Recent Comments in this Document
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I have to agree that I have a much harder time annotating digital texts than interacting on the margins of a physical copy.
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Polina Vinogradova
Ana, when you write “reject a negative identity,” do you mean negative self-view or view of themselves? It might be useful to clarify this as some identity scholars argue that we don’t have multiple identities, but rather multiple layers and aspects of our identities.
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Philippe Seminet
One further artifact that might fit the bill nicely with what you have provided below, even though it has been around for a decade or more, is the use of Second Life for language learning purposes, as this short piece in Omniglot attests: http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/secondlife.php
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Ana, you certainly make a clear connection between communicative competence and the availability of digital tools for language learning in paragraph 6. But I am wondering if it might be useful to redefine communicative competence here adding multiliteracies component (the ability to critically interpret and convey multimodal messages). There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here right now between the definition of communicative competence that language learning relies on and further discussion of resourcefulness and usefulness of digital tools. I think it would strengthen the argument.
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While I agree on the whole with the move beyond linguistic elements given the awesome technology available (great artifacts provided in this piece!), I do find problematic the notion that language-learning is not about grammar. While true for L1, I don’t see why you’d avoid explaining past tenses in L2 without referring to how it’s done in L1. Why not use that resource? Yes, the goal is communication, but grammar provides the shorthand whereby you can more readily communicate the desired meaning.
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Kathryn Tomasek
Hi Julia,
Thank you for including us as an example. Beyond that, I appreciate the variety of examples offered here, since they offer an idea of the range of possibilities with regard to disciplines and tools that might be used in curation assignments. I also appreciate the range of educational levels covered in the examples.
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John Martin
I could see this being taught alongside Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in a course devoted to the history of unseen women’s labor.
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Truett Cates
perhaps better than “pure linguistic” would be “simply morphological”. since there is no aspect of language not included in “linguistic.”
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This might also be paired with a visit from a Copyright Librarian or other staff member with special expertise in current copyright law, author’s rights, publisher agreements, etc., to allow students to put these discussions into a contemporary setting that might be relevant to those who wish to author or publish their own works.
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I’d be curious to hear more about how this complicating and questioning of the notion of “authorship” also impacts the notion of “authority.” This is the only paragraph that overtly mentions them together, but in moving away from the notion of the individual genius composing in isolation towards (or back to) more collective, collaborative, and even unintentional or multi-intentional forms of authorship, what are the implications for literary or interpretive authority?
Comments on the Pages
Hybrid (46 comments)
“There is an important way in which…” This can be deleted. If it weren’t important, it wouldn’t be stated, let alone the first sentence. “Way in which” is likely not needed, as the statement that follows is not overbroad.
“and for me”: Are all entries to be personal in this way?
Hybridity still hasn’t been defined, so one particular viewpoint on it seems premature.
If the first sentence were omitted, the focus would be on scholarly debates.
I like this distinction. As I’ve suggested before, the first sentence could be left out: the distinction that follows stands on its own very well.
This is a nice summary.
Again, the ideas and arguments are strong, and the personal perspective doesn’t add that much, unless the point of this kind of essay is to share personal experience.
Could something more be said about the role of the teacher? Since you discuss physical space and virtual place, where would the teacher be situated?
The elusion of easy or recognizable signification, I feel, formulates part of the digital experience. InThe Age of Earthquakes:A Guide to the Extreme Present by Basar and Coupland the realization of insignificant moments is rendered transient. “At the moment we don’t know which will triumph: the individual or the mob”(217). I see the term as transcendent; neither Japanese not American. This is a very good introduction. The fact that signification does not come readily is key and executed well.
The illusion of easy or recognizable signification, I feel, formulates part of the digital experience. InThe Age of Earthquakes:A Guide to the Extreme Present by Basar and Coupland the realization of insignificant moments is rendered transient. “At the moment we don’t know which will triumph: the individual or the mob”(217). I see the term as transcendent; neither Japanese not American. This is a very good introduction. The fact that signification does not come readily is key and executed well.
The author has not yet discussed the term “hybridity” and for stylistic reasons should be allowed to develop their argument prior to critical engagement. That being said, a level of meandering does seem to take place here that some editing could make sharper.
Why is that so powerful?
This is close to my research as well. Leotard’s The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le Temps 1988) states this notion of the posthuman in a manner that engages why it is important. This is a superficial summery that could use a little more precision. The role of interface is something that could be further developed.
Have a transition when introducing two authors or more.
Personally, I would like to see the author’s sense of “place” developed. Otherwise, a strong passage.
Quite true. I think it is important the addition of this is non-trivial, but produced by design. The idea of it being verified by classrooms is interesting.
Will MLA in-text citation guidelines will be followed or will endnotes suffice?
“For Kraidy, and for me, the term is…”
Is there a way to rephrase authorial agreement without “for me…”?
“the term is powerful exactly because it resists easy signification…”
It’s not clear from the citation inwhich ways the term is “powerful”.
How is “powerful” being used here?
And what does “easy signification” mean? What does “signification” mean? (no pun intended).
The citation gives a variety of examples of “hybridity” according Kraidy, isn’t this an example that description is possible, even if it includes arguably disparate items/concepts? In which way is Kraidy’s description not an “easy signification”? Can the author think of other types of “hybridity” not described by Kraidy?
Unpacking this would make the opening paragraph more meaningful rather than statements the reader is expected to agree with.
“In a broad sense, my own scholarly work is about the (sometimes wondrous, sometimes horrifying) relationship between bodies and technology. I’ve taught in various disciplines since 1999, including literature, rhetoric and composition, education, film, and new media. Thinking about how we occupy physical and increasingly digital spaces has been the thread that connects my work across these disciplines. In 2011, I founded Hybrid Pedagogy: a digital journal of learning, teaching, and technology.”
Is this paragraph really necessary? This can go in the author’s biography when the piece gets published. The paragraph could start with
“My hypothesis is that all learning is necessarily hybrid”,
and from there we would need how the author understand “hybridity”, even if the term is hard to define / conceptualise.
Do we need the implicit division between “physical self” and (we infer) “online selves”? Is there another way of referring to the issue without implying two types of different “selves”? (i.e. do any of the students learning online do not exist “physically”?).
“…my own thinking about…”
I’d reconsider what the object and focus of this article is. It is understood that the article represents the author’s position, unless a disagreement is clearly stated.
A discussion of both citations would be expected here… What next? And how do these positions relate to learning through different methods?
I agree this is a strong passage, where the issue at hand gets grounded.
We have moved from the question of “place” in paragraph 6 to the “social”. Both call for more unpacking, as well as terms like “asynchronous, onground, online, localized and dispersed”.
This came as a surprise, it was until I scrolled down that noticed there is a selection of resources. This could be mentioned from the start– so the readers knows better what to expect.
I completely missed what “FERPA” was from the previous paragraphs…
It is interesting that as examples of “hybridity” in pedagogy all examples are monolingual (unless I’m wrong)…
The selection and article is thought-provoking… wasn’t education always-already “hybrid”? Is there not being “front of the room” a condition sine-qua-non of hybridity, and is this kind of hybridity always online, always based on Web applications, and always assuming a given type of digital literacy and infrastructural and cultural affordances?
Can’t there be ‘flipped classrooms” which are not “hybrid” in the sense suggested in the article, and hybridity which is not based on digital media?
Interesting read; thanks for enabling open peer review for this piece.
As an editor I would check all of these resources are cited in-text, unless the editorial guidelines (my apologies as I have not seen them) may say something about that.
NB To clarify my previous comment the piece should ideally stand alone without having to refer to the whole collection or supplementary documents; hence my suggestion of referring to the selection itself from the start.
[Ugh, apologies for my own typos– wish I could edit my comments 😉 ]
This is an excellent definition of the term, a model for the other keywords in this collection. Given the previous comments, I wonder if this should appear earlier in the statement. Also, it might be helpful to distinguish “hybrid” from “interface” because they are treated in similar ways in both chapters.
This is wonderful and could also fit under the keyword “play.” In case you might find it useful, I have written about a similar role-playing blog assignment I’ve used and revised continually since 2005. The essay, “Digitizing Chaucerian Debate” was published in MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A recent version of this assignment adapted for an Arthurian literature course can be found on my blog, “The Roundtable.”
Could an assignment match the spirit of a book better than this? So great. A relevant resource for digital annotation is Annotation Studio, a social annotation platform designed specifically for humanities’ courses. Another, of course, is Genius, though I’m less comfortable advocating for this platform because of its emphasis on singular (“validated”) readings.
I see the point, but I think the personal honesty of it embodies part of the openness we value in DH
For me, that distinction is the key thing I see in Hybrid Pedagogy so I feel it is central to explaining what HP means
No, I very much like the personal tone in this paragraph, and in all these essays. There is a continuum from curiosity to stern faced academic objectivity, and these essays seem to me to sit at a more informal, personal point on that scale than dead academic writing. I think it’s of value for learners to see that, and it fits with the idea that the artefacts presented in the collection are not nailed down, but can be opened up,and refactored
As far as roles go, the Community of Inquiry model is useful here; in the book (elearning in the 21st century..) it becomes clear that they see a distinction between how a teacher designs a learner experience at a strategic level, and how it is delivered tactically while the course is live. See https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/
Kraidy’s catalog of the uses of the term might lead to the conclusion that it is suspect if applicable in so many ways. Perhaps it becomes the new “multicultural,” and we need to be careful not to use it like “lite” or “New! Improved!” Paragraph 6 gets into the insistence on “both-and” in your use of hybridity–that the differences will continue in play rather than collapsing into a blend. I would recommend a more urgent, upfront warning that the term can be diffuse and misused, and that easy mixing is not what you’re about. More that “powerful because…resists easy signification.”
I want to adapt this assignment right away! Note that Wikipedia’s own guidelines speak of “learning objectives,” and Adeline Koh undoubtedly played a leadership role in her Feminist Theory Seminar with the goals of improving conceptual skills, etc. I’m just riding on the point that resistance to hierarchy and open-ended goals are compatible with clear guidance and specific skills. Misleading above to overstate the rhizomatic.
This seems more likely than the fun Twitter v. Zombies game to “engage deeply” with literature, but here the goals and the tools seem possibly at odds. Let’s think about what Twitter gains and loses. The epigrammatic and iterative public sphere may be our new coffeehouse. But used by a community to discuss long-form discursive texts in “literary heritage,” it may not train in sustained reading of entire texts in the coherent longer form of an essay? Is skill in using Twitter automatically hybrid?
A really intriguing course with an artful exhibit.
“in both…but also”
I agree with Mike.
Nothing to add except praise for this excellent and interesting entry. I like the way you take the more typical use of “hybrid pedagogy” (a combination of online and face to face teaching) and expand it into a range of hybridities. Actually, perhaps that is the one feedback suggestion I would make is that deconstructive one that you might begin by describing the more expected usage and why you want to complicated it, what is served by making it much more complex.
Agreed, Ernesto, that this could certainly go in the bio. At this point, I don’t know that there’s a plan to have that kind of bio and we were encouraged to talk about our personal orientation to the keyword. As I read the other keywords, I find that incredibly valuable — makes me feel as though these aren’t just mere listicles, but a mix-tapes made for me by actual people that I trust.
These are meant to be very brief introductions — to keep the focus on the stuff being curated and not the curator. Hence there was a very specific word count that didn’t leave much room for unpacking. But, yes, I think the word “place” warrants at least another sentence, especially given the extensive literature on the distinction between “space” and “place,” both words I use throughout the intro. Thanks for your comments Ernesto and others. My brain has spun in several new direction. 🙂
Agreed. Even just a nod to how I’m using the word, even if there isn’t space for a full investigation. Honestly, I’m now thinking this might warrants its own keyword.
Would you suggest leading with the definition? I considered putting paragraph 4 of the curatorial statement right at the front. Ultimately, I decided it warranted a little more framing. But I’m not really attached to that decision.
Thanks so much for your comment here and elsewhere. Very useful as a data point. I would argue that pedagogy is intensely subjective and so I would be hesitant to strip the personal from mine or any of the other keynotes. In fact, that’s one of the things that drew me to this project. Many different teachers, pedagogues, educational technologists offering idiosyncratic introductions to a set of teaching materials, resources, explorations — like mix-tapes, as I say in another comment here. So, I wouldn’t want this to become a mere glossary or set of listicles.
But I’m thinking about the balance between the personal, the authoritative, and the function of these keywords as guides. Important to not let too much persona get in the way of the reader (and ultimately students) finding their own way through these examples (their own pedagogies inspired by them). So, thanks. I’ll keep tweaking that balance.
Interface (32 comments)
This is a rich discussion.
But the word “interface” is used in different ways without being foregrounded, so I get lost here about whether “interface” here is to mean “digital” or something broader. This paragraph wavers between the two.
This is also very rich.
But “pedagogical interfaces” is another sub-type–or is it?–and they are defined here as “spaces,” whereas the term and the notion of “boundary” above suggests a surface, rather than a space.
I see the movement from “replace” to supplement to “estrange.”
I don’t see the point about on-demand and STEM.
Then the exemplars are about physical interfaces. Where did “digital” go?
Typo: “phyisical.”
You end with classrooms, and the digital has disappeared.
Is “interface” being thought here in a way that supports both?
Like Edward, I am also confused about the use of the term “interface.” On the one hand, it seems to suggest the material interfaces that facilitate learning, which include books, candlelight, and computer screens. On the other, the emphasis on “classrooms” seems to suggest the environments for learning. It may be both, but I would also like to see “interface” more explicitly defined.
Hooray for this keyword! What great resources you have collected here.
One excellent recent discussion of interface can be found in Johanna Drucker’s Book Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production.
I think it does matter. This is not to discount the significance of learning through screens or other digital media. Students may indeed have learning experiences online that are as powerful as their in-class experiences, but these environments are different and these differences matter pedagogically. Given the earlier skepticism about online modules and the variety of interfaces presented here, I don’t think this is the impression you want to give.
I agree with Edward that the point about “on-demand” and STEM is not clear. Given the last sentence, I think you are trying to emphasize the time for reflection as central to humanist inquiry.
