Digitized Scholarly Editions

How might digitization enhance scholarly (or critical) editions of literary and historical texts? I’m thinking in terms of incorporation of multimedia, accessibility of bibliographic resources, and integration of reference and/or pedagogical material (such as glossaries for foreign language texts)? What would the “dream” scholarly edition look like (from the vantage points of students as well as more advance scholars), and what obstacles would need to be overcome to implement it?

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Participant Pedagogy

Sean Michael Morris and I would like to propose a session on what we call participant pedagogy, which is the idea that students take an active role in teaching and in constructing their own learning environment. Online learning, in particular, has democratized how we think about the student / teacher interaction, allowing students to both take ownership over and claim authority of education (including curriculum development, syllabus creation, assignment structuring, content generation, etc.). The sorts of tools we use and communities we form online inspire us to think differently about how we work in our brick-and-mortar classrooms. Digital pedagogy, even in the classroom, shifts from teacher-led tutorials to laboratory-based experimentation. Many of these ideas are inspired by our experiences during last Summer’s MOOC MOOC. One of the days focused on participant pedagogy. And we also hosted a #digped chat on this topic. For obvious reasons, students in attendance at THATCamp MLA would be excellent additions to this conversation.

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Engaging students in the entire process

This goes along with many of the other posts that have mentioned students and the use of digitized resources in teaching, but I thought I might throw another element in. When attempting to get students involved in lessons, stories of the past, etc. it has always proven more effective to involve students from the beginning and make things more hands on. How can we make this happen in the digital humanities front? Have students create oral histories? Create online exhibits to demonstrate understanding? What other ideas do we have? These projects involve collaboration between faculty and archivists/librarians and most importantly students.

Categories: Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Session Proposals, Session: Talk, Teaching | 1 Comment

Transes

As I have become more involved with DH, and others discover the brave souls at my institution who are interested, I have started thinking more about boundary points other than institution and discipline that I’d like to cross. With a background in language tech, I’m particularly interested in how we can do translingual, transcultural, transnational DH — what tools, structures, patterns, theories exist or need creating. There is some kinship here with Anastasia’s proposal on interdisciplinarity and possibly with Marc’s on scaling up, but I think there’s something else to talk about here with DH on a world scale.

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Teaching literary reading through collaborative annotation

Would others be interested in a discussion of collaborative reading / annotation tools and pedagogy? Whether the goal is simply prompting reflective and engaged reading practices in general education students or developing a collaborative critical edition with graduate students, the idea of social reading is attractive. I would be interested in discussing and sharing ideas.  What tools (Wiki, Commentpress, ebook…) have folks used with success? What parameters or frameworks facilitate active learning and the creation of a useful “product?”  Is there a workable way to integrate mobile devices for in-class participation?

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“Here in the museum we do not invite trouble”: Archiving The Archivists Of The Twenty-first Century

(Quote stolen from John Ashbery’s “Quick Question”)

As someone who’s more interested in contemporary writing online than the archives of older digital work, I often wonder what the archives of twenty-first century online writing will look like in the future. Recent archival projects invested in recent digital already already seem outmoded or at least at odds with how information circulates in 2012/2013. For example, I’m currently preparing a NEMLA discussion that looks at the differences between the Poets Against The War website — a site begun in 2003 and “archived” in 2010 — and the ways poets write and publish work on the web in more recent years. Now, the Poets Against The War site seems clunky and isolated from the rest of the web (and I’d even argue that the site looked just as clunky back in 2003) when compared to the kinds of image macros and mixed media work that poets create for distribution on the web on sites like Internet Poetry (an “archive” of sorts for a burgeoning subculture). The difference between a site like PATW and Internet Poetry, to my eyes at least, is that the authors found on IP are creating work that has the web in mind as its ideal site of distribution and consumption, and it’s also work that tries to tailor itself to the modes of circulation present on sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And the archivists / curators of these projects similarly design their collections to allow content to travel and to be taken apart (literally or analytically).

When I look at some of the projects that archive work from earlier time periods on the web, I often wonder if their frameworks, content, and designs are too often suited only for academic set of eyes (and I’ll admit here that I’ve barely scratched the surface, so please feel free to show me archives that seem to invite other kinds of readers and writers!). Why not allow an archive to interact more with the rest of the web? I guess this is one question that might come out of this discussion, and it’s one that might allow for a number of voices beyond people interested in contemporary writing. But I am also interested in how e-mails, chat material, tweets, social networking, blog content, etc. all might challenge or complicate our ideas of archivists and curators in our contemporary moment. There are already sites like Storify that allow users to corral particular threads in social networks, and things like the Internet Wayback Machine allow us to look back on the web of the recent past, and everyone loves a good word cloud, and etc. And of course, there are sites like the September 11 Digital Archive. But with writing being created in a variety of sites (not just locations, but also in terms of tablets, phones, laptops, etc.) for a range of different audiences, and with tools like hashtags, how might we think through ways of arranging and discussing these various modes of digital texts and literacies? Are we in an Age of the Archivist, in the sense that anyone with a Tumblr account (and / or a scanner or some familiarity with how screenshots work) can curate work? Or is there a need to consider whether the sorts of linkblogging and reblogging and uploading practices on Tumblr and elsewhere are something different?

This is rough and very open-ended, but I’d be happy to help mold this into a discussion that might be worth having with others tomorrow.

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Student Storage & Processes of Multimodal Compositions

I would like to address both the technology (hardware) involved with storing student works and their processes of multimodal composing.

I’d be interested discuss any platforms or systems you use to 1) protect the digital works of our students; 2) protect them in terms of copyright materials; 3) use their works as resources/shareable content.    In our own university and others I’ve been at it, we’ve experimented with Dropbox, Chalk & Wire, Google docs, and Blackboard (the University’s system), but I’d love to hear if there are any other programs out there, the amount of data that can be stored, and how user-friendly they are.  I’d also like to discuss ethical issues and/or fair use practices if we have time.

I’m also very interested in how students create multimodal compositions.  I’d be happy to share findings from a case study I conducted in the fall 2012, particularly students’ process of juxtaposing images and texts, of remixing videos and sound, and creating their own works with a variety of programs – and I’d love to hear your approaches to teaching these works, or theoretical works you use to integrate them in the classroom.

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hidden content collections

This would be a simple discussion on the different repositories we use in our academic work that others might not know about. For example I rely heavily on Archive.org, Hathi Trust and project gutenberg for sample text to use with my class, but I’ve also use the W.E.B. Dubois collection at U Mass Amherst, the TEI collections and the Yellowback scans at the Emory library to show students different methods for handling text. I have to believe we all have link in our bookmarks for sites that we wish others knew existed.

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What does publishing mean?

somewhat similiar to the “That’s not an essay” and the Make session on Digital bibliographies, I’m interested in hearing how others think about “publishing” both as a a method of dissemination and as advancement. I’d also want  to hear where the next iteration of content publishing will look like.

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Talk and Play: Becoming a Better Bloggette

I’d like to talk about and play with ways to get started, keep up, and manage a professional academic blog.  From the mundane how should this look and what site should I use to the more abstract  “Why is everything I say on the internet so stupid?” anxiety of publishing and how to get over it, as well as ways to get in touch with and interact with other academic bloggers.

Categories: Blogging, Session: Play, Session: Talk, Social Media | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments