Navigating Digital Archives

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

Author:

Nicole Gray

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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.

Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:35:03 +0000

Author:

Rachel Schneider

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DestinysChildVEVO

In order to improve my course design and teaching, I ask my students at each semester’s end for feedback on the assignments and course texts. When I reviewed their responses for last semester’s class, in which I taught an E314L class on Women’s Popular Genres, one text emerged as a favorite: the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women Part I.” I used the music video during the first and second class days to introduce students to formal, historical, and cultural reading practices. It did not surprise me to see them bring this up, as popular culture provides unique material for both rhetorical and literary analysis. The various advantages and disadvantages of the material, however, I intend here to further explain.

In this specific case, I agree with my students. Teaching “Independent Women Part I” helped me disrupt students’ expectations and invited them not only to view close reading but the song itself through new eyes. I showed them the video first with lyrics, inviting them to takes notes on anything they noticed in particular: the melodies, the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, the sets, etc. After an initial viewing, during which they also had the lyrics before them on paper, I asked them to talk about what they had observed.

The conversation that followed was wide-ranging: they not only closely read the material but also put it into larger musical and political contexts. They considered how the song’s lyrics and visuals responded to second- and third-wave feminism as well as the specific cultural experiences of African-American feminists. We analyzed how the auditory and visual elements modeled or engaged with these different “feminisms.” The students read the costumes and the performance in light of both the Charlie’s Angels movie the video promoted and the original 1970s television series. We also considered how the song’s rhyme schemes, verses, and bridge build and draw attention to various phrasings, and how lyrics like

“Question: how’d you like this knowledge that I brought
Braggin’ on that cash that he gave you is to front
If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt
Depend on no one else to give you what you want”

developed tone and invited readerly engagement with the text. While the song was familiar and fun, it was also not so recent that they didn’t struggle to reconstruct some of the cultural context (particularly the late-90s/early-00s “girl power” movement). And while we did not have time to read discussions of Beyoncé’s lyrics from pop feminism blog Jezebel, I gestured to it as an example of the connections between art and larger cultural questions.

This may have been so successful in part because, as I’ve previously described on viz, I’ve taught pop culture texts many times before. I’ve planned three classes—one on the Rhetoric of the Musical and two different versions of Women’s Popular Genres—that have all involved popular culture genres: musicals, novels, songs, or television shows. Through these experiences, I’ve learned about the unique challenges that such texts create. For example, teaching my students about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and other musicals in my Rhetoric of the Musical class allowed us to explore the question of how popular culture has commented on and presents arguments about America and “American values” since the genre’s origins in the 1920s. We were able to read and discuss Bruce Kirle’s analysis of Oklahoma!, which argues that the show attempted to persuade people against isolationist policies during World War II. However, the students struggled with accepting the arguments—they had difficulty seeing how something “silly” or “fun” like musicals could have any sort of cultural implications or intent. When teaching them Stacy Wolf’s essay on Wicked, they were even hostile to the arguments. Their own lack of expertise in music also often left them struggling to articulate their analysis of the material: in other words, while they could characterize the melody as “sad,” they couldn’t generally articulate why. Also, while teaching women’s popular genres meant it was easy to allow the students to write their final research papers on any subject they chose, it also meant they were inclined to work on texts that had not yet been included in critical conversations, like the television show The Vampire Diaries or Katy Perry’s music.

Like I tell my students about writing, teaching pop culture texts is a choice with both advantages and disadvantages. Students are easily interested in them, but sometimes lack critical vocabularies to explore them. Their utility also depends on the assignments for which they’re included. In short, I will always enjoy using Glee to teach kairos, but will be sure to provide them appropriate vocabulary to explore how the text performs kairotically.

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Navigating Digital Archives

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Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

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