Blogging Pedagogy - digital archives

Online Archives and the Poetry Anthology

Delacroix — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:56:22 +0000

Author:

Julia Delacroix

Image Credit:

Julia Delacroix

The bottom shelf of my bookcase is dedicated almost entirely to anthologies. I’ve lugged them around with me for almost 15 years, through four cities and nine houses, and every time I move I think about tossing them. Like the set of Collier’s encyclopedias I ditched in 2001 or the Field Guides I donated in 2009, the anthologies may have outlived their usefulness.

Yes, I might have to hit up the library if I wanted to reread that excerpt from “A Key to the Language of America,” but when would I need just an excerpt these days anyway? And when it comes to teaching poetry surveys, most of the poems I’d want to teach are already online. I’ll almost certainly keep my Nortons because I’m sentimental and I’ve kept them this long and I haven’t yet mastered the concept of “sunk costs.” But I assume that my students all sell back their anthologies, and if I were an undergrad I’m pretty sure I’d do the same.

This semester I’m teaching Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing, and with my students I’m reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. One of the more interesting arguments we discussed last week was the idea that the Internet has unbound the news, that most readers now get their news from articles that have been completely removed from their original context. My students and I discussed the ramifications of such decontextualization as it applies to news and civic engagement, but I’ve been wondering how it might apply to poetry as well. The Internet is packed with poems these days, and not just contemporary work. Right here at UT, professors and graduate students have built and continue to work on resources like the audiobook of the 1855 Song of Myself and The Walt Whitman Archive.¹ The Poetry Foundation maintains an impressive online collection, as does Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. When students access poems through these sites, they are provided with an entirely different experience than when they read poems in the chronologically-arranged Norton.

The Poets.org page featuring Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” for example, directs readers to “Related Poems” by John Ashbery and Nicky Finney that engage the tone of Bishop’s villanelle. Scrolling down the sidebar, readers find a predictably long list of “Poems about Breakup and Divorce,” and a similarly long list of “Poems About Difficult Love” before they reach a list of “Other Villanelles.” Search for “We Real Cool” on the website of the Poetry Foundation (maintained by Poetry Magazine), and you’ll find not only a recording of Brooks reading the poem (required listening for any intro. student – the “we”s that end each line getting softer and softer until, by the last stanza, they’ve disappeared entirely) but also a picture of the cover of the 1959 issue of Poetry in which the poem first appeared, along with links to other poems published in the same issue. The interesting thing is not just that these sites recontextualize individual poems, but that they do so in several ways at once. Students can find the work in different forms: draft, magazine publication, book publication, audio recording. They can see the context of first publication, or easily access critical or poetic responses to a given poem. These sites provide a useful introduction to historical, cultural, and formal criticism by encouraging students to think about the myriad ways of contextualizing poems.

My favorite aspect of the contextualization offered by these websites is that instead of locating poems on the tissue-paper thin pages of an anthology, they place them in the context of a vibrant, contemporary poetry community. Yes, you can see the cover of the June 1915 issue of Poetry that contained “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but you can also see this month’s issue, and read Laura Kashiske’s “You’ve Come Back to Me.” You can absolutely read “To My Dear and Loving Husband” at Poets.org, but to get there you have to pass an interview with Mary Jo Bang about use of poetry in American culture, and once you do get to Bradstreet you find at the top of the screen a menu bar that with one click will locate poetry events near you.

Pariser makes a convincing case that the unbinding of news is a bad thing. Even if we flip past the front page to get to sports, we still get a quick flash of what’s going on in the world. When we read about Lance Armstrong’s doping charges on Facebook, we miss out on that. But the unbinding of the anthology might actually result in a better understanding of the world – or at least the poetry world – around us. I’ll admit that I’m not quite ready to get rid of my Nortons yet – not the ones in my house or the ones on my syllabus. They’re reliable, and they include the big names I need for a survey, and I can always supplement anyway. They’re stable, and they don’t present the same problems of access that (outside of a computer-enabled classroom) would attend a syllabus that drew its texts from the Internet. And in part it’s because, when it comes to poetry, I fall somewhere between cheeseball and luddite and I want my students to be able to read outside without adjusting their screen tint. But it is worth considering how my students will find these poems if they don't hang on to their anthologies, and how my own syllabus and individual lessons might be informed by the way these websites juxtapose poems, encouraging conversations about and between poems and poets that the chronological arrangement of the anthology keeps firmly apart.

