robin_anne_reid

Informed Consent Letter: Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!: Secular Readings of Tolkien

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 20:59:00 GMT

Information about Being in a Research Study
Texas A&M University-Commerce

Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!:

Secular Readings of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium

Robin Anne Reid

Description of the Study

Robin Anne Reid invites you to take part in her research study. She is a professor of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University-Commerce. The purpose of this study is to learn how readers of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium who are atheists, agnostics, animists, or part of New Age movements, specifically readers who do not believe in a supreme creator, interpret his work in the context of the common assumption that Tolkien's Catholic beliefs must play a part in what readers see as the meaning of his fiction.

Your part in the study if you agree to participate will be to answer ten open-ended questions about your religious and/or spiritual background, your experiences of Tolkien's work, and your ideas about the relationship between religious beliefs and interpreting his work, and to supply information about 6 demographic factors.

Depending on how much you choose to write in response to the questions, it will take you anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to complete the survey.

Risks and Discomforts

There will be minimal risks associated with this study, no more than that encountered in daily life.

Possible Benefits

I do not know of any way you could benefit directly from taking part in this study. However, the project may help us understand how readers' responses to and understandings of literary texts is related to their personal beliefs and why Tolkien's work has become an international and global phenomenon that appeals to so many different types of readers.

Incentives

No financial or other compensation will be offered to participants.

Protection of Privacy and Confidentiality

Collecting Data

I request some basic demographic information to determine if the demographic make-up of Tolkien readers is similar to the demographics of nonreligious and secular groups in the general population. However, no personally identifying information is requested, such as your name, and you do not need to supply the demographic information to complete the survey. The demographic information requested is: gender, ethnicity, age, nationality, political identification, and an open "other" response.

There is a possibility that you might provide specific information in your answers that, in the context of the demographic information you share, would result in information that is personally identifiable. However, I will not correlate demographic information with the answers to the open-ended questions in my analysis. None of your responses will be connected to the demographic information you supply.

The final question of the survey asks for a contact email if you wish to be contacted for a follow-up interview. If you choose to leave an email address, that address will not be published or circulated, and only I will use it. I will not ask for personally identifiable information in the interview which will focus on asking for elaboration of your answers in the survey.

In addition, in collecting, storing, and analyzing the data collected, I will do everything I can to protect your anonymity, confidentiality, and privacy.

The survey has been created on my individual paid Survey Monkey account; only I have access to this account. The only type of collector I am using is a web link to the survey has been posted on my private academic Dreamwidth blog: I am not using other types of collectors such as Facebook that collect data on users.

In addition, Survey Monkey has an "Anonymous Responses collector option" which lets me choose not to track and store identifiable respondent information in my survey results. I have chosen not to store or track respondent information.

Survey Monkey does record respondent IP addresses and store them for 13 months but then deletes them. Basic information about Survey Monkey's privacy policies and practices can be found on this site:

www.surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/privacy-basics/

The second section on this page gives information for people who respond to surveys.

Complete information about their privacy policy (as of April 11, 2018) can be found here:

www.surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/privacy-policy/

Specific information for respondents can be found at that site, including how they meet the European Union Privacy Shield requirements.

The survey has SSL Encryption turned on which improves security by encrypting the survey and the results as they are sent between you and SurveyMonkey.

Storing Data

The survey data will be exported from Survey Monkey onto the hard drive of my password-protected computer. The exported data will not be shared either online or offline with anyone. One back-up copy will be maintained on a password-protected external hard drive. I will be the only person who can access the data.

I will delete the survey from Survey Monkey at the end of the survey period (November 21, 2018-January 30, 2019). The survey will close on January 31, 2019, 11:30 PM GMT-0500 Central Daylight Time.

Choosing to Be in the Study

You do not have to be in this study. You may choose not to take part and you may choose to stop taking part at any time. You may choose not to answer any of the questions. Participation is voluntary. Refusal to participate or withdraw at any time will not involve any penalty or loss of benefits, to which the subject is otherwise entitled. You will not be punished in any way if you decide not to be in the study or to stop taking part in the study.

Electronic Consent

Clicking on the web link below indicates that:

you have read the above information
you voluntarily agree to participate in this survey
you are at least 18 years of age

www.surveymonkey.com/r/3HQWKF6

Contact Information

If you have any questions or concerns about this study or if any problems arise, please contact the researcher at

Robin Anne Reid

Department of Literature and Languages

Texas A&M University-Commerce

robin.reid@tamuc.edu

www.tamuc.edu/academics/colleges/humanitiesSocialSciencesArts/departments/literatureLanguages/facultyAndStaff/robinReid.aspx

If you have any questions or concerns about your rights in this research study, please contact the IRB Chair at:

Dr. Tara Tietjen-Smith

Chair, Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Department of Health & Human Performance

Texas A&M University-Commerce

Commerce, TX 75429-3011

(903) - 886 - 5545

IRB@tamuc.edu

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An Annotated Bibliography Project

Tue, 02 May 2017 03:22:04 GMT

Ignoring the fact that I have two essays due in the next few months, plus some others in various stages of process (meaning at editors who will no doubt have suggestions for rewrites), the mere fact that summer approaches means that New Ideas are surfacing, and one will not go away.

An annotated bibliography of sff that features female characters who are older.

I've done some searches online and don't see any existing one (though some great discussions and one fantastic amazing resource popped up). I don't see this as an academic project (in the sense of publication), more as an open-access one with the only planned publication being here on Dreamwidth.

To maintain some limits and time control, I currently plan to focus only on print works and to focus first on women authors. This may be a WIP for some time, so those limits may change in future.

I'm starting my own list, and some of the links below include possibilities.

If you care to contribute any suggestions, feel free to drop names and titles below (full credit will be given for all suggestions of course).

I'm interested in secondary characters as well as protagonists.

Links from first Google searches:

Reddit Fantasy

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/4sltis/old_women_as_protagonist/?st=j26x6wzg&sh=745aa53c

Middle Aged Women Fantasy

https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/564432/

Sleeps with Monsters Liz Bourke 2013

http://www.tor.com/2013/01/29/sleeps-with-monsters-where-are-the-older-women/

Ove Jansson's blog (multi-part series)

http://www.cybermage.se/formidable-female-protagonists-in-science-fiction-part-1/

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1254942

Catherine Lundoff's Dreamwidth

https://catherineldf.dreamwidth.org/261709.html

https://catherineldf.dreamwidth.org/362533.html

Brilliant annotated bibliography by Rebecca Marrall at my alma mater, Western Washington University

http://cedar.wwu.edu/cedarbooks/8/

comments

Texts and Genders Course

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:53:52 GMT

I've been very much consumed with other stuff during the past few years (including a tornado that took out a chunk of our roof in 2014--nobody hurt in the whole area which means we were incredibly lucky--and health problems). But I have a resolution this fall to start making more use of this academic journal, focusing specifically on one of my favorite (and often most frustrating) graduate courses: Texts and Genders.

Here is the basic information about the class:

Required Reading:

Sara Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology. Duke UP. ISBN-10: 0-8223-3914-5. ISBN-13:978-0-8223-3914-4
Sara Ahmed. Willful Subjects. Duke UP. ISBN-10: 0-8223-5783-6. ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-5783-4
Ann Leckie. Ancillary Justice. Little Brown & Co. ISBN-10: 0-316-24662-X. ISBN-13: 978-0-316-24662-0
Ann Leckie. Ancillary Sword. Little Brown & Co. ISBN-10: 0-316-24665-4. ISBN-13: 978-0-316-24665-1
Ann Leckie. Ancillary Mercy. Little Brown & Co. ISBN-10: 0-316-24668-9. ISBN-13: 978-0-316-24668-2

Reading Schedule:

Weeks 2-3-4: Queer Phenomenology
Weeks 5-6-7: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy
Weeks 8-9: Willful Subjects
Weeks 10-11-12: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy

Course Description

Graduate Catalog: Three semester hours. A critical examination of how gender differences influence reading and writing strategies of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film, including issues of gender and style, gender and usage, and gender stereotyping. This course is recommended for doctoral students planning to teach and/or produce scholarship on the college level.

The catalog description is written with an intentionally broad focus to allow different faculty to teach with their own areas of specialization.

Here's my specific course description for this class:

Fall 2016 Focus: The focus this fall is on an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to gender theory and how to apply theory to literary works. The class will be a focus on two monographs by Sara Ahmed and a science fiction trilogy by Ann Leckie in order to explore how the theory and narrative of Ahmed's work are in conversation with the narrative and theory of Leckie's work.

Assignments:

Online Discussions: Six @ 200 points. 1200 points. One introduction and five on Ahmed's books.

Writing Journal: Seven entries @ 200 points 1400 points. Exploratory entries on the ways in which Ahmed's work is in conversation with Leckie's.

Paper (12-15 pages): A queer and/or willful reading of Leckie's work. Three assignments: Plan (200 pts); First Draft (400 pts); Final Draft (1000 pts). 1600 total.

Educating About Plagiarism Unit: Extra Credit quizzes and summaries.

Here are some first thoughts as I work on finalizing the materials to upload to the course shell:

More and more I have come to realize that it's important for me as a teacher to explain not only what I want students to do, but why I am having them do it the way I am asking, especially since I do all sorts of new and weird (to them) stuff.

That means a real shift in pedagogical choices from even ten years ago. One thing I've been working on, especially driven by teaching primarily online (which I mostly do because I *like* it, I know I'm weird, I did say weird, right), is embedding process writing in my theory and literature courses. The classes cannot be as writing intensive as the creative writing and composition courses I teach, but I'm working to get a balance in by using more focused discussion questions, and more journal entries which can also involve self assessment of process and learning.

So, for your fun this rainy (in Texas) Saturday morning, some text I just wrote for my Leckie Paper assignment lecture. I'm trying to break my long assignment handups into a lecture plus a shorter assignment handout that refers students to the lecture for explanation and process information.

Part of the lecture will be explaining how they're working on their final paper from the first discussion. (I'm gathering that my approach is very different from many my students report having had in their journals, so I'm hoping this will help those who find it so different to understand the method in my weirdness).

First: "Good" final drafts (defined as meeting my assignment criteria which are based on my knowledge of and experience with academic writing and publishing) come from an extensive and recursive writing process that takes place over time.

Second: Graduate students who carry a heavy weight of coursework and teaching responsibilities in their professional lives may have difficulty starting the writing process early enough on their own time.

Third: Even an extensive writing process can fail to generate a final draft that meets the standards for final drafts if students are dealing with texts and approaches that are new to them.

Fourth: An online course which does not allow for the face/face extended discussions of the traditional seminar does allow for online discussions that can be more focused and comprehensive, allowing for responses and analysis to readings to take place in a group setting where ideas can be shared and reviewed at a later time.

comments

The question of Tolkien Criticism

Sat, 14 Nov 2015 23:44:51 GMT

Another View on the State of Tolkien Criticism Today

The L. A. Review of Books published an essay on "Tolkien Criticism Today"by Norbert Schürer.

In 2800 words, Schürer discusses seven critical publications (from a variety of publishers) published from 2013-2015.

The seven publications are: Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015), University of Notre Dame Press; Tolkien in the New Century (2014), McFarland; Arda Inhabited (2014), Kent State University Press; Tolkien's Sacramental Vision (2014), Second Springs Books; Tolkien The Forest and the City (2013), Four Courts Press; Light Beyond All Shadow (Reprint 2013), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; and A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (2014), Wiley Blackwell.

His conclusion, based on this incomplete group of publications, is that Tolkien criticism today is in a "sad state" (para. 4) with few exceptions (he lists Jane Chance, Michael Drout, and Verlyn Flieger as the excellent exceptions). The reason for this "sad state," he claims, is:

Academic literary criticism has long been caught between these two versions of Tolkien — the difficult litterateur and the successful populist. On one hand, critics do not want to be seen as fawning fans, so their writing adopts a scholarly tone. On the other hand, they want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment. They need to address controversial topics, but they cannot attack the author if they want to find readers among fans, and while they often try to address the entirety of Tolkien’s published imaginary writings (known as the legendarium) they can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form (para. 3).

He approves (somewhat) of Tolkien: The Forest and the City but considers the Companion to be the best and to also supply "academic cachet" (para. 22).

Not surprisingly to anyone knows me, I completely disagree with his assessment of the state of Tolkien Studies generally. I believe some of the critiques he levels against Tolkien Studies are true of all bodies of literary criticism. In other cases, I argue that he is simply ignoring evidence that would contradict the he has made, claims that are inflated and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.

First: Schürer does not explain the reasons for choosing the seven works that he did, not even giving a rationale for limiting the works to publications from 2013-15. Some of the works are published by university presses, and some by more specialized presses ("niche" presses in his word). There does not seem to be any clear reason for choosing these books from the total number of books published during the time period.

The MLA International Bibliography lists seven monographs and nine critical anthologies that were published during 2013-2015, the dates of publication for the works he is discussing. Three of the seven books Schürer discusses are on this list (I have bolded them); four are not, probably because they are written for popular or student audiences.

Since his list of seven is not comprehensive, I wonder why he chose the ones he did. He fails to supply this information.

Monographs

Brawley, Chris. Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Cesff): 46. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Curry, Patrick. Deep Roots in a Time of Frost: Essays on Tolkien. Cormarë Series (Cormarë): 33. Zürich, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2014. Print.
Jeffers, Susan. Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in the Lord of the Rings. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 2014. Print.

Nicolay, Thersa Freda. Tolkien and the Modernists: Literary Responses to the Dark New Days of the 20th Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Parsons, Deke. J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Cesff): 47. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Pask, Kevin. The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

Risden, E. L. Tolkien's Intellectual Landscape. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Print.

Ryan, J. S. In the Nameless Wood: Explorations in the Philological Hinterland of Tolkien's Literary Creations. Cormarë Series (Cormarë): 30. Zürich, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2013. Print.

Zaleski, Philip, and Carol Zaleski. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Print.

Anthologies

Arduini, Roberto, and Claudio A. Testi. Tolkien and Philosophy. Cormarë Series (Cormarë): 32. Zürich, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2014. Print.

Conrad-O'Briain, Helen, Gerard Hynes, and Darryl Jones. Tolkien: The Forest and the City. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2013. Print.

Eden, Bradford Lee. The Hobbit and Tolkien's Mythology: Essays on Revisions and Influences. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Eilmann, Julian, Allan Turner, and Michael D. C. Drout. Tolkien's Poetry. Cormarë Series (Cormarë): 28. Zürich, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2013. Print.

Houghton, John William, et al. Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom ShippeyJefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Print.

Kowalik, Barbara. 'O, What a Tangled Web': Tolkein and Medieval Literature, a View from Poland. Cormarë Series (Cormarë): 29. Zürich, Switzerland: Walking Tree, 2013. Print.

Vaccaro, Christopher. The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-Earth Corporeality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Print.

Second: Schürer's argument seems to be based on two assumptions I do not share: the first is that "critics....want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment" (para. 3).

He does not identify which of these seven critical works is "catering" to fans (or if any of them are), and the placement of this claim at the beginning of his essay implies he is making a general evaluation of Tolkien criticism as a body, rather than only pointing to recent work, but even that is not clear.

Additionally, Schürer fails to distinguish between critics who are academics writing peer-reviewed scholarship for the (primary) audience of other academics and critics (including but not limited to academic critics) writing criticism for a wider audience.

In the second category, I'd place John Garth's superb Tolkien and the Great War published in 2005.

There is a third category these days, academics writing works designed to be read by students (in which I'd place the Companion). Those works are important and needed (I've written for that audience myself!), but they tend to provide information on the existing scholarship rather than make original arguments to contribute to the scholarship.

Of course, any published work can be read by any audience, but I do think it's important to acknowledge the different writing expectations and choices that come with writing for different audiences in a critical review of scholarship.

Evaluating a popular work written for a general audience against standards for peer-reviewed scholarship does a great disservice to the popular work. For example, I'd say that Schürer's claim that "[critics] can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form" (para.3) is completely and provably in error when it comes to academic criticism.

As someone who has been engaged in writing Tolkien scholarship the past ten years or so, who has published and read scholarship for the journals, anyone wishing to publish scholarship in a peer-reviewed journal or an anthology published by an academic press needs to know more than the two main works. There is a growing body of work relying on the use of Christopher Tolkien's HoME. Knowledge of the legendarium and knowledge of the published scholarship on Tolkien's work is required.

I am not sure that Schürer himself has that knowledge!

An author search for his publications in the MLA Bibliography found that as far as the MLA is concerned, he has not published any work on Tolkien.

I am not sure why he was chosen to write this review essay; perhaps neither Mike Drout nor David Bratman, the two most prominent and well-known specialists in tracking Tolkien scholarship, were available (if they were even contacted). But seeing Schürer's record of publications, as well as learning his specialization is 18th century literature, supports my sense of him having assumptions and biases regarding literary scholarship that I do not share.

His MLA listed publications

(I'm giving up on manually putting in the coding for italicizing the titles, both in this list and the longer list below!). :

Schürer, Norbert. "A New Novel by Charlotte Lennox." Notes and Queries 48 (246).4 (2001): 419-22. Print.
---. "An Interview with Robert Morgan." Pembroke Magazine 36 (2004): 252-60. Print.
---. "Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents." Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2012. Print.
---. "Continuity and Discontinuity in Eighteenth-Century Indian Historiography." Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.3 (2009): 453-58. Print.
---. "Emmanuel Dongala: Writer between Worlds: An Interview." Xavier Review 22.2 (2002): 41-54. Print.
---. "Four Catalogues of the Lowndes Circulating Library, 1755-66." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 101.3 (2007): 329-57. Print.
---. "Jane Austen's Bookshop." Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 26.2 (2012): 8-11. Print.
---. "Jane Cave Winscom: Provincial Poetry and the Metropolitan Connection." Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.3 (2013): 415-31. Print.
---. "Millay's 'What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why'." Explicator 63.2 (2005): 94-96. Print.
---. "Pamela's Entertainment: Authorship, Book History, and the English Canon." Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (2002): 637-42. Print.
---. "Sophia/Charlotte Lennox." Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008 of Broadview Editions (Broadview Editions). Print.
---. "Sustaining Identity in I'tesamuddin's the Wonders of Vilayet." Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52.2 (2011): 137-55. Print.
---. "The Impartial Spectator of Sati, 1757-84." Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.1 (2008): 19-44. Print.
---. "The Storming of the Bastille in English Newspapers." Eighteenth-Century Life 29.1 (2005): 50-81. Print.
Schürer, Norbert Ernst. "Lennox and Smollett in the Literary Marketplace: Authorship and Readership after Fielding and Richardson." Duke U, 2002. 3406-06. Vol. 62. Print.

I did not assume that just because I did not recognize his name that he had never published anything on Tolkien: I know from my own work, including two recent bibliographic essays, that Tolkien scholarship is currently large enough that it is no longer possible to know *all* the published criticism on the legendarium.

There will be, increasingly, specialization which is a part of any large body of literary criticism. That specialization seems a natural progression, but I suspect Schürer may not approve of the growing multi-disciplinary approaches that are a hallmark of cultural studies and that have also begun to appear in Tolkien studies.

I tend to think that this wider range of methods and approaches shows the vitality of the field (a claim that Dimitra Fimi makes and supports in her superb monograph published in 2009: Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, Palgrave Macmillan, one of many books which contradicts Schürer's claim about the shallowness of Tolkien studies during the past ten years).

Related to the issue of critics pandering to fans to sell critical books is the assumption that "fans" and "critics" are somehow always already separate.

Fans can and do write critical commentary of Tolkien's work, and not all critics/academics distance ourselves from being fans, a distancing stance that was perhaps once required to support the myth of academic objectivity.

I suspect, given Schürer's commentary on Tolkien's work and style as well as his conclusion, that he would not identify as a fan. But his idea that the primary audience for Tolkien scholars is only fans (instead of other Tolkien scholars) strikes me as bizarre as does the idea that fan demands would affect what a critic would say:

Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is (para.22).

Since the quote above is Schürer's conclusion, he provides no evidence for this claim that critics treat Tolkien "with kid gloves" for fear of these legions of fans.

One major Tolkienist, who is one of the experts on Tolkien scholarship (as shown by this essay and the bibliographic database on Tolkien criticism that he maintains), Michael D. C. Drout and his co-author Hilary Wynne call out Tolkien critics for *mocking* fans.

In their bibliographic essay, they argue that academics need to stop making fun of fans in their Tolkien scholarship: Endnote 36: "Among the many critics who go in for fan-mocking, the most distinguished are Rosebury (1–3) and Humphrey Carpenter in his January 20, 1997 interview in The Independent (cited by Pearce, 3)") (in: "Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982," (2000), Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne).

It is easy to find Tolkien fans discussing the scholarship (in negative as well as positive ways). For example, fans in the Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza have discussed the recent anthology edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien, a collection which was published in 2015 but apparently has not come to Schürer's attention.

If he is not aware of it, I would recommend he see Deidre Dawson's excellent review of the Croft and Donovan anthology which can be found at the Journal of Tolkien Research. [Disclosure: I wrote the bibliographic essay for P&F, and am on the editorial board of JTR.]

I tend to think that he is not aware of the anthology given the nature of his praise for Adam Robert's discussion about "women in Tolkien":

For instance, Adam Roberts makes an innovative and sophisticated argument about women in Tolkien: He claims that female characters in The Lord of the Rings challenge the male-female hierarchy because they embrace renunciation. This femininity is at the heart of Tolkien’s ideology: “a complex repudiation of masculine values of ‘agency’ and ‘action’ in favor of what is, at root, a religiously informed concept of passionate passivity.”(para. 1).

Another area in which Schürer is ignorant of the scholarship is Tolkien's writing style:

Furthermore, much of Tolkien’s work is written in an indigestible faux-medieval style; there are long descriptions of imagined countrysides, and he sprinkles in countless obscure references to invented fantastic histories (para. 1).

As an academic who is one of the handful doing stylistics analysis on Tolkien's work, I completely disagree with the claim in the last sentence as would others who have done stylistic analysis of Tolkien's work, including Elizabeth Kirk and Michael D. C. Drout.

In fact, Schürer does not seem to be familiar with Tolkien scholarship in general, something I would expect for anyone discussing the *current* state of the scholarship. He mentions Jane Chance, Tom Shippey, and Verlyn Flieger who are the three most important Tolkienists—the scholars who founded the academic study of Tolkien—but does not cite any of their work and ignores the fact that they have published scholarship using some of the methods and approaches that he seems to find weak: linguistic, source, and cultural studies.

There is also this odd and unsupported claim:

It is curious that the vast majority of Tolkien criticism in the last decade or so consists of collections of short essays rather than scholarly monographs: It is as if critics do not have the patience to explore their topics in sufficient depth — or, as Tolkien detractors such as Harold Bloom might argue, as if there isn’t enough substance to Tolkien to sustain sophisticated and compelling arguments (para. 7).

An MLA search of books with "Tolkien" as a subject term published during 2005-2015 resulted in 46 hits.

An MLA search of book collections with "Tolkien" as a subject term published between 20015-2015 resulted in 37 hits.

Now, not all of the 46 books are single-author studies of Tolkien's work (but I would not expect them to be!). I could do some further refining of the numbers, but since a number of the anthologies will have a broader focus than just Tolkien's works, I'd be surprised if there was a huge difference in the final results.

It could be that the difficulty of academic publishers, documented extensively, has affected scholarship on Tolkien, with critical anthologies and peer-reviewed journal articles being more likely to be published than monographs, and single-author monographs being difficult to place.

Since Schürer seems to value "literary cachet," let me direct his attention to the Modern Languages Association 2002 Report on the Future of Academic Publishing which documents reasons for the drop in the publication of scholarly monographs as one example of the challenges facing all academic publishers. This problem has been extensively documented among humanities scholars (the sciences tend not to publish academic monographs), and I cannot believe that Schürer is unaware of this issue.

Finally, I do agree with what Schürer says should be the goal for all critical writing:

make well-developed, well-written, comprehensive, and compelling arguments (para.21)

And that Tolkien:

should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications (para. 21).

I simply do not agree that the academics who publish scholarship are not *generally* meeting these criteria (given that any body of work will have weaker publications), and that there is no significant work being done in peer-reviewed journals and by academic presses *as well* as the more popular and general publications.

Nor do I believe that critics who are not academics who wish to publish their ideas and interpretations of Tolkien's work should not do so simply because their approaches and publishers do not meet his standards.

Besides the MLA list of monographs and anthologies published during the past two years that I posted above, most of which, remember, Schürer ignores, below here is a bibliography, taken from the MLA, of peer-reviewed journal articles published in 2013-2015.

Following the list of articles are the titles of journals listed in MLA as publishing the 52 articles and a list of the MLA subjects assigned to them showing the scope of approaches/methods.

Abrahamson, Megan B. "J. R. R. Tolkien, Fanfiction, and 'the Freedom of the Reader'." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 53-72. Print.
Birns, Nicholas. "'the Inner Consistency of Reality': Intermediacy In the Hobbit." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 15-30. Print.
Bryant, Brantley L. "One Does Not Simply Laugh in Middle Earth: Sacrificing Humor in Peter Jackson's the Lord of the Rings." Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 5.2 (2014): 184-98. Print.
Cesereanu, Ruxandra. "'the Fantasy Complex': Close Reading: The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings." Caietele Echinox 26 (2014): 83-98. Print.
Chen, Fanfan. "Tolkien's Style of Fantasy: Hypotyposis, Metalepsis, Harmonism." Caietele Echinox 26 (2014): 63-82. Print.
Christie, E. J. "Sméagol and Déagol: Secrecy, History, and Ethical Subjectivity in Tolkien's World." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 83-101. Print.
Clinton, Esther. "Proverbial Play: J. R. R. Tolkien's Use of Proverbs in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings." Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship 31 (2014): 133-65. Print.
DeTardo, Merlin. "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2010." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 253-89. Print.
---. "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2011." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 259-326. Print.
Drout, Michael D. C., Namiko Hitotsubashi, and Rachel Scavera. "Tolkien's Creation of the Impression of Depth." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 167-211. Print.
Eichel, Andrew. "Interpreting 'sir Gawain and the Green Knight': Translation and Manipulation of Audience Expectations." Fifteenth-Century Studies 38 (2013): 41-63. Print.
Epstein, Rebecca, and David Bratman. "Bibliography (in English) for 2012." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 327-39. Print.
Epstein, Rebecca, David Bratman, and Merlin DeTardo. "Bibliography (in English) for 2011." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 291-307. Print.
Flieger, Verlyn. "But What Did He Really Mean?" Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 149-66. Print.
---. "How Trees Behave-or Do They?" Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 19-31. Print.
Gallant, Richard Z. "Original Sin in Heorot and Valinor." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 109-29. Print.
Garth, John. "'the Road from Adaptation to Invention': How Tolkien Came to the Brink of Middle-Earth in 1914." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 1-44. Print.
Goering, Nelson. "Lŷg and Leuca: 'Elven-Latin', Archaic Languages, and the Philology of Britain." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 67-76. Print.
Hirsch, Bernhard. "After the 'End of All Things': The Long Return Home to the Shire." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 77-107. Print.
Honegger, Thomas. "My Most Precious Riddle: Eggs and Rings Revisited." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 89-103. Print.
Imbert, Yannick. "Tolkien's Shire: The Ideal of a Conservative-Anarchist Distributist Governance." Journal of Inklings Studies 3.1 (2013): 25-53. Print.
Ivar Agøy, Nils. "Vague or Vivid?: Descriptions in the Lord of the Rings." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 49-67. Print.
Jakiel, Rafał, and Józef Jarosz. "Zum Gebrauch Der Übersetzungstechniken Bei Der Wiedergabe Der Eigennamen in Der Deutschen Translation Des Romans Von J.R.R. Tolkien the Lord of the Rings." Germanica Wratislaviensia--Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis 137; 3471 (2013): 95-112. Print.
Jakupcak, Maria Frassati. "'a Particular Cast of Fancy': Addison's Walk with Tolkien and Lewis." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 45-66. Print.
Kullmann, Thomas. "Poetic Insertions in Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings." Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 23.2 (2013): 283-309. Print.
Lionarons, Joyce Tally. "Of Spiders and Elves." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 5-13. Print.
Livingston, Michael. "Troy and the Rings: Tolkien and the Medieval Myth of England." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 73-91. Print.
Long, Josh B. "Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien's View Of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 31-46. Print.
Madsen, Catherine. "Theological Reticence and Moral Radiance: Notes on Tolkien, Levinas, and Inuit Cosmology." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 111-26. Print.
McGregor, Jamie. "Tolkien's Devices: The Heraldry of Middle-Earth." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 93-110. Print.
Mitchell, Phillip Irving. "'but Grace Is Not Infinite': Tolkien's Explorations of Nature and Grace in His Catholic Context." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 61-81. Print.
Munro, Rebecca. "The Art of the Lord of the Rings: A Defense of the Aesthetic." Religion and the Arts 18.5 (2014): 636-52. Print.
Ordway, Holly. "'Further up and Further in': Representations of Heaven in Tolkien and Lewis." Journal of Inklings Studies 3.1 (2013): 5-23. Print.
Organ, Michael. "Tolkien's Japonisme: Prints, Dragons, and a Great Wave." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 105-22. Print.
Prendergast, Monica. "Running around with Inmates, Maps and Swords: A Reflective Poetic-Narrative Autoethnography of a Prison Theatre Production." Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 18.3 (2013): 313-23. Print.
Rankin, Sherry. "'Where Are the Horse and the Rider?' an Approach to Using J. R. R. Tolkien's the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings to Teach Medieval Literature in the British Literature Survey Classroom." CCTE Studies 79 (2014): 48-57. Print.
Reinders, Eric. "Reading Tolkien in Chinese." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.1 (2014): 3-27. Print.
Rogers, Hope. "No Triumph without Loss: Problems of Intercultural Marriage in Tolkien's Works." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 69-87. Print.
Saxton, Benjamin. "J. R. R. Tolkien, Sub-Creation, and Theories of Authorship." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 31.3-4 [121-122] (2013): 47-59. Print.
---. "Tolkien and Bakhtin on Authorship, Literary Freedom, and Alterity." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 167-83. Print.
Scott, Carolyn F. "'Beyond Hope He Saved Us': Trinitarian Analogies in the Lord of the Rings." Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 18.1 (2015): 132-51. Print.
Shank, Derek. "'the Web of Story': Structuralism in Tolkien's 'on Fairy-Stories'." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 147-65. Print.
Snow, Kayla. "What Hath Hobbits to Do with Prophets? The Fantastic Reality of J. R. R. Tolkien and Flannery O'connor." Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 17.4 (2014): 108-29. Print.
Sullivan, Karen. "One Metaphor to Rule Them All? 'Objects' as Tests of Character in the Lord of the Rings." Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association 22.1 (2013): 77-94. Print.
Swank, Kris. "The Hobbit and the Father Christmas Letters." Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 32.1 [123] (2013): 127-44. Print.
---. "Tom Bombadil's Last Song: Tolkien's 'Once Upon a Time'." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 185-97. Print.
Testi, Claudio A. "Tolkien's Work: Is It Christian or Pagan? A Proposal for a 'Synthetic' Approach." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 1-47. Print.
Turnock, Julie. "Removing the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3d High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of Digital Convergence." Film Criticism 37-38.3-1 (2013): 30-59. Print.
Vink, Renée. "'Jewish' Dwarves: Tolkien and Anti-Semitic Stereotyping." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 10 (2013): 123-45. Print.
Wallin, Mark Rowell. "Eurhythmatic Analysis: A Rhetoric of Adaptation." Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 6.2 (2013): 125-39. Print.
Wodzak, Michael A., and Victoria Holtz Wodzak. "Visibílium Ómnium Et Invisibílium: Looking out, on, and in Tolkien's World." Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review 11 (2014): 131-47. Print.
Yoon, Minwoo. "[Nature in Tolkien's Fantasy Literature: The Economy of Slowness]." Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 21.1 (2013): 127-57. Print.

According to the MLA, here are the journals that published the 52 peer-reviewed articles listed above:
tolkien studies: an annual scholarly review 21
mythlore 12
caietele echinox 2
journal of inklings studies 2
logos: a journal of catholic thought and culture 2
ccte studies 1
connotations: a journal for critical debate 1
fifteenth-century studies 1
film criticism 1
germanica wratislaviensia--acta universitatis wratislaviensis 1
journal of adaptation in film and performance 1
journal of the fantastic in the arts 1
language and literature: journal of the poetics and linguistics association 1
medieval and early modern english studies 1
postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1
proverbium: yearbook of international proverb scholarship 1
religion and the arts 1
research in drama education 1

MLA subject terms
tolkien, j. r. r. 7
fictional world 4
catholic novelists 3
christianity 3
film adaptation 3
jackson, peter 3
paganism 3
style 3
authorship 2
biographical approach 2
characterization 2
divine grace 2
heroism 2
lewis, c. s. 2
linguistic approach 2
nature 2
review article 2
the lord of the rings trilogy 2
the shire (fictional place) 2
3-d film 1
addison, joseph 1
aesthetic values 1
aesthetics 1
agrarianism 1
alice books 1
allegory 1
anarchism 1
anglo-saxon culture 1
antisemitism 1
armitage, simon 1
artistic freedom 1
arwen (character) 1
bakhtin, mikhail mikhailovich 1
barthes, roland 1
biographical information 1
blindness 1
bombadil, tom (character) 1
british columbia 1
buddhism 1
carpenter, humphrey 1
character names 1
characters 1
christian theology 1
collective unconscious 1
comitatus 1
creation 1
creativity 1
dante 1
depth 1

I have not spent much time addressing the criticisms of works Schürer considers evidence of the "sad state" of Tolkien criticism, and I don't intend to do so.

In most cases, it is because I have not yet read them (since they don't address the issues I focus on for my Tolkien scholarship, specifically applied linguistics/stylistics, queer and gender theories, and film studies).

I've been spending more time recently reading at peer-reviewed articles.

But I also decided that the larger disagreements I had with his commentary on Tolkien studies were important than focusing on individual works.

I will offer a reassuring ending for those who share his desire that publications on Tolkien come from publishers that will add "academic cachet" to the work: the recent publication by the Modern Languages Association of Leslie Donovan's anthology, Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's work should gladden their hearts.

Since I see that Dr. Schürer teaches Tolkien, although he has not published on Tolkien, I hope the volume will be of interest to him!

comments

Session Reports from the Popular Culture Association Conference

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 22:02:46 GMT

I've been taking note at the sessions I attended at this year's Popular Culture Conference.

As before, with my MLA notes, these are my rough notes, just basically proofed, and my sense of what I heard. They cannot be considered authoritative/checked/edited/reviewed by speaker!

This conference was incredibly fantastic--the variety, scope, and sophistication of the presentations in the Fan Culture and Theory area was dazzling, and the other areas I managed to catch a session or two in were equally good.

This was a session cosponsored by the Romance Studies and Fan Studies area on the ethics of scholarship in fan and romance studies.

FAN STUDIES AND POPULAR ROMANCE STUDIES SPONSORED
Uneasy Pleasures: Ethics of Romance Studies/Fan Studies Scholarship

Introduction: Heather Schell

Assorted difficulties with ethnical issues involved in conducting research which has to do with the creations of and interactions of people who are alive and paying attention to what I as a scholar am writing. It changes the dynamic a little bit. I was in the delightful position of having a wish list of people whose perspective on this I wanted to hear, and they all agreed. Catherine Roach, scholar in romance studies, working in particularly with idea of aca-fandom; Laurie Kohn documentary film maker who is also creation and support with NEH grant called popular romance project which among other things is creating a shared space for romance writers and scholars, and readers, ROMANCE PROJEC. And then Catherine Larsen, are chair of fan studies, and really a very important figurehead who has done a tremendous amount of work in the past years to advance the field of fan studies, and is possibly the most tireless scholar I've ever met. It's impossible to go into our suite at any time when I'm awake and not find her in there working.

Catherine Roach: "Romancing the Academic: Blending the Fictional and Analytical Genres of popular Romance Writing by Catherine LaRoach and Catherine Roach"

UNEASY PLEASURES ETHICS OF ROMANCE STUDIES FAN STUDIES SCHOLARSHIP.

Warning: my talk contains a scene of explicit sexuality, go get a coffee. My larger research interests are in representations of female sexuality within fantasy spaces in pop culture. This paper's not meant to be really serious. I hope you laugh. You can cheer, jeer, and go ahead. I'm trying to be serious but in a non-serious way about an experimental approach to academic research and writing. Deliberately goofy aspect, performance, humor, and poking fun at myself, at academic conventions of sober academic analysis, and insider/outsider split, that can make conversation against academic fan divide problematic.

What I'm doing here is writing an academic book about the function of romance narrative in popular culture. Find one true love and live happily ever after. I'm also writing genre romance fiction, from inside and outside simultaneously. Deep participating observation, or observer participation, performativity ethnography, aca fan studies. Bringing fan and academic communities together—it's just fun.

Write in different ways.

So I propose that this pleasure is serious and seriously seductive stuff, so elsewhere I introduce germ ludic researcher, ludic reader, one who engages in research for play or pleasure. Not being theoretical. Demonstrate this play instead, and do something goofy.

I think this is how theatre people workshop a script. Two hands talking. I'm not sure about that and just going to do it.

Catherine Roach right hand nerdy romance studies academic asking critical questions about the genre.

Left hand Catherine LA Roach writes Victorian historical romance fiction, on second e book with Simon and Schuster. And she'll respond to these questions and critiques. Creative side, less traditional side. She's got the bangles on, rings, with a manicure. None of the above.

She's prettier, can you tell. She wears sparkly velvet gowns, and Roach doesn't get sparkly velvet.

Talk and debate, LaRoach is going to read some of her romance ficction. Add in another voice later of romance author I met at a conference, neutral omniscient narrator, with open hands.

FOUR people.

It's a little complicated. But it's an experiment.

ACA (academic): Catherine Roach

ROM: (romance novel writer) Catherine LaRoach

OMNISCIENT NARRATOR

UNEASY ROMANCE WRITER

ACA: Virgin trope. Your heroine the honorable Miss Callista Higginbotham is an inexperienced virgin seduced by hero. Why is genre awash with passive virgins? Master of Love. Consent and mutuality.

ROM: SIGH must you be so tendentious and one sided. Lots of romances where romance is egalitarian. To drive a plot needs disequilibrium. Obvious starting point.

ACA: Seduction motif such a trap. Sunk many a girl. Why so lovey dove.

ROM Wow, you're on a roll, you nerdy academic types think steamrolling others is the way to go.

ACA: Read from your scene.

OMNISCIENT NARRATOR: HANDS OUT RED FONT SHIFTED FROM TIMES NEW ROMAN TO ROCKWELL WHICH I INTEND TO BE TAKEN IN MOST SALACIOUS WAY. Romance writer Master of Love.

ACA: He's seducing her but really she's seducing herself with fantasy of romance narrative, not happily ever after. Dump her.

ROM: Or she could dump hi, neither of which would make for a romance novel.

ACA: Genre tells its women readers not only that they want this bad boy seductive narrative but they need it. Woman studied crying, had broken up. I asked if she was really such a great guy, I don't know, but we were gonna move in and get married. MY LIFE IS OVER> Upset was about moving one true love.

ROM: oh the poor girl. I agree entirely that the romance narrative becomes an imperative in the culture especially for women. It shouldn't be an imperative, man doesn't need woman, or woman need man.

ACA: You agree with criticism of genre.

ROM: NO, I don't agree. We're looking at this from different angles. Emotional satisfaction essential to genre fiction, romance and mystery. Life doesn't always end with happy resolution. You'd have to critique a wider human desire for resolution.

ACA: I don't think you're answering my question.

ROM: that's because you seduced me into talking your language. Love can be a trap. The one you love will always fail, and you'll screw it up yourself. Because who truly knows their own heart. It's the first noble truth of Buddhism, all is suffering imperfectly fulfilled disaster. So it's heartbreaking.

Life and love are a timebomb waiting to blow up in your face.

ACA: who you're even more grim about love than I am.

ROM: I'm happily I love and married.

ACA: I'm married to him to.

ROM: safe space to explore connection, love entails great vulnerability. Genre not for everyone. I do think women enjoy romance fiction than men do, and the stakes are higher, and many appreciate the space to work out problems in a patriarchal world. That's one reason why the ending where it all works out is such a sweet fantasy of life.

ACA: I'm going to have to think about all that. Ending in terms of novel.

ROM: I wrote last scene deliberated to show equality in their love play, there's a reversal at the end.

ACA: Reviewer said love scenes are pushing boundaries to good taste.

ROM: I laughed out loud in my office when I read that. Last chapter,, should always feature anal play. It's the end.

ACA: rolling my eyes. Why not read the place.

ROM: Acknowledge hot fan fic about MIAMI VICE. Back to Rockwell Red.

ACA: Well, so is this the new height of feminist liberation, anal penetration of man. This is pornography.

ROM: why not, she takes charge, AND SHE'S NO LONGER PASSIVE.

ACA: Push your boundaries of shameless hussy.

ROM: Politics take something down. I like being

OMNISCIENT NARRATOR: Published author at conference, uneasy about it. New voice coming in.

NO HAND VOICE: I was very offended by your presentation, I want to read a novel written by someone who has poured her heart into it. Not as experiment.

NARR: Insider uneasiness arises from outside attention. ROM: read romances all life, I love the genre, although I do think about it critically in many ways. MASTER OF LIE and INIGHT OF LOVE

UNEASY: You needed an excuse to write a romance. You are treading on sacred ground. Researcher and romance writer.

ACA: It's not Catherine, it's me, m any academics write …insider/outsider issue. The concern is with a type of border patrol. Insiders legitimately don't want academic outsider criticizing their genre based in false or incomplete understandings of their novel.

Insider could read my work as blasphemy, spying, etc. So the question then is who gets to speak for and about the romance genre, narrative. INSIDER: FAN AUTHOR or OUTSIDER academic cultural commentator. Which of them is the more authoritative writer. We're both voices of the heart engaging joyfully in and with the romance genre.

ROM: you're going to make me cry it's so beautiful. I sense a happy after ending.

NARR: conclusion back in critical and theoretical mode, and I've used up my time, so I'm dubious about theoretical modes. Fracture lines of anxiety.

My own uneasiness and anxieties, how not to offend my fellow romance writers by coming off as a spy; how not to lose respect of fellow romance academics, not doing enough work for merging field, I'm more about pleasure than anxiety how to understand creative and fruitful possibilities of ludic research, wholehearted engagement of self. ROACH and LAROACH coming me together and leading more forward to another model. Thank you

Laurie Kahn

"Ethics, Romance and Documentary Filmmaking: the importance of building trust and the folly of fixed perceptions"

NEH FUNDED SITE: http://popularromanceproject.org/

DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER ROMANCE PROJECT. I'm actually not going to show images today. I realized of taking on the task of introducing the dilemmas we face as documentary film makers, if I were to use a lot of illustrations, I'd be here as thee hours. Just raise some questions we can all explore.

Questions I'm facing at the moment which has something to do.

My aim is to immerse viewers into world they do not know, to introduce them to remarkable characters and worlds that have been ignored or hidden or misrepresented by the mainstream media. Tell stories that matter, keep being attracted to stories about overlooked female communities, but have gender, race and class as well. So as a film maker, I'm a nonfiction story teller. I'm not writing articles. I'm a storyteller, and I think about these stories in classic three structured films:

Cards that are color coded by events and characters, and I spread them on floor, rearranging and talking about space of narratives.

The key thing at every stage or production, there are thousands of choices that have to be made, and the decisions all shape what audience thinks and perceives. Doing the research, reading, finding archival footage, the music the photos the documents, choosing which characters you will focus on, what events will you shoot and how.

Editing hundreds of hours into a film of an hour or two. Hundreds of choices.

ETHICAL CHOICES INVOLVED AT EVERY STEP. Truthfulness and distortion of the truth in ways that you might realize, or might not realize. Seeming little decisions that can make a really big difference, often key difference in how an audience will perceive the story being told. If you shoot someone from below it makes them look menacing, from above, it's condescending, I have my eye right next to the lens of the camera, at same level of eye of person I'm interviewing to make respectful conversation among equals. Lighting makes a big difference: golden glow around someone, makes them look angelic, you look them in film noirish, it menacing, and it's scary. Something is going on. Choice of archival photos and footage: it's not real but people think it is. Ken Burns did film about Huey Long, knew Long had bodyguards all the time. Not dramatic enough for Ken—he finds state troopers with big black jackboots and puts in the film—that choice will be repeated over and over again, by everybody: this is the way people are going to think it was. I might be a purist—but that's wrong.

Sometimes I think these mistakes get made because people don't have time, it's ignorant, haven't done research, or made editorial choice.

Sound effects—seems trivial—sound of bird vs. gunfire. You've completely change the meaning of the scene. MSUIC.

When I'm teaching I showed that scene from ROCKY running up steps and I show it with the triumphant music, and then I show it with really menacing music, escaping in spy film. Same footage, different music.

Let's pull back from details:

Big picture:

Responsibilities to subjects of film, people who trusted her with stories.

Responsibility to larger community these people are part of who expect their community are going to be portrayed fairly. Don't always agree.

Responsibility to viewers to tell what I believe is the truth to them, as well researched and thought through.

I have responsibilities to funders to live within budget, and make a film audience will want to watch—entertaining and educational.

Responsibilities often conflict with one another.

Aim to be respectful but honest.

Aim to be transparent and open-minded and not wedded to preconceived ideas.

Make my best judgment of what I'm seeing and to figure it out.

Some of choices facing on this film LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS

Preview of the film part of a kickstarted campaign.

Part of this much larger popular romance project, documentary website, symposium at the Library of Congress, and a library Program at the American Library Association.

How am I weighing my responsibilities to subject, community, audience, funders.

I don't have the answer—so leaving them open.

In a film, you can only get to know five or six characters well, there will be chorus of other characters, but we've only got time to know a few.

These people who I choose are the ones I will spend the money to go shoot living their lives with their families in their communities, which five or six I choose will have a big impact on how they'll understand the romance community.

And there are different approaches to making a character based film—decide story ahead of time and find the tones that allow you tell the story, spend a time, edit.

That's how a recent film was made about the romance community GUILTY PLEASURES.

But the one author was profiled was a man, and the readers were all isolated, seen alone or just with their spouse or partner, not with a larger community, all were desperately seeking connection and excitement in their lives. Real lives vs. fantasies.

I started this film with zero preconceived ideas, not a major fan, did read some. Process taking much more time what I see, have discovered, is so different from well work stereotypes of lonely woman. Global romance community, write and read and blog and design. Bug Business making billions based on these old archetypical stories, yet these folks are pioneers in social networking e books, self-publishing, keeping publishing houses alive that have romance branches.

Relationships that start online with shared love of books and become read. All the different communities.

Intrigued by assumption that's common in the romance community that all romance readers are potential authors—really fascinates me, and the way it plays out in the larger romance community.

I finally got NEH production money, believable, ROMANCE.

I've got now money to go out and shoot not just masses of interviews at a conference but to go out and shoot characters to people .

Video cameras to aspiring writers, one in Australia. Given video cameras to woman who quit her job as engineer, single, broke up, she rockclimbs, she bikeraces, she's gorgeous, she broke up with him and what will happen, and she hasn't been published she's gotten close, and she's spent years writing this novel, and if she gets a three book contract, this woman will be in trouble. We'll see how it all plays out.

Video camera north of Yorkshire who has a farm they built together, sheet, and horses, and she's raises dogs, and goes out on the hunt, working class, six kids and four grandkids.

Video diary camera in Mumbai, India who has just published one book, she's a banker.

Working with video diary cameras, camera keepers, giving them feedback. Headed out into field to shoot other main characters living their lives. Interviews with more than fifty people. Shot more than usual filmmaker because I had a website to feed.

These fifty people have trusted me they all want to be in the film, well known aspiring, how do I represent this whole community. What is implied, what will I be saying, different combinations of different characters, combinations. Age, class, region, sub-genre, attitudes, family situation, sexual, race.

What do I owe the community to get that picture correctly. This is causing me great pain.

As a film maker, I need telegenic character people will want to watch, energy levels, different visual elements, circumstances, and compelling character arcs. That is a very big question.

Another big question: to what extent am I going to protect characters, they're beginning careers, vulnerable, not fully aware of how they will be seen with characters, if material puts them at risk, do I explain, do I get them to buy. Million moral decisions ahead of me. Will I show film to characters before it's released: you don't show, but there's a different level of trust, long form long term with people you know over years.

They will not get veto power.

Will I show people that plays into stereotypes (laugh at them vs. laugh with them). Do I censor what is real to save from mockery.

Some of subjects are savvy and aware of how they're perceived—they were really wary, the decision went to top, senior executives realized it's in their self-interest, ore people temped to do self-publishing, to show people how much value they add. I need time to script everybody.

Needs to choose what seems real and what doesn't.

Answers to funders and broadcaster: HBO and PBS want different films. Kickstarter money from the community. Responsible to community.

LITMUS TEST is when people talk about film the next day over machine. I had no idea X Y A and they're left thinking.

Professors use in courses.

Heather Schell "Say it to my Face: Ethics, Etiquette and Romance Scholarship"

Fan vs. popular romance scholars.

Keynote address to international association for popular study of romance: what do critics owe the romance.

What do critics owe the romance author.

Just as romance authors provide the subjects of our analysis. Novelists are active and influential members of our area.

Romance writers relationship with romance authors –sometimes one and same. What are our responsibilities toward these novelists, what do we owe them.

Romance writers THEY

SCHOLARS as WE

Problematic, but multiple hats.

This question of standards of conduct relates to ethics or etiquette.

Codes of behavior

What romance critics say and do has an effect on romance novelists has a reciprocal effect on critics. Unfortunately in history of romance scholarship.

Review: handful of romance scholar from 70s-80s (usual suspects) unwittingly fermented a deep distrust and distain in writing community for feminist and political scholars. Wariness still lingers decades later. Today's popular romance scholars conscious of this is cautionary tale—interpretive failings of usual suspect-these scholars errors were as much about ethics and etiquette as they were about theory.

Ethical breaches: etiquette

Subjects of our writing, community of romance writers and readers. Must move questions into the open. And reach some consensus if we are to move forward effectively as a field.

Standards of ethics and etiquette: romance writers have developed a very clear standard of community etiquette. "Must be nice"

Critiquing another writer or author is not being nice.

Romance scholars might be tempted to abide by code.

Not good default decision: scholarly community has expectations.

Let me be perfectly clear: I don't believe our scholarship is skewed, I want to ensure that scholarship is skewed, but professional colleagues need to know this.

Open the discussion on some starting points: professional ethics in fandom studies.

Professional concerns overlap in interesting ways, and they've already initiated the discussion about ethics.

Test them against the usual suspects.

Snitow, Modleski, Janice Radway, Mussell

Test of guidelines have been simple: would their early writing have passed their guidelines.

Easiest starting point: use of published work

Literature background, MLA, responsibly acknowledging one's sources. MLA statement of ethics, a scholar who borrows the works and ideas should acknowledge whether or not it is published.

Not an adequate safeguard from causing harm: earlier scholarship perceived as an offensive assault. Kathy Sidell notes feminist criticism of romances know what is right for other women, and oh my do they feel the us/them distinction acutely.

Many of today's romance scholars are equally dissatisfied with the scholarship of this era: MLA standards were followed, they cited, they attributed, therefore, we need to look further for guidance.

Prominent arbiter of ethics: Institutional Review Board whose approval is required for research on human subjects. Ethical ramifications situated at the IRB—as if it's the expert. Ethical guidelines steer biomedical and behavioral research in US to avoid abuses.

Much controversy over university IRBs have claimed increasingly large jurisdiction over research in all disciplines.

What do guidelines have to offer us: research based fully on published sources is exempt.

Tricky wiggle room with fan studies but not with romance studies.
Policy and protection of human research subjects would not avert outrage caused by the earlier scholars. Janice Radway ethnographic approach might need IRB review—but it was her interpretation that caused offense.

FIELD OF FAN STUDIES

Share some of same issues that complicate fan romance. Fans characterized negatively by popular media; many fans of science fiction and horror can testify to the negative representations of reading habits. Scholars of fandom may feel content pressure to defend choice of field or disavow personal interest.

Voracious readers who will track down material relevant to community, read it, and communicate with the scholars.

Kathy's recent collection ETHICS

ACA FANDOM: Aca fans come out of the closet. Outing oneself in this way signals to audience of potential fan readers, not approaching readers as outsiders, but as someone who sees herself as a member of the group she is studying, "eyes that are clear but loving". This approach can be limiting, it's possible that scholars having breezily self-identified as aca fan may feel their ethical concerns are resolved. NOT TRUE.

Using this as a standard may enforce the notion that one has to be an avid fan to study X. Not a good analogy for romance.

While fandom studies may have reached a point where acafandom does not suffice; it might be useful for romance studies to accept responsibility to accept key questions about our personal relationship with popular romance. Responses to Modleski's LOVING WITH VENGEANGE might be more nuanced if she had acknowledge a long time readership.

Potential readers extend beyond other academics. Even truer today with the internet.

Organizations all over the internet encouraging cross pollination of collaboration and interaction.

Positioning oneself as a fan could work because it pays attention to the multi-faceted audience with whom we are writing.

Studies of academic rhetoric have adopted metaphor of conversation that occurs in scholarship.

Literature based on dead authors.

Cultural studies Marxist approach ignores "authors"

Titles of works cited in usual suspects, not authors.

If we write while consciously imagining the authors we're discussing might read our work; this awareness will transform our writing unless we are sociopaths, but we might get writers block. This technique will keep us honest, but disagreement can lead to constructive debate.

Katherine Larsen "Ethics Expectations and 'Problem' of Aca-Fan"

Gone back and forth over last several days with the conclusion—sometimes it's one thing, sometimes it's the diametrically opposed one, so I may wake up tomorrow morning and scream.

Commit what may account by heresy.

Within fan studies, the concept of ethical research by unspoken expectation that those of us conducting the research must be fans in order to speak for or theorize fans, makes lines for ethics difficult. Matt Hills, Buses, Helleksen, written recently offering problems and solutions.

Some problems citation problem.

Hills gave us aca fan.

Researchers own relation to material.

Issue is one of boundary negotiation.

Academics/fans/creators.

This paper then seems to consider three variations of thinking about usefulness and limits of thinking about this

As illustrative of one of the more divisive problems.

PRACTICAL: Busse and Helleksen Identity Ethics and Fan privacy: many of us come to fan studies with widely varying citation conventions many come to humanities, trained to see text as text. As opposed to social science traditions. Make the case for treating fans and fan works differently than other texts because of privacy expectations.

Disagree: expectations about privacy on internet has been pretty much shot down.

Nature of content and venue begs for different treatment: sexual nature, explore themes that are disturbing pornographic. Fans ought to be treated differently .

Claim is based on supposition that they are revealing real name instead of pseud. Never seen indication of academic outing fan.

TWC: Busse and Helleksen developed citation policies and muddying distinctions between fan and academic.

Issues of language, us and them, choices that we have to make if you're speaking you have to position yourself.

MATT HILLS: now acknowledging fans, but our own approaches to the field. Distance and ethical consideration Roger Silverstone) to reconsider issues of identity and positioning to reconsider ideas he did in FAN CULTURES.

Two unsatisfactory stances: too close or too far.

CLOSE: scholar fandom lacks critical distance, too in love, seen as corrective to earlier works. Never leveled at Shakespeare scholar!

Hill's goes beyond the typical too close argument to point to another difficulty: meditating our own fan experience while ignoring other modes of fan activity—gaps in research yet to be filled. Fan fiction growing, fan viding, fan producer relationship, however precious little work done on Coplay, fan crafts, fan art, and meta And it's worth noting here that an archive of our own has recently allowed meta in which raises all sorts of other issues and I had to jettison.

Certain texts are foregrounds in fan studies. To the point where they have become canon overshadowing less well known fan communities.

On to the too far argument: here scholars of other disciplines enter field of fan studies bringing own conventions to them. Psychologist sociologists, early modernists, enter field well trained in their home disciplines, lacking media training.

Too far: potentially failing to attain proper distance and fail to STUDY THE AVAILABLE SCHOLARSHIP.

Autodidacts fan knowledge where it is not deemed important to cite scholarship.
HILLS: proper distance difficulty negotiation of fannish moral economy---fannish privileges and polices others practices, varies from fandom to fandom and community to community.

Balancing this must be a simple acknowledgement of one's own academic and disciplinary specific moral economy.

Gaze is meant to be two way: analysis vs. emotion.

His own previous work has missed the mark.

OTW allows Meta on fiction archive.

2009 SURVEY FAIL

(ran out of time, had to close down, after brief discussion of own situation as academic, and as fan).

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MLA 2013 #584: Accessing Race in the Digital Humanities

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:23:37 GMT

Saturday, 5 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Commonwealth, Sheraton
Presiding: Roger Whitson, Emory Univ.
Speakers: David Kim, Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Michigan State Univ.; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.
Responding: Tara McPherson, Univ. of Southern California
This roundtable addresses how applications and interfaces encode specific cultural assumptions about race and preclude certain groups of people from participating in the digital humanities. Participants present specific digital humanities projects that illustrate the impact of race on access to the programming, cultural, and funding structures in the digital humanities.

This s the sister session to the #transformDH session from yesterday--and one of the presenters was on first session I saw.

Introduction: This is sort of the companion to Adeline Koh's companion panel yesterday. Adeline had the great idea to talk about race in the digital humanities, we got a lot of people who are really interested, and she asked me (Roger) to head up the second panel (so many people submitted). Conversation started in October, went through last year's MLA about the role of critical theory and critical race theory in the digital humanities.

Natalie Cecire, When the Digital Humanities was in Vogue--starter to the conversation.

Hughes' piece on the Harlem Renaissance about how race problems were perceived as solved. DH has lack of race criticism--assume that DH assumes race is solved problem.
Critical race studies isn't over because of DH: wants to think about it as access, how work gets done, not just representation. Agrees with Noviske "tacit understanding" -- compared with Tara McPherson--structured by Fordist systems.

Tara McPherson's piece. The idea that one can take project split it up into different sections before putting it back together, a modular logic of wok in digital humanities--similar to how race riots were quelled during the 1950: isolate people, and take care of all the pieces.

This is problem for DH.

Natalie added to that, emphasis on hack code is attempt to dilute the critical power of doing. (NOT SURE I GOT THAT PART CLEARLY!)

Complications at the beginning: he does not want us to assume panelists agree with what he says.

Could it be Noviskie: was right: interface and architecture not just discursivity take the center. Favors individual critic--issues of institutional labor (individual critic, vs. collaborative).

Was mentioned as an ally at yesterday's panel: is not an enemy, but that languages implies he is outsider. And that's not the case in DH. He sees an ally as being excluded.

Individual critique makes him feel excluded. Professional, collaborative practice makes me feel included.

(MY NOTES HOW MUCH IS THIS "WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE MEN" i.e. Who is excluded from DH where he feels all included--I'm assuming it's mostly other white men, and he doesn't see the exclusion of everybody else? A really odd formulation.).

How much work are individual scholars in DH replicating from Computer and Writing, media studies, new media, and communication fields? Are we transforming in ways that have already been transformed. Issue of work on critical race already done in other fields--Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Chun and Tara McPherson.

Quick examples: Web project on lynchings in Georgia. With Digital Commons, Miriam Posner, he was project manager of this project--1875-1930. Sociological approach, quantitative narrative analysis, cultural differences between collaborators, power differentials between professors and post-docs, different visions about audience, content, purpose.

Post-doc fellow, not a professor himself.

Newspaper articles; sociologist wanted to digitize; quantitative narrative analysis; explore what environments made lynchings more possible.

One of the problems is different perspectives that I as project manager who has English background and is interested in the culture of lynching, and the importance of telling the story of the people who were lynched, and the sociological approach faculty member advocated, quantitative, based on graphs, maps, charts, not the stories. Power differential between post doc and faculty.

Creates whole set of political and institutional issues often scholars are not used to dealing with, and that sort of make the issue of bringing up important racial issues more complex than it might have first seemed.

Questions: Matt Kirschenbaum public visibility of DH, its connection to administrative infrastructure, collaborative nature, how do we pay attention to marginalized and otherwise silenced voices.

What assumptions about race are built into the tools, ideas, and workplaces, used in the digital humanities (Tara McPheson's work on modularity and relationship to controlling race riots)?

How much of this work has already been done by disciplines not usually identified as DH (computers and writing, media studies media archeology, new media).

Three speakers: Lee Bessettt, David Kim, Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Lee: Orality, Performance, Race and DH
Continuing labor, the work we can or cannot do in DH,
She is asked why she hasn't done more with this project--element of time is lacking.

Presentation today is theoretical and imaginative on my part until I find the time to do these things.

Asian Author Danny Lafierriere (sp?)

For oral traditions, oral cultures, that have been ignored marginalized, by the institution because of their very nature.

Rewriting, revising, updating work--his process is strongly connected to orality.

Multiple revisions.

Storify.com/Readywriting/orality-performance-race-and-dh

FICTION THAT CAME OUT AROUND OCCUPY MLA (CHECK OUT?)

Lodayans (spelling) : Haitian ("lying to get to truth" rough translations)

Little miniature stories get to truth thorough artful lying.

L's autobiographical project (emotional rather than factual truth).

Orality and performance in L's work.

Ignorance of this genre linked to bias over written literature, and the system in Haiti (it came from rural part of Haiti). "pays en dehors"

What does this have to do with DH?

Can use existing DH tools to deal with texts and materials not included in traditional literary studies (single/authoritative/written text).

Available through various outlets: Concordia's university's oral history project which allows for oral histories to be annotated, searchable, etc.

How to work with videos? Media? Make it a more meaningful experience and resource for academics. They have great stuff online, particularly for Montreal's migrant community where they're talking about their experiences and what they migrated for and why, and these sorts of things. Why couldn't we use something like this in order to interact with L's work. And quote project: 'digital technologies are opening up new ways of working with audio and video interviews" (not just interviews).

Spoken language is lively.

As literary theorists, this could also be useful to us, given more generally how multi media many of our authors have become, in terms of promoting themselves, making their own work, book trailers, podcasts, etc. How can we incorporate into our study and understanding of literature?

Another piece of technology that recently introduced to: Scalar

Creating a book which can incorporate many different forms of media. Text, media, and audio you can annotate and connect and interact with.

One example to enrich and preserve oral traditions: such a Ladoyuans (spe?).

L: chronicled first year in Montreal, 1976, 366 poems (leap year), then found a video of documentary. Television special came out ten years before novel.

Novel in 1984.

2012 a new edition that is almost three times as long of this same narrative of his arrival in Montreal.

How can we working with all this stuff (he has huge amount of stuff out there), manageable, make more available in public, and how deeply rooted it is in the traditional Haitian culture and the tradition of the Loydouans : use digital humanities tools to preserve and promote understandings.

DAVID KIM

Project is interactive.

Three-D modeling of Chicano murals in LA

Housing Project: Estrada Courts housing.

Before get into project: respond to Roger's questions unprepared (thought he'd be at table).

Digital Humanities: for the past few years, when we do discuss race in DH is the issue of complicity. How embrace of technology in academic settings, participate within these fragmenting of discourse around race, and I'm really excited to every year see the discussion around that is moving from simply locating complicity to laying down terms of DH. Dark side roundable provocative and thoughtful.

Mark Marino is here--lessons I learned while at Vector's NEH Summer institute for digital Humanities, for American studies, and an amazing group of scholars, everyone more senior than I am with their book projects and manuscripts, and they came primarily to develop a digital version or digital companion to develop their project. I came in as grad student, previous in English graduate program, refocusing on race, gender, sexuality, relating to space/spatiality.

One thing that kept on popping up during six week period was the danger of also revisiting a lot of the language and a lot of the strategies of multiculturalism and not focusing on complicity in representation of diversity.

We do have a n opportunity to advance our understanding of race and perform these various critiques that is not grounded in discussions of the past, especially when the field itself has moved away from simply process of representation to phenomenological performative understanding of identity.

One way to address issue of complicity as I work with digital tools--does text analysis and visual rhetoric and GPS and modeling--generalist--talk about the imperial gaze of Google Earth. That in itself is not reason to abandon Google Earth --but need to avoid euphoria and buy wholesale the promises.

Any critical scholar doing critical race critique and digital humanities must struggle with issue of complicity. Rather than expanding the scope of what digital can take on, gain something by scaling back the actual function of the digital in our analysis of race and identity, going back to the early days of digital humanities--what if we're able to frame digital simply as methodology humbly offer my project I worked on for six weeks at Vector (but working for year and a half later). Project partner and me. Roman architecture specialist, and critical/ace/gender person.

Image set of this mural set in LA. McPherson and someone else served as advisors.

What do 3D modeling have to offer about what we already know about this site? How much does it have to offer in consideration of community murals in process of analysis?

Murals discussed as movement to consolidate/fix identity (literally fixed onto walls) (done in books). We thought representation of fixed archive of things, no room to engage with the site specificity of embodiment and actual performance and performative way--more productive way of looking at murals thirty years after Chicano art movement. Three d modeling model was done in Google sketcher, and exported to Google earth, narrative or analysis and interpretation is built in hypercities platform (in house at UCL) Lots of exciting rejects being taken at UCLA around recreating Roman architecture, taking advance of these various platforms to recreate and reimagine ancient sites that no longer exist

One of the issues Phil Effngton brought to it immediately--methodologically we have to think differently. We are no longer working in things that no longer exist--we are recreating site that tis still there. S a matter of face, that mural--Will I am shot a musical video in front of mural a few years ago.

What can the murals actually tell us about this site. Actually most visible mural at the public housing which is home to about 60 murals, all painted during the 70s and 80s as art of Chicano and Chicano arts movement, as well as Los Angeles' urban beautification project.

In documentation or archive of these murals, primarily the historians focus on very visible murals that directly engage us with politics, events and ethos of Civil Rights movement of the time, but if you are able to walk through the site and experience it all its nuances. There are murals on the interior walls there are murals that do not directly relate to the civil rights movement. And that is also because as a community project, maybe children were involved Alleyway murals.

Plays video while he talks.

Able to come up and offer analysis of the murals that do not necessary fit into the previous consideration of the site. One is the persistence of the imagery of the Azlan (spelling?) alternate temporality and spatiality (?). Another analysis able to perform was the importance of graffiti in our first preservation efforts, kind of doing back to how Roger opened us up and these questions that Im trying to address.

Digital is not the only thing that's complicit: technology of the archive if you want t reimagine it as a critique; it almost must challenge the documentary, realist, objectivist claims that we invest in the very notion of the archive. So instead of documentary function of the archive, read archive as interactive. Archive in way not fixing identity into bodies. Traces performative aspect of all these different ways in which cultural expressions and productions engage in various nuances and complex development of information given that historical period.

Offering this project not only as 3D simulation but as one methodology o look at a very particular thing, a very small thing, a particular cultural production, but push back n Derrida's archive fever to digital archive fever. We create archives because we can. We do these sites and gather materials because we can.

Long with engaging with race and DH on this level of representational polities: we could all benefit for more archives. But as form of critique--kind of a pushback on the longstanding epistemological claims of the archive that many have addressed as problematic. Diane Taylor (?) has remarked on the problem of UNESCO's preservationist approach of documenting culture. The particular advance of modeling/simulations, we can consider issue of embodiment as we get closer to the murals; the accumulation of graffiti as a text that documents the different co-existing issues of identity. Digital tools can be incorporated into our advancing of critical ace analysis and DH.

Added collaboration with community based cultural organizations is very rich--and there are entities willing to fund because digital).

Jennifer

Composing body in you tube
Trailer/teaser

Today I have a monolid look
How is this composing a bogy: I do feel a lot more confident and pretty
Western look/western eyes.

Surgery to look more white!
Just got back from the surgery

Nothing wrong with hoping to look better.

Time, Technology, and the Mediated body
Temporal Logics in the Rhetoric of East Asian Blepharoplasty in Online Video

Brief description of procedure--surgeon does incision to create fold to make eyes look larger.

Breast augmentation, tanning, teeth whitening in the US: its not even seen in the plastic surgery.

Look at approximately fifty videos on YouTube which range from lectures about techniques, to TV excerpts to journals of healing and recovery, to testimonials, before and after slideshows.

Analyzes video images audio comments, and viewer comments.

Interface of YOUTUBE (titles, ages, viewer handles). Ability to moderate and hide particularly comments.

Commentary, tags, likes/disliked.

Robust range of perspectives come together as values are articulated, negotiated, and sometimes realigned.

Looked for two things: how changed over time. Temporal logics, I'm talking about series of rhetorical constructs though which we interpret our lived experiences (quantitative times) or qualitative times process narrative).

How came to project; started with a simple question: how do cultural values change over time.

Came from a personal place as I wondered why different time periods ages background have different ideas about good, bad, attractive, unattractive, and how varied values lead to conflicts in relationships.

Rhetoric grounded in cross-cultural communication.

Notions of progress in certain cultural values, temporal values.

Temporal logics.

Narrowing in on objet of inquiry of online video about east Asian .blast.

Methodological approach: strange of inquiry, problems with how to approach

Rhetorical construction of cultural values, change over time
Progress as temporal logic that grounds possibility for particular kinds of racism, and how racism moves across cultures
Internet as a spec of cross-cultural communication and negotiation
The construction of race in online space
Double eyelid surgery as a racialized practice that is understood differently (SILDE CHANGE NOT COMPLETE)

How theories of time have implications for body--how time frames way user access race
How does time function a way of accessing race? how do users access race through technological interfaces
How are bodies composed in multimodal texts?

Not going through findings--from here, through my analysis of these videos is to build a framework for production, analysis, and organization of multimodal representations of bodies.

Is body being racialized in this text?
Is body being framed in terms of desire in this particular text>

Aim at more responsible representations of bodies in video production.

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MLA 2013 Session #550: The CLassroom as Interface

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:35:22 GMT

Finishing up my posting on sessions! As before--transcribed, lightly edited!

550. The Classroom as Interface
Saturday, 5 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Hampton, Sheraton
Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California
1. "The Campus as Interface: Screening the University," Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego
2. "Being Distracted in the Digital Age," Jason Farman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
3. "Virtual Classroom Software: A Medium-Specific Analysis," Kathi Inman Berens
4. "The Multisensory Classroom," Leeann Hunter, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

The classroom as interface--who could resist this title! NOT ME! I was so on this session, and it was as wonderful as I hoped.

And to heck with waiting for summer--I have to get a new net or some other nifty portable device ASAP! Before my next conference. (UPDATE: I now have a nifty Dell XPS Ultrabook, delivered yesterday, which I shall dig out and purr over very soon).

I love this blogging of conference sessions. I love that MLA has tables set up in the back for bloggers and tweeters.

I think this session will be very useful as I think about my Team Zombies vs. Team Werewolves popular culture course I've proposed teaching as part of my College's large-class initiative (the basic plan: 100 students, me, one GA, and a large major tech auditorium class twice a week, and discussions groups once a week, and lots and lots and lots of social media and technology--including games and other cool stuff I learned about in the last session).

Introduction: Kathi Berens

Avenues of access: define some terms at the beginning, for everybody, a colleague will be a participant for the Virtual Interface this talk. (My note: OK, this is great—she's doing the Virtual and well as Physical talk at the same time during the presentation—and it went beautifully).

User interface: space where interactions between humans and computer perform. Mobile commuting is part of our students' habits. Those people who still log in and consult internet at designated times (work email, shopping) are not in this group, but for those whose smart devices are never far from their bodies and consult the devices so many times during the day that the distinction between on and off line is gone: ubiquitous computing.

The classroom is an interface whether or not one's course design reflects this state of being.

We have yet to see about how mobility and on demand learning ought to shape education beyond investment in MOOCS (NOTE: I did not hear any good words about MOOCS at the places in MLA where I hung out).

Four contexts: university wide distribution of tech to students; learner's dispersed attention; virtual classroom platforms; and the unique qualities of bodies (non verbal modes).

Move from university to learner's body in presentations.

"The Campus as Interface: Screening the University," Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego

Mass distribution of hand held devices to students offer new ways of reading and writing is no longer new. Project allowing students to read textbooks, buildings, each other. The Sixth HP Initiative. Counter anxieties about post literacy and the distraction panic.

Ten years worth of work four case studies that should be studied in the "HISTORY" of this kind of campus initiative.

The 2002 HP devices at UC San Diego
2004 IPODS at Duke
2009 and 2011, IPADS at Seton Hill and Maryland

Tell us about how students should decipher meanings in higher education.

Rhetoric that documents a decade of ubiquitous computing and explores ideologies of what soon may be forgotten chapter. Unpacking the basic assumptions of these pedagogical experiments, perhaps we can learn something about our own inheritances, rather than assume that use of devices is always radical new. (NOTE: I know a similar initiative was 'new' on my campus a few years ago—wonder if anybody had looked at the results of the earlier initiatives—I'm betting not?)

Clickers, iPhone apps that exploit mobility and fluidity of classroom dynamics; there is a digital past to be archived, curated, and theorized for university stakeholders.

One of first mass distribution efforts rarely mentioned today--inheritance of my own. UC San Diego. I sometimes bring the device with me to show but didn't today though I felt kind of guilty--can still get it working.

Fall 2002 700 wireless equipped jordana HPs were given to students through the on campus program (residential college, didn't get name, innovative core curriculum theme of active learning). Institutional partners Institute of Telecommunications, CAL II IT , general education, digital literacy pre req in programming that requires ongoing work with Computer Science and Engineering.

First year writing requirement, but also lower division programming requirement.

Jordana distribution was meant to dramatize the fact that campus had developed a mature wireless network--information retrieval and digital awareness.

Wireless as a cultural imaginary was supposed to supply euphoria as oppressed subjects were liberated from lock down .

Wireless promises utopia… (name of critic I didn't get), and…

Planners wanted (JORNADA HANDHELD POCKET PCS) involved artist to get involved -- "beyond product placement"

Powering up 700 devices to be taken out of their box by ecstatic students to be photographed and filmed as part of narrative—the dramatic opening.

Big unveil (photograph).

Adriene Jenik Off_the_grid
Helped with effort--vulnerabilities of what it means to be off the grid.
Game like activities n art and graphic design--negative space--rethinking the elements of the campus.

Negative space of nonwired areas selected to investigate and challenge questions.

Explicit treasure hunt activities and other games Trigger, Tag, and Tell
Mystery History
Maprobabiotics
Finders Keepers
Activities of Social Surveillance to identify presence and locations of actors in groups.

One of the hopes of distributing such devices was to allow students to be seen and see in new ways: Lev Manovitch: screen and not screen out.

Ideologies of transparencies: relationships based on proximity and transparency as metaphors, and how university should function.

One of the thing I'm interested in as a scholar--what are the analogies made between values associated with technology, and values associated with institutions. The ways I'm interests in how analogies between democratic institution in the form of a government agency might be imagined to be like certain kinds of distribute computer networks.

Unpacking metaphors that he's using (Griswold, chancellor?)

Hoped to use concepts of space and space--department, provides services for aggregate of people (Learning Assemblages slide), Griswold.

Any technologically and complex multiversity has a complete set of parts: Space, place, Ubiquity: residential college neighborhoods; departments have schools. Faculty belongs to college and department. Academic neighborhoods -- using mobile technology.

Unlike those imagined confident and technological fluent generation, the initiative leaders feared that there would be isolation and unfamiliar growth with the arrival of baby boomer children--these devices might guide students' participation into new types of spaces/communities--networked publics, and opportunities that could be mapped.

Networked publics: Issue of people not being in institutions -- people not there full time or with full attention. At time HALF of undergrads had cell phones.

Social Surveillance: Artist was inspired to develop dystopian rather than utopian devices of such devices.

Pedagogy of total information awareness -- she decided to use the technology artistically in somewhat different ways (collaboration with other artists), to create SpecFlic: installation about alienation from print artifacts.

Node in universal repository.

Giant hyperwall display.

Librarian image Jennik with appearance mediated.

Students enrolled in classes--contributing footage to the archive.

Saw how platforms can control and surveil.

Polling classes: sporadic intermittent quizzes to help students make sure they're enrolled in class

Clickers are used to poll students continuously.

Acknowledgement: power being used--the creators saw it as participatory not hegemonic The Politics of Polling: "The ActiveClass Project, Experiments.." Ratto et. Al.

Political aspects (professor and student) separate from physical effects (de Certau would disagree).

Jornada eventually jettisoned -- as technology changed--smart devices became perceived as scattering attention, distraction of students, intensifying conflicts between faculty and students about whose technology. "The War on Learning" Remixed of faculty and alienation. Angry professor.

Faculty: difficulty in using the original tool was cited as virtue because students could not use to multitask in class. (stylus, keypad, etc.)

The Distraction Panic: ActiveClass -- small display and pen-based input was seen as positive. Minimal distraction (but seen as problems).

Within a year even early adopters abandoned ActiveClass platform. Not required. Sold devices.

What went wrong, what went right?

Duke University 2004-2005

20 gigabyte apple iPads Belkin voice recorders, 160 students, freshmen.

Recording lectures, capturing sound from field work, skill and drill in foreign and language classes, peer feedback data storage.

Student appreciated being asked to curate an archive of materials in their first year experience. Mobile electronic practices may be social rather than individual in nature.

Participating faculty often were frustrated with copyright restrictions of ITunes, and apple lock down. Absence of training and support. Absence of systems for bulk purchasing or academic use.

People backed off after the first year

Valuable results claimed.

iPad distributions: Use of ebooks threatened to break monopoly on textbooks--but it has perils.

Class, race, gender operate in terms of Apple

Textbook wars? Elitism?

E-waste.

Emphasis on individual rather than shared social practices.

Dennis Jerz on Seton Hill: provides better feedback through it, would like to gather data on student annotations on their work.

Jerz, interactive fiction, active bloggers.

Hasan Elahi: digital artist who did work on surveillance after discovering he was on Do Not Travel list. Ipads very well suited. Experiment with students getting t-shirt, and QR codes and finding student to match up with shirt.

TransBorder Immigrant Tool

Ubiquitous computing technologies to avoid technology for political and social impact and work.

Community stations: group co presence around shared deliberative spaces. Low tech media (Wayne Yang, first year capstone comic con).

In virtual window, NAME not clear, Leon Batista Alberti to Paul.

Mass distribution to hand held devices offer new ways for students to read university and interfaces, maybe we should read the university differently ourselves, and consider connections of face with interfaces, in ways that respect technology of rapid building of systems in which we're constructing knowledge and regulating each other's conduct. The thought that system could be more transparent by handheld device .

Another saw first year experience as liminal time to be captured and stored/archived.

Recent romance with paperless computing--merits further close reading--as we unveil new interfaces with the classroom, don't lose memories of other experiments.

"Being Distracted in the Digital Age," Jason Farman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

Number of mobile devices--huge numbers--most ubiquitous device no face of planet. Have to deal with mobile devices in the classroom.

Right now: three options:

Ignore the devices (probably most used).
Ban the devices (lot of people write ban into syllabus)
Incorporate the devices.

This s the method I'm talking about today, how to incorporate these devices, and one I do. The reason I've incorporated the devices is that I had to for a new job.

Digital Cultures and Creativity. Students given IPADS when they enter the program. Hired Fall 2007 to get program off the ground, and about a month before classes started I got an email that said all the students are getting IPADS, please incorporate into your curriculum.

I've never touched an IPAD I don't know what to do, or what machine can do. This brings me to the most fundamental question:

What is the right tool for this particular job? Not always digital.

The question about the proposal to incorporate IPADS into your curriculum.

You have a tool, now find some uses for it. Flips the question (should be, I want to do X, what is the best tool?)0

Third year teaching with IPADS in the classroom (will be the last year), this has been the most challenging aspect of my job. Is finding ways to use the IPAD and there's an expectation to use them dynamically.

Projects:

Twitter backchannel
Site specific quizzes
Map making projects
Participatory surveillance
Flash mobs
Location based gaming
Documentaries
Locative storytelling projects
www.jasonfarman.com

Does in classes without IPADS because students have the devices.

Download twitter application and create a backchannel where they create hashtag for class for discussion throughout.

Dynamic space of conversation.

Fantastic to hear from all 80 students--never ever hear from all, but with Twitter, I required that they contribute during the lecture.

The shy students are quite vocal on the backchannel.

Lots of resistance to using Twitter on the classroom, distraction, disconnection between the lecture and the information stream of twitter. Surveyed at the end, the very first tweet I got F 2010, this is certainly the first class I've taken where we're encouraged to be distracted by mobile devices.