I absolutely adore this activity. In fact, I think you should consider including a longer quote from Cordell’s blog here, especially this part: “An ecology of media, including candlelight, parchment, and calligraphic standards circumscribed and defined the labor of early book making, which in turn helped determine what books were made (or saved). And that labor is also important as labor: bookmaking was a laborious process, an embodied process. The books through which we understand early periods are not simply those that were written, but instead those that survived, and often because they were mediated and remediated through a series of scribes, formats, materials, and, later, typesetters and editors.”
I love everything about this, especially the emphasis on concision. One of my graduate students, who is also a high school teacher in the Boston area, has a similar Twitter assignment with an emphasis on responding to literature. He asks students to “live-tweet” Hamlet, focusing particularly on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Some of his materials can be found here: http://engl611-mueller.wikispaces.umb.edu/Allen. If you want more information, don’t hesitate to let me know (alex.mueller@umb.edu).
Ed and Alex — thank you for these observations. Your idea Ed to foreground the multiple implications of “interface” in a classroom setting is a good one. After the close of the comments period (3 August) I will add a sentence further defining interface. We curators must adhere to strict word count specifications, so perhaps one solution is to replace the Cramer and Fuller definition with one that does a bit more definitional work specific to the humanities setting.
Like Alex, I admire Johanna Drucker’s several articles on interface. I’ll revisit her “Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory” (Culture Machine, vol. 12, 2011) to see if there’s a moment in that essay that unpacks a bit more the tension between Interface’s traditional work of “task-oriented efficiency” (1) and the more exploratory, metacritical uses of interface in the pedagogical works I feature here.
Hi Ed — please see below a response I wrote to both you and Alex. Thank you for reading and offering your insight!
Thank you, Alex!
I respectfully disagree, Ed. In suggesting “walls and Windows” as a shorthand to evoke both physical and virtual portals to learning, my conclusion moves us from thinking about Interface as a setting — the digital/virtual dyad — to the sorts of mentoring and emulation that digital makes possible. I’d wished this short entry (short b/c tight word count specifications) to move us from a conception of Interface as a setting or meeting point to one that glimpses the sort of mentoring new interfaces facilitate.
Alex, thanks. I’ll need to clarify my position that these assignments excel because interface is an object of critical interrogation. What I object to are templatized OL learning environments that present the interface as if it were invisible or neutral.
A way to get closer to a definition of interface and the importance of the term could be to reference to some of the literature on interface culture, eg Steven Johnson’s classic “Interface Culture”, or some of the works pointed at here: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/aug/3/interface-aesthetics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rhizome-fp+%28Rhizome+%3E+Front+Page%29&utm_content=FaceBook
Depending on how research-based it should be I could also suggest some of my own work 😉 e.g. The Interface Realism article from Post-modern culture, the introduction to our book Interface Criticism or this manifesto: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/manifesto-post-digital-interface-criticism
I also find this great! I wonder if it would be worth to focus explicitly alsoon actual textual and literary interfaces such as eg ebooks, the www page, social media, books (including special and strange books such as the mentioned House of Love, small press books, post-digital books,etc)? Eg to discuss what the interface and digitisation does to our literary culture? Anyway it’s a great way to perform material reading in practice!
Such a great point about the term classroom as a heuristic for understanding the changing locii and dimensions of instruction. For me, the chemistry definition seems less useful than extending that (already implicit) insight to the term “interface”: itself a heuristic, useful for focusing on and understanding the changing ways we encounter students “digitally,” and one that doesn’t preclude face-to-face, blended, or other modes of instruction, as this rightly points out.
I agree with the comments above that the concept of interface wavers a bit in this paragraph. Rather than define it against the physical classroom or Cramer and Fuller’s point, you might feel empowered to be a bit bolder and stake a claim on the interface itself as a heuristic, as Paul suggests above. The wonderful resources that you’ve gathered here indicate that screens and keyboards aren’t the only material sites for tech-inflected learning; pencils and sonnets, too, can be interfaces between us and knowledge, or us and the past. Being a bit bolder here would enable you to jettison the physical v digital history in the second sentence (which I think, strictly speaking, isn’t true — there’s a long history of correspondence courses by mail).
Søren, thank you for reading my chapter and for suggesting other resources. Indeed, your work on the technical, social, sensory and political dimensions of interface has been some of my core reading for years now. The depth of your work on interface stretches back to Max Headroom and its imitation of a computational interface to fascinating work on the physical mechanics of HCI, such as the button.
Alas, strict word limits inhibit the sort of survey that you suggest. But it’s a good idea to revisit Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture (1997), one of the first books to talk about interface as a move from efficiency to “art form.” Julia Flanders develops that idea much further (into the humanist metacritical reading of interface as site of “productive unease”) in her “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship” (2009).
Tx again, Søren, for your influential work and the time you gave to this.
Thank you, Paul. I taught “How Not to Read a Victorian Novel” in a master’s class (“Digital Aesthetics”) at the University of Bergen this last spring (2015). Your essay was a marvelous springboard for an in-class lab. I taught your essay with Stephen Ramsay’s Reading Machines (2011). Wordle exercises and other techniques for visualizing word frequency quickly gave students sufficient experience to grok Stephen’s word frequency analysis in Woolf’s The Waves, for example. The pairing let students apprehend immediately the differences between distant and close reading.
Thanks, Alex! There should be some kind of wiki where Twitter exercises are gathered. Such a good lab for making free indirect discourse.
I believe there’s a typo here, and that the title should read, “How to Not Read a Victorian Novel” (which implies something different: not reading at all vs. reading deficiently).
Word Counts? In a digital work? Well, cheat: write a longer essays on interfaces on your blog, and reference it for those who,want to go deeper into what is an important concept
I love the metaphors here, and when Jesse quoted them also. Of course there’s more to say, as it does matter how the classroom is structured, as you say in your first sentence. You’re interested in the effects of these material and affective differences.
The orientation and keyword are strong, and each of the chosen exhibits is interesting as well as promising for pedagogy; nice variety. I appreciated the Puerto Rican life writing for broadening horizons. The curator’s comments introducing the assignments could be honed; at times they are condensed or scattered, more like blog posts themselves. In what way does each example innovate regarding a more explicitly defined set of meanings of this particular keyword?
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing this here . I think specifically this artifact illustrates your last paragraph especially “the interfaces of human meaning making” that trespasses windows and Windows…
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I find your skepticism towards templatized online classroom modules interesting. The alternative you propose is useful, however, could you make a concrete example of how this could be done? It seems hard to successfully achieve.
Defining the parameters of “digital exploration” might be useful as that can be construed as rather open-ended.
I would argue that Burgess’ students are not “translating” Shakespearean sonnets, but are remediating them.
The “on-demand” and STEM disciplines are pertinent to your argument. Though, as the previous commentators have mentioned, perhaps expanding that a bit would help clarify why this is an interesting aspect of electronic literature that digital or cyberspace can claim exclusively.
Additionally, if space permits, establishing a difference between digital and electronic literature would help with clarity and in differentiating your terms
The hypothetical questions you raise are an excellent means of engaging a critical debate without over burdening your word count. I don’t think the purpose of your term is to have the absolute final answers, but raise these arguments in a compelling way. In a shifting media environment and in an evolving literary ecology, these questions are basically at the heart of your topic.
You are right though, you have limited space to talk about such a weighted term. “Human meaning-making” is a nice, taut means of describing interfaces after a relatively short build-up. Well done.
This is an excellent way of introducing the complexities of Danielewski’s debut novel. I agree that it is indeed overly ambitious to assign House of Leaves to an introductory literary course. However, for seniors or MA students, it is more appropriate. The use of collage is another portal of entry into House of Leaves, in particular the “remastered full-color edition.”
Failure (29 comments)
Here is a good example of how an attempt to be gender inclusive actually reads as a gender bias. Sentence two makes it sound as though only females can or will fail. For the sake of clarity, it should be re-written as “Although no one wants to be a failure in one’s work, …”.
That’s a good catch, Andrew. Many thanks for including a suggestion to rewrite it as well.
Maybe failure is a “feature” of learning and teaching rather than a prerequisite to them?
I love the idea of showing these different categories that highlight multidimensional aspects of failure as tackled in Digital Pedagogy.
I coincidentally read this #Fail blogpost by Audrey Watters on the same day I was reading your curation and as wondering if there is a category missing? Possibly systemic failure or such? Where something outside of the technology itself, and outside of the teachers and learners is making digital pedagogy projects fail? It also has elements of #4 where students are “breaking” the system in order to learn or get more out of the tech. But I think the project itself was a fail. And I don’t know how to categorize it with your current categories.
I wonder if it might be helpful to somewhere discuss this from a more critical perspective in the sense that talk of “learning from failure” and resilience and such affects different students differently. Yes, we should all learn from failure, but failing can be much harder for certain students to get up from because they are under different sets of social constraints and have different amounts of cultural/social capital. And so when we encourage students to fail in a class, their capacity to take those risks will differ, and there is a psychological impact that may be difficult to undo?
Would it be too much to mention how digital narratives like video games are often built on repeated failure — Holemvik showed that nicely in his 2015 CCCC presentation. Further, perhaps, are narratives such as Inanimate Alice which also utilize failure and incorporate it as a structural element. I’m suggesting that critically thinking about failure and preparing students for it may be a digital literacy skill itself which your tiers so amply work through in various ways.
I agree that it may not be a prerequisite. Take this situation: I watch a trainer/teacher teach a group successfully, I watch them teach a different group using a different way. I analyze and discuss the difference and how it relates to different situations and or different learners’ needs. I’ve learned without failing. The teacher I observed also may or may not have failed in the process of learning how to teach the two different groups.
It is not about generating students to fail, but rather providing opportunities to fail (essential to learning), where students can critique and analyze the methodologies they are embracing.
I agree with John Hansen’s comment above. Yes, we know that failure is vital to learning, but some discussion of the degrees of failure, the conditions under which students fail (low stakes, immediate feedback, opportunities to try again), and the pedagogical research on “productive failure” (Manu Kapur’s work is key for this concept) might provide important context for your development of these tiers along with the artifacts you include below as examples of the tiers.
“taught the concepts conservative nature of both history and the web.” unclear
I share the essay’s optimism on the productive uses of failure. At the same time one can’t wish away the fact that sometimes failure can indeed be debilitating. Perhaps some of the secondary literature you cite (e.g. Carr) address this at length. But at least some acknowledgment of it here would, I think, be in order. On a related point, I like the four orders of failure that you outline. Here it seems there is a progression of sorts between what one might crudely call “objective” failures and “subjective” failures — (I’m not entirely happy with these terms but I can’t think of anything better at the moment). What I mean is that at Failure level 1 the monitor either turns on or it doesn’t; the program either functions as expected or it hangs up; At Failure Level 4 (what you label Epistemological), one can always redefine the what is considered “success” in the first place so that “failure” is defined in a relational sense. So here it is not a question of failed or not failed. It is more a question of relative failures and successes.
In any case, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this catch. It should perhaps read “The assignment successfully taught the conservative nature of both the discipline of history and the web.”
Should probably be edited to read “But what caught his surprise was the reluctance of the history majors in his class (who made up a minority) to participate.“
Brooks’s affiliation is missing. It’s Oklahoma State University.
Warnick’s affiliation is missing. It’s Virginia Tech.
Graham’s name doesn’t link to his website, as the other entries do on the site. It should be to http://electricarchaeology.ca/. His affiliation is also missing. It is Carleton University.
I think that this is a good distinction and maybe a better way of putting it. Thanks for the suggestion!
Hi Brian and Quinn,
I wonder whether incorporating language about process and/or iteration might be useful to the framework you set up in this curatorial statement? A process-oriented mindset is certainly implicit in much of what you say—e.g., in paragraph 4 when you note that failure may position students/teachers to “better teach the concept to others”—and perhaps making it explicit would be useful to readers.
I also wonder whether you might acknowledge the uneven risks inherent in calling attention to and even celebrating failure. A willingness to be transparent about classroom successes and failures is tougher if one is in a precarious employment situation, or subject to negative bias from students/peers/etc.
Probably need to update Quinn’s title / affiliation given his new job.
Here is the feedback that we received at the MLA 2016 session on the keyword.
Do we talk in any way about the affective response to failure? Especially in connection to people of different genders or different classes?
Is failure in the sciences an important touchstone? Could we discuss journals of negative results?
To what degree is something like a “proof of concept” aligned with the idea of failure?
There is a certain celebration of failure in our current zeitgeist. But imagine a first-generation college student who doesn’t see failure in the same light. Is there a way of talking about the same things that we have identified here but through the lens of “success”?
What sort of religious discourse depends on narratives of failure / salvation?
Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure could be an interesting touchstone.
There is no discussion in the keyword about failure in the context of language learning, which often has failure built into it.
N.B. I don’t think that many (any?) of the people offering feedback had actually read the keyword. Instead, this is based on what they were hearing me say in the session.
Thank you very much for the suggestion!
Thank you very much for the suggestion!
I think that systemic failures are different from what we’re talking about here. Pedagogy operates within a system of education, of course, but an individual pedagogy strikes me as something that can be separated from that system. Put another way, when the LAUSD’s iPad initiative falls apart, that might impact my teaching but not in a way that is in my ability to control it. The teachers in LA didn’t choose the technology, they had no ability to make the iPads show up when the problems started.
I think we’re concerned here with things that are more under the control of an individual. In the case of Tier 1, you could simply choose a different technology, one that works better. Within a systemic failure such as the one Watters discusses, you lack agency.
Thanks for these references and for the suggestion!
We received similar feedback to this effect at the MLA session in Austin and we will think about how to incorporate references / caveats into our keyword. Alas, we have a word count to hit, so figuring out how to do all of this is part of the trick!
Thanks, Katina. In paragraph 7 we call the third tier “a corollary to a peer review workshop within a process-based writing pedagogy.” Are you suggesting we incorporate more of this language throughout the entry?
