Lane has taken a positive step in hiring a Learning Designer as a faculty member. We have had a smart and talented staff member in this role for years, but being staff rather than faculty limited him. 

I worked with Kevin this spring to plan for streamlining and clarifying the interface for my online course. I had mapped all of my assignments to course outcomes, but previously I’d only done this assignment by assignment. Kevin advised a single snapshot and so I created Curriculum Map ENG 217 Course Outcomes with Activities. 

Using Voyant to “not read” Dracula

The first time I introduced students to distant reading methods, I provided them with Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” and “Slaughterhouse of Literature,” two key essays that explain his purpose.  For the most curious students with some English courses behind them, these essays are a revelation. But for many students I found that the essays were too dense. So this year, I have provided a 15-minute online lecture that summarizes and paraphrases Moretti’s purpose in these two essays.

This video lecture provides the context for students’ work this week: Working with Voyant tools to learn how to (in Paul Fyfe’s phrasing) “Not Read a Victorian Novel.”

After #METOO. Lauren Klein’s blog entry became part of our course this year. This was one of those times when teaching online and in a community college course is highly challenging, because there was so much complex background to discuss. But I linked to Klein’s blog for those who could make sense of the conversation, and in some ways Klein’s piece became a bookmark for next year’s curriculum update.

Step by step instructions for this week’s work with Voyant tools are here and here. 

It’s already Week 4 of my second time offering a DH@CC course: “Reading, Writing, and Digital Culture.” It took 2 years to get the name changed in the catalog from “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” which no one on my campus understood!

The very first things students do in my class is to create a course-dedicated blog (or at least a course-dedicated page on an extant blog) and to introduce themselves on it, and so I did the same thing here. I walk everyone through the weeks as I see them unfolding, hoping I can stick somewhat to the plan. Although I couldn’t fit it in last year, I am working really hard to put together a modified/right-sized instructional demo for students to create a digital edition using smart phones and cheap apps. This idea and some of the scaffolding is totally indebted to Shawna Ross at Texas A&M, who provided a comprehensive introduction to this work in a webinar on programming for humanists. Her book with Claire Battershill, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, is out this year from Bloomsbury Academic.

If I do manage to teach my online students how to create a digital edition–of a menu, or a letter, of a book chapter–then it will be as part of their larger Omeka archive project, which makes up the heart of the second half of the term. Last year’s students struggled for the first couple weeks trying to figure it all out, but the feedback I got by the end of the term was that it was incredibly meaningful for students to be able to curate their own digital collection.

Next week, I’m working with Annemarie Hamlin at Central Oregon CC in a collaborative assignment with her students. Both classes will share their work in a Google doc and use the comments feature to talk to one another about their discoveries. Tune in in a couple weeks and I’ll let you know how it goes!

Survey results from a follow-up to the 2013 National Survey of Digital Humanities in Community Colleges are in.

This week’s featured question: Which of the following do you use regularly in your humanities courses? (“Regularly”= at least once a week in all your classes)

You can view them here.

In Week 7, I realized that less was more at this point and gave my students a second week to develop their Omeka sites. I often feel that I’m not doing my job if I don’t create new assignments and activities each week, but I have learned slowly that students miss the satisfaction of really developing something that they’ve learned. With Omeka especially this was true, and so I took my foot off of the activity pedal so students could build their archives to their satisfaction.

Now, in Week 8, students are headed in yet another new direction: taking “synthetic selfies.” I got this idea originally from Jena Osman, whose book and presentation, Public Figures, explore the non-human gaze of public monuments. 

Rosa Parks Statue, Eugene. Source: Wikipedia

Since the weather is finally nice, I’m asking my students to watch Osman’s chapters and then go outside and find a public monument and explore the gaze and view of non-human subjects with a selfie-stick. Cyborgs, enhanced humans, and “beat box” singing all reveal an increasingly sophisticated popular familiarity with human/non-human relationships. Focusing on a pre-digital form, the statue, provides a literal brick-and-mortar experience of the non-human. I’m hoping that Osman’s anticipation of selfies and “photo bombs” through immobile statues will give students a defamiliarizing vantage point from which to examine their own experience of the non-human.

I got the idea for this assignment from Kaia Sand’s assignment here. 

Here are my assignment instructions, based on Sand’s: 
Take a Synthetic Selfie

We are past the mid-term point, and anyone who has taught quarters understands what May 7th feels like. Running on fumes and very hard to continue to create!

But I’m so convinced my students will reap great rewards by creating their own archives. So, with the help of a blueprint by Amanda French  I provide step-by-step instructions with customized illustrations to my class this week.

Writing curriculum is like…writing. Less is always more. “If I had longer, it would be shorter.” So I asked my students just to create their archive, to upload 3 items, to post a reflection in our LMS. That’s enough for this week. It’s a lot.

Instructions for Your First Upload to Omeka Archive

The term is flying by. I just finished looking at students Emotion Maps from Week 3. They were amazing–I loved how diverse students’ choice of emotions were–from “anticipation” to “dominance” to “joy.” This assignment met my expectations for introducing students to the Library of Congress Chronicling America database collection while also introducing them to the steps for producing an annotated map as a collection that tells a story.

This week is mid-term, and I am introducing students to Franco Moretti and “distant reading.” It’s difficult to assume that all students will be able to wade through “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” and “Conjectures on World Literature.” Some of my students seem like they may be literature majors in the making, while others are unlikely to have read many novels at all in college. So I took it upon myself to create a  lecture with 25 slides to introduce students to Franco Moretti’s New Method of Reading ; it includes paraphrases and summaries of these two articles, walking students through Moretti’s concepts. If I were teaching f2f instead of online, this would be an extended lecture/discussion class session–perhaps the entire class session. For my online class, my goal is to give students the background for why we would want to use “distant reading tools,” and in the absence of a lecture setting, I simply told them what I thought Moretti was getting at  I love the term “methodologically bold” that Moretti uses to inspire students everywhere to come up with hypotheses. 

After students read both these two essays and my summaries of them, I ask them to follow Paul Fyfe and Ryan Cordell and “not read” a Victorian novel from Project Gutenberg. I had wanted to try multiple tools, but in the end I realized that Voyant alone is enough of a challenge, and so I created a step-by-step for students to work with Voyant and post their discoveries and “bold methodologies” to their blogs. 

Here are my instructions with screencaptures, rubric and grading criteria. I have divided into two files because they are large files.

Instructions McGrail Distant Reading Part 1Instructions McGrail Distant Reading Part 1

Instructions McGrail Distant Reading Part 2Instructions McGrail Distant Reading Part 2

Week 4 is already done and I’m just now able to post from my course. When I was developing my composition course, I read some great work by Ann Frances Wysocki about how students need to consider the ethics of representing themselves and others online. 

Since I’m asking my own students to create archives that may include photos of my students or their family and friends, I adjusted my calendar so that we could slow down and collaboratively create a statement for the ethical representation of themselves online. 

Here’s my screencast video introducing students to the assignment:

https://www.screencast.com/t/TPdUltE9

Here’s the written INSTRUCTIONS FOR COLLABORATIVE STATEMENT OF ETHICAL REPRESENTATION 2