¹I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the amazing Paradise Lost Audiobook.

Navigating Digital Archives

Gray — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 19:54:37 +0000

Author:

Nicole Gray

Image Credit:

Michael Mandiberg

As a student, graduate or undergraduate, working with an archive can be daunting, and the effort doesn't necessarily get easier when the archive is digital. But as more digital archives become available, it's worth considering how they might be used as classroom resources. My students in "Banned Books and Novel Ideas" this semester are reading several books and authors that have affiliated digital archives, and figuring out how best to introduce them to the resources available at such sites is an ongoing challenge.

My first attempt was based on an assignment I had in a research methods class, which involved going to the physical archive to pursue a very specific, focused series of questions. When we were reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I went to Stephen Railton's Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture website and tried to think of questions that would not only lead my students to the particular parts of the archive that I wanted them to think about for class discussion, but also would get them curious enough to poke around for themselves and see what was available. Railton's website, like many other digital archives, offers a series of teaching options and pathways for students, but many of these seemed to require more time and outside reading than I wanted to spend in this case. In an effort to encourage in-class exploration, but not get them bogged down with reading, I created a new assignment. The first part asked them to navigate the interface in any way that made sense to them in order to answer a series of factual questions. The second part asked them to come up with a historical research question based on their reading of the book and the section headings on the archive, and describe how they might use the archive to pursue it.

The assignment generated productive engagement, but we ran out of time to talk about the answers, and I felt like the factual questions didn’t take us as far as they might have and some time could have been saved by providing a brief tour of the archive on the front end. For the next archival encounter, I had the students visit the online Walt Whitman Archive while we were reading selections from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I spent a few minutes at the beginning of class talking through the various sections of the archive, then set them to answering another set of questions. This time, I asked them to locate material related to the topic of the class (censorship: we’d talked about Anthony Comstock in previous sessions), to go through the images of Whitman and find their favorite, and talk about why they liked it, and to find three different versions of a poem – manuscript, periodical, and collection – and compare them. After they answered the questions, we spent some time discussing their answers.

Doing this at the beginning of class worked much better. The tour helped orient them as they answered the questions, and so they were able to do so more quickly. Students who finished with the assignment early poked around in other sections of the archive that I had shown them, and our discussion afterwards gave everyone the opportunity to talk about what they had found. We were able to compare photographs of Whitman and consider how he constructed his image visually, and how that compared to the way he constructs a poetic persona in his poetry. The last question, where we compared three versions of “The Dalliance of the Eagles,” was also productive. The variants my students discovered led into a discussion of some of the specifics of Whitman’s punctuation, word choice, and subject matter, and we were able to think about the (substantive, in this case) revisions between manuscript and print as a site of textual instability as well as one way to get at the meaning of the poem.

Next time, I might experiment with a more open-ended assignment, and I’ll give a few more tries before the semester is through, but it’s exciting to have the resources in class that allow students to explore the texts we’re reading and their surrogates in digital space.

Digital Romantics: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and "Radiant Textuality" in the classroom

Ptacek — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:38:20 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

Andrew @ epicdoesn'tbegintodescribe

I’m teaching E 314L: “Reading Poetry” this semester, with a fantastic set of students of all levels of proficiency who really like to dig into the big issues motivating our poems. Early in the semester when we read Donne and other metaphysical poets, our classroom discussions often coalesced around two or three centers of gravity for each poem. Though opinions and readings about what the poems are up to might be divergent, we could normally, as a class, agree on a few choice passages as the cruxes for making meaning.