We got some comments at our MLA session about the different risks / affective response that students of different genders, class backgrounds, etc. might experience when confronted with an ethos of failure. But thinking about it from the standpoint of an instructor is also helpful. Thanks for that!
Thanks for these thoughts, Gaurav, and for the articulation of “objective” and “subjective” failures.
We continue to hear feedback about the affective experience of failure, and we will certainly be working something into the final version to that end.
Remix (17 comments)
“Scholars point to…” What scholars? The author might be partially referring to common knowledge in the field, but if authorities are mentioned, they should be credited.
Perhaps the author should make reference to the practice of “scratching” that was popular in the 1970’s which the Jazz musician, Herbie Hancock, exhibited on the 1983 record Rockit.
The author makes a huge solipsistic leap including “…audio, video, text, or some combination of these…” in the argument. If this is to be included in the definition of “remix” then the origins of this sort of recontextualizing go back much further. Visually, one could argue that this begins with Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists. This continues with the Surrealists. Max Ernst is well known for his collages.
This is only a fraction of the argument, and one would almost need a law degree to exhaustively address the legal issues. In the United States, freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment. The courts have over the years limited the right if free speech slightly. Examples of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment include: libel, slander, and copyright infringement.
As this applies to “remix”, it should be noted that copyright infringement occasionally becomes an issue. The Sugarhill Gang lifted a bassline from Queen’s song “Another One Bites the Dust”, and MC Hammer made an out of court settlement with Rick James regarding MCHammer’s use of the bassline from Rick James’s song “Brick House”. DJ Shadow, who used Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in several of his songs (the fair use clause likely applied), had to make special arrangements prior to releasing one of his albums so as to avoid litigation.
The statement that begins, “Remix challenges…” overreaches its argument. Perhaps “The ease of using technology to infringe on copyrights challenges our cultural beliefs about authorship and ownership;….” might clarify the argument.
Eliot’s The Wasteland is a great example, but isn’t that what literary are currently doing when they critique Eliot’s poem?
The Flows of Reading multi-media digital book is shown in the body of the article with a screenshot, but the work is absent from the bibliography. While the digital book itself interestingly supports the author’s argument, the abstract of the chapter titled “Appropriation and Remixing” is not entirely accurate. The links found in that chapter between say, Star Trek and Tale of Two Cities, are very thin. The mentions of Shakespeare’s appropriations in that chapter are accurate but slanted and amount to truisms.
Moby Dick is an interesting example of the arguments that this author is making, but more accurate examples from literature would include: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. In fact, James Joyce wrote in a letter to George Antheil in 1931, “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.”
The Curatorial Statement is most helpful. Attention is paid to both value and possible problems with remixing. The Statement made me want to explore the artifacts included and inspired me to try remixing in my classes.
Further elaboration in the comments will help with this excellent syllabus.
The syllabus here is very informative and easy to appreciate. More comments on its contents would be most helpful.
The more I read, the more need I feel for pedagogical suggestions. The Curator could have a link to a page where people new to these ideas could go for help so they could apply remixing to their own classes and generate their own ideas based on what was suggested.
This site is amazing–but overwhelming without help.
The copy of the artifact is not available
Probably because the artifact is not available, the paragraph is much more pedagogically helpful than a mer syllabus, which will be accompanied by an instructor’s comments. This paragraph was truly helpful.
This artifact is impressive and a great inpiration.
This artifact took its own sweet time cutting to the chase, but when the chase happened, it was very informative and interesting. I especially enjoyed the sound clip.
Again a very helpful artifact. The questions asked were provoking interesting reactions and making the viewer question preconceived notions. Best artifact so far, I think because it asked questions of the viewer without too much guidance–find your own answer. This is the best basis for creating something yourself.
Hi — The editors along with the MLA are in the process of figuring out how to deposit copies of all artifacts into CORE. You’ll find that many of the artifacts don’t have actual copies available right now. Please bear with us while we figure out how to make available every artifact (along with appropriately-obtained permissions!). That will probably not occur until the final publication in early 2017.
In the meantime, you (and anyone else) are welcome to peruse the available artifacts in our GitHub repository, with this particular artifact being one of them: https://github.com/curateteaching/digitalpedagogy/blob/master/keywords/files/remix-Audio-Collage-Assignment.pdf
Thank you for all of your cogent comments to this keyword.
Very necessary document!
I made this comment on ¶ 41 in error and cannot seem to erase… Very necessary document! pertains to ¶ 31
This documentary should be the first artifact in the remix section. It prepares the mind for all that follows.
Collaboration (17 comments)
Small grammatical item–parallelism in sentence 2, “improving” and “to equip,”shifts from gerund to infinitive.
Content is great.
Please note that the site was collaboratively created with Alex Layne. Thanks!
First bullet has a parallelism problem: “…we sought to include projects that foreground, and/or by including collaborators that embody”
Seems like the logic here calls for “include projects that foreground … and/or collaborators that embody…”
Thanks! Noted.
Thanks for catching this.
Thanks so much for pointing this out! We’ll make sure to give Alex Layne credit for co-creating this terrific site.
In a few more sentences, I would like to see you build on the idea of “collaboration by difference” and foreground your own definitional use of this concept. What are the stakes and import of this concept for all of you?
Seconded.
It would also be great to see more about the varieties of collaboration, and where the line (if there is a line) is drawn in terms of whether something is or isn’t collaboration. For instance, is the giving and receiving of feedback on a single-authored work a form of collaboration?
I like this way of understanding collaboration as a coming together across difference.
In my experience with collaboration, there are as also challenges with regard to unclear and/or varied expectations and differences in terms of how and what kinds of labor are valued. This might be something to address. Also, are there best practices for collaboration both in- and outside of the classroom?
I wonder if it would be helpful to include an explanation of how these values were chosen and why they were important to you all as teachers, collaborators, etc.
Hi team. Love this essay. One idea: you’re really approaching this from a humanities model. It would really help out social scientists to see a paragraph or two on participatory action research. I can point you towards key folks on this if you’re interested–just email. JJG
Hi Jack, great suggestion. The volume as a whole has a humanities focus but participatory action research would be great to include. We’ll see if we can work something in.
Thank you both! We’ll work on drawing this out a bit more.
I’d like to see more framing in this paragraph to allow your position to be more visible as distinct from the thinkers you’re building on. There is especially room for this kind of signposting at the end of the paragraph. I’d encourage a sentence following the Bruffee quotation—here you could re-articulate your stance, allowing for a clearer transition into what exactly “these approaches” are (for you) at the start of the following paragraph.
When you say, “digital tools can streamline collaboration,” I ask: why is there the need for this? What’s your implicit argument about collaboration that’s underlying the use of this verb? I’d like to see this implicit argument made more explicit.
Since there are three collaborators on this piece, I’d be interested to hear from all three of you in this paragraph. I’d also like to see some synthesis between the examples from the different collaborators and also at the end of the paragraph as a way to transition to the next point.
Rhetoric (16 comments)
Given that there are three or four substantial paragraphs defining rhetoric without modifiers, it might be nice to have more discussion about what visual and digital rhetoric might be or how they are discussed beyond the qualification ‘it’s not just web design.’
I find the part about design being applied as a form of rhetoric a little unclear. Is it meant as the design of the sentences and their use? or design in general? Are we discussing the design of the table itself, the design of the placement, the design of the argument or the design of the word choice in said argument?
I think that, since so far the general concept of rhetoric is being discussed, a specification between its orality and literacy should be tackled. Is the author focusing on the orality of rhetoric, the presentation style in different fields or the transfer of this on paper?
All of the above really. There’s a bit more on this at Eyman & Ball (2015) in Composition Studies, but I usually go back to Buchanan’s earlier connecting of rhetoric and design:
Buchanan, Richard. “Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice.” Design Issues 2.1 (1985): 4-22.
(perhaps this could be a footnote, or I could add a paragraph on this if there is room to do so)
I’m focusing on rhetoric as theory and method, which can be applied to speech and performance (the medium of delivery that was the focus of much classical rhetoric), or to print (including document design), or to texts (which include print, video, audio, interaction, links, etc.). I think one key point is that rhetoric is both analytic and productive — and it can be applied to any form of communication.
Good idea – I’ll see if I can add a brief definition of each variant (although I think there really should be separate entries for each one).
I appreciate the comments! I’m replying as they come in so that I can pull those responses and layer in during the revision process (so please don’t read these as arguments against the comments, which is not my intent).
In my teaching experience, undergraduates bring into the classroom an everyday, American understanding of the word, rhetoric, which they understand as a synonym for “lies, falsehoods, or cunning manipulation of language.” I’ve found it useful and important to discuss this common usage first, before moving on to these meanings. It might be useful for other teachers if this document addressed this, if only very briefly.
Good point – my understanding of the audience for this project is teachers, who I would hope would already understand rhetoric as a field and not a pejorative, but a note that in teaching rhetoric this is a useful starting put would serve that audience as well.
I like how the artifacts are labeled according to which “rhetoric” provides the focus: classical, visual, digital — one of the challenges I’m having with some of these “keyword” essays, the curatorial notes, is I’m finding them difficult to navigate. The organizing of the artifacts here, the organization of the “Praxis” entry — these are models of clarity, models for making this material easy to move around in and use.
Janine, can you be more specific about “navigation?” Do you mean the structure of each keyword or the layout or the actual digital navigation? do labels need to be applied to identify artifacts? or is that the curatorial statement needs to be linked better to the artifacts?
Putting this comment here because I’m not sure where else to put it…
This chapter raised an interesting question for me: are the keywords intended to gather resources related to the keyword itself (as here), or resources that foster the practice of the keyword (as in most of the others posted so far)? There’s not a strong difference between those two, and maybe it doesn’t need to be worked out (I’ve already learned a lot from each authors’ resources, regardless!) — but some authors seem to interpret the keyword more widely than others.
The “once again” in the opening sentence of this paragraph feels strange to me. I think many will look to the mid-late 1980’s as a time when the field, then conceived through Robert Connor’s leadership as “Composition-Rhetoric.” Honestly, the confusion over our field’s name is so frustrating; it nearly defines the field. I am glad that a lot of Kairos editors and contributors, along with many in our field generally use “composition” because it’s clean, simple. But still … if you’re going to nod to that “once again,” it feels right to explain it historically (through Connors, or others working around that time). Alternatively, since you’ve already indicated that rhetoric features as central to a liberal arts education, maybe you may simply refer back to that broad overview language? So, something like, “In the field of composition, so central to a liberal arts education, the teaching of rhetoric features prominently as an approach to teaching writing and elemental skill at attending to audience, purpose, and context.”
Obviously, you’re not setting up a binary as though The 2 choices were “visual rhetoric” OR “document design,” but the “whether” points in that direction. Omit and revise?
This is a terrific project and will prove to be a very useful resource. You are indeed brave to take on “rhetoric” as a keyword. I might push a bit on the boundaries of the definition insofar as it seems totally linked to designed communication, argumentation, and persuasion. While those are central, the definition might be expanded to touch on identification as another facet or corollary. So, basically Burke. I realize the immense absurdity of saying “so, basically Burke,” and this may be wandering too far from the audience and purpose of the project, but I thought I’d make the suggestion.
[…] Figure 6. Screenshot from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities […]
Description (16 comments)
Your entire advisory board is American.
I know the keywords are being posted in batches, but it would be interesting to see the whole list. I’d like to know what keywords will be covered even as I’m waiting for all the content to be filled in.
Oops: never mind. Found the list!
Are we saying here that composition, writing etc are not part of DH? Sure looks like it!
Perhaps worth asking here (as well as in paragraph 7) about audience/users for this collection: many will be MLA members who teach literature and would like to know how to integrate digital humanities into their disciplines, through undergrad and grad courses, but who are not focused on “teaching technology.” This introduction seems here to collapse a lot into “teaching technology” or digital pedagogy, and humanists might want to clarify to all audiences that there is a range of advanced research with technology that has less to do with the technical side of how the course is run, apart from the kinds of assignments and student products that are afforded in digital research. I’ve heard deans at various institutions confuse digital humanities with wired classrooms and MOOCs.
Good review of the “literature” on this topic, and convincing need for this online collection with extensive pedagogical examples–and again, it’s not co-extensive with the circumstances of Rhetoric and Composition or Computers and Writing.
[…] Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, a “collection of downloadable, reusable, and remixable pedagogical artifacts,” invites feedback on its first batch of artifacts, which are organized by keyword: […]
Not only that, but all of the contributors (to date) are based at US institutions…
“Preservation” is not a neutral critical act. As such, I’m intrigued to know more about this “new way”. How, for instance, do the editors/contributors propose to avoid the danger of “fossilizing” the “syllabi, assignments, projects, results, assessment strategies” being collected/curated?
It’s perhaps a little unfair to critique Digital Humanities Pedagogy for privileging “reflective essays over the everyday artifacts and resources of teaching and learning”, since the decision not to focus on specific resources and artifacts was intentional, and, I assume, made for the same reason that the present collection is structured around “keywords” – that is, to facilitate a productive degree of abstraction. The goal was to privilege principles and practices over specific texts, tools, software/hardware configurations and the like, since these date quicker than the underlying methodological/theoretical questions they were designed to address at any given point in time.
Would a collection of “everyday artifacts and resources of teaching and learning” have been more desirable than “reflective essays”? I’m grappling with this question as I read through the essays in the present collection. Is abstraction of structure enough? Is sufficient reflection provided to ensure that the curated artifacts and resources are accessible and relevant? Is the result not simply to curate a series of snapshots of how (aspects of) digital humanities are being taught at this particular moment in time?
For example, could someone with no experience of digital text analysis read Natalie M. Houston’s chapter on “text analysis” and come away with anything more than a selection of relevant (at time of writing) links to articles and syllabi from 2011–15?
*US should read “North American”.
I am surprised to see The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (jitpedagogy.org) missing from this lit review. For the past five years, JITP has been at the forefront of scholarly publishing in digital pedagogy across disciplines. Matt Gold, an editor of this project, is a founding member of the editorial collective.
JITP is mentioned in paragraph 8.
Contextualize “new way of preserving” a bit more.
I assume that by “new way of preserving syllabi, assignments, projects, results, assessment strategies, and experiments that complement and extend the growing body of resources” the editors are referring to digital archives (containing both theoretical reflections and teaching materials specific to different disciplines) that instructors can easily access and benefit from/contribute to. Is this correct?
This is very exciting! MLA is moving forward to keep up with the incredible speed and diverse epistemologies currently used by the “cybernetic minds” that our students bring into the classroom.
From 2016 MLA discussions on DH it was clear that we need to generate dialogue across disciplines (including non-traditional interlocutors, such as IT technicians, graphic designers, video and audio producers) without whose collaborative input DH would not be possible. Overall, very exciting.
It would be wonderful if access to such artifacts for digital pedagogy are made easily accessible by a visual-oriented design, thus, opening way to visually-intuitive searches. Jameson foresaw this cultural shift toward “a predominantly visual or aural” cultural production (Postmodernism, 38) as early as 1991. We can acknowledge the power of the visual and the aural in our époque, however, the challenge seems to still dwell on how to theoretically elaborate (and create) from the visual and the aural thinking vis-a-vis the written word.
Archive (14 comments)
I find the use of the term ‘archival material’, followed by ‘a rare early edition’, somewhat jarring.
Perhaps rephrase simply as ‘an archive’, as you explain the differences between collections and a more technical definition of archives in para6?
I think you are talking about curation, whether it be as an archivist, librarian or museum curator. The focus in paras 4 – 6 is on archival methodologies.
Make Curation your topic, and then you can discuss different methodologies, appraisal, selection, exhibition and display. Discuss content and object.
I agree that the general focus seems to be curation, and I found the original organization and title a bit misleading until I read enough to clarify priorities and subordinate parts. Otherwise, I appreciate the complexity of all you have considered here.
I love the first sentence here.
I really like the way you open the curatorial statement with “wonder.” At the same time, it may be useful to shift some of this paragraph earlier in the statement so that readers have a clearer sense from the outset of how you’re understanding “archives.”
This is so great. Re: the last sentence, I’m thinking back to last week, which I spent at the Schlesinger archive, and I’m reminded of how sometimes it’s the *ephemera* and not the Literary that can be the most enchanting & surprising.
I’m not convinced that trying to flip the question of whether digital collections lose materiality into an assertion that they put it into relief makes sense here. The examples that follow focus more on textual studies than on material studies. Part of the confusion might be the elision from “materiality” to “material culture studies”: the questions of the actors and location of reading might perhaps be cultural studies, but they do not appear, from how you’ve presented it, to be connected to the materiality of the texts.
The relationship between the materiality of texts and digital objects is complex; since it’s not a primary focus of this exploration, I would cut it rather than oversimplify or misrepresent it.
I agree with the other commenters that it is very jarring to encounter “rare early edition of a canonical novel” as the first example of an archival material. Unless you’re talking about an author’s archives, such an object would more normally be described as a rare book, not an archival object. (See my overall comment on thinking through “archive” and other keyword possibilities.)
I like that you refer to the SAA’s Code of Ethics. But it highlights for me that the second activity you refer to here–“as when the topical focus of a digital collection reinforces or challenges traditional ways of studying literary history”–is not really the activity of an archivist, but of a curator.
What is being described here sounds a lot more like curatorial actions rather than those of an archivist–it’s about gathering and displaying a narrative out of a collections of materials (which might or might not be an archive).
Like the other commenters, I don’t feel like the keyword “archive” and the essay match: the essay is less about recognizable archival practice and more about interacting with old texts, whether online or on paper.
It might help to move the definition of “archive” up to the start of the essay; clearly stating at the top that the authors were using “archive” not in its formal definition but in a vernacular sense would have prevented some of my initial confusions.
But I would also encourage rethinking the decision to use “archive” merely as a collection of old books and manuscripts (what a lot of libraries refer to as “special collections materials”). Archives have a specific theory of practice and thinking about the choices that go into preserving objects in order to document an institution’s or individual’s history opens up a lot of pedagogical questions. What does thinking as an archivist mean when it comes to selecting materials for posterity? What sort of decisions & implicit cultural values do we see in the work of past archivists? Those are different engagements with intellectual history than wondering and transcribing.
Should reworking the essay to give it a more formally archival focus not happen, I would encourage the editors and authors to find a different keyword. “Curation” is one possibility, although with that keyword one might imagine being able to find information about data curation. Another keyword might be “Special Collections”, although if that is chosen, it would be nice to see some examples that focus more specifically on physical bibliography and engagement with hands-on explorations of rare books and manuscripts.
We appreciate these perspectives on terminology–specifically, our use of “archive” and how it relates to linked terms like “curation” and “special collections.”
These questions touch on an ongoing debate within the archives community–professional archivists as well as those who use archives–that could be described roughly as a debate about broad vs. specific uses of the word “archive,” which often correspond to symbolic vs. functional uses. Certainly, there are pros and cons to both kinds of uses. We have opted for a broad and more symbolic use here–ie, a use that embraces many kinds of materials and many kinds of collections, beyond those that officially and literally function as archives. This symbolic use is most famously employed, of course, in Derrida’s Archive Fever (which is about books, memories, and email, among other kinds of records) but it goes back at least to the 17th century (see Oxford English Dictionary entry for “archive”). This type of use has been widely adopted within the humanities and also accords with more vernacular uses of the term. While “archive” is subject to the same kind of dilution through over-use as, say, “curation”–see, for an expression of concern about the former’s use and meaning, William Maher’s 1997 Presidential Address to the Society of American Archivists, cited in the SAA glossary definition of “archive”–the broad use of “archive” seems to us most appropriate in the particular context of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, which is aimed at teachers in the humanities from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, in a variety of roles, who have different kinds of access to special collections, archives, and digital collections. We fully recognize that our use may not be the best use in a different context. And we have made every effort to ensure that, despite our broad use of a term that is central to a particular professional identity, we are not contributing here to the unfortunate but long-standing academic practice of ignoring or erasing archival labor and expertise.
We are thinking about how best to represent these debates about terminology within this collection’s pedagogical framework–by discussing the value of opening up this debate in the classroom itself, for example. It might be interesting to find another forum beyond this comments section in which to continue this conversation about the contexts and stakes of different uses of “archive” and related terms such as “curation” and “special collections.”
Regarding “curation” specifically: we designed the sequence of subtitles in our statement–“wonder,” “mediation,” and “curation”–to suggest both independent activities that teachers may undertake with humanities students as well as a possible staged series of activities. In other words, sometimes in practice all you’ll be able to do with archival materials in a classroom is introduce them, in order to encourage curiosity; sometimes you’ll be able to build assignments or whole courses around them. Some of our commenters suggest that we have substituted “curate” for “archive”; others perceive that the emphasis of our statement seems to bend more towards “curation” (also used in a broad sense in our piece, to include a spectrum of practices regarding inclusion, exclusion, and organization). We are very mindful of the power of pedagogical activities focused on curation–when students analyze collections from the perspective of how they were assembled, for example, or when they themselves assemble archival collections and exhibitions–to bring to the fore many of the issues that we imagine teachers may want to address when using archives in the classroom. We will consider as we revise how to ameliorate the perception that we focus more on curation than wonder and mediation (because, in fact, we see them as inter-related and equally important). More generally, we’ll think about how to make our approach to these terms clearer throughout the statement.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. The relationships between different material instantiations of texts, especially as they cross and recombine media forms, are indeed complex and worthy of attention (we were thinking about work by Matt Kirschenbaum, N. Katherine Hayles, Bolter & Grusin, and others). We do want to keep the issue of materiality central here, not only because it becomes increasingly important in the digital environment, but also because we have found it to be intellectually rich and stimulating in pedagogical contexts–students respond to the materiality of texts in ways that open up a wide range of questions. We have both found, for example, that it is incredibly productive to mine that frisson of (mis)recognition that occurs when students encounter a text they’ve been able to touch and see in person remediated in an online collection. We do move in this paragraph quickly from materiality to a wider textual studies context; in revision, we’ll work on how to better signal these moves.
The questions you raise in paragraph 3 are fascinating, and we think are exactly the kinds of questions that arise when teachers encourage students to understand archives as constructed/constructing histories through the materials selected and preserved. We take up some of these issues–the complications of selecting for posterity and the cultural values implicit in archivists’ actions–at later points in this piece (see the paragraph below about “value-laden actions” and our inclusion of the “Your House or School in 100 Years” exercise). With our ten objects, we tried to select activities and examples that will prompt class discussion about how and why archival records and collections are created, who creates them, and what gets left out. We are thinking through how to make such issues more explicit.
Community (14 comments)
Given the collaborative authorship of the piece, could you clarify whose teaching perspective is featured in these two paragraphs?
Honored that you feature HASTAC here! For examples of how it might be effectively used for a class, see this group (a Computer Science Ethics class): https://www.hastac.org/groups/computer-science-ethics, or Scholarly Voices, which focuses specifically on undergraduates: https://www.hastac.org/groups/scholarly-voices.
I just wanted to comment on how well written this is! Miranda Joseph is always the first scholar I think of when I hear “community,” and I love how you nuance her work.
I’m also glad that HASTAC is included here, especially because it has provided a community for so many who feel marginalized in academia. As someone who does some behind-the-scenes stuff with HASTAC, I wonder if there is some way to nod to all of the deliberate labor that goes into these community-building efforts, whether it’s planning the annual conference, publicizing events, or creating groups so that like-minded people can find one another.
I love this into. Well said
I love this distinction between virtual/digital communities and traditional ones defined by geography or “born into”ness
My problem with this paragraph is that you haven’t engaged yet with a critical view of community, and you are now treating it as a “good” thing even though we have not yet unpacked it and defined it. This paragraph makes total sense, but does not follow from your earlier critiques of the term
I would love more details on how community is built in this particular instance
I wonder if this particular project is a convergence of the digital/geographic divide in community?
I am not sure i understand why citizenship scholarship skews to sciences? Maybe i don’t understand the term “citizenship scholarship”?
It’s not clear to me the mechanisms for community building here. I suppose someone could participate by transcribing stuff and never interacting with others?
Also happy to see HASTAC here. I find this online community of much more general interest than the ones above and would have liked to see it mentioned earlier, if possible? The other before it are very specific and of interest to very narrowly specialist fields
I like this example for connecting a digital community for analyzing a historical community
This is again a beautiful example of offline and online community supporting each other.
Text Analysis (12 comments)
It’s very kind of you to include my assignment in your keyword. It appears that the em-dashes have been left out of this quotation, however. It should read: “we might not learn anything earth shattering—or even anything—by taking this approach.”
Though literature is not my field, Digital Tools: Sherlock Holmes’s London as a topic modeling assignment was truly inspirational. I looked at what students had posted to their blogs and how they recommended specific software or video tools for outstanding visual effects. One student showed maps of Sherlock’s London and pointed out an apparent mistake made by Doyle. Thank you for sharing this with your readers.
I wonder whether a similar assignment based on Daniel Levine’s Hyde could be crafted. This novel describes the comings and goings of Hyde.
Perhaps add a bullet point about preparing or processing texts in order to make them manipulatable by algorithms and to select features for analysis. Since this is about 80% of the work and a crucial interpretive step, it would be a shame to elide it.
This paragraph is very clear about a complex problem: the plural and messy genealogies of digitally-assisted “reading” or “text analysis.” It’s tempting to collapse all these things under one umbrella; I appreciate the way the paragraph teases them apart, acknowledging in particular that it might not be a story that entirely fits into any one discipline.
This assignment promotes the use of a proprietary (.com) annotation software. Even if it is free (for the moment) to use, such .com tools are subject to changes in platform and delivery, and there are other, better open source and open access annotation services to promote for digital annotation assignments. The nonprofit organization hypothes.is offers everything that a.nnotate does, and perhaps one of the university-level assignments featured in its Educator Resources might be mentioned here, at least as an alternative to the .com resource. See https://hypothes.is/ and https://hypothes.is/teacher-resource-guide/ .
hyper link on “WordHoard” is incorrect, given as a string of several links:
http://wordhoard.northwestern.edu/userman/index.html%7D,%20%5BTapor%5D(http://www.tapor.ca/),%20%5BWordSeer%5D(http://wordseer.berkeley.edu/),%20%5BVoyeur%5D(http://voyant-tools.org/),%20and%20%5BMonk%5D(http://monk.library.illinois.edu/)
which obviously doesn’t work!
Strong, clear statement. In my experience, text analysis also serves as a—or the—primary way that people understand DH. It might be worth acknowledging that perceived primacy.
In teasing out the nuances of humanities research, it might make sense to offer additional categories–not just distant reading versus literary close reading–but perhaps also an acknowledgement of reader response theories, theories of “writerly” texts, etc. This would provide additional context for later discussions of projects that ask “students to critically debate the subjectivity of critical interpretation” (para. 35).
This is a great, careful walkthrough of this important argument. I might suggest a revision to “tools only make it easier” — as was commented above, here’s a chance to underscore the difficult work (with which you’re all too familiar) of computational text analysis. Might also clarify that it “tools make it easier to address” those aspects of textuality which are computationally tractable. Defining/discovering what is computationally tractable is an exciting piece of the work, too.
Oops — I meant for this comment to be attached to paragraph 5 (above).
Where should the parentheses close in the first sentence? The reference to one of five tools suggests that the WordHoard exercise should be introduced as one example.
The curatorial statement nicely frames key issues in text analysis, and you’ve selected a terrific set of resources. I’d suggest briefly explaining the criteria for selection. Out of all the resources on text analysis, what made these stand out?
Poetry (11 comments)
To stay consistent with the plural usage of “programs” in this paragraph, I suggest changing “curriculum” (singular) to “curricula” (plural).
I can see we’re going to have to fight this out: I also have Zach’s Twitter bot assignment on my own keyword (“Play”—coming out with the next batch of keywords). If you’re already including Zach’s, maybe I should switch over to Allison Parrish’s just-released alternative. Allison’s spreadsheet method tweets from a pre-established list of text (like, every word in the English language).
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It is indeed a wonder. Your description is spot on, too.
I love your framing here, Chuck.
I don’t know that your comment on marketable skills adds much to your statement; you might consider removing it and just starting this sentence with “It is worth arguing that…”. You’re setting up a strong case for the importance of being able to teach complex material in fluid ways, and your framing is driven by poetic inquiry and pedagogy. I would keep the focus there. Getting into how these skills *are* in fact transferrable to many other professional environments is definitely possible, but may be beyond the scope of this particular text.
So glad to see Joanna’s terrific project featured!
Agreed. Thank you!
Thank you!
I wonder if deleting the parenthetical there would solve the problem via tone. But I see your point: maybe just have the sentence begin with some version of “It is worth arguing” or “It is worth highlighting…”
Note: need to update so that Scholars’ Lab is mentioned.
We duel at dawn.
I’m sure it’s okay for a resource to appear more than once…maybe? Not everyone will visit the same keywords, so maybe a little more exposure of the resource is good?
Storytelling (11 comments)
Nothing in the rubric about the visual channel? Given all the curated artifacts, it’s surprising that the visual is absent.
In addition to the work of selecting, representing, examining, and responding to stories, story production is the preoccupation of at least some of these fields mentioned (some of which straddle the humanities and humanistic social sciences). In this sense digital storytelling has helped make the production of stories more accessible to a wider range of humanities practice.
This last point–on constructing the classroom space as zone of collaboration–might be expanded to consider digital storytelling as pedagogical practice that centers student voice and in particular, is effective in centering voices often unheard or marginalized within the institutions of schooling. See Glynda Hull’s research page for any number of publications addressing this topic as undergraduates at UC Berkeley join Oakland community youth in digital storytelling activities after school.
As an example of this possibility, see Glynda Hull and Amy Storaniuolo project, Space2Cre8
In education and in wider society. Consider Lissa Soep’s work at Youth Radio in Oakland, in which digital storytelling (in the form of radio stories) is a form of participatory political action.
Perhaps worth noting here that Creative Commons licensing and Fair Use best practices have also expanded possibilities for digital storytelling.
It would be fair to mention Joe Lambert here as catalyzing that project. As well, in tracing the history of digital storytelling through the CDS curriculum, it might also be noted that it was (and remains) a curriculum organized around “7 Steps” and include those steps. Beyond the formalized curriculum, we also see growing out of CDS an “ethics of digital storytelling” that centers the personal narrative.
while remaining heavily focused on the process: script writing, storyboarding, and story circles.
Is there a place in your entry to point to the wider interest in the intersections of digital storytelling and digital mapping? I’m thinking here of storymapping, and the particular approach of embedding stories spatially in digital maps to explore and construct narratives that frame a sense of place.
The broader project within which the Macalester Stories were produced is here, if anyone is curious about seeing other campuses doing similar work.: First in our Families
The broader project in which these Macalester projects were produced is at First in Our Families, if people are interesting in other campuses work with first gen students and digital storytelling.
Open (10 comments)
This statement, while rhetorical, is perhaps more of a literal threat than the author realizes. (See the books by Renee Pittman.)
As a Democrat, someone who doesn’t believe that market forces should be allowed to go completely unregulated, I think this paragraph should be rethought. It comes across as naive and muddled.
Sentence 2: Re-capture a system dominated by market forces through interventions in favor of openness?
In the traditional paradigm of open societies vs. closed societies, it seems the open societies were always market driven. So “re-capture” is the wrong word.
An example from real life that the author is not familiar and hopefully is helpful: In the early days of the Internet (circa 1992), there was an international chess server (ICS). This was built by many engineers from around the globe in their spare time. The engineers were unpaid, but they wanted to use the Internet as a way to play chess and chat. The source code was open, chess was their hobby. The Berlin Wall had come down. One of the engineers, the person who claimed to have started the website thanked the engineers for all their hard work and promptly made the chess server a for pay service. He claimed he was just “Beta testing” the server and intended it to be a commercial site all along. He claimed to be mystified and baffled that people were building his infrastructure, generously, without pay. There was a backlash of anger, and he was forced to make some concessions, offering many features for free without pay. My point as it relates to openness: the capitalist in the story was essentially acting as a pirate stealing code that took years to build. This is the business model that, unregulated, could become a normal practice. This is different from the “re-capturing” that you mention in your essay. Very often business people will talk about the content provided for free on the web, and they look for ways to “harness” it.
I hope this comment is helpful to you.
Hi Benjamin,
Thank you for pointing out that it may not be correct to posit open as being in complete opposition to the market. The point I am trying to make, which is Yochai Benchler’s, is that there are alternatives to the market and bureacracy, a sort of third way that is exemplified by efforts like wikipedia and linux. In the revision, I’ll see if I can make that point more explicitly. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks so much for including my assignment! The most recent version is at http://www.briancroxall.net/s15dh/assignments/building-a-map-of-mrs-dalloway/. I don’t know if there’s a reason to go with the 2014 version of the assignment over the 2015 version. I’ll let you be the judge of that!
My affiliation has also changed to Brown University of late.
Just a quick copy edit: 8 lines up from the bottom of the paragraph: the creation _of_ an architecture….
And do you really want to split that infinitive in the next to last line?
Thank you very much for using this assignment as an example, Mike.
Another little copy edit: term papers? (4 lines up from the bottom)
mark up?
I noticed that your descriptions of the artifacts, you emphasize “the promises…of open digital pedagogy” more than the potential “challenges and problems.”
How is this evident in the artifacts you have chosen?
Access (9 comments)
The problems stated are important; thinking outside one’s own “box” is valuable. The approach to this keyword is fascinating to me, and the goals are clearly stated. I look forward to the artifacts.
A wonderful artifact! I am going to write my administration; I have felt uncomfortable with our statement for quite some time.
This artifact was an eye-opener. I have never taught an on-line class and have been hesitant because I didn’t know how to address exactly these problems. It is not only students with disabilities that need these strategies. I have talked to several non-learning-disabled students, who have complained about on-line classes for reasons now explained to me. Thank you for this.
This site is a goldmine of information, simply and clearly communicated, and draws attention to many necessary things to think about. The links provided shine. This is a recipe for developing a great website.
Helpful.
Not very helpful. And the typos on p. 1 turned me off.
One of the best practices for accessibility, as outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, is to display URLs as linked text, not the raw URLs with its slashes, colons, underscores, and the like. A seeing impaired individual using screen reading software like JAWS encountering the URL would have to endure a long and incomprehensible series of words, letters, and punctuation, none of which would actually inform the person what the link goes to or is about. This will become even more apparent if functions like JAWS quick keys are used. One function pulls the URLs from a document and list them in a dialog box. Here the context of the URL is lost and the only clue the person has is the link text itself. The tells the seeing impaired person very little about what the link is or where it goes to.
WCAG 2.0 covers this in section 2.4: Navigation.
2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context): The purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. (Level A)
2.4.9 Link Purpose (Link Only): A mechanism is available to allow the purpose of each link to be identified from link text alone, except where the purpose of the link would be ambiguous to users in general. (Level AAA)
For a more user friendly explanation, see WebAIM’s page on Links and Hypertext
It would be great if the keyword page on access and accessibility followed the best accessibility practices.
With the variety of teaching methods available to us these days and the fact that students have individual preferences for types of class meetings, we clearly can make a course accessible in more than one format at the same time. If, for example, I am teaching my Spanish literature course and some students cannot attend due to conflicting schedules or even a disabilty that prevents attendance, I can display the course in any format I want on-line. If a student cannot hear, I can direct them to the visual exercises, if one other cannot see, I can direct them to the audio exercises and if, in fact, they can do neither one, I would want to know what system uses the sense of touch to communicate the words. Yet, assistive technology is not always an answer for these people. The digital world may still be cutting out a percentage of the population that is too disabled to access it. In my case, for learning foreign language, those who can hear have the advantage even over those who can see and so we should support assistive technology on the auditory level more than any other. A course in History, for example, can be taught on-line without any form of audio if need be, but language is more effectively taught with that feature. We need to think in terms of how to effectively teach in each subject area to provide tha best level of accessibility.
Thank you for your comment, Nancy. Did you want to see something added to this entry in terms of your comments or were you making a general statement about digital and accessibility?
Blogging (9 comments)
This is so helpful. When I assigned individual blog entries in my composition course the result was grading chaos. I despaired and eventually used the blog tool provided in my institution’s Blackboard Learn interface. While it was private and made grading easier, these blogs did not allow students to play with design and really make the blog their own. Crowther’s idea for a student generated blog digest solves that problem, but I would be interested in how others found a creative solution to the blogging dilemma.
This whole approach has me worried, probably because I teach English and stress “writing in the profession.”
The bullying aspect is a real concern. I find–at least for my purposes–that structured peer review will give students a safer environment. But I am looking forward to learning more.
This artifact strikes me as incredibly unhelpful. The last assignment says “comment, but you won’t be able to do it well, as you don’t know the material.” I would leave the class.
This artifact is helpful, well organized, and gives access to interesting links. A good presentation of what DH can do.
Clear, well-thought-out assignments.
Very helpful artifact. The concept and student work shared makes it doable to create a similar set of tasks in almost any class.
I like the straightforwardness of these assignments. I am tempted to incorporate some of these ideas in my next semester’s classes.
The openness and possibility for interaction among students make this artifact interesting and provoke me to try this out.
I love the assessment criteria here. Humor and precision, what a combo!
Code (8 comments)
Why is it necessary to learn something other than coding by learning to code? I argue (as did Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg in Dynamic Personal Media) that coding is a new literacy, allowing us to express thoughts in ways that other media do not. Do we ask “What else should someone be learning when they learn to read and write in textual language?”
It’s sufficient reason to learn to code in order to communicate in new ways. It’s reasonable to ask what ideas can be communicated in code that can’t be communicated in any other way.
Michael Mateas has a terrific essay about Alan Perlis’s call for everyone on campus to learn to code, from 1962. Perlis argues that learning to code allows us to study process, which is not possible in any other way, and that the automated execution of process creates new domains of inquiry like computational science, engineering, and journalism.
A couple of other reasons that I discuss in my book Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: Research on Computing for Everyone.
We live in a computational world. We tell students to study physics because they live in a physical world, biology because they live in a living world, chemistry because they live in a chemical world. We learn computer science to gain insight into our world.
Code has a history. Code is inseparable from the programming language in which it’s written, and the programming language has a complex history of influences. One of the best papers describing this interplay is Alan Kay’s History of Smalltalk.
Code has economic value. Just as it was valuable to be literate when most of the world was not, and numerate before businesses had accountants, it’s valuable to know code and to be able to bring it to a code illiterate world.
Way, way too long-winded. Occasionally funny, but only occasionally. The “lesson” gets lost in verbiage.
Doesn’t this artifact belong under “gender” rather than code?
This is most interesting. More than the above, because it is grounded in something specific. And what it brings to the table is varied and valuable.
I love the description of this expansive pedagogy, and agree that it’s something to which the humanities can contribute. But some of it seems more about the materiality of machines than code itself. Perhaps Kirschenbaum’s work (e.g., Mechanisms) could connect the two a bit more closely. How is a pedagogy of code different from any other kind of critical media studies? Or is it? To me, perhaps a closer analogue would be in thinking about algorithms and the way they structure our information feeds. Work by Tarleton Gillespie and Safiya Noble comes to mind here.
This is a really interesting artifact, and I like the pedagogical suggestion for imagining creative possibilities in the study of code. I found it a bit confusing following the link since it’s all attributed to someone named Tunny, and some aspects of that site are pretty dated or broken. This interview with Zach Blas helped me to understand his Trans-Coder project better than the site itself: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/aug/18/interview-with-zach-blas/ Perhaps it would be kind to readers to link to this interview in this description.
I’d second Mark Guzdial’s suggestion of excellent references in terms of learning coding *as* coding. He’s right that we rarely need to make the argument that writing or literacy is important to learn. My read on Lauren Klein’s paragraph is a little different though: it’s not about learning coding to accomplish something else, but instead: what does it mean to learn code? Particularly in the humanities, which may feel like its treading on CS turf by teaching code. We may not have to argue for *why* we teach writing, but we (here I mean writing teachers such as myself) are constantly having to justify what kind of writing we’re teaching: to students, accreditors, deans, dept heads, even ourselves. What is the value of the 5P essay (not much)? What about the personal essay? Does writing teach us a way of thinking (which some say)? etc etc etc. In her next paragraph, I think Klein makes that “devil’s in the details” argument clearer.
Praxis (8 comments)
This is really fantastic work. I have been wondering recently about the REF here in the UK (Research Excellence Framework) — whether and how we might incorporate digital pedagogy and communities as part of the assessment process concerning what constitutes “research excellence” — particularly in the humanities. How might we integrate the “digital fingerprint” of our own work into an assessment of research excellence?
Thanks!
April Pierce, University of Oxford
I really appreciate the clarity of this statement. The authors’ pedagogical stance is clearly articulated, as is the rationale for curatorial decisions. Maybe I’m just more “praxis”-minded, rather than theory-minded. I find this entry to be really valuable.
I appreciate the inclusion of an explicit rationale here. It may help to have a bit more of this in all of the keyword essays.
I love the inclusion of Janet Stephens here; it helps to ground “praxis” in a real-world example of how disciplinary knowledge-formation and boundaries are shifting. The authors might consider taking it out of parentheses and including a few other brief examples.
There’s a lurking dualism here that might make it seem as if the skills of reading and writing and the curation of a past dominated by the codex are at odds with training for the 21st century. You yourselves suggest that praxis theorizes. You might add here something like ” process of making and theoretical reflection on methods as these have adapted over time.”
Agree with Whitney!
“Importance” is getting overworked. A small point ’bout diction.
Exactly!
Gaming (8 comments)
Here’s the link to this post: https://www.hastac.org/blogs/twelsh/2010/10/26/how-not-teach-video-games
I would consider either leaving out gamification or treating it separately. Gamification is frequently the creation of some kind of rewards system on top of something that isn’t a game. So in the next paragraph, you can have a use of gamification that isn’t “play”. This isn’t meant to trash gamification as there are good examples. Jane McGonigal had real world examples in her book, and I’ve been a fan of Bard’s “Reacting to the Past”.
