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?

A quick update on this assignment. While as with many mini-research assignments these can elicit very formulaic responses to questions, I also discovered that for several of the students, this was exactly the kind of assignment that drew them in and gave them a sense of ownership and discovery. One student talked movingly about how discovering a Filipino American author affected her and made her wish she had known about this writer when she was growing up Filipino in America; another mother of five wrote about an African American mystery novelist and discovered that while she hadn’t always admired the genre she could see how the work of this novelist could have a positive political dimension.

Introduction to Women Writers ENG260 Fall 2012
Second Blog Assignment: Voices from the Gaps: Women Writer Discovery Blog Entry (mini-research/critical essay project posted onto your course blog) (10%) http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/
POSTING DUE DATE:

Friday, Due Friday October 26 at midnight.

HOW TO POST:

Post the URL to your completed blog entry in the Moodle assignment link that says “VOICES FROM THE GAPS: WOMEN WRITER DISCOVERY BLOG”. This is where your grade will show up in Moodle.  To find out what your URL for this blog entry is, go to your actual post and copy and paste the URL that shows up.

ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION:
For this blog entry, you will be using the same blog that you created for your poetry map, only you will add a new post to it and title it “Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers Discovery Blog.” This assignment gives you the opportunity to explore a woman writer you may not have heard of before and to read what a fellow college student  has researched and wrote about her. You will then write about this artist in your blog, following some questions below. This blog should give you a sense of discovery.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. BROWSE THE VOICES FROM THE GAPS PAGE TO SEE WHAT CATEGORIES ARE AVAILABLE AND WHICH ONES INTEREST YOU: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/

You can choose whichever artist you are interested in as long as she is not one of the writers that we are working on in class. You must use the artist pages that are on this site as your source of information. If there are related links within the site, you can use information found on those sites as well, being sure to mark your reference in your blog by using hyperlinks.

2. 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 this or 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/

3. BEGIN DRAFTING YOUR 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. Your blog should answer the questions below. You should use an essay format, however, with your intended audience being your fellow students and other blog readers in the blogosphere who may be interested in reading what you have to say about this author.

1. Who is the artist you have chosen?
2. Why were you drawn to this artist?
3. Summarize this artist’s major accomplishments. If you can, find something that they have created and describe it or discuss it.
4. Talk about what is unique or unusual or interesting to you about this artist.
5. Talk about how what you learned about this artist relates to some of the themes that we are exploring in our class:

• about women’s identity as artists and difficulties they have;
• about the role that race and ethnicity have played in the identity of this artist and also in their work;
• about the relationship between money and a “room of one’s own” and this artist’s life and/or work
• is the issue of a “single story” at play in their life or work? If so, how?

i)        What do you think of the student researcher’s work?

ii)      Be sure to provide a summary of your overall findings.

Once you have posted your entry, post the unique URL for this post to the Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers Discovery Blog link in the Moodle 5^th week course block.

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 woman artist s/he chose (satisfactory). All sources are correctly cited either by linking to the sites. Strong entries make useful connections with course terms and course readings and discussions. Exemplary entries provide original or creative insight and/or connections.
3. Blog entry demonstrates a general understanding of the chosen writer and her work (satisfactory).  Strong entries utilize course terms and work to discuss the artist and her work. Exemplary entries provide original or creative insight or connections about the chosen artist and course terms and discussions.
4. Satisfactory blog entry provides a clear analysis and detailed response to the chosen artist page(s), using literary terms and reading skills learned in the class. The analysis answers the questions above. Strong analysis provides depth and connections; exemplary analysis 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.

ASSIGNMENT: UNCLE TOM’S CABIN AND MATERIAL CULTURE

This assignment uses resources from the University of Virginia’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture archive.  Students read a few chapters of the novel in their Norton Anthology and the goal is to get them to see the influence the novel has had on American culture in general and racist stereotypes in particular. The assignment was designed as a series of Moodle forums.

For DH Lab: Please choose at least TWO forums below to browse and answer questions in.