For the past few weeks, however, coinciding with our reading of Coleridge and Wordsworth, our discussions have been full of wildly divergent readings, where even coming to a consensus about where the poem’s center of gravity is up for (often exhilarating) debate. Part of this, of course, is my students’ increased confidence in utilizing their close-reading skills and navigating emergent classroom relationships, as well as our focus on some longer texts. But sometimes it seems that they’re not even reading the same texts. And with good reason—they’re not.

I’ve tried assigning “works” (that is, novels, plays or poems) without assigning “texts” (specific editions) before, to mixed success, but this semester’s adventure into something close to Jerome McGann’s radiant textuality was the result of a few happy accidents. The first is that I ordered for the course, sight unseen, a version of Lyrical Ballads that combined a reputable academic publisher with the siren-song of affordability. But when the text arrived it rapidly became apparent to me that this particular version of the text didn’t work for my classroom needs, reprinting only the 1798 poems in their unrevised state, providing little introductory material, no bibliography, and no annotation to help curious students. A fine book for a graduate course, but for an introductory class it simply didn’t suit our needs.

The second happy accident was our good fortune to be using a DWRL classroom equipped with state-of-the-art technology, which meant that I could encourage students to ditch this text while easily disseminating pdfs through our class website. But a funny thing happened to those pdfs—while some students diligently printed out their packets and came to class with the traditional underlined and marked-up text, other students showed up with just laptops, iPads, even Kindles. It quickly became apparent, too, that not everyone was reading from the pdfs I’d posted: some students were simply grabbing the text online from a variety of resources. While this at first made my somewhat-compulsive inner bibliographer cringe at first, in the spirit of adventure I decided to play along, and even to encourage students to look at digital versions or editions of the poems. Overall I think the experience has been salutary, though not without a few pixelated pitfalls. What follows, then, is an initial report on the pleasures and pains of digital reading in the Romantic classroom.

Though McGann confidently argues in Radiant Textuality that physical archives are quickly being replaced by digital ones, in reality the process has been slower and less unilateral than theorists of the 1990s imagined. While there are great hypertext editions of poems here and here (largely overseen by McGann himself), most authors still haven’t received any kind of extended bibliographic treatment as digital texts, despite the obvious power of the internet to assist Anglo-American, and especially genetic and social-text editing. This means of course that caution has to be exercised about the accidentals—misspellings or misprints that creep in through transcription or by utilizing “faulty” editions. The Victorian Web’s “Tinteren Abbey,” for example, is a place unmarked on any map. But more than that, the web—or at least this iteration of browsers—levels out the distinctions between the various iterations of a text, as our class discovered when we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge’s poem, of course, exists in at least two quite different forms: the archaic ballad of 1798 and the much-revised poem published in 1834’s Sibylline Leaves. Over the course of 36 years Coleridge modernized the diction, added and removed a subtitle and argument, pruned the poem of some overt gothic material (the hand-of-glory sequence), and added those famous, inscrutable glosses. Online texts aren’t always particularly good at identifying which version one is reading—and the glosses pose a particular problem in a digital layout. For our class a serious downside to reading Ancient Mariner digitally was just this lack of identification, as students would read out line or point to passages that were missing, altered, or renumbered in other versions of the text. At the same time this pandemonium of texts allowed us to talk about revision and problems of “authorial intent” in concrete and specific ways.

But what about relatively stable texts, like “Tintern Abbey”? Our classroom discussion of the poem helped bring home to me the importance of context in constructing meaning. A student confronted with the version presented in the very fine The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry, replete with headnotes, author biography, and sound annotation confronts the poem in a very different context than a reader who finds it on, say, the Victorian Web. Even apart from the lamentable (if pardonable) misprint in the poem’s title, by encountering the poem on a website devoted to Victorian literature one gets a very different perspective on the poem’s content and influence. One sequences the poem next to its temporal contemporaries in the useful but arbitrary back-construction of “romanticism,” while the other puts the poem into a constellation that includes Sterne, Tennyson and Hardy—a no less arbitrary placement, but one that reveals different facets of the poem’s meaning and influence. Similarly, a reader who comes across Rime of the Ancient Mariner here can see the poem in dialogue not only with other poems by Coleridge (as in our in-class reading) but with contemporary poets across a wide range of categories.

In all, I’ve been pleased with our attempts to pursue poetry on both a physical and digital front. Though using unspecified digital texts of canonical poetry can cause a bit of confusion that takes precious class time to straighten out, at the same time it can help to break down the monolithic appearance of the canonical text by providing multiple avenues of access and context. Perusing the text online, or in a variety of formats, can help bring back the strangeness and the newness of great works of literature, helping students see them not as dusty urns on a shelf but a vital and living part of our culture, and making students new readers.

Encouraging Class Participation with Google Docs

Rachel Mazique — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 18:35:40 +0000

Author:

Rachel Mazique

Image Credit:

Salman. "Google Docs VS Microsoft Office Web Apps." Techtoggle. 15 July 2009. Web. Sept. 30 2012.

Classroom dynamics can vary widely from one group of students to the next. This fact has really struck home now that I’m teaching two sessions of Rhetoric and Writing: “Disability in Pop Culture.” I walk into both classes with the same lesson plans, with (one of) the same interpreters, and with the same kinds of technology available. Many variables are different; different buildings, different classroom space (in terms of size), one interpreter is different, different days, different time of day (although both take place in the afternoon).

However, the biggest difference is the group of students themselves. Both classes have a range of upper classmen with a few sophomores. One class has a good number of journalism majors, but both classes have students with a wide range of majors and educational backgrounds.

Because I assess students using The Learning Record, I know from their background information (interview and reflection), that many students in one class prefer to listen rather than speak when learning new ideas or grappling with new concepts. In the class that took about four weeks to open up and have a rolling discussion (or one that doesn’t require my constant prompting) many students are self-professed introverts. Now, because The Learning Record requires “outstanding participation in all course activities” for an “A” grade, the hesitation to participate in class discussions becomes a concern for those students who learn best by listening—or those who have a fear of speaking in class.

In order to have a class document of students’ questions and thoughts on their assigned reading, I planned an in-class activity in which students would write their questions on a class wiki page—for all to see. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, our course work is conducted almost entirely on the wiki (excluding class meetings, office hours, and required reading in the form of printed text). This class document would also serve as an informal work sample (in the language of The Learning Record) documenting evidence of their reflective learning and critical thinking processes. However, my original plan to use a wiki page for the activity did not go as planned, as PBWorks does not allow for more than one typist at a time.

This, however, became what my colleague, Cate Blouke, called a “happy accident in the classroom,” as I quickly checked to make sure that all students had a gmail account, then added a link to a Google Document titled “Questions …” to the wiki page I had intended students to write on. Google Docs does allow for multiple writers at once; students, by way of experimentation (first-time experience for everyone) developed their Digital Literacy as they quickly navigated this new format and learned how to save their own space on the document and personalize it with their preferred font, font size, and color.

Having students work on the Google Doc allows everyone to see each other’s questions; it allows me to monitor their progress without peering over everyone’s shoulder or walking around to quickly check computer screens. I can stay in one place and observe their writing process—with all the backspaces, highlighting, rewriting, pauses, and self-correcting that goes on. Google Docs also allows me to quickly intervene if a student is not quite following instructions. I also get a better idea of the time it takes students to write and can easily see when most students are done writing—as activity quiets down on the Google Doc. (Without this document, students may appear to be busily working online, but they may have jumped to a different web page or activity once completing the given task.) Having all their questions as a starting point also helps guide the discussion, and the document allows us to return to past questions that are not answered in one class. The digital archive functions as collective class memory; we will not forget because it is saved online.

In these first four weeks of the semester, after our first “happy accident,” we have used Google Documents three times. The first was for their questions on the reading, the second time was for a collaborative class resource page on instances of “disability” in pop culture, and our most recent encounter was for a quick workshop on their individual research questions.

As useful as the tool has been to me as an instructor facilitating learning and working to make the best use of our class time, what I’ve found most interesting have been the student Observations on the use of Google docs during in-class activities.

One student wrote,

“I noticed the class seems much more comfortable using technology to interact with each other. Also, all the questions that were written on the google doc, while similar, all offered a unique perspective on how people interpreted the readings. (digital literacy; Creativity, originality, imagination)”

Another wrote of his difficulty with using this new format and of his strategy for adapting to it,

“In class today while we were all brainstorming on the Google Doc, I observed that it was extremely difficult to type information on the page because it was bouncing all over the place with everyone typing at once. To solve this I typed my comments on a seprate word proccessor and copied them in. Digital Literacy &prior and emerging experience”

A third indicated that she liked being able to participate via Google Docs (I should note that this student does not generally speak up during in-class discussions):

“In class today we used a google document to express any questions or reflections we had about the readings we have been assigned to read outside of class. This type of class participation allowed me to write my own reflection and also allowed me to see what were my fellow classmates reflections and questions about the readings were as well. (Skills and Strategies, Independence;Digital Literacy)”

One observant and introverted student (who also puts good effort into pitching in when he can) noted that the digital format for class participation allows for greater “accessibility:”

“I noted that the majority of students are still shy and don't contribute much in discussion, myself included. I did notice that working on a Google Doc simultaneously allows for more easy and accessible sharing of ideas though. (Presentation, Knowledge + Understanding)”

All four of these observations came from the class that has (up until our most recent meeting) been generally quiet and reserved during discussions. The student dynamic in the other class—which is much more vocal—did not seem to view the use of the Google Doc as an alternative mode for participating or accessing class discussions. Their observations focused on the pragmatics of the Google doc (observations along the lines of: "my reading notes allowed me to remember my questions and thoughts on the readings, so I knew what to write on the Google doc;"and, "the collaborative resource on disability in pop culture allows us to see how disability really is everywhere—even if we haven’t noticed it on our own").

However, those two comments also tell me that the Google Document has a pedagogical value when used in the classroom. When asking students if they have any questions, few, if any, may speak up. Open-ended, on-the-spot questions often leave students speechless. On the other hand, when asking students to write their questions, they know they are being observed “on paper” so to speak, so they are much more inclined to generate a question to demonstrate that they have, in fact, completed their homework. Last, collaboration in online spaces allows students to “see” each other and to realize that everyone has something to contribute.

Finding Trial Transcripts Online and Exploring 18th-19th Century Crime Broadsides

Coulson — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:04:28 +0000

Author:

Doug Coulson

Image Credit:

William Hogarth

I’m teaching an upper-division rhetorical theory course about legal rhetoric in which I focus students on the rhetoric involved in adjudicating particular cases in dispute. The initial unit in the course focuses students on the rhetoric of narrative, memory, and proof surrounding factual disputes in particular cases. Although there are many examples of such discourse, the most classic example is in a legal trial. My goal in the unit is to illuminate certain common topics, or topoi, of forensic discourse as well as to illuminate the contingencies in factual disputes that create opportunities for persuasion. At the conclusion of the unit, the students write a 1,000-1,500 word paper in which they rhetorically analyze opposing arguments regarding an evidentiary controversy in a forensic dispute, which in the context of the course nearly always means a trial. The assignment specifically requires that in addition to a primary source for the arguments the paper analyzes, the paper must include a primary source of the evidence in dispute. This latter source typically includes trial exhibits such as photographs or video and/or the testimony of trial witnesses reflected in a trial transcript. Trial transcripts, however, can be difficult to locate and access.

As a result, toward the end of this unit I conduct an online research tutorial with my students in class designed to assist them in accessing trial transcripts and excerpts from such transcripts. In an electronic classroom in which each student has access to a computer with internet access, I first show students the location and search features of various online resources for trial discourse. One of the greatest sources for such discourse is the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection, which provides free online access to complete word-searchable trial transcripts from the most famous cases of one of America’s greatest trial lawyers. Two other great free online trial archives are the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, containing details regarding 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court, and Douglas Linder’s Famous Trials Site, which includes excerpted arguments, trial testimony, and exhibits from numerous famous trials. In addition, certain paid databases available through the University of Texas at Austin contain trial records, such as Hein Online’s World Trials Library and Gale’s Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926. I also point students toward the print volumes in the extensive Notable Trials Library series, many volumes of which contain extensive excerpts from the trial transcripts in a large number of famous trials, as well as other print sources for opening and closing arguments from famous trials.