"It's a distraction, but a benevolent one"

Sp 2012, survey, and some of the responses were "I was skeptical about the use of twitter but it felt like distraction, but started to appreciate it as it went on". We could have a dialogue of class while learning. I felt like it was a distraction but it deepened the discussion on important topics.

Was I requiring students to be distracted

CATHY DAVIDSON NOW YOU SEE IT MUST MUST MUST READ

One thing I pass on: idea that multitasking takes many forms, and it takes place within a variety of contexts. When I have a discussion with faculty member, it's a bad word, and a single bucket--wrong way of thinking about multitasking.

Understanding multitasking is the key to success (DAVIDSON).

Good and bad types--what is involved.

Driving and reading a newspaper that conflict, but driving itself requires multitasking.

Driving with a stick.

Embodied experience of multitasking relegates certain tasks to the background.

I like the question that she raising: what is monotasking. I don't think anybody is monotasking right now.

SHERRY TURKLE ALONE TOGETHER
"There are really important things you cannot think about unless it's still and you're only thinking about only one thing at a time. Some things not amenable to thinking about fifteen things"

Hamlet's Blackberry: Digital busyness is the enemy of depth.

Opposite of what my students said.

Larger historical view of distraction: Derrida's entire project of deconstruction Western logocentrism was about exposing the fetish of thinking of the spoken word as the house of true presence, vs. written work as departure for it. Throughout history we fetishize certain forms of connection and dismiss others.

Ausander (book title): live meeting real time get together, transformed by recording media. All of us together are in synchronous proxemics engagement, but that's been informed and absolutely transformed by digital technologies, by recording media, the live and the mediated, the document and the live performance have been so enmeshed that you cannot separate any longer. To fetishize these real time get togethers or is illusory.

Using mobile technology, think about classroom as synchronous place and how we fetishize certain types of connections and dismiss other types.

PROJECTS using technologies.

Have site specific quiz where students engage with space and place (one thing mobile technologies did well).

Seven Scenes, platform, has quiz function, and real time feedback.

I start by asking them about relationship of content to space and place. What does that have to do with the space of campus, and find a connection between space of campus and your material, and get the students out there to think about relationships about the material.

Flash mob: October image, on video, MP# flash mob, University of Maryland. MP3, hit play at 4 am, doing activities, all of the things they were going to do, get as many people involved as possible.

Ideas about headphones are instead a connecting technology, listening to the same thing at the same time.

MAP ATTACK
Locative game, open search platform, designed over weekend y students AT NYU.

They have to capture the flat, transform the university space into a game board, do to this similar to the flash mob.

Reimagine spaces of campus.

Created several maps using their devices--surveillance maps of U of Maryland campus where we have hundreds of surveillance cameras around, I wanted them to think about the campus as a surveillance space to ask questions about what is privacy in the digital age. Do you thin its important that you're being watched.

Other maps: accessibility map of the campus (on of the worst in terms of wheelchair accessibility, wanted them to see that).

Create infrastructure maps, chart data centers on the east coast, wireless towers, materiality about devise we're giving them.

Story projects, sort of littering parts of story around campus, campus narrative backdrop. Glitch project, screen capture. Google Glitch Project Maryland.

Students imagined combining Alice in Wonderland with the Matrix, what would that look like.

Documentaries using the IPAD, shot all video, did the editing, took a topic that we covered, and had to interview experts on that topic and deepen their relationship to is.

In conclusion; I think it's important for us to begin to imagine creative ways to incorporate these technologies rather than ban or ignore, such a pervasive part of our culture, woven into our students every day lives, we're missing important opportunity, and also I think to be my job to get the students to reimagine the uses of these devices. See students using them in ways that they don’t think about. Take the most intimate device of their life and reimagine how they use it it's transformative.

"Virtual Classroom Software: A Medium-Specific Analysis," Kathi Inman Berens

Begin by noting that this session is also being broadcast in my virtual classroom, run through Adobe Connect, people there are there right now, I'll just show you guys in the audience, what it looks like from the host's point of view; The software apportions the space, by work, by task, and I want you to keep that in mind as I work through some of the slides.

When we're in the classroom or embodied situation, relations are more social and fluid, and not so efficiently organized.

Walks away from podium to show what it looks like.

Also because I'm speaking, those of you in the virtual world, I'm not going to be here with you right now, so Jesse is.

So, this talk is called Virtual Classroom Software, medium specific analysis.

Software Design: transparency is the goal, you should be able to pick up a device and use it without reading any constructions. Manila folder on a desktop looks like a real folder, but you can cram more into the virtual one. Best image for aspiration for software design.

Not always the case: Does software take us

Transparency and ease of use habituate us to limit our thinking to terms of software presents us.

Virtual classroom, frequent experience of failure teaches us to resist being lulled or coopted by software because we must create workarounds.

Software failure every single class.

Students learn to 'see' how software makes choices for them which they may nor may not accept.

Students have invented workarounds.

What students also learn in that class of creating workaround--software makes choices which they may or may not accept.

Students have agency that they wouldn't have outside virtual environments.

My boss: one class, two classrooms. USC has a lot of master's programs that are entirely online. Often outsourced to third parties (how does university retain integrity of missions if there is for profit intervener supplying the interface). Undergraduates forbidden to take online courses for credit.

Classroom was experiment it is synchronous. We're all in the same space at the same time whether that space is virtual, embodied or virtual and embodied.

The software is designed for emote designers; it is not designed for what you see in this slide, the virtual classroom with the students actually face to face.

Backchannel is face to face.

Boss: "the virtual classroom software will always work, right

"define 'work'"

So the different stakeholders have different perspectives on failure:

Administrators: gazing mostly at themselves, mastery is the value proposition of university ; come to use and we will make you smarter and better, and we don't say come to us and fail, but failure is a key element of our pedagogy. It is absolutely essential to getting students digitally literate. Hard to explain to administrators -- they don’t understand ubiquitous computing, learning how to work with interface is just like reading.

Virtual classroom software mishaps made hackers of us all: this is what the software offers us, not letting us do what we want to do, so invent new stuff. Software presents workgroups to work out, not as effective to meet face to face. Need to meet face/face is so much more information dense.

They're doing research together and harvesting links can make sense of virtual meeting

Inoculation Theory of Failure: give them one big dose of failure early in the semester.

QR code scanner hunt inspire by Jason's work on campus, and I designed it so they couldn't win.

One team cheated to win, and that's fine (what that showed us, is that the pedagogical design of university, people do what you need to do to excel). My class is collaborating and relying on each other, and requires trust, and requires idea we will all benefit from it. I will share this knowledge, That experience enabled what became a big project the hidden USC, virtual tour of campus, they embedded a gmap with a lot of media rich links, we crated a couple of games in twitter and Facebook, pitches at prospective USC students, real work in the world for a real climate.

Failure is fixative (not sure of word): remember pain, remember to do differently. Auden's elegy to Yeats.

Students master the work around.

Design: "ace" is synecdoche" s software designed that it fetishizes the face when in fact what we learned is the entire body does the most work intellectually; my students disable the video, just use audio, faster, lighter weight, much easier for us to focus on the content of what were doing. It's the voice that works--face slows down working conservation because there are too many inputs for human and bandwidth load.

Only use audio when I lecture.

Key concepts in virtual classroom software: Katherne Hayles, Medium Specific Analysis; Jason Farman: Space is Produced through use; Ian Bogost Procedural Rhetoric. Janet Murray, Inventing the Medium, ABSOLUTELY MUST GT.

Thoughtlessly designed for Cognitive Overload: designed by for people who know nothing about pedagogy. Very hard to keep track of what you're supposed to be learning. We would reconceptualize it to make it a more fluid space.

Chat space better than video space -- refuse to come on camera because they don't look good.

Conventions of atomized bits don't allow simple integration.

Software fails taught us to see: SUPPOSED TO HAVE AN ANIMATION THAT SAYS EPHEMERALITY

Software cannot replicate: both virtual and embodied necessary in pedagogical design. Everything that can be digitized will be; optimize what cannot be digitized. Valorize the ephemeral.

Serendipity: MOOCS can't do it.

Photo, Jenna and Jenkins, went to Jenkins, got interviews for final project--and so that informal connection turned into formal learning, where they went back to revisit work--all came about through serendipity.

Pleasure: the pleasure of having good together, having a meal together, worked with Jack Halberstam at USC, and had an inverted classroom, and one team brought donuts.

Synchronicity=Eventness: Meeting 2 or three times a week suits F2F but not hybrid.

We supplement with micro meetings in Twitter.

Project based learning synchronizes so-learners across platforms b/c student activity, not teacher agenda, is focus. Unfolds dynamically.

Eventness:

Attending to software makes us impatient of inauthentic measures of learning, and got angry about final exam, and exceeded it to punish teacher. "This is how many fucks I give"

One last slide: discern the software's procedural goal.

Issue of Profession 2012 "remember that our basic message is 'we are allowed to think about alternatives" Manifesto for rethinking about the relevance of humanities. Need to think about procedural goal, and change it so that it can meet our own course.

Not currently designed for pedagogy, and would be nice interruption if it was.

"The Multisensory Classroom," Leeann Hunter, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

Now going to University of Washington-Pullman

Moving to embodied interface.

Multisensory classroom.

Part of problem: how to respond to the online and virtual interfaces from fae to face classroom.

F2F

Interactive classroom: multisensory cannot be easily replaced online.

New London Group:
Written
Oral
Visual
Audio
Tactile
Gestural
Spatial

GESTURES: movements of hands and arms; expressions of face, eye, movements, and gaze; demeanors of the body, gait, clothing and fashion, hair style; dance action sequences, timing and frequency, ceremony and ritual.

I come out professionally today: Child of Deaf Adults, grew up with six hearing children and two deaf parents.

Facial expressions and body language were a primary mode of communication. (Three boys before her as middle child.

For better or for worse, lighting, movement, touch and gesture and space were my primary modes of communication.

Had to be face to face more than I wanted to be, and as soon as I could disappear into a virtual body I did, and if I could interact without any single human being, I'd patronize (UNCLEAR)

F2F bad breath, smelly underarms, temperatures to rooms, we can't control, desks that are uncomfortable, difficulty to hear or see the speakers when lighting or bad or too loud. In short, the physical classroom for the easily distracted or very sensitive student is nothing short of a nightmare.

How I went from silent non-verbal child of deaf adults to English professor is another story.

2011 parents coming to visit--see me in classroom.

Asked students to remediate group projects into a deaf friendly format, could mean different things, and I thought they were excellent, and I asked my dad to pick out the best one. They put together fully captioned slide shows, performed min action sequences, and some learned some sign language.

My dad completely unimpressed, signing to her, saying, without bodies and facial expressions, that's not deaf friendly. I learned a lot from him that day

One of the points that he made was that it's not these visual aids or these captions or all these other supports that we do that is deaf friendly it's the story we tell with our bodies.

My dad is a master. Will Smith is dad's favorite actor, and, he has amazing facial expressions, if you're watching any other drama, and you're reading captions, might as well read book with pictures, as opposed to Smith telling stories with his body.

Because he was so disappointed in students to demonstrate what a nonverbal skit would look like.
s
When I was a child, he came to elementary school and did mimes for classmates.

The teacher tells the story of dimwitted professor teaching a boring class, droning on about class, words on textbook, he got hit by spitball.

The grumpy old teacher ends up threatening the students with a ruler.

Catches one, says, come up to front of room,

Big student, takes own punishment.

Parodies old classroom where teacher knows best, but students saying in non verbal ways that it isn't working.

Students don't throw spitballs any more, and teachers don't use rulers, we have mobile devices and teachers who give dirty looks to people looing at screens.

Nonverbal skit

I nothing happens in classroom when we ask them to put class away.

Has students prepare nonverbal skits in more formal setting.

One class period, low stakes activity. They compose nonverbal skits, and act them out, and talk about and reflect.

Terrifying thing for students, but so many of them have written on their reflections how much they liked being forced out of their comfort zone. I actively engage with them as they're practicing and preparing their skit. They never want to go over the top, and then during the presentations instead of just laughing and clapping, I have students identify effective uses of nonverbal gestures, or how they might present something in different way.

Skits explore spatial and non verbal codes--but what happens after. They're transformed.

They're all sitting with the laptops, they're not looking at anything but ME when I walk up to the front of the class.

All of a sudden their attention has been recalibrated, retrained , to see there is something happening in front of classroom, I am an embodied interface in the classroom.

Through play: people learn to trust one another (CATHY DAVIDSON). Chuck Hamilton, quote on play, Second Life.

Why do we leave play to change--why do we leave it to students and workers to decide what constitutes play in face/face setting. Taking after chuck's idea to create a formal play space in a virtual setting.

Create in physical classroom.

Using non verbal communication in projects:
Do rhetorical analysis of advertisement--they have to recreate advertisement with their own lived version for it.

Parody: Tobasco sauce…consume TABLASTO

Second one: often ask students to reflect on identities, and this sort of empty space of their mind, have students perform experiments to construct their identity as a consumer. This student decided to give away one of her coffee mugs, illustrates the redundancy of two coffee mugs, both as an object, but as a kind of rhetoric if the second coffee mug doesn't add anything to her life except the burden.

ACADEMIC SPEED DATING.

What comment or question do you have about the panel?
Stand up, friend a stranger, share
Find another stranger repeat.

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MLA 2013 Session #353. Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communicati

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:58:55 GMT

Friday, 4 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Republic Ballroom, Sheraton
Presiding: Michael Bérubé, Penn State Univ., University Park

The news that digital humanities are the next big thing must come as a pleasant surprise to people who have been working in the field for decades. Yet only recently has the scholarly community at large realized that developments in new media have implications not only for the form but also for the content of scholarly communication. This session will explore some of those implications—for scholars, for libraries, for journals, and for the idea of intellectual property.

Welcome to Avenues of Access--part 2 o a three part presidential forum, Michael Bérubé, president of forum for another 48 hours.

Brief confession: was thinking back to various MLAs past when the question of the digital just came up, and I was member of Task force, on promotion and tenure, and several who had written the portion of statement on online publishing. Some people are only happy with print journals -- the question is yes, the way you're money is secured by that gold in Fort Knox.

Reads description. One more confession: twitter feed,

Adjunct had read paper rom distant. Changed MLA to the twitter feet.

Go in order listed in program.

1. "The Mirror and the LAMP," Matthew Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

Adjust emic and can be heard easier.

Attended first ML convention in 1996, PHD student in VA, Charlottesville, up the road in DC, a bunch of us carpooled. Like many firs tie attendees I had mapped out my convention schedule; ne session in particular stood out to me, The Canon and the Web, the web presence that you see here--you see the static screen shot, had been placed online months prior to convention. Animated gifs, and tables. Evident will to situate session in contextual network. Links to readings, Clear desire for interactivity, live email links, and the injunction to initiate a correspondence. Curatorial responsibility which seem very contemporary to me. Participants with links to ages, and MLA bios. Some major names, and all of hat was a key element of the panel's appeal. Other key element was heralded directly n the session's title, and substantiated in this formidable site--the web itself, celebrated not as a convenience or contrivance for delivering content.

World wide Web was not the same web as the web e have today, neither temporally or technologically or aspirationally. Still mostly flatland, html rendering synchronicity of different browsers, IE and Navigator war, starting up . HTML 3.2. No XML not DHML.
No commenting facility, no feed. There was no Google. You yahooed; there was no shame, we all did. Alta Vista.

The real backbone of scholarly communication at the time remained listserv email. You subscribed, were on, you posted, or lured, or flamed, or accidentally hit reply all, but you didn't have to worry about how many followers you have, or if you would be retweeted. You didn't have to ask if you could be somebody's friend.

Humanist Discussion Group Listserv: May 14, 1987.

Name reminds us of a time to conceive for the need or more than one listserv. Humanist remains active today; some of you may also follow an account on twitter (hum_comp)--culling archives for tweets.

Early humanist listserv saw much more clearly what the challenges and opportunities of humanist communicating would be.

By 1998, I was clear that many of scholarly listservs were already living out their lives. H-CLC comparative literature. Advanced maturity in the medium?

Great migration to blogosphere, nascent social networking software. The bogs are still with us today, but these were the salad days. Removable Type or MT; some bloggers seemed to exist only in comments. Group blogs feature of scholarly languescape.

Grand Text Auto : discuss on digital humanities, computer literacy, code criticism. Active and energetic user community that spurred MIT Press to use it as an open peer review for a monograph

Movement from graduate school to faculty to administration--less time to do the online thing.

Rise of twitter impacted blogosphere.

MLA Commons launching this weekend at the convention: intended to facilitate active member to member communication.

Built out from CUNY commons, built on top extensions--and lost other terms--bedrock of technologies. Working through online scholarship:

Access -- always engenders power. Power dynamics are built into social networking society. Ability to define relationship functions is at the heart of the web.

MLA Commons--at what point will filters go up home filter? Higher or lower rank? Be wary of procedural models into its fabric.
Access involves risk.

Posting prose in full of dissertation -- inspired by Harlan Ellison who wrote short stories in windows of bookstores. The web had the potential to be panopticon.

Asked if he was worried about plagiarism -- m response to the question about plagiarism, Poe's purloined Letter. Single best way to get work into circulation.

Blogging in 2003, blogged under my own name. twitter 2006, I have not blogged every good idea, I have not tweeted every insight, there is stuff to keep to myself, or stuff I release strategically, and everybody has to find own comfort zones.

Access always entails risk. Scholarship not zero sum game--but reputation can be.

Access always requires time--all part of a stream of text.

Speculation on future--interoperability not likely.

All of this is the same no matter how much attention spans changed--most scholarly careers measured in fairly pedestrian ways.

One final urging: not too soon for MLA commons to be planning for its own obsolescence, our social and scholarly networks are ever more porous, but they are not reliably portable. Relationships require enormous amounts of investment and time.

Online personas change and move across the platforms.

Relationships and work can endure after platform disappears.

2. "Access Demands a Paradigm Shift," Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ.

A few years ago, I spent a day in a cinder block space of cement floor and fluorescent lighting, twenty people and fifteen desks, 200 desktops, and other devices. Anonymous warehouse in San Francisco, obscure space, under overpass. I pressed the door bell, nothing, I pressed gain. Finally someone buzzed me in. had arrived. Welcome to the corporate headquarters of Wikipedia--sixth most trafficked site on the internet. To interview Jimmy Wales -- one question, did you know, Jimmy? Did you suspect? Largest encyclopedia the world has known. No cloister in history could compete with the success.

His answer: in 2002, we thought a couple of hundred people would think Wikipedia an interesting experiment. First pace most of us go for information. Lifesaving information. Wikipedia's even useful for serious scholarship in ways one might not expect: when I first bean making contribution to Wikipedia a class assignment, and substitute for research paper, I came across the entry on calculus;. The entry gave credit to Egyptian, etc., transcultural history--I called reference librarians to verify. No book had it; she tried to verify it; she made phone calls at research universities in Egypt Greece, Iran, India, China each of them knew the western history o calculus one of them knew about her own country' history. The residence librarian at Duke was able to confirm.

Americas: Asian immigrants, etc. Inuit's Excellent.

Why isn't this open access produce king us rethink?

1. Openness o contribution allows us to rethink expertise
2. The lack of a formal predetermined taxonomy of what counts as knowledge
3. Volunteerism and lack of compensation and overt recognition.

Think about new avenues of access to scholarly publication.
Formal education has not kept up with the changed requirements of everyday life and work.
We need to redesign our priorities based on human desire to know.

Peril: job description more important.

Redesign our institutions for critical thinking and critical contribution.

Openness is compromised.

Only 13% of contributors are female; in a world populated by female librarians and teachers and other forms of knowledge workers.

Open access is not de facto open. Must be taught and reinforced and practiced. W need to teach new skills of online publication, presentation, as professional and pre-professional. Add activist component to what we teach.

Mass media is no longer uni-directional: economic, legal, psychological, and cultural impediments. Understanding and overcoming those barriers -- the 21st century digital literacies -- need to be part of education.

Take up the challenge: our place is essential.

Lead the way to a major paradigm shift in education-all levels, all disciplines.

