A collection of notes from my first hybird “digital humanities” class at Lane.I am teaching this introductory class MW in a traditional classroom, with Friday’s class in a computer lab. Several blogging assignments will encourage students to try out their writing in a public forum, and we will use the Friday class to look at other digital humanities projects, and encourage students to tinker and create digital projects that begin with what digital fluencies they have and build on them.

Here is the Poetry Map Blog Entry assignment that I started out the term with. We have returned to this assignment each week for a few moments in the lab, since some students have had trouble figuring out how to set up their blogs. Some are unused to commands such as “Ctrl V” and instead use their mouse. It has surprised me how many students don’t know about this command.

ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS (IN COMPUTER LAB)

Introduction to Women Writers ENG260 Fall 2012

Doc McGrail

First Blog Assignment: Poetry Map Blog Entry

 HOW TO POST:

Post the URL to your completed blog entry in the Moodle assignment link that says “POETRY MAP BLOG ENTRY”. This is where your grade will show up in Moodle.

ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION:

For this blog entry, you will be learning something about the poetry scene in one state in the U.S., and exploring the life and poetry of one of the women poets in that state.  You will then choose a single poem by that poet to write about.  You will post your work to your blog as a Poetry Map entry.  Use the title “Poetry Map: State of {xxx}. Poet: {xxx}

This assignment will probably take you 2 hours to complete, depending on how engaged you are with the assignment, among other things.  The blog entry has two parts. The written part has a short research component (I will direct you to the site) and also a literary analysis component (I will provide questions to guide your response/analysis).  You should plan to spend an hour browsing the website for your assigned state, choosing one of the poets on this site, and one of her poems to write about. You should plan to spend another hour writing up your blog entry about the poetry scene, where women seem to fit into it, and about the poet herself and her poem.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. TAKE NOTES:

To begin, you should have a notepad or an electronic notepad open so that you can record your findings as you go.  It’s always best to write down anything interesting so that later you can write more formal paragraphs from your notes.  Remember that any information you get from any source needs to be documented by pointing to the site.  Here’s a resource for finding out how to cite a web-based resource:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08

2. FIND YOUR STATE:

First of all, scroll to the bottom of this document to find your name and your assigned state.  You will need this information in order to complete the assignment.

GO TO POETS. ORG

Next, go to the National Poetry Map on poets.org here: http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/382

 

4. BROWSE YOUR STATE POETRY SITE

Click on your assigned state. You will find a wealth of information about poets and poetry from that state.  Spend some time becoming familiar with the different links and resources on your page.  Concentrate on the poets who are women, since that’s what you’ll be writing about.

5. BEGIN DRAFTING YOUR TWO-PART BLOG ENTRY

My advice is to create a draft in your word-processing program or on paper and then post your polished work on your blog as a final step. You will be creating a two-part blog entry (you can separate it with headings):

PART I:  THE POETRY SCENE IN YOUR ASSIGNED STATE

Give your Blog readers a sense of the “poetry scene” in your state by writing a paragraph or two in which you answer the following questions:

1. What is your assigned state?
2.. What are the names of the women poets from your state?
3.  What kinds of reading series, conferences, and literary festivals are happening in your state? What specific mention is made of women poets?

PART II: CHOOSE A POET AND A POEM

The second part of your blog entry is more detailed.  Choose ONE WOMAN POET from your state and read what the website has to say about that poet.  Take notes on things about this poet that interested you.  Then read some of that poet’s poems (there should be some links to poet’s poems on the site.)  Get a general feel for that poet’s style and subject matter.

Next, choose ONE POEM by that same poet.  You will write a brief (250-word) response/analysis of the poem using what you are learning in class to talk about the poem.

Here are some questions that can guide your analysis.  You can begin by first drafting answers to the questions and then use your answers to write your analysis/response in paragraph form.

1.  Who is the speaker of the poem? Is it an adult or child? Man or woman? Happy? Lonely? Puzzled? Other?  Remember that the speaker in a poem is NOT the same thing as the poet (the person actually writing the poem.) The speaker is a creation that the poet has

2.  Who is being addressed in this poem? Sometimes a speaker will address a specific audience, sometimes a more generalized group.