BACKGROUND:

In class on Wednesday, we started to look at how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental form supported her novel’s rhetorical purpose: to protest the institution of slavery in America.

At the time of its writing, most black Americans responded enthusiastically to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Frederick Douglass was a friend of Stowe’s; she had consulted him on some sections of the book, and he praised the book in his writings. Most black abolitionists saw it as a tremendous help to their cause. Some, however, opposed the book, seeing Uncle Tom’s character as being too submissive and criticized Stowe for having her strongest black characters emigrate to Liberia.  To this day, it is difficult to fully comprehend the complexities of racist feeling in America in the wake of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s publication and the Civil War that followed it.

GAMES HELP CHILDREN AND ADULTS ORGANIZE THEIR WORLDS

Games provide epistemic frames for children and adults to understand how the world is or should be organized.  An “epistemic frame” is a cognitive and emotional structure that organizes and orients each person’s ways of knowing the world. It is made up of the values, knowledge, skills, identities, and rationales for decision making. An epistemic frame is highly relational: it provides hierarchies and relational connections among the people, places and things in our orbits.

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN: A NEW EPISTEMIC FRAME

Because of its pervasive popularity, Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided a new epistemic frame for white Americans (and Europeans) to comprehend the humanity of black slaves in an abolitionist context. For whites in America—Southerners and Northerners alike–this epistemic frame was grounded in Christian piety, the cult of true womanhood, and domestic individualism.  For example, when Eliza demonstrates powerful maternal devotion she provided white women with a model of identification, which changed those women’s epistemic frame.

A FRAME IMPOSED ON BLACK AMERICAN SLAVES AND FREE MEN AND WOMEN

Of course, for black American slaves, this epistemic frame was objectifying and imposed from without; it infantilized black men and valued male and female submission to “God’s will” as understood by white Southerners and Northerners. Thus, while we can admire Stowe’s rhetorical skill in mobilizing sentiment for a just cause, reading this novel we also bear witness to the racist effects of her choices.  If we can hold both of these contradictory ideas in our minds at once—Stowe’s achievement and her production of racist sterotypes—we can begin to understand this book’s place in our American Literature Survey.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TODAY’S LAB:

For today’s DH Lab, FIRST click on each of the links below and follow the links to the web archive, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, maintained by the University of Virginia.

Once you’ve scanned everything, decide on a forum and answer the question(s) there. Feel free to enter into conversation with each other by replying to the original question and/or the responses of your classmates within the forum. But you should post about at least two sites.

TOY VILLAGES:
Check out the two “Toy Villages” –Play Village Version 1 and Play Village Version 2. Notice that these villages include an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” feature. Answer both of these questions:

QUESTION 1: What do you make of this feature of a village game in a 1905 child’s toy?

QUESTION 2: The curators suggest that this is a “plantation recreation” game, even though not explicitly stated. How does this village contribute to the “epistemic frame” within which children would understand American history? The division of white and black roles in a given “village”?
_____________________________________________________

BROWSE THE SITE

To see the variety of cultural objects inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you may want to browse the entire collection here.

How does it change your perspective to see not just children’s games but “adult toys” and other forms of entertainment emerge from Stowe’s novel?  Taken together, how do these artifacts–created over a period of 80 years–contribute to a cultural epistemic frame?

___________________________________________________________

PAPER DOLLS/RAG DOLLS

The profound learning that occurs with manipulable toys such as village sets and dolls goes beyond the narrative structure set up in Uncle Tom’s Cabin the novel, create an infinitely variable reorganization and reinforcement of the social structure.

Review the collection of paper dolls, cut-outs and rag dolls here. Then continue your reflection on how these objects of material culture contributed to the epistemic frame launched by the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Note the DATES each of these was produced: only one in 1865; the others were in the early 20^th century.

QUESTION: In what contexts can you imagine these figures reinforced the lessons Stowe intended? In what contexts can you see these figures reinforcing emergent racist stereotypes that Stowe may not have intended? What significance could the dating hold?

_________________________________________________________________

UNCLE TOM CARD GAME #1

Read the introduction to this game here click on the “Directions” on the left pane. Click on each of the different character cards, paying special attention to the different “whole families.”

QUESTIONS: What kind of epistemic frame does this card provide for the players?  How does it differ from the frame created in Uncle Tom Card Game #1?

______________________________________________________________________

UNCLE TOM CARD GAME #2

First click on “See the Cards.” After you have seen the four sections of cards, go back and click on “Read the Rules,” and follow how the game is played.

QUESTION:  How does this card game reimagine the world of the novel? Do you think it’s true to the spirit of the novel? What advantages might such a game have in the abolitionist fight against slavery? [Note that it is published the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.]

ASSIGNMENT TIKI TOKI TIMELINES AND WOMEN WRITERS CLASS

Just finished teaching this class, and overall it went well–if by “well” I mean students didn’t entirely mutiny. 75% of the students not only completed the assignment but also had time to get creative. My main requirements were that students would first find the timeline site, create an account, learn the steps for creating timeline entries and then read a couple established websites to do some research on Emily Dickinson and/or Harriet Jacobs. I also wanted them to understand why including the URL was important. Not only does it help everyone avoid plagiarism, it also helps students participate in an active way, sharing sites with one another.

Uneven preparation continues to hinder smooth progress: some students don’t have internet and so use classtime for things other than our research, etc. I require them to post the URL for their timeline to be sure that they have at least walked through the steps.

My Instructions for Creating Your Own Tiki-Toki Timeline for Women Writers

NOTE: You can develop one or more Tiki-Toki timelines for your final project if you wish. Today everyone will be tinkering with one.

IMPORTANT: By the end of class, post the URL for your tiki-toki timeline in this forum to get credit for attendance.

1. Go to tiki-toki.com http://www.tiki-toki.com/
2. Click on “free sign up”
   1. Choose a username: “YOURNAMEEnglish260”
   2. Type in your email address
   3. Choose an easy-to-remember password
   4. Click on the box that says “I agree to terms…” and click “Sign Up”
   5. Once you have signed up, click on “log in” and type your new username and password.
   6. Once you are logged in, click “Create New Timeline”
   7. Click on the triangle that says “ADMIN”
   8. Go to “Settings” in the ADMIN box at the top right-hand side of the screen.
   9. Give your timeline a title. You can change this in future if you wish.
   10. Choose a start and end date. You should start around 1800 for our purposes, although this can change if you wish later.
   11. Click on “SAVE”.
   12. Next, we’re going to write an entry for our timeline.
   13. Go to this link: http://www.neabigread.org/books/dickinson/readers05.php
   14. Reading this page, I find that 1890 is the date when E.D.’s first volume is published.
   15. To add an entry, we go to the ADMIN box and click on “stories.” Then we go to “+Create New Story”
   16. We give the story a title: “First volume of E.D. poems published.”
   17. We give the story a date: We know it’s 1890, but right now I’m not sure what month, so I will write January.
   18. Now enter the information, perhaps putting some context: “Four years after her death, her first volume of poems is published.
   19. Now copy and paste the link into the place where it says “Link”. This will allow your readers to know where you found this information and to follow up. You MUST provide a link to information that is in your timeline. If you use information you find elsewhere, you should include that citation within the story block.
   20. Click “save.”
   21. Now we’re going to create a category so that when you add different women writers to your timeline you can easily see which one the timeline is about. You can change these later, but we’ll do the same one together today.
   22. Go to the ADMIN block and click on “Categories”.
   23. Click “Create New Category”
   24. Give a title “Emily Dickinson” to the first one.
   25. Click on the “colour” bar and choose a color.
   26. Click “SAVE.”
   27. Now go to your story on Emily Dickinson and Click “Edit.”
   28. Go to “category” and Choose “Emily Dickinson.”
   29. Click SAVE.
   30. Now for the rest of class, spend time reading around in the links below. When you find interesting information that would be useful in a timeline of E.D., go to your tiki-toki timeline and follow these same instructions. Be sure you include the link where you found the info each time you add a new story.

Doc McGrail’s Tiki Toki Timeline is here.
http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/68232/Women-Writers-Class/#!date=1830-12-10_12:00:00!

For Emily Dickinson:

General Information:
http://www.neabigread.org/books/dickinson/readers05.php

A timeline of Emily Dickinson’s life
http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/timeline

Dickinson archives with interesting photographs (“deguerrotypes”) of two women, one of them Dickinson the other Kate Scott, who some believe E.D. was in love with:
http://www.emilydickinson.org/

A university research site:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/dickinson.htm

A site that explores E.D.’s poetry and correspondence with Susan Huntington Dickinson, her sister-in-law.
http://www.classroomelectric.org/volume2/hart/

For fun: a collection of E.D.’s letters to Thomas W Higginson—for a look at her handwriting:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157604466722178/with/2403509440/

For Harriet Jacobs:

General research:
http://www.harrietjacobs.org/

PBS Series on Harriet Jacobs
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2923.html

A timeline of Civil War-related events:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Jacobs/hj-timeline.htm

ASSIGNMENT: Ngrams on 18th and 19th Century American Lit Themes at the Mid-Term

Prior to this DH Lab, we had finished the mid-term class assessment, and had made our way up through The Scarlett Letter. The lab class is just 50 minutes, so to introduce the concept of Ngrams, I used the now-classic TED talk “What We Learned from 5 Million Books”; it provided a quick introduction to the Google Ngram viewer and what it might afford students for text mining purposes.

On our Moodle LMS, I provide links to Ted Underwood’s Stone and the Shell Blog on etymology and poetic diction so that  really engaged students can read Professor Underwood’s lucid and sophisticated ideas about what text mining is beyond Google. And I also link to the Atlantic Monthly’s article on the new Google Ngram viewer.  I try to adhere to my own “DH at the CC” principle of “do it during class or they won’t get to do it at all.”

Here are the instructions I gave to students in a smart classroom with some demo’ing on my part first:

For this week’s DH Lab, use your readings so far and the examples from The Atlantic Monthly and the TEDx talk to dig around the 19th century for trends in the way people were writing about themes from the decades that we’ve been reading in.

(Start with 1800-1900 in American English but you can play around with those years if it serves your research purpose….)

You will probably have to try a few of them before you find any that make some real sense. Once you find an ngram that seems interesting or telling to you, post the link to it and offer a comment on what you think it might mean. In other words, try your hand at “culturomics” and text mining.

And here are some interesting ngrams that students found. What I like about these is how their tacit and emerging ideas about American literature and history are present in their choice of word pairs and clusters.

Scott found that “heaven” and “hell” were less prevalent than “god” and the “devil.”

From Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative to Equiano’s Slave Narrative, the juxtaposition of captivity/slavery and Christian ideology was emerging as a theme for students.

Some students used the lab to follow their own interests, as here with “easter” and “christmas”–interesting nonetheless.

This student found an interesting trend that suggested while “old” and “new” changed places, “change” was less commented upon.

My strongest impression of using this assignment in class is that students were thoroughly engaged in it, looking for words that would bring an interesting data patten. One or two were satisfied with utterly flat lines, such as what emerged for “who, what, where, when, how, why,” but overall students posted intriguing ngrams that led them to more questions than answers–which is just what I had wanted them to see about this kind of text mining.

What continues to be a challenge in doing DH at this level is to fully integrate these new tools into class in a way that supports their ongoing 10-week investigation of the subject matter–here, “American Literature.” Last term, In Women Writers, I focused too much on the tools and left the integration behind. This term, I’m asking them to use fewer tools and leading them through a more archival approach–through primary sources, material culture etc. Since we only have one day in the lab–and students thoroughly enjoy and engage in face-to-face discussion the other two days, it will be a matter of really designing each of these assignments in such a way that each of these labs will give a double aha moment: about how new tools can offer new ways to think about old ideas and even lead to new questions altogether….

ASSIGNMENT: LIVE TWEETING LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Last week, our DH Lab involved everyone getting a Twitter account, learning about hashtags and then live-tweeting a clip from Last of the Mohicans. In some ways, the digital components of this term’s class are a little less ambitious than last term’s, as I am trying to respond to students’ criticism in the Women Writers class in Fall that we did a lot of digital work but it wasn’t tightly linked to the course content for a given week. (We always worked with women’s texts, for example, but they might be different from the ones we were reading on the syllabus. The annotation project, for example, involved obscure women writers that aren’t anthologized or even published outside the Brown Women Writer’s Project.)

So, since we were reading James Fenimore Cooper, the Twitter exercise allowed for a direct engagement “lite” with the text, via Miami Vice director Michael Mann’s version of the story. And it didn’t hurt that Daniel Day Lewis starred twenty years ago playing Natty Bumppo. We’ve talked a lot about his Lincoln this term.

Here’s the Storify of the Tweets from the live tweeting activity and the student instructions for the DH lab. There were more than 120 tweets during the 25-minute film clip. Since this is an entirely new class for me, I can’t take the time to create a really meaningful Storify with organized commentary, but for now they are curated. In yesterday’s DH lab I showed students the Storify; no one in the room had heard of it and we had a brief discussion about the genres that are springing up via social media and I suggested that at the very end of the second American Lit survey we might want to consider this genre of writing.

Live Tweeting Last of the Mohicans

NOTE: DO NOT LIVE TWEET AT THE MOVIES! It is rude and distracting.

Learning Goals of this exercise:

• Use 21^st century social media to comment upon a late 20^th century Hollywood film adaptation of an early 20^th century film adaptation of a 19^th Century colonial American novel of an 18^th century war between the English, the French and the Mohican and Huron tribes of North America.
• Participate in the “culture of academic reputation” that emerges when a Tweet is interesting enough or engaging or useful enough that it gets “Retweeted” and thus develops a following.
• Establish a Twitter account if you don’t already have one.
• Learn how to create #hashtags for a community of peers interested in the same topic or idea
• Practice using the 140-character constraint to make meaningful comments that contribute to a dialogue about an event (such as our clip from Last of the Mohicans).

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Establish a Twitter account if you don’t have one. For more info on Twitter for beginners is here.
2. You can establish a new account just for this class if you wish, as I have done. My handle is @DocMcGrail.
3. Post your handle in the Digital Humanties Lab #4 so that everyone can find you and follow you in this class. If you don’t want your social tweets from the rest of your life to be followed, create an Eng253 or LCC handle for yourself. Twitter lets you have as many as you’d like.
4. Go to Twitter.com
5. Follow instructions for signing up, and sign in to Twitter
6. Once the film begins, create 140-character comments on the film using the hashtag #LCCeng253 at the end of your tweet.
7. Be sure to use #LCCeng253 so that all of today’s tweets will show up on the same page.

Some prompts for tweets:

1. Something from the film triggers a memory or a thought related to our other readings or discussions in class.
2. Something from the film runs counter to your understanding of history or culture of the time—either of 1826 when Cooper published the novel or 1757 when the novel is set.
3. Something startles or surprises you.
4. Something that impresses or engages you particularly about a scene, an actor or dialogue.
5. You come up with something witty to say about the film that you think might be interesting to your peers.

Retweet!!!

As you are reading other students’ tweets, when you find something interesting, “retweet” it! This will share your peer’s tweet with your followers, and build your peer’s reputation. At the end of class, we will be able to see whose tweets get the most RT’s.

Digital Humanities Lab #2 Using Google Maps to Create a Geographic Plot Summary and Analysis of Huckleberry Finn

OBJECTIVES OF THIS ASSIGNMENT:

• Learn how to use custom Google Maps as an alternative essay format that provides 3-D information about your subject matter.
• Learn how to annotate a Google Map
• Think about the “river of life” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by plotting events in the novel onto a physical map of the Mississippi River and its surrounding area.
• Think about the plot of Huck Finn in terms of the geography of slave states and free states and how that geography functions as a meaningful narrative undercurrent throughout.

INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS:

1. Begin by opening two tabs, one with Moodle and one with Google Maps here: https://maps.google.com/
2. Next click on “Get Directions” and type in “FROM Eugene Oregon” “TO Hannibal Missouri”
3. 1948 miles, 30 hours by car.
4. Next click on “My places”
5. Next click on “Maps”
6. Next click on the red square button that says “Create Map”
7. [Click on the “interactive tutorial” link so that you get a feel for how to create your own Huck Finn map.]
8. Title your map using your first name and “Huck Finn” and click on the “unlisted” option to keep your work private. Save your map.
9. To get credit for your DH Lab today, click “done” and then go to “My Maps” then click on the title of your map, click on the blue “collaborate” link and then cut and paste your URL into the DH Lab in Moodle.  Once you have created content in your map, this will show up when Doc McGrail grades the lab.
10. To begin adding content to your map, search for the REAL place of “Hannibal, Missouri” so that you can begin to plot your map in St. Petersburg, Missouri, the fictionalized place in Huck Finn. See below where I have typed in “Hannibal, MO”.

Now that you know where to begin, you’ll want to put your own “custom place” into your map. Find the blue balloon icon and click on it.

Blue balloon is the middle icon next to the “hand” above.

12. Use the zoom feature on the left to give you a broader view of the Mississippi and Huck and Jim’s journey. Use the “hand” icon to move the map around so you can follow the Mississippi all the way from St. Petersburg to the end of the novel.

13. One scholar of Twain has created a map that offers a tour through the novel and includes some historical material. Take a look at Byer’s Google Map analysis of the novel here to get a sense of the potential for this project: http://www.ibiblio.org/byers/maps/hf/

13. For today, your job is to create a map entry for one of the episodes in your reading so far. [Look below to see a list of episodes or choose one that sticks out in your mind so far.] To do this, locate where the episode takes place geographically and place a blue map icon there. There is a map below with some clues, and you can also use Byer’s Huck Finn’s Journey assignment to help you choose. Create a blue icon for your location and move it to the place on your own map where you think it should go.

14. To get credit for your DH Lab today, post the URL to your saved map and include a comment in your blue icon box . TO DO THIS: When you’re done, you can click “done” and then go to “My Maps” and you’ll be able to click on your map, click on “collaborate” and then cut and paste your URL into the DH Lab in Moodle

NOTE: If this project appeals to you, you can also develop it for your CLOSE READING NOTE for Monday.  For the reading note, choose 4 other episodes from the novel, and create an analytical note for each. Your analytical note should include some in-depth discussion of the following:

• A key quote
• A key conflict of this episode
• A key lesson that Huck learns through this episode
• How this episode contributes to the “imagined community” of the developing American nation, either in its moral questions, its customs and manners, its dialect, the myths it adheres to, ideas of race, class, gender, education….
• A key question that the episode suggests

 Suggested episodic table of contents. 

• This list is taken from Seth Hudson’s English Class Blog Choose one of these episodes to map in your Google Map
• Episode One: Chapters 1-4
  Characters introduced, We see Huck’s conflict with society.
• Episode Two: Chapters 5-7
  Huck is Kidnapped by and escapes from Pap.
• Episode Three: Chapters 8-11
  Huck meets Jim; they salvage the house w/ the dead man. Huck dresses like a girl to get info.
• Episode Four: Chapters 12-15
  Huck and Jim interact with the robbers on the Walter Scott
• Episode Five: Chapters 16-18
  Huck and Jim make it to Cairo. The Grangerfords vs. the Shepardsons. Back on the Mississippi
• Episode Six: Chapters19-20
  The Duke and the King are introduced. Indian Pirate con.
• Episode Seven: 21-23
  The Royale Nonesuch
• Episode Eight: 24-30
  The death of Peter Wilks
• Episode Nine: 31-33
  Jim is sold by the King. The King and the Duke strike out on their own. Huck becomes Tom Sawyer
• Episode Ten: 34-43
  Huck and Tom “free” Jim.

BELOW IS ONE SCHOLAR’S MAP OF THE JOURNEY
From David Wells, “More on the Geography of Huck Finn” South Atlantic Bulletin 38.4 Nov. 1973