As a conclusion to this online research workshop, I have students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides. Beyond teaching additional online research skills regarding legal rhetoric, the goals of this assignment are to further a discussion of the symbolic aspects of legal rhetoric, or how legal rhetoric operates not only to decide the outcomes of legal cases but to shape communal values and norms. To accomplish this, I have students conduct an in-class rhetorical analysis of the texts and images in the database. These materials describe crimes and the apprehension of criminals during the 18th-19th century when such information was widely disseminated in broadsides and public discourse regarding the investigation of crimes common. The assignment both reinforces the availability of many interesting forms of legal discourse online and generates engaging class discussion.

To begin the assignment, I introduce students to the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides. With students at their computers, I demonstrate the site's search features and discuss a couple of sample broadsides as a tutorial of the site. I inform students that their task is to isolate and analyze the ways in which norms and identity are rhetorically constructed in one of the broadsides from the site. The remainder of the class is then devoted to students conducting their own research and posting their broadsides along with a brief rhetorical analysis to a course blog to which they regularly post other assignments. The blog posts may then be discussed collectively as a class with or without requesting individual students to present on their broadsides and analysis. This assignment can be completed in a single class period or span two class periods, depending on the details of the assignment.

I don’t grade the assignment but use it as an encouragement to collectively explore and comment on some fascinating documents regarding the public rhetoric surrounding particular cases of crime. It's primarily designed to engage students in questions considered during the course and to facilitate class discussion. I've used this lesson plan with two classes and both groups of students found the broadsides and their rhetoric fascinating and enjoyed the assignment. Their contributions have been consistently engaged and insightful. The assignment not only provides a thought-provoking ending to what can sometimes be a tedious research tutorial, but has helped me to simultaneously teach online research skills, generate interest in the materials contained in online archives, and illuminate the cultural significance of forensic rhetoric beyond instrumental problem-solving motives.

Teaching with Early Modern Digital Archives

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:51:09 +0000

Author:

Brad Irish

Image Credit:

Kladcat

In the last three decades, our understanding of early modern literature and culture has been enriched by a renewed attention to data that might be called "archival." Because of the proliferation of digital repositories such as Early English Books online, scholars and teachers have increasing home access to resources previously restricted to on-site consultation. While such archival material is often incorporated into graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, there is also significant opportunity to employ it in the instruction of early-major and non-major literature students.

For teachers with access to EEBO (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), early modern printed documents provide an obvious way to supplement introductory class lectures and readings. (I routinely ask non-major students to read packets of "microtexts"—short, targeted selections from unedited early modern texts.) But in addition to such instructor-driven usage, I've had great success having students seek such data themselves. To conclude a unit on Hamlet, for example, I ask groups of students to brainstorm thematic clusters (revenge, ghosts, suicide, etc.) of contextual relevance; they employ these terms to search out EEBO documents that shed light on our understanding of the play. Initially, many students struggle to make sense of what they find—but the challenge is a productive one, and they ultimately seem to enjoy the experience of such detective work. The subsequent presentations and discussions enrich our collective understanding of the play, while exposing the class to a representative sampling of early modern documents. (For more on this lesson, see http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/old/content/eebo-show-and-tell.)

Though less widely available than EEBO, Gale/Cengage State Papers Online (http://gale.cengage.co.uk/state-papers-online-15091714.aspx)—a vast collection of manuscript documents from the early modern period—is a digital archive that offers similar pedagogical opportunities. Because of the difficulties of reading early modern manuscripts, the students' use of this database requires a much higher degree of instructor-mediation—but, when documents are properly vetted, groups of students can enjoy a similar (and amplified) detective experience by attempting to transcribe material of low-paleographical difficulty. For instructors without access to State Papers Online, many suitable manuscripts are freely available elsewhere on the internet.

The increasing digitalization of documents from the early modern period has been crucial to scholarly production. It can also help enliven our teaching, at any level of the curriculum.