3.  What is the situation being described in this poem?

4.  What is the tone of this poem?

5.  What is the poem’s argument or main point?

6.  What are some remarkable features of the meter, rhyme scheme or line length/line breaks that you think are important for understanding the poem?

7. Is there something in the poem that makes you think about what you are learning in class about women writers in their social and historical context? If so, discuss that.

Once you have answered these questions, you can begin to develop your two-part blog entry, using the answers to construct your essay.

GRADING CRITERIA: (Satisfactory Grade Range: 70-80; Strong Grade Range: 80-90; Exemplary Grades 90-100)

1. Follows instructions
2. Blog entry demonstrates a thorough and correct if brief overview of the “poetry scene” in the assigned state (satisfactory). All sources are correctly cited either by linking to the site or by creating a works cited list at the end. Strong entries do all this and also make useful connections with course terms and course readings and discussions. Exemplary entries do all this and provide original or creative insight and/or connections.
3. Blog entry demonstrates a general understanding of the chosen poet and the poetry posted on the site for that poet (satisfactory).  Strong entries do this and utilize course terms and work to discuss the poet and poetry. Exemplary entries do this and provide original or creative insight or connections about the chosen poet and course terms and discussions.
4. Satisfactory blog entry provides a clear analysis and detailed response to the chosen poem, using literary terms and reading skills learned in the class. The analysis answers the questions. Strong analysis does this and provides depth and connections; exemplary analysis does this and uses the analysis as an occasion for an original or creative insight.
5. Prompt posting assumed for all satisfactory grades. Late posts lose a 10% per day late.

YOUR ASSIGNED STATE: (list of students’ names and states here)

SETTING UP YOUR BLOG
You should do this as soon as you can so you can begin working and ask questions if you come into difficulty.

1. Get a gmail account if you don’t already have one. Go to blogger.com and click on “Get Started.”
2. Go to blogger.com here http://www.blogger.com/home and sign in with your username and password.
3. You will find yourself on the “Dashboard”. Click on “Create a Blog.”
4. Name your blog. Choose something descriptive. Your first name and Eng260 is easy to remember too.
5. Choose a template
6. Start blogging. You can begin by going to the “New Post” link at the top of the page.
7. Go to “Design” to find the “Settings” tab. This is where you can set your privacy setting. To keep it private while still sharing it with your fellow students, you can upload the link to your blog in the assignment forum “Poetry Map Blog Entry.”
8. Here’s my own beginning Poetic Anthology Blog, entitled “April is the Cruelest Month”….http://docmcgrailsfavepoetry.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

IN-CLASS WORD CLOUDS AND Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

(Note: After I had taught and wrote about this, Jacob Heil @dr_heil led me to Ryan Cordell’s more developed work with word clouds and Paul Fyfe’s “How to Not Read a Victorian Novel.” My next foray will benefit enormously from their work.)

Each Friday we have an hour in the computer lab. Today, we went to Wordle.net and spent half of the class selecting chapters from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to create “beautiful word clouds.” I am charmed by word clouds, and I think that they provide an engaging and unintimidating way to introduce data visualization–its affordances and its pitfalls–to students, even those who are struggling with how to use “Ctrl V” or who don’t know why we have to use Firefox as our browser.

I was guided by Ted Underwood’s blog on “Where to Start with Text Mining,” to introduce students to the purpose of text mining. I knew we wouldn’t go anywhere near the primary research he and his colleagues are working with. But getting students to have a sense of these categories of text mining helped them see what “big data” can do in the humanities. Underwood’s list pointed the way: Categorize documents.  Contrast the vocabulary of different corpora.  Trace the history of particular features (words or phrases) over time. Cluster features that tend to be associated in a given corpus of documents (aka topic modeling). Entity extraction. Visualization.

So we began with visualization. No one in the room had heard of “wordle”–which surprised me. And so we went went to UNC’s website where a full-text version of the book was available in a single page, and I asked them to select “all” and copy this into the wordle window.  The wordle we all came up with, more or less, looked like this:

 

We quickly saw that “Page” was not a word that would help us to interpret Jacobs’s book, and so this led us to a very clear idea of the methodological problems that might come up with text mining: all words in a book don’t “mean” the same, and so finding ways to filter those words out is key.

