for entertainment purposes. A reason it wouldn’t be included in the
category of a digital humanities project is because it does not “[involve]
iterative processes and many dimensions of coordination, experimentation,
and production.” (Burdick 128)
 The game doesn’t search for any answer, or have an end purpose or design.
 DH projects are also meant to “[contribute] to and [advance] the state of
knowledge in a given field” (Burdick 128). Seeing as a game is built to
entertain, we can deduce that this is not the purpose of Akinator.
You decide.
Works Cited
 Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey
Schnapp. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012. Print.