Remember our own institutional history: pundits love to say education hasn’t' changed in 2000 years. Partly true, but not really accurate. Almost all of the institutional apparatus hat now governs our forms and norms of higher education-1870-1924, Industrial Age, supporting capitalist production of that era. Had to move to more research--transformation. Industrial -Educational Complex.

19th century research university structured around technology of last information age.

Developments of research and workplace==all of them institutionally mechanisms of expertise.

Few educators today realize how deeply tailored are university structures we've inherited. Scientific Learning management-Taylor--ideas of scientific learning management spread throughout higher learning administration as good management practices. The humanistic mode of analytical thinking has been on the decline every since--humanities mode designed to be minimized by professional structure.

Taylorism--still educating students as if hey participate in the communication cycle to the Industrial age.

Lot of gatekeepers in the way of idea moving to publication.

Communication circuit looks more like this -- DIS organization of contemporary online publication.

Hyper commercialized ecology of possibilities -- tantalizing in design, yet exist to turn voluntary and open contribution into someone else's profit.

If it's free, you are not the consumer, you are the product being sole.

Academics need to be helping students negotiate perils of access.

Critical contributing means helping students gain confidence contribute meaningfully.

New paradigm ahead: access into just e publishing but new publics.

Lot of hype about the new form of education: MOOC

Harvard and MIT

1 billion learners.

New access to education==is it revolutionary?

MOOCS are seen as the great disruptor--structurally they disrupt the least about higher education.

Big professors, tenured white male professors, talking heads, through MOOCS: they do not invite students to contribute knowledge. No participatory knowledge. Nor do MOOCS warn students against dystopia possibilities of surveillance--a world where those in power can exploit open access to individual data.

Billions of learners--or billions being trained into global power force.

Global canon and decentered perspective--NOT in the MOOCS, preserving the Eurocentric perspective and canon. Imperial knowledge,
2013 we should not be massively scaling an outmoded model of education; we should be remodeling our institutions for new participatory curriculum.

Liberal arts as start-up curriculum for resilient global citizens: open contribution, open canon, voluntary participation, all elements that should be incorporated into the education.

Digital humanities is only one to have taken seriously he new epistemologies -- participatory components and humanistic analytical schools -- slide: 7 billion authors, 7 billion teachers.

It has evolved through some of its issues-not changing things at the start, not addressing race, gender, hierarchy, power.

3. "Resistance in the Materials," Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia

Most mornings these days esp. when I'm the first to arrive in the Scholar's Lab, I'll start something printing on the replicator, before I get into my email -- grinding whir as the machine revs up, a harsh lilac colored light, things become hot to the touch, and I walk away. I don’t even bother to stay now to see the mechanized arms moves.

Lapsed Victorianist who trained in archeology before gravitating toward most concrete aspect --design of tools and online environments that emphasize materiality of texts and our physicality of it. I print to feel productive. Art objects, little mechanisms, experiments, cultural artifacts, cheap three D printing always readily become things. It's like when I learned to set type on a press.

Sometimes a failed print--a mess.

William Morris: it's not too long ago that we couldn't imagine humanities computing to become so mainstream, so common, active rather than passive detractors. Late 1990s apprenticed under Jerome McGann, technical writer, Morris, embodied frictions become revealingly evident when you move from print to digital material.

You cant have art without resistance in the material.

Only rarely contextualized or traced back to its source: Morris' son in law reports it in a study about the new fangled device about a typewriter.

Morris condemns the typewriter--between a man and his work. Paper, quill pen, condemn the pneumatic brush.

Make the work too easy--the les thought. You cannot have art without resistance in the material.

Sticky typewriter -- own type of resistance.

Resistance unhelpfully and inaccessibly located in a tool set. Disenfranchising resistance felt by scholars and students new to MLA

When established DH scholars are feeling generous toward ourselves--inevitable learning curve of DH, and so we might confess that among the chief barriers to energy are poorly designed research tools and social systems.

Tensions and fractures and glitches reveal opportunity.

Until quite recently every self professed digital humanist was deeply engaged in tool building or most fundamental type of remediation. Algorhythm, or software procedural devices, or patently ontological conceptual tools like database designs and mark up schema: frameworks testing hypothesis. Tools had one thing in common: their own users had make them, and understood continual remaking of them in response to resistance as natural part of process to use.

Three crucially important factors converging for humanities today: most critical moment.

didn't get clearly
Physical to digital and back again: handcrafted boutique digitization in the 1990s was jarred and overwhelmed by mass digitization.

Least common denominator of digitalization has had consequences to engage with physical archives.

Decade on, we have only just begun to grapple with the primary digitalization of scale.

Momentous scholarly changes by development of ubiquitous digital to physical conversions tools.

Consumer accessible 3 D fabrication.

Embedded and wearable computer devices.

Others are ahead -- social scientists, artists, etc. new digital materialities.

2. defamiliarizes our own practice so thoroughly, feel levels of resistance

Speaking in code.

Without a clear call from people feeling barred from access, software developer's community might not be talking about what we have internalized.

Unclear: interface, architecture, communal in discursive humanities design. Style of scholarly communication that differs from verbal expressions.

3. Call for thinking about work from marginalized groups from outside--prompt to make accessible the unspoken.

Morris: middle ages, art and labor, beautiful--man and nature made. Made mainly for use instead of to be sought and told.

The rise of casual and alternative academic labor: alt-ac labor (IT, another places for institutional hiring)

DH will only scale as commodity tool use for the classroom---not as research in its own right. Casualization of academic labor.

Allow generation of scholars to at will teaching and labor--we will lose control over materials, tools and time

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MLA 2013 Session #129: Teaching in the Shallows: Reading, Writing and Teaching in the Digital Age

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:43:57 GMT

Thursday, 3 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., Berkeley, Sheraton
Presiding: Robert R. Bleil, Coll. of Coastal Georgia; Jennifer Gray, Coll. of Coastal Georgia
Speakers: Susan Cook, Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Christopher Dickman, Saint Louis Univ.; T. Geiger, Syracuse Univ.; Jennifer Gray; Matthew Parfitt, Boston Univ.; James Sanchez, Texas Christian Univ.
Responding: Robert R. Bleil
Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains argue that the paradigms of our digital lives have shifted significantly in two decades of living life online. This roundtable unites teachers of composition and literature to explore cultural, psychological, and developmental changes for students and teachers.

* * *

This title caught my eye immediately: I do not dispute that patterns of reading and writing and viewing have changed, but I do immediately get grumpy at the tendencies of people of my generation or older to go all Golden Age and claim that students/people now cannot read or do X as they used to do, and that it's all gone pear-shaped and bad, instead of changing. Why not say people who grew up in X time cannot navigate the new materials and develop the new reading skills the internet age demands? Why always the Golden Age, it was perennially better in the past that comes out?

This is fairly small room--one table in back for bloggers (at the earlier second language learning session, the room was twice as large, but only half as full). I am always conflicted: it's great to be in a full room, for the sense of excitement. But I hate being in crowds (I usually sit in the first row or so, yes, I am that type, which fills up only reluctantly and only if there's a crush). Now, I'm in the back row with one other person at the blogging (I was the only one at the blogging table at the languages one).

I am realizing I need a new toy: Fluffy, my netbook, is only about three years old, not even that (summer 2010?), but it slow, and clunky, and I want something even lighter and easier to work with. Summer paycheck is I predict likely to be spent on a new something or other--will probably go through Dell since we get employee discount.

This writing up notes from conference presentations is the easiest way to work--as long as I post (and tag!) on my DW -- my hand written notes are nearly unreadable even to me.

* * *

Rob Bleil from U of coastal Georgia.

Discussion at the end.

Slide before each presenter.

Conversation began with the Google article on bad impact of internet. Article spoke to something that spoke to him--started as librarian--doing technology, and felt like h was losing track of conversation. Marshall McLuhan, Media, and Nicholas Carr, The Shallows. Jennifer and I wanted to convene panel is because the references they saw were borderline vitriolic--a lot of venom being directed at Carr. This speaks to issues that we're seeing in our classrooms, talking about at our colleagues, and they'd never seen a single panelist at MLA that addressed this issue. This is the opportunity to get involved in this conversation.

Comic: Google Making us Stupid? First side of a postcard that Jennifer received in the mall in November, announcing Andrea Lunsford's new book, published by Norton, and I thought it was cool, but the postcard on the back: We don't think so," researchers who looked at thousands of pieces of writing done by students in first year writing in composition classes didn't find a single usage of students using abbreviations.

Carr doesn't mention it in the book or in the article-Andrea Lunsford's new book is published by Norton--same publishing house that published THE SHALLOWS. The PR department's not talking to each other. Need to have conversation.

Right now, without further introduction.

SUSAN COOK: (like the slide)

One of my grad school mentors taught low tech survey courses; she explained she felt students were losing their ability to focus and listen. She used an overhead projector, or lectures to the class. And she read. I was a TA for her 19th century survey course so I knew students had a hard time with absence of visuals, and focus on single text, rather than multiple ones. Graduate department is digital humanities one (Santa Crux?) In a recent article for INSIDE HIGHER ED they argued digital humanities has value beyond its status as a hot new field. Liu and Thomas try for well-conceived humanities conceived models of digital work--to affect university policy. I often think about two competing attitudes as resisting the shallows on the one hand, and seeking to transform them for non-shallow on the other.

Effect of juggler's brain? (term)

Explore extent to which I think he is right--but he neglects to consider that deep sustained thought is not categorically removed from digital brain. Can mitigate more deleterious effects.

Greater good of humanities.

Carr's argument through SHALLOWS is that our brains are becoming rewired because of time spent on the internet. Engages all senses (except smell and taste), simultaneously. The net in other words demands multi-tasking. Provides high speed system for rewards and feedback. Rewarded cognitively for moving through material correctly. Distracted mind, surface level attention at best.

We become used to new way of thinking, crowds out time for deep reading and thinking.

Read passage--to my two sections of freshman composition this fall. Before I started reading, I asked each class to pay attention, and asked them for questions. Across two sections, three out of thirty students were able to answer all four questions. Difficult to listen on reading aloud. Difficulty to pay attention.

This time, however, as a result, both classes of students that they wished they were able to focus. Shock and embarrassment of being confronted by their inability to pay attention, or cultural shift. This is a marked change in attitude. I conducted experiment in response to Carr--all-day writing. Prove Car wrong. I gave the students a separate homework challenge. Read for an hour without getting up or looking at other media. Any reported they were unable to complete the challenge.

Wide spread distraction in our students across disciplines.

Illustrate Carr's juggler's brain at work in the college classroom.

Upper level students asked to design collaborative blogs (Dickens, popular media, etc.)

Teach valuable skill to create live collaborative website from within an English course.

New technologies surround students, ask them to spend less time. Try to subvert them.

Ask students to analyze values of projects I bring into classroom. I want them to engage in sustained thought, but I'm not sure we have to turn away from internet to get there. Sustained reflection inside the class--discussions--outside the class, reflection papers. Locate hidden depths within the shallows.

Christopher Dickman technology, classroom

Classroom pedagogies bring up some more expansive issues, question at the end, to what degree do we have a mandate for long-term memory, and how can technology facilitate it or address t.

Crucial neurological dynamic: "cells that fire together wire together" Hebb's rule.

Foundational principle. Carr doesn't deal with pedagogy--he's paying it.

Connections are basis of long term memory: a mandate than when students leave classroom, they take something with them.

We're most interested is not necessarily explicit memory (content), but more concerned with for long-term transfer and what students can take with them, implicit memory Concept/strategies.

Carr=schema

Memory formed: motivation

Three cognitive pedagogical that can help facilitate some of these connections, firing of the neurons.

Active learning

Doing the 'work' of the class in class
Activates previous knowledge,
Opening multiple neural pathways

Immediate feedback

Quick better, not immediate.
Time lost is opportunity for wiring lost: the more time between, the less chance for strong wiring of neurons.
Why people can get so good at video games.

Metacognition
Peer instruction
Thinking about thinking, but also ability to monitor progress as we go along.
Make work and thinking visible, and put it into contrast with other work.

Put their work out there, in contrast with their peer's work (most important), as opposed to exerts.

Teaches students who are working at similar levels with each

How People Learn, Bransford et al.

Classroom:
Composition. Practice summary. Good introduction to abstract and how the abstract system works in professional articles, in sciences but also humanizes.

We have a conversation about what constitutes a good summary; after that, I have students try their hand at summarizing an article that we can handle in class. Paste it into a common Google document (see here on the slide). Three of their attempts, so immediately they have 19 other examples of someone who's tried this task.

Then they have to pic two that they think have done a good job--not their own--usually get clear winners. So then we have a conversation about why these are the best ones. How could you improve yours, why didn't yours get the vote. This particular assignment has all the articular things: active learning, doing the summary, feedback in the form of ratings, seeing other students' work, guided reflection to see the metacognition.

This is possible without technology, but it makes it quick, and efficient, and have it a daily occurrence.

Pedagogical consequences:

De-centers instructor
Gives students more control and responsibility
Feels less like a sandbox.
Developing own skills, not just playing.

Double Bind:

Try to incorporate technology more and more: necessity of liberal tech policies in class.

Whatever you can put on the syllabus, my students bring their own laptops, and tech.

Inevitability of distraction.

Exercising control

Loss of student agency

Less likely to transfer knowledge.

To what degree do we have a mandate for memory?
To what degree does tech and distraction prevent in-class schema formation.?
Can we or should we hope to guide student memory enough for transfer?

These answers I think really change from situation to situation I don't think there's one best way of thinking there are multiple ways of thinking and multiple literacies--in what situations are they the best.

TJ Geiger II
Mixtape

Three tracks and a Reprise
Mixed tape

Jason Homerie's tracks and composition
Track 1; Most recent issue of Profession, presidential forum
Track 2; The Citation Project
Track 3: Story from writing center

Jack Halberstam: "unlearning," attention, collective action
Kathleen Fitzpatrick literacy online, attention, interaction

And both cite: NOW YOU SEE IT by Cathy Davidson

Halberstam we have to unlearn what we have always taken or granted, or what has consistently been effective. Attention, Davidson talk about distribute selective attention, through groups coming together to form collaboratives, where we all notice things that stand out for us. What we eah have noticed, new ollectivities, new understanding emerges.

Fitzpatrick cites Davidson book: where literary is happening these days, online, attention, interaction.

Distribute knowledge, distribute engagement with a problem. Not expertise.

Track 2: The Citation Project

24 researchers led by Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamison examines
1911 citations in
174 student papers from
16 different colleges and universities (community colleges to Research 1)

(WOW)

Type of source use (graphic)

When a student cites a source, when there's a parenthetical, an acknowledgement, what are they doing: are they quoting as they paraphrasing, are they summarizing, are they patch writing (substitute word, rely so closely on sentence source), (summary: three or more consecutive sentences compressed by half expressed in fresh language).

50% copying directly
Most of the time they acknowledge it's a quote.
About 16% of the time they are patch writing, failing to paraphrase.
30% of the time, they are successfully paraphrasing.

6% of the time, they are summarizing.

1911 citations about 6% of the time.

What does that suggest about while source understanding.

Where in their source material are they drawing the citations from?

46% page 1 in the source
Website sources turned into a pdf, and it appears on the first page of pdf
Very top of page 2, even with a bunch of blank front matter we counted that as page 2.

More than three quarters;"
Page 2 and page 3

Track 3; Writing Center

Student comes into writing center with report primarily a string of quotations.

She tries to paraphrase some of them but as she talks it out, she continues to rely too closely on vocabulary and syntax of the source sentence.

I turn it face down and ask her to say what she learned.

She tells me, and I say 'write that down."

OH, so that's how you can write a paraphrase.

Students trying to articulate what they’ve learned, they cannot move away from source.

REPRISE:

Unlearning for students and teachers.
Attention: focused and unfocused.
Crowd sourcing and collaboration
Summary and paraphrase are important.

(THIS IS ALL OR MY 355 YES!)

Assignment idea:

Selective attention and crowdsourcing summary

Skim and read the article….locate all the instances where your assigned word is used in the article. How often it is used/ What section of the article does the word appear in most frequently? How is it being used in various instances? How does the development of that term promote the larger argument? Re there sources cited when that term is used/ How does the source seem to be used to assist the author in saying something interesting or useful about that term/concept or about her larger argument?

Talk amongst themselves about what they've found -- same term.

Distribute groups: economy and cultural person.
How do all the different terms relate together, and then we reflect the end of the class about what does it mean to do this kind of approach.

Iterative reading: reading differently, talking with people. Read a text for different purposes at different moments.

What does the promotion f humanity value (engaged reading and whole source understanding) look like at this historical moment.

How do we work with the cultural changes and technological affordances to promote students learning.

Jennifer Pooler Gray

Carr and other social commenters lac the young users and learners' perspective - they deal with their own experience--but how interesting though that such concern and worry is shown to the young uses of the digital culture, but these voices are missing or marginalized.

Users are contaminated by immersion in the medium, and excluded from the social commentary.

Many students are asking students and faculty to read into the discussion of these issues (mandated reading). Carr's commentary is receiving national attention and value; however, the specific voices of those subjects he worries over the most are missing.

Study highlights omission, brings student voices into this discussion.

During this study, I shared the work of some commentators on digital culture, and asked them to weight in on their understanding. Age 18-22 Students had not lived in the world without the digital daily influences. Read and watched 2001 movie (most of them had not).

Carr references the works out panel has discussed already. Students provided optional feedback and response, I'll be providing a close reading on the main methods of analysis on the student's response.

Paying attention to what the student does can provide insight…James Paul Gee linguist explains function of this kind of analysis.

Gee: language exists so we can say things. Information not only one. Language does allow us to inform each other, but to do things and be things. In fact, saying things in language never goes without doing or being things.

Looking at student language not only tells us what the student is communicating, but the position and relationship with the topic. The writer designs the method.

138 piece of student witting.

Small piece of paper.

19 year old student. This is his reflective thoughts.

Technology presented as a companionship: WITH (technology)
Books not With him

Past vs. present: reads books/with technology

Word count: when dean recalls past experience as a child, 43 words long, punctuated his writing on his own. These choices, not my busses. Image re-created from memory.

Rest of his sentences come to an average of 13.5 words: declarative statement, state his experience, do not recreate any mental pictures. Longer more detailed description of his past, shorter in current situation.

Next slide is most alarming: shifting perspective between the past ad present.

NOW underlined on slide three times.

The dangerous aspect is how Dean positions himself revealed in his language choice: subject of sentence to object of sentence.

This…it

Objectified by technology, acted upon by technology.

We

No more I
We/this/it

"pretty"
"little chunks of work" adapt

Brief study: light it can exist on possibilities of opening up research to more student users.

Another student's work on Carr's work: "Jake says in his reflection I think that we the students are the most essential part of Carr's argument though somehow he forgot to mention us. Maybe the internet really is disturbing his thought patterns"

App

Parfitt
Teaching Deep reading in the Age of distraction

Deep active reading read the Shallows on IPAD using Kindle app. Never seen a paper copy. Re-reading the Shallows now, it already seems a bit dated to me because Carr tends to equate the demise of the printed book wit the supremacy of the web, and I think eReaders call this into question.

They raise the question of how our devices and apps develop to allow us to read in a variety of ways.

Orality of literacies, the need to convey analyze and respond to complex arguments.

The way we talk about reading in rhet comp circles is undifferentiated--title suggest continuum from shallow to deep.

Four premises or propositions:

Cartoon: on phone, I'm sitting here reading a book just to see if I can still do it. Need for deep reading is not going to go away for some segment of the population rapid silent reading is a skills critical in shaping the modern world--emerged in 111th century). SPACES BETWEEN WORDS evolution in the printed text from something that is difficult to read (no spaces) to something more like the text we're familiar with. Another development is conventional word order in Latin texts, and the rudiments of punctuation.

Before 11th century, reading is mostly oral, people read for other people.

Once silent deep reading became possible, it made possible that sustained internal dialogue between the reader and text whose fae in the digital age Carr is so concerned about. Development produced the modern world: first and important of developments like Guttenberg's Press that led to literate world, and made literacy necessary. It's the most efficient and productive way to generate, circulate and receive complicated ideas. That's why literacy spread so steadily and widely from the 13th to the 19th century in order to participate in this increasingly complex world, you needed to be able to read this way. And the rising middle class in 18th century Europe and America, this type of literacy became synonymous with literacy.

