Digital Writing Month Pages

30 Days of Unproofed Planning, Documenting, Searching and Recording for Doing American Lit with a DH Component at the CC

DigiWriMo DigiDay1

My plan for DigiWriMo: Use each day to write up my American Literature Survey class Winter and Spring Terms. This is a digital class, with Fridays in the Digital Humanities Lab as I call it.

I have never taught this class before, and so it’s a bit frightening! I will rely heavily on the great work of many syllabi that have come before me.

I have been reading This is Enlightenment by Bill Warner and Clif Siskin. I have always liked their formulation that “Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation.” I’ve always liked Warner’s formulations—they are efficient statements of a point of view, always dense and amenable to great conversation and unpacking. So I’ve been thinking of spending my Am Lit survey stealing a bit of this idea: imagining that the idea, practice and place of “America” is also an event in the history of mediation. I’m thinking this might be an interesting throughline for the two-term course: a way to place the documents that we sift through (for documents they are, as Woolf would say, to the core. For one could hardly call some of these American literature artifacts “literature”—not in the sense that my spoiled Brit Lit survey self expects. Instead, I believe that American lit is best studied as a series of interventions and inventions and mediations. Some of it is inspiring and ponderable all by itself—there are many masterpieces. But I think a lot of it is best read as dashes on a treasure map—take one on at at time, skip to the next one, and piece together some kind of narrative.

So what have I found so far that I’ll want to use in my class on the Friday DH segment:

Here: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/timeline.html Women and Work 1800-1930. This will be a great collection to use for late in the first term and early in the second. I am teaching Women Writers right now, and I believe that this could work for now too if it weren’t for the fact that there is such a rich literature (not just “documents”) in Women’s Lit considered over time and globally.

Pochohantas Archive here: http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/pocahontas/index.php

American Lit Survey to 1865

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Finals Week

American Lit Survey Spring Term 2013