Blogging Pedagogy - digital texts

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

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 11:27:20 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

Image Credit:

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. Far from being stodgy or leather-elbow’d, the scholars on the SHARP panel “Wormius in the Land of Tweets: Archival Studies, Textual Editing, and the Wiki-trained Undergraduate” showed off projects and classroom pedagogies for teaching students about scholarly genres and book history practices.

Because SHARP is the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, many of the academics on the panel discussed what kinds of digital editing projects their students had accomplished. The digital edition is a great place to teach all kinds of scholarly labor: researching textual histories, deciding on a copy-text, making editorial and style decisions, writing footnotes and scholarly introductions, locating and incorporating contextual documents and academic research to provide background, as well as considering how to address and direct their work for a particular kind of audience.

On one hand, Dr. Stephen Gregg of Bath Spa University showed off online scholarly editions of Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman and A Hymn to the Pillory that his students created. What’s nice to see is that Gregg’s students themselves considered questions of accessibility: how can more people access high-quality editions? What kinds of audiences should the text and notes be prepared for? His students chose online delivery systems for their texts and even considered how the coding itself is a separate kind of text. They considered how to remix the eighteenth-century page online: one student opted to preserve the catch-words while the other used hyperlinks for the notation system. Each text includes a critical apparatus to explain its methodology as well.

On the other hand, Dr. Emily Friedman of Auburn University had her students create a proposal for a new critical edition of a text. They examined first editions of various period texts and discussed and examined critical editions like Broadview’s edition of Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers to think about what an edition could include. Her students then produced PDFs with sample statements of editorial style, critical introductions, and contemporary textual elements like book reviews. They also designed cover illustrations for their editions and wrote reflection pieces on how the cover represented the book. Her Prezi shows not only pictures of the completed projects but also the students from the class who successfully won a research award for their work.

Interactions with physical books weren’t limited to research archives. Dr. Evan Davis of Hampden-Sydney College discussed how he taught students book history by asking them to take blog posts they had written for the class, revise them, then actually produce a physical book of them. As his course covered Gutenberg to Google, he forced students to embody a variety of experiences from book history, whether reading a book in different formats (iPad, Kindle, and book) or in different situations (by candlelight). What interested me in this was not only the consideration for how format and design affect the reading experience but also how students played around with the low/high tech concerns: one student printed his book with QR codes inside, so the reader could move from physical object to mobile browsing.

Finally, Wayne State University’s Dr. Lisa Maruca teaches the eighteenth century through media events like the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or the début of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Maruca then connected her concerns with public events with the students’ own public personas, encouraging them to choose a blogging platform like WordPress or Tumblr and develop their professional identity on the blog. Maruca got even the digitally resistant students thus to consider questions about design, intellectual property, and publicity through their own created persona, linking the past with the present.

As an eighteenth-century scholar myself who is likewise interested in increasing my students’ digital literacies alongside my own, joining the historical study of communication technology with how to conduct it in the present, such work is deeply inspiring. If you’d like to learn more about the kinds of ideas exchanged at the conference, feel free to delve into the Twitter archive created by Ben Pauley.

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.