digital humanities

Scholarship Outside the (UT) Ivory Tower

Submitted by Lily Zhu 24Nov

I’m currently teaching a course on “subversive” cartoons though as a class, we decided to focus on television shows traditionally aimed at children and pre-teens. It’s been a wonderful, engaging experience with passionate students contributing insights that have never crossed my mind. The rhetorical politics of ignorance in Adventure Time? Addiction and depression in Hey Arnold!? Cognitive difference in Jimmy Neutron?

Graphing Empathy

Submitted by Scott Garbacz 25Apr
Two survey questions asking students to rate their sense of empathy with Huckleberry Finn and Jim.

This semester, I taught a Banned Books class focusing on the ways that authors deploy empathy. One cornerstone of the class was a series of daily surveys. Each discussion was preceded by a survey (pictured above) in which students gave an informal ranking of their empathetic response to the main character(s) featured in the day’s readings. My goal was to help students theorize their own responses to stories, but I also ended up generating some unexpected revelations.

Field Report: Eighteenth-Century Literature Meets Twenty-First Century Tech

Submitted by Rachel Schneider 01Apr

The weekend of March 21st, I was able to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. While I always enjoy attending panels on subjects related to my academic research, another delight is seeing how other eighteenth-century scholars talk about teaching.

Why Teach Popular Culture?

Submitted by Laura Thain 05Nov
Photo of South Austin Museum of Popular Culture

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students.  In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”  

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet.  We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”  

The Case for Digital Submission

Submitted by Cate Blouke 13Aug
Student papers in a box

It's the end of the semester, and across the nation an all-too-familiar sight is littering the hallways of English departments: the box of student essays.  Sometimes it's an envelope, sometimes it's a stack of papers half-shoved into a mailbox or under a door.  But the sight of these final papers abandoned by their students and/or professors reinforces my conviction that it's time for us to move to digital submission.

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All materials posted to this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. We invite you to use and remix these materials, but please give credit where credit is due. In addition, we encourage you to comment on your experiments with and adaptations of these plans so that others may benefit from your experiences.

 

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