If you do decide to keep it, maybe make clear you’re referring to gamification examples that result in an actual game.
I like you’re list of challenges, and I’ll add a few more.
What each student experiences in a game will vary depending on choices they make in the game. That can make discussions more difficult as students don’t share the common experience they would have with a reading or film. Of course, the professor may have not had the same experiences as well.
Some students will resent the introduction of a game. For them this may signal a lack or seriousness or clarity on how they’re being assessed.
Many games are extremely intensive with a single game running into the hundreds of hours. For commercial games, it’s a selling point. There’s also a long learning curve. It can be hard to work into an already full syllabus.
Other artifacts:
Ed Webb’s essay on using Civilization V and creating historical scenarios. http://www.academiccommons.org/2014/07/23/learning-together-with-games-civilization-and-empire/ Here are the descriptions of the mods created by the students, http://blogs.dickinson.edu/edtech/2014/11/04/civ-5-mod-colonization-of-africa-historical-scenario/ and http://blogs.dickinson.edu/edtech/2015/01/23/civ-5-mod-western-world-in-1492-historical-scenario/
It was part of this issue, my essay was really just a list of games for higher ed, http://www.academiccommons.org/games-in-education/
Sites with games:
http://www.gamesforchange.org/
https://magicspellstudios.itch.io/ (University of Rochester)
Commercial video games are designed for people with two hands. Not all of my students have two hands.
I strongly dislike the word “gaming” in the present context and would prefer that the keyword be changed to something like “gameplay,” “gameplaying,” “video games,” or “video and analog games.”
“Gaming” has long been a euphemism for commercial gambling.
“Gaming” in the context of “gaming the system” or “gaming out a conclusion” tends to connote using a rules system rather than working within a rules system. While this subversive impulse is often useful in a classroom context (and with humanities students, often hard to avoid), it does not reflect the wide scope of human interaction with rules sets that Dr. Phillips describes in the Curatorial Statement or demonstrates with the Artifacts.
Most importantly, “Gaming” and “Gamer” have been tainted by #GamerGate in such a way that I find it very hard to refer to “gaming” (or “gamers”) in a classroom context without the noisome freight of misogyny, fear, and toxic privilege. I find I can no longer in good conscience refer to “gamers” as a non-inflammatory term to describe people who play video games, for the same reason that I can’t use “bikers” to refer to all people who ride motorcycles.
I would urge Dr. Phillips and the editors to reconsider including “gaming” as a keyword in this worthy project.
There is an English problem here, in that we have too few words available to describe too many things. The Swedes are fortunate enough to have two words in this conceptual space: spel and lek. The former means to participate in a rule-defined activity; to play a game. The latter means to be playful, to pretend, to frolic–a verb much more aligned with Dr. Sample’s keyword. How, then, to express this concept of spel, which reflects the “structured play” definition of gaming put forth by Dr. Phillips. Perhaps the simplest solution is merely “Game” or “Games.” Change the gerund to a simple noun.
Link to the .PDF at “Copy of the Artifact” seems broken. I got a “page not found” error.
When I click on the Source URL, I get a “This site can’t provide a secure connection” error. Tried two different browsers. Same result. Maybe that’s my school network security?
It is. I can access metrac.org on my mobile.
Labor (8 comments)
I was wondering if you could discuss the rights of the student to opt out of participating, especially as it concerns the creation of an online identity that they may not wish to cultivate.
Link to Memoranda of Understanding seems to no longer be working.
I love the image of the “spectre of labor”. I wonder if the “seance” here is about both making visible and giving voice, since the latter is what I associate with this kind of conjuring. If so, what are these voices saying or asking for beyond recognition? For scholars, recognition also comes with rewards that are both tangible and intangible (publication credit, promotion & tenure, reputation, etc.). What are we prepared to offer these laboring spectres beyond a token acknowledgement?
This paragraph answers much of my question above. Getting students to examine the value of their own labor as well as that of others doing similar work is a key pedagogical goal here, even if that value isn’t fully realized in their current environment. I’m curious how this work might reveal the costs of digital labor to the institution and what, if any, implications it might have for how institutions treat this labor or address this cost.
Excellent resource that addresses my question about the “voice” of the spectre above. This is a clearly articulated list of reasonable demands. I like the idea of integrating this into syllabi, as well as into course management pages and into any digital archive of course materials. Is it advisable to have faculty and students sign such a document as well as making available?
This should also be required reading for those already in graduate programs, particularly those preparing them for academic careers. Far too many graduates enter the profession with little or no knowledge of how their discipline or institution evaluates, rewards, or acknowledges various forms of scholarship.
Do any of the resources below, or the possible assignments using these resources, attempt to measure the actual economic value or impact of digital labor? While this is probably a fluid and relative value, is it possible for students to look at various ways of measuring and attributing economic value, either in terms of “fair wages” or just being able to articulate such value when dealing with institutions, funding agencies, grant applications, budgeting, etc.?
I could see this being taught alongside Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in a course devoted to the history of unseen women’s labor.
Network (8 comments)
Not sure why the link is missing. It should be http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/crowdsourcing-curating-networks-it-has-to-be-meta/61392
You might want to include the ease of entering or exiting networks as apposed to communities of practice (see Sasha Barab and Thomas Duffy, From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice in Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments edited by David Jonassen and Susan Land, 2000, Lawence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, p.25-55 to see the complexity of becoming a community member which is not needed for entering or exiting a network.
Perhaps you can mention the role that storify or related website plays in archiving a network’s activities so a network can be accessed at the user’s time frame rather than the collectives. This allows for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction with the network (just in time access as the need arises).
I think that networked learning also involves a flattening of the education relationship of teacher (facilitator) and learner, so that learning is not uni-directional, but that those in the educator role can learn from the students as well. In this way it can contrast with the notion of the sage on the stage as we all can teach and learn from one another. This does not diminish the expertise that the teacher brings to the content area, but rather that learning is messy and involves everybody.
good point Virginia! Thanks
love this point, too, Virginia! Thank you
oh my, yes, Jeffrey, that is a GREAT point. Didn’t realize it wasn’t explicitly in there!
I wondered who is dismissing social media and why? Individual lived experience of transformation learning mediated by social media does not exempt the use of social media for learning (and other activities eg news consumption) from critique. As you know, I have done research on this, influenced in the last 18 months by Light and Mejias. I was also interested to read of Melanie Joseph’s critique in the Community keyword in this resource.
Social Justice (8 comments)
Excellent first point about teaching social justice. Some call this “taking the inward journey,” “silent reflection,” “hearing from within,” in order to “see” where you are within a system you are critiquing is an important first step.
Again, a good point here. The basic point is that everyone should find one’s own role or, as I say in my faith tradition, one’s own “call” as it relates to social justice.
Good point. One engaging in social justice work should understand their own privilege. Some in other traditions call this work taking the “inward journey,” doing “self reflection” or “listening to the self.”
True, we are academics and theories and methods are what we teach. However, in the “real world,” our theoretical concepts sometime fail us. They fail us because we can become so beholden to our theories and methods, that we simply forget about compassion and empathy. The truth is many of the people that will stand with us “in the streets,” may never have heard about our theoretical approaches. If we judge them only based off of what we learned and/or taught in class, we alienate people right from the start.
Now saying all of this, I do think one of the things that academics can contribute to the “movement” is to (on invitation) help people understand our theoretical presuppositions.
Overall, this is a helpful piece to get academics to start thinking about how social justice looks in the classroom. Many of us are “active” in social movements, but we still tend to separate our activity from our teaching. Dr. Taylor show us that we no longer have to do this. I highly recommend this article to all who struggle with their teaching and social commitments to social movements.
In Paragraph 6, I was very interested in your introduction to the concept of intersectional privileges of teachers. I would like you to consider highlighting some of our privileges. This paragraph appears more of a description of the elements of teaching social justice, but no mention of what or where our privilege(s) lie in the conversation, theory, methods and action of social justice in our pedagogy or in classroom. It is a rich description though. A final suggestion, remove or elaborate or move the sentence on “self-care”. It stands alone and feels random or a part of another conversation on social justice. I’m enjoying the read.
I love that you included this! Just a small note — there were 11 of us who contributed to this project. It was our final project that emerged from the wonderful course taught by Dr. Risam & Dr. cárdenas. All of our names are at the bottom of the page you link to. Agreed that the syllabus to the course itself is also an invaluable resource.
I completely agree that social justice is difficult to define and varies across disciplines, but perhaps it would be helpful to name some of what it typically encompasses (thinking of explicitly mentioning racism/anti-racism, feminism/sexism, discrimination, LGBTQ justice, collective dissent/resistance).
Some historical context might also be helpful — I know I use the term “social justice” a lot, but I actually don’t have good information on where the term came from/when it became popular!
Digital Divides (7 comments)
Thank you for this – I had actually never come across its use in the plural and I find it really useful that you’ve done that.
Just before you wrote “intersect” I was thinking of “intersectionality” and how many kinds of inequity are intersectional and therefore should almost always be referred to in plural to allow for those intersections to be made explicit
Are you aware of Chris Gilliard’s work on digital redlining? I wonder if there is a place in your literature review to mention this as the intentional creation of “divides” of infrastructure/access within the US geographically.
editorial comment. You have “by with” (you just need one of these words)
from your summary, I don’t understand how this is a service learning project. Merely “interviewing” people from underserved communities is not service (imho) unless the students actually take some sort of action to support these underserved communities, at the very least through advocacy or writing to local politicians or such… unless they did more, but it’s not clear from your summary how they “worked with” the communities beyond interviewing members and discussing stuff in class… or unless there is a different understanding of “service learning” that is different from what we use at my institution… So this may be a misunderstanding on my part of what service learning should be, or what these students actually did
I was a bit surprised that the extensive Microsoft bibliography didn’t include reference to Lynette Kvasny’s work eg https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=Kvasny+Digital+Divide&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_x7-6mrDRAhVDJCYKHTDJD0QQgQMIITAA I found her contextual and generational rather than aceess approach to digital divide to be useful in exploration of digital divides in global north and south.
I think that is an excellent idea to put theory into practice.
Video (7 comments)
Nice background to set up the topic–and completely apt, I believe.
In the first sentence, the phrase set off in dashes could begin the sentence. That would interrupt the sentence less: Given this, it seems counter-intuitive that…
I believe this is a good rhetorical move: video writing is…writing.
Something caught my attention in the second sentence; the use of the terms “video production” and “video-making” and I wonder if the use these terms are being used synonymously or if one should be used consistently throughout? “Production” seems to be encompass both making and editing, no?
I agree with Ruben that attention to terminologies would be useful – we’ve got video production, digital composing, and video-making (and other possibilities: video composition, audi0-visual writing, video editing, multimodal composing …) Perhaps some explanation of the choice of term here – or the multiplicity of terms – esp. for a DH collection.
Also, were there other non-Apple smart phones that allowed capturing video, or was the iPhone the first?
Finally, along with capturing devices and publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, the ease of access to (and ease of use of) editing software has really brought video into the writing classroom. Now you can edit the video you could only shoot and then publish in the 90s, bringing video even more into the realm of writing.
First sentence here (and last of previous paragraph) might add more modes of expression to “competencies with the moving image”: sound design, animations, colors, fonts, spatial arrangement, etc. are also all part of video composition.
The characterization of the post-cinematic approach is put in opposition to the audio-visual writing approach in par. 4. While you do acknowledge that the two overlap and are not strict oppositions in par. 6, I wonder if you can tweak wording in pars. 4 and 5 to paint a more complex picture of how the two can interact?
Students might be asked to compose a non-linear, experimental video in a writing class (using juxtaposition of images and sounds, for example), a video that is not a GIF or not for social media, and that is not in the documentary-style. Such a product might not fit so neatly into the two pedagogical approaches described here.
Re: the curated artifacts, I think those assembled are excellent. That said, I would love to see more work by student composers themselves, more pedagogical resources composed by women, and more resources put together by those who identify within minority groups.
Some options might be the video work and pedagogy of Sarah Arroyo and Bahareh Alaei-Johnson; the video work of Casey Miles, and Timothy Briggs’s OU Career Investigation Project at https://oucareerinvestigationproject.wordpress.com/ (with a large corpus of student-composed videos).
Community College (7 comments)
“the term”
Scheduling computer lab time as well as time in the traditional classroom sounds ideal to me, though I imagine it is very rare to find a literature class with that kind of access to a lab at our resource-strapped CCs. When I am lucky enough to get a computer classroom for one of my basic essay writing classes, I can intervene in and encourage their writing process in real time, and help when the computer frustrates them. Because even now, in 2017, there are CC students who prefer to handwrite a document before laboriously keyboarding it, who aren’t comfortable with a mouse, who don’t have an intuitive sense of how to tinker with an interactive site. We middle-aged instructors may assume our students are more fluent in digital than we are, but I continue to be surprised by the range of abilities. So I will emulate this model, and not send students off to wrestle with projects on computers alone.
Visually beautiful as well as enlightening!
As brilliant and inspiring as the presenters and organizers were – and they were! – what I want to experience again is that intense, constant hum of engaged conversation and collaboration around each table at the NEH Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities Summer Institute: “Digital Humanities at the Community College: Beyond Pockets of Innovation, Toward a Community of Practice.”
Some mention of informational literacy or sorting credible information warrants mention here. A defining feature of 21st century living is sorting information, and Digital Humanities offers CC students a tremendous bootcamp experience in this.
I would extend the analysis that cc students “are immerse in a digital worl: Digital Humanities can help them understand it.” That reads patronizingly to me. Rather, I suggest a creative or building verb. For example, Digital Humanities can help students engage and shape their own digital world.
You are welcome to grab any of may materials from jacknorton.org .
What you have is fine, though sometimes dated. It’s also pretty. My students produce some ugly dh projects, that they do it themselves, not dh center, no tech support save me. I like the early projects here because they speak to a “make it work” ethos that I find attractive. The prettier the site, the less “blue collar dh” it feels to me.