I walked them through the quick process of “find” and “replace” in Word, such that we got rid of the offending “Page,” and a new wordle emerged:

 

A wordle using the text of _Incidents_ with the word “Page” removed 297 times.

Everyone now saw that “children” was the most frequent word in the book. While “Flint” and “master” and “slave” were also prevalent, this word “children” supported our discussions all week about the book: that Jacobs had a rhetorical purpose in mind: she wanted to build a bridge between herself and her audience, and being first a child and then a mother helped her to do this with her white audience.

I then asked students to spend the rest of the class selecting portions of the book–chapters that had intrigued them or interested them–and see how creating a wordle supported their initial interpretations. We all wrote up our comments in the live forum in our LMS.

During class, one student went and found a text by Sojourner Truth and created a wordle and reported on the prevalence of “God” (smaller in Jacobs’s text).

 

A wordle from Sojourner Truth’s narrative.

I think that I will use this wordle exercise again–and maybe extend it to the ngram viewer so that we can look more closely at relationships among words over time.

Definitely a useful introduction–very small steps, just enough to intrigue the students but not overwhelm them. Something to build on this term.

 

Adapted from Ed Folsom’s Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman and American Culture

INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS:

Read the instructions below and then post your response to the Moodle forum. If you have time, respond to your peers and begin a conversation about Whitman and how his poetic device of cataloging can help us become better readers and interpreters of American Literature.

For today’s Digital Humanities Lab, your job is to explore this “e pluribus unum” work of “Song of Myself” and think about the mechanisms of continuity, unity, fluidity in Whitman’s manuscripts alongside the discontinuities, deletions, substitutions and redirections that run through the surviving drafts of his poem.

1. Go to the Whitman Archive page “Whitman Manuscript Drafts of Song of Myself” (1855) here. Read what author Ed Folsom says about the collection of manuscript drafts of the poem.
2. Next, open a second tab and go to one completed version of “Song of Myself” online (this one from University of Illinois’s Modern American Poetry site–a really useful one to bookmark).
3. To complete your perusal, you will spend some time toggling between these two sites. Start with the original draft manuscript fragments located in the left frame and find lines that interest you.Select just a short phrase that you think might have found its way into the final form. (If you choose too large a phrase, it may be hard to find.) Click on the example below to enlarge:
4. Then see what you can find in the final draft form that matches the draft phrase or words. To locate words or phrases that you find in the drafts in the final form, go to the final poem and type “Control F” and a box will open on your screen. Type in those words and see if they are in the final poem. Click on the example below to enlarge:
5. Click on the DIGITAL HUMANITIES LAB RESPONSE link in Moodle to post your responses.

QUESTIONS FOR EXPLORATION of the SITE:

1. EVERYONE ANSWER THIS QUESTION: A question of composition:  What scraps and patches of poetic drafting eventually find themselves in Whitman’s final poem?  What does this collection of digitized manuscript fragments—and their subsequent scattering in four archives—tell you about the composing process?

THEN CHOOSE FROM THESE QUESTIONS:

1. A question of formal devices: The poetic device of cataloging that Whitman uses here and throughout his ouevre provides a dynamic model of inclusiveness, as if the goal of his poetry is to collect everything under a single “roof” of poetry. What are the advantages of this device? What are its limitations?
2. A question of poetic nation-building: What aspects of Whitman’s fragments and final poem “Song of Myself” situate the poet and poem in larger themes of American literature and culture—the sense of a “boundless dream” and hunger for new beginnings?
3. A question of comparison: For those of you familiar also with Emily Dickinson: compare Whitman’s sprawling freedom with Dickinson’s tightly bound intensity and talk about how they are both somehow “American” by talking about the emerging national literary characteristics or persistent themes, tone, concerns, focus etc.
4. Which of the scraps (“the cocktail napkin drafts”) in this collection are most interesting to you and why?
5. If you’re interested in the printing/publishing aspect of literary enterprise, you may want to read the entire article by Ed Folsom, University of Iowa. What does he say about the value of the “HRC manuscript” to literary scholars and why?
6. Think about your own writing and thinking and revising process. What is the significance of this collection of fragments to you?