Thank you Jack! Yes, the goal was actually to provide a historical perspective on DH at CCs, hence the dated quality!
Queer (7 comments)
This is the first place where “queer” gets separated from “digital pedagogies.”
Could the notion of queer be unpacked perhaps earlier?
The quotes and ideas here are very rich.
The last part makes me wonder if queer digital pedagogy requires gay & trans identities as a necessary part?
I love this quote. Perhaps some part of it goes earlier? And it might be added that this is one perspective on queerness in terms of temporality.
I’m not entirely following the line of thinking that connects the (problematic) “digital natives” rhetoric to queer digital pedagogy. It may need more explanation, or you may consider removing the quote and beginning with a definition of what it means to queer technormativity, absent the quote.
In general, I enjoy, and would love to see more of, the manifesto-y statements in the author’s own voice — e.g. the idea that queering technology means rejecting a one-tool-fits-all approach; the (unprobed) scare-quotes around “representing” and its impossibility; etc. Here, as in most of the keyword essays, I think a bit more boldness is warranted. All of these authors are experienced practitioners; their own thoughts on what ___ means to digital pedagogy is what keeps me reading.
The whole digital native/immigrants stuff is, for me, a complete sidetrack here. I would edit the second part of para 3, all of 4 and the refs to natives and immigrants in #6: and by edit I mean ruthlessly expunge to preserve the clear focus on identity politics which is important and very well expressed here. Try it, and see how it flows
Here I would rewrite this as ‘Queer digital pedagogy noisily refuses traditional narratives (now turn……’ And carry on, losing the native immigrants thing.
I found your syllabus online this Spring and plan to use your I-logs idea in my Intro to Queer Lit course in Spring 2016. We already use D2L for discussion postings, but this iLog ramps up the interactivity, research, and learning community. I found the other resources you mention here and curse the fact that I missed the 2014 HILT course “Refracting Digital Humanities”–there’s been nothing like it since! I hope it will be offered again. There’s not enough material for those of us who want to infuse digital pedagogies into queer courses. Thanks for taking the initiative in addressing this absence!
Keywords (6 comments)
A strong vote for design.
Design – It’s flexibility is unbound. It can be verbed to describe our costumes, experiments, environments, garb, plans and models – our stage. As separate from graphic design, it is the base that forms digital pedagogy and our andragogical structures.
If you’re looking for more keywords:
Digitisation
Materiality
Modularity
Programming
Another keyword that seems necessary given the current STEM climate:
DATA
This is an impressively thorough list!
You may also consider adding that tricky, sticky word critical, so often used as shorthand for “the humanities’ contribution to thinking about technology,” or just “humanities pedagogy” more generally. It can be hard to find resources that help students (and instructors) query and reflect on what that crucial word really means.
Recommended including TEXT.
It has different meanings in different genre and times.
Intersectionality (6 comments)
Excellent sentence – succinctly explains the key aspects of intersectionality. I find statements like this useful because it allows readers to gain an understanding of a term/concept quickly rather than asking them to read through paragraphs of texts without getting a concrete idea of what the point is.
Really clear link to pedagogy!
Is good to include the history of intersectionality as this helps show its importance.
I appreciate having this explanation/context for the artifacts – allows readers to have context for these examples.
[Moreover, they represent the broadest conception of digital methods, from digital cultural mapping, new media analysis, and data visualization to digital storytelling and digital archives to videogames and wearables]
The second half of this sentence requires some attention, I think.
More generally, I really value the work you’ve done here in charting the history of “intersectionality” as a language that enriches feminist theory and DH practice. What I wanted perhaps a bit more of is how exactly the artifacts/projects you list showcase this kind of work.
Roopika, I found the entry as a whole very well laid out and helpful. Great explanation of origin and importance of term, clear connection to social justice movements, and nice segue into the rest of the volume.
The array of intersectional approaches in the artifacts is very impressive. I wonder whether the description of the kinds of affordances they offer could be sharpened up somehow because they feel rather general to me at present. Would it be possible to group them somehow according to how they help to mobilize an intersectional approach, or talk about how these different kinds of affordances or approaches connect in specific ways to intersectionality? I think revision along these lines would help this section further illuminate intersectionality within DH pedagogy and lead well into the annotations of the artifacts.
Curation (6 comments)
I wonder if it’s worth mentioning that curation is also a process of exclusion–choosing to preserve objects ABC means a simultaneous choice not to preserve DEF. Of course, digitization gives us new opportunities to preserve everything (Google Books, etc.), which has its own pros and cons (no one is excluded, but nothing is organized). But there’s something political about the curatorial choices we make, and a long history of preserving voices of privilege, that might be something worth talking about, even briefly.
I love this! Perhaps it would be helpful for readers to see the original assignment for this project: http://miriamposner.com/dh101f15/index.php/assignments/final-project/.
Hi Julia–I’m not quite sure how curation “licenses” students. I might be a little caught up in its legal association. Do you mean to invoke that association? If so, could you clarify why and how that fits here? Otherwise, maybe consider another word. It became more clear a few lines down when you referred to curation “activities”–do you use the term with activities as implied throughout?
How might current “data refuge” projects fit into these categories? To my knowledge, they haven’t had time to be deeply integrated into syllabi or curricula (perhaps others know of examples?), but students have certainly been at work in helping to curate and preserve existing (especially climate) data. Perhaps it’s a final step in the lifecycle of data curation laid out here? From creation, to collection, to recontextualization, to preservation?
I wonder if this opening locates curation practices too emphatically outside the traditional academic disciplines like literary and historical studies, and that the point about digital humanities extending them backward doesn’t do enough to create a sense of the stake these disciplines have in (and the activity of people within these disciplines in) “doing” curation. I think the choice of syllabi below helps demonstrate that point, but it may be worthwhile to make it more emphatic at the top.
Hi Julia,
Thank you for including us as an example. Beyond that, I appreciate the variety of examples offered here, since they offer an idea of the range of possibilities with regard to disciplines and tools that might be used in curation assignments. I also appreciate the range of educational levels covered in the examples.
Race (6 comments)
I would love to have references for more of these statements. I know this is an intro but I got curious regarding both the statements on both sides of the story/argument.
I would be interested in your process of curation and whether you can link to a place that contains further links?
I love that DigPedLab produced something you could use here!
I know nothing about the Unity platform so was confused by each mention of it
This is terrific, Adeline. Clear and compelling.
The connections with public reach/impact in paragraph 6 and engaged pedagogy here are excellent.
Sound (6 comments)
This is a good mapping of some main areas of teaching. However, I would suggest considering expansion. Various archives (Ubuweb, Pennsound, PoetryFoundation etc.) have opened new possibilities for fruitful teaching of literary sound (esp. poetry, from Dada /Futurism through 1950s Beat, 1960s Text Sound, and contemporary interdiscplinary sound art ex. Radio Radio). This has been complemented by the emerging research / teaching agenda involving transcription, visualization, and/or computer-aided analysis (see HIPSTAS).
I would also like to say thanks for this great collection of syllabi and assignments that I will certainly use in my own tool chest. I agree with KS that it appears to be light on projects/applications for analyzing sound collections and has a much greater emphasis on history, production, and curation (including mapping). It may be helpful to consider Sonic Visualizer, Praat, or other analysis tools such as ARLO, which we are developing as part of the HiPSTAS project (see http://hipstas.org and http://arloproject.com/). There are quite a few resources listed on the site including powerful descriptions of the kinds of projects that scholars want to pursue in this area: http://blogs.ischool.utexas.edu/hipstas/institute/participants/. I have also written a pretty extensive brief on DH and sound analysis just published as part of the New Companion to DH: “When Texts of Study are Audio Files: Digital Tools for Sound Studies in Digital Humanities”: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781118680643_chunk_g978111868064326. I’m happy to send it to you if you’re interested. Thank you again for this contribution. I’m looking forward to trying out what you have already included.
This is a fine start on sound in digital pedagogy. I want to second the comments of Kenneth Sherwood and Tanya Clement. The vocal performance of literature is a powerful way to approach texts in the classroom, and digital tools allow us to analyze them in new ways, with attention to intonation patterns, speaking rate, rhythm, etc.
It is also important to note that auditory perception is extremely subjective. A notable linguistics experiment demonstrated that undergraduates perceive the identical recorded lecture to be more difficult to understand if they are shown a photograph of an Asian-looking lecturer, and told that that person gave the lecture, rather than a Caucasian-looking lecturer (see Rubin, D.L. “Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Judgments of Nonnative English Speaking Teaching Assistants.” Research in Higher Education 33.4 (1992): 155-68.
Linguistic analysis tools are helpful in the study of vocal performance. I would also mention a new open-source forced aligner tool, called Gentle, developed by a brilliant creative programmer Robert Ochshorn. (Gentle is built on top of the speech recognition program Kaldi, developed at Johns Hopkins). Gentle, like most forced aligners, “takes media files and their transcripts and return extremely precise timing information for each word (and phoneme) in the media.”
https://lowerquality.com/gentle/
Here is a long list of speech analysis tools, some more user-friendly than others:
http://liceu.uab.es/~joaquim/phonetics/fon_anal_acus/herram_anal_acus.html
This list of “mainstream digital audio technologies” is technically a list of “digital audio workstations” (DAWs). That’s not to nitpick, but to suggest that it might be helpful to include other mainstream sound-making technologies—such as USB microphones, portable recorders (Zooms, et. al.), MIDI keyboards, and the multitude of music and recording apps for mobile devices. I think portable audio recorders especially are good support for the next sentence about sonic engagement in everyday life.
Thanks for this feedback. I appreciate it!
Great suggestions. Thanks, Tanya!
Iteration (5 comments)
[definitions belongs]
One of these should drop an “s”
Very well written stylistically and has a clear purpose. Language is not too complicated, but still serves to give a more complex overview of the term.
May be beneficial to add a clear statement of how iterations differs from revisioning or versioning – although the material on how the purpose of versions rather than iterations was quite interesting and helpful for someone who does not have a lot of previous knowledge about this term/concept.
Fascinating example of 100Y’s in Garamond.
Is good to tie iterations to the idea of different approaches to a subject or topic. It also opens the door for creativity in how to tackle or create something rather than being constrained by traditional approaches.
The artifacts work well to illustrate how iteration can be incorporated into courses or projects. I loved the example of “Words and Images”, which again sparks creativity and new ways of thinking about something as simple as an introduction. The examples included also show the breadth iteration can take. May be nice to have a list of the artifacts before delving into them, or to have them numbered in a way that makes it clear where each begins.
I really enjoyed this entry, as it made me think more carefully about the relationship between iteration and versioning, as well as the pedagogical benefits of iteration.
I found the overview quite lucid. I was a little puzzled by what Aaron Henderson’s exercise would involve: drawn a grid and sketch eight versions — of what? This may be clear within the fine arts but it wasn’t clear to me.
I really enjoyed the range of artifacts. I think it might have helped me a bit to orient my sense of what was going on in some of them have an early signal of what kind of discipline(s) or program(s) were involved.
I’m working within a group of peer reviewers and have been tasked with addressing some issues with formatting. You have been forewarned!
I’d like to flag a few quick-fix layout problems (unless they’re baked into the template — and if so, perhaps there’s work to be done there) that may improve the navigation of the curated artifacts section:
i. Perhaps all ten artifacts could be listed under a table of contents ft. internal hyperlinks
ii. Numbering each curated artifact may help improve navigation.
iii. Descriptors beyond “screenshot” I think would be handy — or suppress “screenshot” entirely.
iv. The screenshots could perhaps benefit from a thin border.
Wonder if “revision” should be included as an example of iteration in the sentence beginning “For teaching, iteration may be thought as remix, revision, etc.” ? 1st sentence in paragraph 6, states that “Learning how to compose in digital media ofter involves iterations rather than revisions..”
Language Learning (5 comments)
perhaps better than “pure linguistic” would be “simply morphological”. since there is no aspect of language not included in “linguistic.”
While I agree on the whole with the move beyond linguistic elements given the awesome technology available (great artifacts provided in this piece!), I do find problematic the notion that language-learning is not about grammar. While true for L1, I don’t see why you’d avoid explaining past tenses in L2 without referring to how it’s done in L1. Why not use that resource? Yes, the goal is communication, but grammar provides the shorthand whereby you can more readily communicate the desired meaning.
Ana, you certainly make a clear connection between communicative competence and the availability of digital tools for language learning in paragraph 6. But I am wondering if it might be useful to redefine communicative competence here adding multiliteracies component (the ability to critically interpret and convey multimodal messages). There seems to be a bit of a disconnect here right now between the definition of communicative competence that language learning relies on and further discussion of resourcefulness and usefulness of digital tools. I think it would strengthen the argument.
One further artifact that might fit the bill nicely with what you have provided below, even though it has been around for a decade or more, is the use of Second Life for language learning purposes, as this short piece in Omniglot attests: http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/secondlife.php
Ana, when you write “reject a negative identity,” do you mean negative self-view or view of themselves? It might be useful to clarify this as some identity scholars argue that we don’t have multiple identities, but rather multiple layers and aspects of our identities.
Multimodal (4 comments)
I feel like the annotation of this artifact needs to give a little more info. Reading it, I don’t feel I truly understand what Ana’s article was about. I can guess, because I know Ana but it would help to know more before clicking.
This is a great note. Thanks. The word count is very restricted here and I think I was hoping the title would convey the content but since the title is not in immediate proximity to the curator’s note, it doesn’t work that way! I’ll be sure to remedy.
This is a great keyword essay, and I’m so glad to see it here! I agree that Kress’ separation of dissemination and form is not always useful or practical, particularly as we advocate for what we’re doing in our institutions. I also appreciate critiques of the Western-centrism of Kress’ articulation of senses. Sarah Pink (2011) calls for us to “re-think Kress’s notion of ‘sight, hearing, smell, taste and feel’ as ‘each being attuned in quite a specific way to the natural environment, proving [sic] us with highly differentiated information’ (2000: 184). Instead, we might take as a starting point the idea that a rather less culturally structured flow of neurological information becomes differentiated into categories that we call the senses. As such it is not so much that ‘none of the senses ever operates in isolation from the others’ and that this ‘guarantees the multimodality of our semiotic world’ (Kress, 2000: 184). Rather, it is that we tend to communicate linguistically about our embodied and sensory perception in terms of sensory categories. However, because one category is never enough to express exactly what we have actually experienced, the illusion of the ‘separate’ senses operating in relation to each other is maintained” (p. 265) I think her critique, as well as Paul Prior’s (2005) similar critique of Kress’ “container-esque” definitions, supports your argument for flexibility in terms.
Here are the full citations:
Pink, Sarah (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research 11(3): 261-276.
Prior, Paul (2005). Moving multimodality beyond the binaries: A response to Gunther Kress’ “Gains and losses.” Computers and Composition 22: 23–30.
This paragraph seems key, as you articulate why assignments that incorporate the creation of multimodal projects is important to students’ ability to critically engage with such texts. Given the anticipated audience of this volume, I wonder if you might incorporate some of what you say here into an earlier portion of the statement?
Design (4 comments)
This sounds like a terrific approach! What about design as it applies to pedagogy, though? Important models like backward design, universal design for learning, and others help us to create courses in which students can learn the concepts you outline here most effectively.
I agree with Josh’s comment, and especially think that universal design/design for accessibility is an important element of what readers might look for in this keyword.
I like this idea, but how do students know what a genre is, as opposed to a medium? (You can tell I’m an auto/biography theorist, can’t you.)
Another vote here for treating the idea of “design” somewhat more broadly. The three “pedagogical commitments” you describe in paragraph 7 speak beautifully to dimensions of design practice, but I’d also love to hear what you have to say about the stages of design process. For example, what might be the role of design-testing in some of the assignments you describe? I think that by speaking to the stages of design process you would naturally address some of the concerns that Josh and Katina have raised, since these stages apply to a wide variety of design products, from web sites to syllabi to curricula to class assignments themselves.
Authorship (4 comments)
I love how you frame the current shift in understandings of authorship within the birth of this concept in the 18th century. Is there a particular moment you can point to, that illustrates this shift? Wordsworth?
I wonder if, in your first paragraph, you could also take a moment to acknowledge the potential benefits of authorship being available, as you write, to an unprecedented number of people. I agree that the lack of barriers makes it difficult for students to fully appreciate the process of publication (and it has certainly opened a can of worms in terms of the trust we can place in the “truth” of a text), but it has also given voice to those who would otherwise be silenced.
Thanks for including my project and this sharp analysis of its ambitions! Just a note on spelling, Savonick.
I’d be curious to hear more about how this complicating and questioning of the notion of “authorship” also impacts the notion of “authority.” This is the only paragraph that overtly mentions them together, but in moving away from the notion of the individual genius composing in isolation towards (or back to) more collective, collaborative, and even unintentional or multi-intentional forms of authorship, what are the implications for literary or interpretive authority?
This might also be paired with a visit from a Copyright Librarian or other staff member with special expertise in current copyright law, author’s rights, publisher agreements, etc., to allow students to put these discussions into a contemporary setting that might be relevant to those who wish to author or publish their own works.
Play (4 comments)
I absolutely agree here that playful pedagogy is a response to what you are calling “zombie play.” What is so interesting about the unfolding of pedagogy in higher ed over the years is how much it has disregarded play. Developmental psychologists and educational theorists, on the other hand, have long described the foundational role of play for children’s learning processes. I’m convinced the connection between play and learning does not magically disappear as we get older, it just gets subsumed in schooling by more traditional teaching approaches. What is so important about the new models you are discussing is that they are returning to one of the essential modes by which human beings learn.
‘Salter’ is repeated.
This is a great section—love the clarity and applicability.
I’m really excited to be included in this keyword! However, I taught this course at UC Santa Barbara, not UC Davis.
ePortfolio (4 comments)
Small style suggestion: you use “in part” twice to begin back-to-back sentences. Also, I wonder if you may add in the fact that portfolios were introduced to offer a process-oriented form of assessment (Belanoff/Murray/Elbow).
This is awkward in syntax, but also neglects to highlight collaboration between peers. ePortoflios offer the possibility of generating asynchronous conversations between classmates, across sections, and across campuses.
A citation for this survey is needed.
This overview is very clear with some excellent points made throughout, but lacks a sense of excitement about the possibilities ePortfolios offer to an educator. Why should we be interested in implementing this form of learning in our programs? Why is this a worthwhile and valid form of digital pedagogy?
Mapping (4 comments)
Thanks for such a great entry, Diana! I’m not sure if this is beyond the scope of your entry, but one area that might be worth nodding to (perhaps in the “Related Materials” section) is sound mapping. There are a lot of great digital sound maps out there. For instance, the British Library maps come to mind: http://sounds.bl.uk/sound-maps/. Just a thought. Thanks again for sharing these fabulous resources!
Thanks for much for including this, Diana! Love your essay, as well as the examples of projects you include.
Very nice write up, Diana!
In reading this, I wonder if you should add a paragraph about data sources (geonames, etc,) and geocoding and how the challenges that go into the data content stage of work. The data selection, cleaning, creation are what underpin the work, and is more time consuming than most realize.
Maybe you can also be interested on including a comment about maps created from literary texts (such as Don Quixote for example: http://quijote.bne.es/libro.html).
History (4 comments)
In the last few days, the site has gone off-line. I’ve contacted various folks involved, and it seems to be a snafu further up the chain in the university system. Hopefully, the site will be back online shortly.
The maligned essay can be so much more than it is made out to be here. If instructor control is lessened and topics can be freely chosen within class parameters, the traditional essay can be a lot of fun, both to write and to read and grade.
Hi Bente – thank you for your comment. I agree, the essay can certainly be more than what in typical practice it has come to be. But I think it can only be this if instead the focus is on the process, rather than the product: that instead of assigning an essay, the instructor builds into assessment work that valorizes and explores every stage in that process, including grading and feedback – and grading that makes a point of evaluating whether or not feedback has been incorporate from previous stages. At that point, the entire process ends up looking more like ‘unessays’ that what we often see on a syllabus.
Happily, it’s back online.
Annotation (3 comments)
I love the idea of “intimacy at scale.” Worth expanding, if you have the space.
Great examples. Two other annotation tools to consider mentioning are Prism (http://prism.scholarslab.org/pages/about) and Social Paper (https://gcdsl.commons.gc.cuny.edu/portfolio-item/social-paper/), both largely developed by graduate students.
Great suggestions! Thanks!
Project Management (3 comments)
Graduate and undergraduate training in project management are incredibly important, but there is also a great need for better resources to help established faculty members retrain as project directors and managers. I’m wondering if you would recommend different resources for faculty members or for people who are responsible for retraining faculty members in these roles that might mitigate some of the pain of the school of hard learned experiences? Would these be different resources than those you would recommend for undergraduate and graduate education?
On a related note, I often think about the power differentials and expectations for “project managers” and “project directors” and who steps or falls into each kind of role (often graduates students in the first, tenured faculty in the latter). I am very much in favor of semi-formal and formal project management training for DH projects, but I also wonder if–in teaching these skills specifically to students–we are reproducing hierarchical power structures that we might instead push back against or unsettle. If we really do value the work of PMs, why are so few tenured faculty in these positions? I would love to see more projects where students were directors and faculty (who know the inner workings of institutions and funding agencies much better than students) were PMs. I realize this may well be out of the scope of this essay, but because the book specifically focuses on “models” and “experiments” I wonder if there are alternative models or alternative ways of filling existing models of project management that might better reflect our aspirations as a community?
This piece includes several great resources built by and for the digital humanities community. What role, if any, should resources and training (not tools) built outside of the community play in training DH project managers? Are things like PMI certification useful or necessary for digital project management? If we’re interested in providing students with “transferrable skills” (which we may well not be), would more general project management training be more transferrable?
Really agree with your framing. Because project management is often not something that scholars recognize as part of their jobs, I wonder whether it might be useful to illustrate this with some concrete examples. E.g., even if someone isn’t involved in, say, collaborative digital projects, things like crafting a syllabus, writing a book, or planning a new component of a department’s curriculum also draw on the same skills.
Professionalization (3 comments)
Hi Jennifer, this is such a crystal-clear entry into the topic. Great framing. I especially like your emphasis in paragraph 5 on the integration of applied knowledge and public engagement as core, not peripheral, elements of professionalization. (Tiny note—looks like there’s a typo in Louis Menand’s name.)
Really great piece to include.
I appreciate both how professionalism is framed here and the helpful set of resources gathered together here. Given the focus of the larger project, I wonder if more might be said about the connections between digital pedagogy and professionalism, e.g. how to acquire technical expertise, how to create a professional identity online (beyond getting an ORCID), and the significance of online communities. Also, I wonder if the primary audience is students (as suggested in paragraph 7), instructors (as suggested in paragraph 10), or both.
Reading (3 comments)
This paragraph hints at, but never quite states, the ways in which the concepts of reading and literacy as strictly connected to aphabetic text have been challenged and extended by multiliteracy theory (see The London Group). The question of “What is literacy/reading?” is implied by Tim Burke’s inclusion of books by Eduard Tufte and Scott McCloud in the History of Reading Syllabus.
[Whether they imagine reading as distracted, discontinuous, materialized, black-boxed, close, distant, human, or mechanical,]
Per previous comment, not included here is “alphabetical, visual”….
Maybe another possibility for the list of collected artifacts, whether the whole syllabus or some part thereof: Andrew Logemann’s course “The Future of Reading” ENG 471 at Gordon College: http://eng471.logemann.io/calendar/ Learned a lot from this; Logemann includes some great prefatory material for each class.
Diaspora (2 comments)
[ Diaspora is not seduced by the promise of a home/hostland; never stops seeing the missing, the dead, or the dispersed (“don’t think I didn’t notice those tombstones disguised as waves”); is incessant in its longing. Attuned always to those lost beneath the sea, silenced in archives, or disappeared behind electrified carceral fences, diaspora work means working with the living and the dead without knowing who is here, who is gone for now or gone forever.]
To the previous quote I commented above it is a much needed analysis that puts to words the experiences, the resonances that transpire between a living descendant of a historical actor I study(an enslaved waterman from the Great Dismal Swamp) and myself. The longing for home, homeland is indeed incessant and a major element of recovery for him. His journey began with finding his ancestors and the journey continues with bringing together kinfolk and going “home”, seeing “home”– of course given the uncertain origins of where enslaved captives came from home is not easy for him to determine a specific location in the African continent, but the promise of a vision of what home was or might have been for ancestors has created a grand sense of purpose for him.
Disability (2 comments)
I really appreicate that you take on the numbers issue–which is almost a trope in anything written about disability–with such nuance here, pointing out that it IS about ubiquity but also about — as you point out– AGENCY.
My finger slipped as I finished. I can’t tell if the comment was actually sent. Please let me know if I need to reconstruct it.
Thanks,
Karen Reeds 1/22/2017
karenmreeds@gmail.com
How to Comment (2 comments)
The first thing that seems necessary is a definition at the top of the page for Digital Pedagogy.
How does it differ from any other pedagogy?
You may want to check on the other pages first. There’s a rationale and context for the collection that highlights digital pedagogy. Does this answer your question?
Sexuality (2 comments)
I really like the way you’re embedding the digital pedagogy in the broader contemporary stakes of sexuality studies. Great that you’re drawing on other work in this volume, too.
This is a powerful paragraph. I wonder whether you might introduce the added complexity of today’s networked public environments earlier, to start gesturing toward the digital from the beginning of the statement?
Public (2 comments)
I very much agree with you. I wonder whether reframing the last three sentences as positive (why teaching and learning should be open and public) rather than negative (what is lost if they’re closed) might make it even more powerful.
I like the rhetorical effect of repeating “What a waste” here, but in the end I agree with Katina. I think this wonderful curatorial statement would benefit from a more fully developed justification of public-facing student work. I wonder if you might consider saying a little less in your statement about the rationale for selecting particular artifacts so that you can more fully develop the contrast between a “closed system of knowledge production” and an open one.
Gender (2 comments)
Some updates:
Our digital collection has over 70 oral history interviews and more than 5,000 digital items.
Because our archive is a closed repository (it requires a login), we have created a public website featuring content curated from the repository. The biocuration assignment is focused on creating content for our public website, not the archive itself (which is not open to the public, and contains only primary materials)
Thanks, Maria! I’ll update this info for the final version.
General Comments (1 comment)
I have to agree that I have a much harder time annotating digital texts than interacting on the margins of a physical copy.
Fiction (1 comment)
This is a lovely read and an important set of entries for teachers of fiction and literature. It’s especially savvy to structure the essay along an increasing scale, and the well-chosen examples clarify the sense of that choice. At the beginning, I wondered how this entry might distinguish itself from related fields, or other keywords this volume might ostensibly include. As it articulates “fiction,” perhaps it can more clearly explain the need to differentiate this from “literature” or, in the context of so much digital emphasis in this volume, of “electronic literature.” (Editors: Should that be its own keyword entry? I hope it will be.) Not sure what reasons you might want to foreground to make this contrast/distinction: “fiction” as it enters the curriculum, as it spans various media (as mentioned in the next paragraph). All the content is here; just wonder if a bit more disambiguation might help.
Online (1 comment)
Suggestion for another entry in related materials, perhaps even a cited reference in the prose about the contrast of online and LMS: Groom, Jim, and Brian Lamb. “Reclaiming Innovation.” EDUCAUSE Review 49.3 (2014): n. pag. http://www.educause.edu/visuals/shared/er/extras/2014/ReclaimingInnovation/default.html
Groom and Lamb make a very sympathetic argument to this entry, that the best “online” learning is done outside of (and often in direct argument with) enterprise solutions. They provide some great examples, too, in the companion piece.
Classroom (1 comment)
I have no “power” over the spaces where I teach, but will tell our teacher training program about this keyword.