Now in the 21st century the capacity may be only one type of literacy necessary amongst plurality of literacies--it's still necessary.

Complex argument involving complex arguments are not going to go away.

Technology doesn't matter as long as comprehension is equal to demands. Not just casual browsing and hyperlinking--have to comprehend and responds to complex reasoning.

Particular kind of deep reading (different from aesthetic reading, devotional reading, close reading which involves analysis). Scholarly reading: I need to teach my students as current academics in an academic world, future professionals, and world, I need to teach them how to do this kind of reading.

Specific sub-skill: comparing texts, annotated texts, first stage in a writing process. Purpose is to contribute something new to a scholarly conversation.

Not just academics,

Jardine (?) and somebody else.

In-class work that extends attention span
Required re-reading
Note-taking strategies
Reading €portfolio

Brains can adapt.

This kind of reading has to be taught--the need will not go away.

First year comp, college writers.

Four techniques:

In class work
Read 3-4 pages silently
Answer assigned questions in notebooks
Re-read passage silently
Respond (freewriting) discuss

Required rereading: assign challenging texts and assignments that necessitate re-reading
Build time into the syllabus for required re-reading
Discuss the value of re-reading

Note-taking
Marginalia
Dialectical netbook
Quotation exegesis commentary Free form reflective notes/reading journal
Outlines, diagrams, or maps of an argument's structure.

Marked up text

Reading Portfolio
Complies evidence of a student's work as a reader
Makes reading "visible"
Enables reflection on student's practices as a reader
Holds students accountable as readers

ePortfolio

Use pones to take pictures and post them -- reflect wok as readers.

Chase Sanchez

I stat off with a couple of quotes from Carr's book:

Page 111 people feel deep reading is worthless
Chapter 5: could not get quote.

World lit class

He was part of IPAC: books had the books.
All readings read through IPAD
1/3 would print off notes
World Lit survey Cour129se: how to promise deep reading and understanding in classroom.
Consciously thought of that during the summer--how to promote deep reading.

Quizzes/tests how to promote deep reading and critical thinking.
Move from summary to difficult questions
Reading and discussing literature
Gain something from class time.

Quizzes:

IPAD had an effect on how I came o promote tee ideas through the quizzes and reading.

How did IPAD contribute

Enhance discussion of deep reading/critical thinking as COLLECTIVE

Convergence Culture
We have a combined experience

Can look p words by just clicking on them
Allowed them to look up information on author or subjects they did not know about in group discussion.

Discussion wise: it seemed to really enhance classroom participation and the relationship to the text.

Progression of quizzes--promoted deeper reading better critical thinking even when using IPAD.

Deep reading typically isn't a problem.

Ina actual classroom setting, technology can actually benefit the teacher rather than hinder student performance.

THE COLLECTIVE

Deep reading is another way to talk about Collective critical thinking as opposed to individual deep reading.

Examples of collective internet learning:

1. Tolstoy's What Men Live by, explored religious figures and motifs in the stories, biographies and hyperlinks,

Nam Le Vietnamese migration to Australia: using Ipads in groups looked up historical accounts of he travel, ad found pictures of what many of these books would look like.

Conclusion: In understanding the difference between collective and individual learning, we need to distinguish between different forms of learning o promote deep reading and thinking in classroom. In actively pursuing these skills in group settings, one can safely assume that these skills can also help the individual in their own personal reading. The best thing a teacher can do in a literature classroom is take advantage of the internet in any aspect to butter utilize the tool as a way to support education and reading in a positive light.

POST PANEL: This session was one of the very best of the conference! I got lots of great ideas to use in my teaching, and I loved the overall attitude (at the end, I commented saying that I was teaching comp way before the internet, and the traditional college age students then were not more able to "deep read" and "think critically" and "write well" than now--AND the pedagogy was much lacking (no revision, all lecture). Golden Age nostalgia is junk thinking, and even worse in academic settings.

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MLA 2013 Session 486: Games for Teaching Language, Literature, and Writing

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:35:54 GMT

Saturday, 5 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Commonwealth, Sheraton
Presiding: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.
Speakers: Evelyn Baldwin, Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Mikhail Gershovich, Baruch Coll., City Univ. of New York; Janice McCoy, Univ. of Virginia; Ilknur Oded, Defense Lang. Inst.; Amanda Phillips, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore; Elizabeth Swanstrom, Florida Atlantic Univ.
This electronic roundtable presents games not only as objects of study but also as methods for innovative pedagogy. Scholars will present on their use of board games, video games, authoring tools, and more for language acquisition, peer-to-peer relationship building, and exploring social justice. This hands-on, show-and-tell session highlights assignments attendees can implement.

* * * *

My notes before the session started:

This looks like a nifty electronic roundtable: computers are set up around the room, with people setting up their projects--it is billed as hands on!

I'm not so much interested in using games in the classroom (NOT a gamer myself), but one of my doctoral advises is doing her dissertation on this topic. I'm chairing, with my two composition colleagues as committees--because even though I'm not a gamer, I know more about gaming from my immersion in fandom, I guess. Or, it's an ongoing example of how I am in charge of directing all the weird stuff nobody else in the department feels capable of tackling--which comes down to creative writing and all the stuff in the broad penumbra of sf/f universe no matter what the media/focus.

I see a composition title over to my left--and I am interested in hearing about the social justice components (I was teaching readings associated with social justice in my comp classes back in the day, before I even knew that term).

Introduction: Bryan Croxall. MLA Committee on Information Technology. As we last year were talking about some of the things we wanted to see happen at the MLA, the committee felt that we wanted to continue pushing the MLA into exciting different forms of presentations, and that's why we're doing an electronic roundtable format here today. We wanted to recognize the importance pedagogy plays in all of our careers, a subject that it increasingly presents at the MLA. Teaching plays into research and research into teaching, but teaching is something that we want to be sure that we talk about. Games represent new sometimes way of teaching language and literature and writing in the classroom. We have a group of people talking about all these subjects. One presenter (Oded) could not come because of illness (language learning).

Format: I am about to stop speaking. And then we'll crowd around the different monitors Presenters will each will speak for five minutes, dinging bell going off if they go over, and we will sort of move counterclockwise around the room. Each person has a chance to talk about the assignment, and then open format where you go to each of the participants at their stations about the work they've been doing. Links from them
about assignments.

My notes: I sort of carried my netbook and tried to take notes during each presentation, then went back and talked to three. Now I'm typing up additional material based on memory (my next session isn't until 1:45).

Janice McCoy, Univ. of Virginia
Composition

She is using the Taboo board game (adapted) to teach students how to write description. The game involves students getting a card with a taboo word (which they cannot use in their writing), and associated taboo words (ditto) (the example was umbrella, with five or six words that would commonly be used with it, like rain).

They have to write a paragraph of description without using any of the words.

Then they get together in groups to read aloud paragraphs with others trying to guess the taboo word

(She said it might be useful in foreign language, and a language teacher taking notes chimed in enthusiastically that yes, he was taking notes!)

Then the groups evaluate the paragraph not on which was easiest to guess but which are best according to class criteria (use of sensory details, etc.).

They are writing and evaluating without even knowing it.

Mikhail Gershovich, Baruch Coll., City Univ. of New York

(I was in the back of the group--this was heavily attended session, and could not hear or see that well).

2 big ideas
Gaming communities sites of communication
Creativity and invention

Makey makey You can put this produce on anything that's conductive and it will be usable -- so he was forwarding his slides with a makey make (spelling?) on a banana. He has students make game controllers for their favorite games using a variety of objects.

Students design controller in groups talk and write and present it

Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore.

This presentation was incredibly exciting--and Anastasia is the first person I went back to talk to.

It's about using Inform 7 (open source, text based, easily bundled, easily used, natural language on top of programming code) to create interactive narratives. She uses it in program for creative writing--then moving into game writing (and coding) in the interdisciplinary program she teaches in.

I asked her afterwards about using it in an online creative writing class in an area where many students don't have a lot of technical knowledge, or even computers/internet access at home--and everything she said (note above) convinced me that it was very usable.

There is an interactive fiction community online

My next Forms and Genre course is so going to be interactive narrative, using Inform 7.

Resources I looked up:

http://inform7.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
http://www.ifarchive.org/
http://ifcomp.org/

Evelyn Baldwin, Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville

This presentation covered about how to use MMOORG games in a collaborative pedagogy course -- she used World of Warcraft as a place for students to game in and to study sociolinguistics and culture of the world.

The game was designed to make places to collaborate.

This is a new kind of gameplay pedagogy.

Results in class: immediate community/communication as the less knowledgeable students went to the knowledgeable students.

The students familiar with the game created a guild for the class and invited everybody in class to join.

The confidence and community in the gaming world carried over to presentations and work in the class (writing and presenting about the world, cultures, and sociolinguistics). The writing was collaborative as well.

Gee Book on literacy and games.

Group participation soared to all time high: everybody involved in the game, and in the study, and in the writing. High grades as a result.

Elizabeth Swanstrom, Florida Atlantic Univ

Science fiction, eco-criticism, games, in classes.
Games defined broadly: including games but also sites with game like elements.
Also study of larger systems behind it, and taking what they learn outside the game.

Principles:
Eco quest
Greenpatch FB (not around any longer)
Ecosia game like features

Corresponding
Agency of non human
Slipping glimpse
Art
Ocean currents into writing system

Collapsing
Complicate collapse boundaries
Intimate transactions art installations

Greening the Game blog archive
http://greeningthegame.wordpress.com/about/

Amanda Phillips, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

Teaching variety of social justice courses with video games.

Difference in video games can be analyzed with social justice theories

Mainstream games have lot of problems w/representation

Can look at rules and analyze as well as representation

There is harassment and exclusion but also pushback in the gaming community, more and more groups becoming visible.

Perceived demographics vs. actual demographics.

Demographics

Look at unfairness of rules--possibility of gaming the system

Modding games to bring queerness in.

Gamified issues (from earlier presentation)

Digital identity Lisa Nakamura
High tech blackface

My notes: After talking to Anastasia, I dashed over to talk to Amanda.

I teach an online graduate course on gender, and I am consciously trying to make it more intersectional--and it struck me that some games would be an incredible way to go. But what I have learned over the years (*shudders at Second life memory*) is that many of my students are non-traditional age, don't have computers at home, or only limited internet access, not technologically savvy, etc. Plus, count me as someone who hasn't done games at all/much (I sucked at pacman), but who wanted to integrate them to class (and I'm not afraid to tell students when I'm still learning something and am bad at it! In fact I think that's a useful pedagogical tool.)

She suggested flash games--and directed me to the following resources.

Auntie pixelante
We must make the games we want to play
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/

Dys4ia
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565
going through transition

LIM
http://mkopas.net/files/Lim/
simple, a bit glitch, but about trying to pass

Molleindustria
http://www.molleindustria.org/
Radial game designers
Some problematic stuff but they have some very politically conscious games
Do deal with race, global politics, deal with religion, sexuality

My note: deal with later in the class, with analysis of the games using the social justice theories!

Mattie Brice
Social justice blogging
http://xgalatea.blogspot.com/

Also: Borderhouse (which I follow and love and have recc'ed)
http://borderhouseblog.com/

Introduction to gaming
Small Worlds
Really great way to get students to think about how gaming is largely about moving through space, moving through virtual spaces. Armor games

http://www.smallworlds.com/login.php?login=true

(think this is right one--I asked Amanda for her presentation and will doublecheck). It's a game (2D) about moving through space in gaming.

Lev Manovitch write abou navigable space.

http://www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf

This game is literally just about moving through space and uncovering puzzle world.

TWINE making games

Auntie Pixelante
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/twine/

http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

*****

I left this session incredibly bouncy and happy about integrating games into my gender theory course, and my pop culture course (zombies and werewolves)--in different ways and for different purposes.

And I am NOW seeing that MLA has a lot to offer me (they didn't back in the 1990s when SF was omg so weird and not allowed)--and maybe not at the highest level, but in the graduate students and the junior faculty I see presenting here, I am incredibly thrilled and happy with these spaces in the conference.

Now have to see about joining MLA Commons….

And oh is my sf group going to snicker about me and gaming since I've always been resolutely no way dudes!

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MLA 2013 Session #239: Representing Race; Silence in the Digital Humanities

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:23:29 GMT

Friday, 4 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Gardner, Sheraton
Presiding: Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey
Speakers: Moya Bailey, Emory Univ.; Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Hussein Keshani, Univ. of British Columbia; Maria Velazquez, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
Responding: Alondra Nelson, Columbia Univ

This panel examines the politics of race, ethnicity, and silence in the digital humanities. How has the digital humanities remained silent on issues of race and ethnicity? How does this silence reinforce unspoken assumptions and doxa? What is the function of racialized silences in digital archival projects?

****
This was one of the sessions I had to attend--and it was one of the best of the conference so far.

Adeline Koh:

Conception of panel: February or March this year a lot of discussion in blogosphere about silences in digital humanities, cultural silences about race, gender, disability, being somewhat neglected, and this resulted in a collection of posts Digital Humanities Now. Exploring this issue of race and ethnicity as structural elements:

Calibration of DH Tools
DH Archives
Virtual Identities
Pushback within communities
How do we navigate this silence

Anne Cong-Huyen

Thinking Through Race (Gender, Class, & Nation in the Digital Humanities; the #transformDH Example

Small effort, grown to larger banner movement, to move DH in transformative way. Pointing out faults and shortcomings is not enough.

Image of Map, borders, restriction of digital humanities geographically. Borders/boundaries, text embedded in a global map.

Start: Digital Humanities vs. digital humanities. The institutionalized and the broader field (little d h): different communities. Organizations and groups with lower case dh include HAYSTACK, HomeLab, #transform DH

Funding rewards certain practices at larger institutional settings; NEH support reflects assumptions about what is valuable about DH. Build maintain databases, digital tools, etc. Tangible recognizable projects. Few of these projects deal with text or works of those marked as Other in terms of race, etc. Only 3 out of 22 projects dealt overtly with (missed phrase). A lot of the work funded is in English, historical (18th century) , copyright issue. Europe and the US are focus.

Presentation in conference at Puerto Rico, and MLA 2011, went on to produce a document "Toward an Open Digital Humanities.' (all on her blog), a useful primer of approaching inclusion and access. Participants of the session put out an open call on twitter ASA 2011; six came together, all early career academics, grad students, newly minted PHDs, to share material concerns about our futures, and what we saw developing.

Saw potential in the digital humanities, but found ourselves concerned about its development. The issue of labor, ethnic and gender populations who produce the technology, the types of academic jobs; concern about some of the positive views of technology, and such technologies and practices that align with certain kinds of practices of Othering, already in academia.

Some people's work does not get recognized as DH -- and the DH was not speaking to concerns of group whose areas of study include:

Critical race and ethnic studies
Feminist, gender, queer studies
Postcolonial, transnational, diaspora
Disability Studies
DIY (Add your Own!)

Reactions to what was happening in the field: DH prides itself on being interdisciplinary collaborative and inclusive. Pushback against what we were doing, even from some allies, was surprise.

Resistance at MLA 2012

Our work challenged conception of DH as insurgent/technological. We encountered pushback from people we did not expect it from--people who should have been our allies. Roger Whitson (chairing the sister panel). Comment on Roger Whitson Does DH Really Need to be transformed: my reflections on #transformDH, led to active response (Alexis Lothian).

Central Points:

Gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and ability are all central to how we encounter and participate in digital humanities.
#transform DH is a larger endeavor>Participate
We must work collectively towards transformative social justice oriented engagements.
Be a digital humanist--reassert the human in the humanities.

More concrete ways of participating:

Join the community
#transform DH community
Transformdh.tumbr.com
#transformDH tag on twitter, facebook
HASTC also has a #transform DH page.

All information here:

We want everyone to be involved.

Anitaconcihta.wordpress.com

Moya Bailey unable to join us, but she posted summary of remarks on her blog to view at: MoyaBailey.com

Hussein Keshani: race and state patronage of Digital Islamic studies in the UK explores state funding and governance and control.

New title: How to fund non-Western digital humanities projects in the UK: become a terrorist.

Intersection of race and digital humanities Islamic studies in Eng./NA sphere, it seems that DH projects in their initial and grandest incarnations followed some unspoken rule that the purpose was to construct cathedral for western identity.

Appetite for resources voracious--would marginal fields be crowded out. Towering projects of DH: biggest most ingenious and technologically complex ones, all seems to retell narrative of western exceptionalism, the Enlightenment, the long 19th century (British and American).

All printed books in early English
Women in British Isles
Shakespeare is revered throughout
Shakespeare global project
Ancient Rome digitally reconstructed

The rise of DH is part of a savvy and heroic attempt by the old humanities to reinvent itself and demonstrate its relevance. But this uneasy feeling grips me, it is the feeling that a powerful new way of constructing liberal or humanistic arts emerges, but it's being employed to focus on the Western heritage.
Financial and technological resources are allocated--best support in Anglosphere must first be devoted to cultural touchstones of western Civilization, the Western self is a racial category not just a cultural one, reproduces itself. My error is to assume that the humanities/liberal arts is a cosmopolitan area.

There are efforts to deploy to study subaltern, marginalized, etc., to study how objects of race are constructed.

Race is both reimagined and reinstituted in digital culture.

But these efforts tend to be piecemeal, sporadic one offs not institutional in nature, dwarfed by the Western scale.

Discuss the case study: digital Islamic studies in the UK

"Be careful what you wish for"

State in Anglosphere deliberately focused its resources on digital Islamic studies--which counters much of what I just said.

Why did it do so?

The UK government asked for strategically important higher education projects to be identified by a Higher Education Council; in the following years, 350 million pounds was pledged to reinforce those designated error. 2005-2012: STEM, etc. foreign languages, etc. then at a later date Islamic studies (new category added) in response to government commissioned report "Islam at Universities in UL" Sudiki (spelling?) Focus on Muslim students and on promoting to them a moderate multicultural friendly version of Islam--to ensure that students have access to material on how the teachings of Islam can be put into practice in a contemporary pluralistic society; to improve quality of spiritual advice and support in universities; to identify gaps between needs and aspirations of Muslim students, and the programs of studies available in universities in England

This report and context are substantially different than the past, reacting to growing population of Muslims in England.

Changed dynamics between Muslims and policy makers since 9/11: need to make sure growing Muslim population is an asset not liability (QUOTE).

Educational minister: commented on press release. "thoughtful and helpful contribution…the effective and accurate delivery of Islamic studies is important for a multitude of reasons including community cohesion, and preventing violence" Islamic Studies became a strategic field of study.

A major player was Joint Information Systems committee--digital humanities entity digitized Islamic manuscripts; they commissioned a report which connected work to the press release, but omitted a key sentence: "this would in turn contribute to preventing violent extremism." Information but not violence.

Small and marginalized field was worthy of resources--upsurge of governmental funding coincided with the UK's government of rising terrorism as a threat following 9/11 in US and London bombings.

This was to tame the population, to assimilate, to inoculate against violence. In the Anglosphere, the Muslim is both medieval/contemporary Other

Race in DH is not only one of exclusion, so take heart: but paradoxically one of inclusion too. The case suggests that in order to be included, one must be deemed a sufficient threat.

State wants to affect young Muslim. Does creating a digital humanity database of Arabic texts really do that? Don't know. But good for Islamic studies, and digital humanities.

Adeline Koh: navigate silences about discourses and love.

Navigating Archival Silence
Creating a 19th century postcolonial Archive

Archive and Power: forms by which knowledge is made knowledgeable
Knowledge production, limits possibility of knowledge. (Foucault)
Achrontic power (Derrida) type of power that calls things into being

Digitizing "Chinese Englishmen"

19th century journal.
Using digital archive programs to construct a postcolonial archive.

DH has lots of work on 19th history, but little on colonial history or empire--or even situating canon authors to colonialism.

"Chinese Englishmen" Anglophone Chinese diaspora in S Asia, specifically Singapore and Malaysia. Privileged Chinese subjects. Qing Chinese Empire and British--torn between two. Bourgeoisie intermediaries.

The Straits Chinese magazine
Modeled after Blackwood's and Macmillan's
Upper class periodical to give voice to Chinese diaspora of Malaysia
Edited by Song Ong Siang and lim Boon Keng

Alpha form: decentralized a postcolonial archive, one that questions the structure of imperialism in the archive itself.
Artifacts that have been unrepresented

"Postcolonial" derives from Edward Said and postcolonial studies: a mode of criticism than a time period.

Archive which works against imperial meaning making in the archive by implementing new types of reading and technologies that disrupt the colonial meaning.

Cultures of circulation, manipulation, management that allow object to enter an archive--Allan Isaacman, "interrogate needs for scholars to overcome colonialism and apartheid".

Subject matter: allows for more comparative structures of similar hybrid dynamics against 19th century European empires.

Spinoffs: African Englishmen, Indian Englishmen, Caribbean Englishmen, etc.

Digital: hypertext, use of tags, "open up text" to different interpretations.

Digital product will accommodate public commentary through comments form.

Goals for more decentralization; crowd source annotations of the text, encourage audience participation and annotation.

CMS Shift: now hosted in wordpress, but will be planned to Scalar.
Metadata will be tagged in RDF format, allowing others to interact easily with the archives.

Scalar: allows comments to play a more central role in determining the structure of the archive.

Social Media: Twitter account cenglishmen
Twitter: #CEnglishmen
Future: Tumblr

Digital recovery project--think through creating a postcolonial archive; through attempts to be self-critical of knowledge formation (not top down).

Maria Vaelaquez; Blog like you love, anti-racist projects, Black feminism, and the virtual.

Introductory chapter of dissertation
Highlight connections between black women's projects during the 1990s and information technology during that period.

2 examples of principles and practice.
Two quotes: about new skin for earth--no race, gender, age. Etc. Story of technological transcendence saying that technological systems will mimic then replace the organic. All equal/utopian. Identities becoming unmarked but still circulating.

Not the only story coming from the 90s: crescendo of black female creators.

Link the two movements to highlight social justice issues on the cusp--anti-racist blogosphere.

Information Age rhetoric during the 1990s, situated in context of social justice movements, particularly in the Black community with suddenly much stronger sense of spiritual and local transformation.

Writing genre fiction and race.

Conversations occurring in virtual communities, and in meat space events.

WisCon, Arisa, etc.

Virtual labors of love, etc.

Talented and passionate community of women in love with the creative works and women of color.

Discussions around Trayvon Martin's Murder
Whitney Houston Project
Racefail 2009
Angry Black Woman website.

Link personal and political, blogs that are public anti-resistance efforts, highlight self-love and community love. Focus on Black women's empowerment. Spiritual, creative, and political links in the projects of love.

Conclude: 2 sites as examples (one successful, one not)

Carl Brandon society; increasing new awareness of authors of color, Samuel Delany's article.

Online journal to sell stuff to support fans of color attending the conference--playful and successful.

Fostering communities of color in sf.

Community building online for friendship and allegiance must be demonstrated textually online.

Lifting Voices. Services for children in that particular area -- DC homeless shelter. Ask students to write letters

Advertising on Black blogosphere for financial support -- advertising campaign--similar to Black women at the turn of the century.

Both are using the same method of relying on community allegiance and transformational power.

Lifting Voices ended up closing shop, but did produce a book of student writing.

Did not work in long term---no institutional support.

The questions framing this special session focus on the critical utility of the humanities and addressing race, gender, and nationality, and ways in which people make use of the digital commons--fail without access and resources.

Respondent: Alondra Nelson: couple of points.

Provocations that we can use in conversation.

Thanks for invitation.

First ever MLA.

Heartening and discouraging: changes from her dissertation on this topic.

Disconcerting that there's still a resistance to inserting race, ethnicity, and gender into space -- that we're seen as creating a problem where things are just fine.

New iteration of the quotes with which Maria began her dissertation.

Heartening: one, sense of collectivity of #transformDH

That MLA 13 there are more audience members than the panel as opposed to the inverse, so that means that you guys put your finger on something that's important to a lot of people.

1. transforming DH, changes sought in DH
Social justice, social transformation: what can the humanities and what can the DH do about issues that aren't just about the humanities? Inequality and larger than academy

2. resources that are allocated--social control that comes back again and again in state surveillance that probably should be a more explicit conversation, and part of issue of peer review. Intervene in peer review projects.

3. raise the issue of the Digital Divide a term which I despise because it creates the problem it's trying to diagnose--who is DH for? Who is transformed DH for, for the transformers (heh), for academics, for broader society.

4. Touching on composition of archive and what's included and how: one thing I would hope that would be in the forefront of transform DH as it involves. Is thinking more about the politics of composition, and so what does a transformed archive look like. What does progressively composed DH archive looks like. Not just excavation and retrieval. Difference between creating a postcolonial archive ad an anti-colonial archive.

5. What does it mean or a transform DH when the people you want to be in conversation are using mobile aps -- are there technical tools that you want to think about as being important and loud and thus transformative work. Women are less likely to use social media sites and more likely to blog and so to the extent that the transformDH project is about representing different audiences, and more diverse ones, and reaching that audiences, technical question is an important one.

Q How does this relate to humanities as a large -- not just DH issue.

Applies to everything

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MLA 2013 Session #60: Learning outomes in online second language environments

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:28:31 GMT

This presentation included powerpoints for all three, images, and, in the last presentation, a lot of graphs and statistical information. It's challenging to try to 'render' that in typed text (as opposed to a presentation that is delivered entirely verbally), and I'm not sure how good a job I did!

I don't teach languages, but I wanted to get notes from this session for my department's language faculty.

As I said earlier, rough notes, spellchecked and slightly edited, but probably less clear in some places due to my disciplinary ignorance.

Thursday, 3 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., 206, Hynes
Presiding: Sébastien Dubreil, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville

Learning outcomes--linguistics? Group. Fifteen minutes per each. Questions: propose on twitter, write them down, and hold them until the end of the session.

1. "Teaching Language and Culture through Social Media and Networks," Edward M. Dixon, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Director of the Penn language Center at the U P, also teaches German, very active member of the community. Northeastern Association of Language Learning and technology. Going to talk about some work he's done with social networking in German, already published, and this.

This picture here is used to advertise the online courses in the summer at Penn. They meet online, and meet and chat. A chat in German and English: at home on couch.

One of the outcomes I'm starting to see is that they interact in a more authentic environment.

Many different approaches: self and task based learning. Instructors and tutors as mentors to guide student. Flip classroom whereby community centered learning environments see recorded lectures, communicate with peers in online discussions groups, and peer mentoring.

Online courses assimilate the learning environment of the face/face classroom, but us the new techniques for pedagogical outcomes. Elementary ones taught face/face, online in the summer. Class participation is replaced by social networking.

Can both formats produce the same results; does one do it better than the others (Summer online).

Collaborative role playing approach in online course. Course objectives but means are different: Adobe Connect, Blackboard, Face book, Google Docs.

Free online self-learning program (Deutsch Intraktiv) open access. authentic digital videos, slides, audio text, overview of culture and language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. Sequencing of course topics are planned in accordance with common European network based on proficiency from A1-B-1. Students able to perform

Can understand main points of clear standard input
Situations deal with travelling
Simple connected texts on familiar topics
Can describe experience.

Program has own build in comprehension checks--there is testing--I don't duplicate the wheel by testing in the online class.

Testing in DA is practice which can be repeated until student achieved perfect score. Portfolio assessment of students works: 5 blogs, 10 Facebook entries, 25 oral assignments, 3 online oral interviews, 2 online tests, online final, 10 interactive lessons etc.

Has points for each of the categories (final interview, and final exam).
Instead of testing they're doing writing and interviews, testing them for their proficiency levels rather than test scores.

I want to move on to the problem with program that is for reading and writing and he has to bring the social interactive content to the course.

Use Adobe Connect, What can Adobe connect do; PowerPoint presentations, introduce content, grammar, it's sort of linked presentation mode, and then we go into the second phase: first phase is his; second interact with students, ask them questions about the content; the second phase is that they interact with each other in written and oral chats.

Cycle: Third is in class non structured -- and fourth is out of class asynchronous activities with instructor feedback.

Not doing textbook activities: trying to align the activities they're doing in the online course with the activities they're doing in homework assignments.

Trick I is making it work.

So this is where the students begin interacting with me: Adobe Connect.

Chatrooms allow students to intrat with each other--what I love about this program. I can create Chatrooms and put them in groups and pairs. And the beauty is that I can see exactly what they're doing and give them immediate feedback to all four groups. They can see each other's work and learn from each other. They can see ideas and linguistic competency. It's a collaborative environment. WRITTEN chatroom

After they do this, they go into the oral classroom where they can repeat or develop new. Then the homework assignments build on it: Essay blogs, simple essays, talking about themselves (looks fairly short on scree). Gives them global feedback and cover main problem in essays. They have to self-correct. Then gives them a list of errors put at the end to find and identify themselves.. Goal is for language competency so they can improve and thinking about where their mistakes are.

By end of 12 weeks, they're writing this much content (and not talking about themselves full screen, multiple page, ten or more) about a children's book they're reading.

Also use Facebook: after first day of class of talking to each other and getting to know each other--recycling who they are, where they come from. This s after an hour and fifteen minutes of instructions--I couldn't see them because we were interacting orally, but they didn't want the camera on because it was a distraction, just the audio stuff. I came to my colleague the first day, and wasn't sure they were learning, but he saw by Facebook entries there's a lot happening.

Using stuff in face/face class--what I do in online, helps with f/f. So brought face book into face/face class where they will interact on their own.

Also students are correcting each other in friendly and professional way.

Example from b.

After two weeks, we had interview, where students had following topics (greetings, backgrounds etc.). Grammar and new vocabulary as well as recycled vocabulary.

Student evaluations highest evaluation for the course is 4.0--highest for online.

Responses: enjoyed online aspect, but did. Thought it was easier to concentrate without the traditional classroom format. They experienced it immersion. If it as good as or better than anyone.

The homework was all great. Much praise for it--they're seeing the homework activities as one sort of cycle which is what I want them to experience.

Building a Model for online Distance Courses Through Social Media and Networks.

Outcomes: shift from private to more public learning spaces.
is teacher centered and more student and community.
Extensive collaboration and participation.
Learning for meaningful and effective communication rather than for passing chapters tests and unit exams.
More learning for self-correction and per correction--much more peer learning.

Out of class activities--collaborative peer learning, fostered communication, in class activities.

More authentic learning of structures as they are needed for conversation and communication.

Non-threatening learning environment.

QUESTIN ON: own FB, etc. they have use own Facebook, but have a private group, so only people in class can see the postings.

2. "Developing Pronunciation Skills at the Introductory Level: Motivating Students through Interpersonal Audio Discussions," Cindy Lepore, Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Use technology in phonetics and phonology.

French, concentration in linguistics.
Talking about the pilot study that is a prelude to the research I've been doing for dissertation.

Background: students want and are held to native speaker norm. absence of clear methodology and teaching materials regarding pronunciation. Social environments are useful in developing proficiency.

How can this be addressed.
So many online social environments.

Emerging social technologies, how they fit into language classroom, investigate motivators associated with development of pronunciation skills

Came up with idea Interpersonal Audio Discussion

Audio based discussion board.
Users participate asynchronously
Voice Thread: group conversations shared and collected in one plate. Conversations presented as collaborative, multi0media slide shows.

Voce thread example if you actually went into a voice thread to participate.

Atkins? Affordances of voice thread: Like a discussion board, see how the users are in the voice thread; those are the people who left comments; this is just one slide out of an entire slide show, can have many slides. Conceptualized in this on visual diagram.

Not a lot of disparate comments.

Collective wisdom of everyone participating. Social technologies allow feedback , comments from larger audience.

Can be instantaneous. .Lots of uses.

R Questions

What are effects of participation in IAD on students' pronunciation in intro French courses?
Which aspects of the treatment impact student motivations?
What I role of audio on participation.

Pilot study: French 103
Intensive first year review courses that covers both semesters in one semester.

False beginners, past work in French.
13 students who consented to study
18-25, 8 female, 5 male.
5 were majors or minors (more motivated)
7 wanted to use French in career.
One of instruments noted snapshot of students--high self-confidence.

Data Collection and Instruments:

Mixed methods design

Quantitative: pre-questionnaire, VT ratings, self-assessment, exit questionnaire.

Qual: exit question questionnaire, instructor/rater reviews. Interpretation based on both quan and qual results.

Interviews with instructor of course, and raters of Voice Threads (graduate students).

2 grad students: 1 native speaker, one nonnative speaker. Completed rating form provided to student as part of feedback. Students did self-assessment.

Timeline: 1 semester.

Multiple activities integrated into the curriculum for semester.

Debriefing with instructor and raters.
First day: VT homework information sheet, using Voice Thread
All of students participated whether or not they were in study.
Pre-questionnaire, consent, initial snapshot. Biographical data, major, etc.
More about their perceptions of beliefs and attitudes about how to improve pronunciation.
VT activities: four
Initial practice, introduce themselves,
Corresponded to topics covering in class
Activity duration 2 weeks
After students went into thread, participated, assessed by readers, feedback given them, self-assessment , hard to develop self-assessment form that was useful. Kept trying to change. Plus, minus, etc. Students compare themselves to someone in the classroom, relating to confidence or anxiety.

After each activity.

Each activity lasted around two weeks.

Exit questionnaire -- Atkinson and Burden --what did they like, what did they find to be motivating or demotivating.

Instruct and rater interviews.

QUAN: SPSS
Tested all the stuff (ARGH NUMBERS)>

Chronbach's Alpha
Pearson's R.
Etc.

Uses quoted to back up results.

No significant difference in pronunciation between first and last one.
Correlations some statistically significant--if students identified it as important, they also place more importance on speaking practice in class.

Peer feedback: if they felt it was motivating, they had a tendency to report that the treatment was positive motivator.

Perceived gins reported--also reported they had less anxiety.

Knowing a peer would give them feedback and be listening--increase in motivation, confidence, less anxiety. Overall positive benefit.

QUAL:

Higher anxiety reported knowing they would be singled out for review by a peer.
Speedy feedback from instructor preferred
Confusion with instructions, deadlines, website.

Positive: go back and listen to and or re-record comments of VT.

Updates/Alternations: final study done.

Alternations made.

Eliminated third party raters; instructor took on larger role, giving them feedback.

I asked student in pilot study to try to remain anonymous, don't put personal pictures, etc. They totally ignored that, and it is a social technology, they do want to share things about themselves. Everybody sharing all the time. Eliminated it in the study.

Updated activity format: VT, to foster interactions, work with several deadlines, because students were confused about when they should be posting and when--activity divided into three steps: brainstorming task, then initial comments by deadline one; now go back in and interact. (MY discussion, clear deadlines).

Instructor conducted hands on training in the classroom which helped.

Self-assessment task, instead of identifying a specific person, they compared themselves in general, so they did not have to identify a certain person.

Added a journalist task and open ended items.

Pedagogical implications:

The use of VT alone does not result in improvement of pronunciation accurate or fluency.

Sheds light on role of peer motivation in development of pronunciation skills importance of relationship between motivation and feedback supported environments; students have positive perceptions of VT features as a tool to hone pronunciation skills.

Depending on learner preference: some people may not like it (positive or negative is individual wok); student anxiety may increase or decreases (apprehension).

Six had positive experience; others 7 not to positive. It was a small study, so no way to know reliability.

3. "Español Two Hundred: Bridging Medium, Collaboration, and Communities of Practice," Adolfo Carrillo Cabello, Iowa State Univ.; Cristina Pardo Ballester, Iowa State Univ.

Two presenters.

Both in online and hybrid courses environments, doing lots of work.

Background: focusing on writing

Improvement of writing tasks
Transition to Blackboard 9
Implementation of interactive grading rubric (to avoid having too much to grade/correct)
Increase awareness of grading criteria on students' part
Communities of practice, collaboration, shared knowledge

Course interface in Blackboard

Moving from WEB CT to Blackboard 9
Kept similar interface based on icons..
Writing assignments that follow up on readings that students complete.
Icon has writing assignments in humanities area: three tasks to complete. First there's reading for the chapter, then there's a comprehension quiz, then there's a writing assignment called "one step further" in which they write about what they learned in reading.

Participants

Two semesters
201 and 202
N=140, N=25
First language, mostly English but not all
97 F, 43 M
Age18-22, mostly 18
Seven sections of 1.

Major shift from first to second class, all first language English.

Collected data working in pairs or groups in writing assignments (80.6% said yes).
Peer review experiences (90.29) Mostly in class

Procedures: pre-surveys (first week of class--background, etc.)

Mid semester snapshot so far..

Post: final impressions, at the end.

Grammatical structure for each one changed.

18 items
6 background
Liker scale
Open ended question to elicit comments

(hard to make sense of while looking, not trying to write up).

Procedure

Reading, review instructions for writing task; they are provided for grading criteria (interactive embedded within the instructions that students receive), then they switch into the writing of the first version of the task; then they do peer review, revise, and obtained a grade.

Access to audio recording, synonyms, translations.

Changed in shift to BB: instructions for all the tasks for the semester in one place.

Screenshot of the rubric that students receive when they read instructions--how many points for each of categories.

Shot of entry--will see total views--how many other people have seen their entries.

This is what students see in peer review assignment: list of entries that have been posted, and then they get to choose who they want to comment on.

Interactive rubric pulled out of grade.

Screenshots of the process.

Results

Limitations not able to track individual students, track load for teachers.

Conclusion

Medium used had an effect on opinions students developed
Provide more information about points to cover in peer review
Provide clear expectations in terms of due dates in syllabus. Not just in online courses.

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MLA 2013 Session 22: Building Bridges, Expanding Access

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:18:20 GMT

Notes from MLA Sessions on or related to Digital Humanities at 2013 MLA.

Disclaimer: while I've done spellchecking and basic corrections, these are very raw. There are sentence fragments; there can be some slippage from first person to third person (I type while listening!) for the speaker, and there are some terms/words I did not catch or do not know how to spell. But I've learned from past situations, if I try to polish, these notes never get pubished.

So, they're rough.

22. Expanding Access: Building Bridges within Digital Humanities
Thursday, 3 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 205, Hynes
Presiding: Trent M. Kays, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.

Speakers: Marc Fortin, Queen’s Univ.; Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia; Brian Larson, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Sophie Marcotte, Concordia Univ.; Ernesto Priego, London, England

Digital humanities are often seen to be a monolith, as shown in recent publications that focus almost exclusively on the United States and English-language projects. This roundtable will bring together digital humanities scholars from seemingly disparate disciplines to show how bridges can be built among languages, cultures, and geographic regions in and through digital humanities.

* * * *

I chose this section for the focus on more languages than English, and the multidisciplinary perspective. When I got here, I was thrilled to see a table in the back for bloggers and tweeters: though I still have that LJ knee jerk response that I am not a blogger! And I shall never be a tweeter! (MLA has its own hashtag though, for those of you interested--in fact, each session has its own hashtag--MLA2013 plus session number--in this case #22). But since I have my netbook and am writing up notes to post on Dreamwidth, and got here early enough that I was the first (there are only six seats, and a power bar yay), I decided to claim my space. So far two others have joined me (I'm the only woman so far). The only bad part so far is we're at the back, near open door, which means cold draft! *settles warm scarf around neck and adjusts fingerless gloves (which are proving incredibly helpful in ongoing cold hands problem*

Larson has a great handout--which includes the link to an electronic copy at a tiny url: "Expanding Access: Building Bridged" remarks and his references: http://tinyurl.com/BNLMLA13

The presider noted that there would be a link to her visuals at the hashtag for the session (Storify?).

I gather that at least two of the session haven't showed up--probably one is the one from England (*shudders at cost of that ticket these days*).

On the elevator ride, I saw one of my aca-fen friends--I was going up, she was going down. I hope we can connect later (offline OR online OR both).

This is a roundtable--so far five presenters here. People coming in--five now at the blogging table (three women); fifteen or so in the audience, and about three minutes left until noon strikes --now, thirty plus, and others coming in.

SESSION NOTES: Some people did not give their names, so I'm sort of guessing in a few places.

Lee S. (readingwriting on twitter); announces #mla13

Presentation is online on Storify: search for readywriting, and find a link to this particular presentation (sources and resources). Organizer of this panel; wanted to bring group together because DH panels do tend to get sequestered along still traditional disciplinary and linguistic delineations, esp. in modern languages. There's a panel at 1:45 for digital francophones (French, and typically would not appeal to the entire group of digital humanists). Different people different academics from different disciplinary backgrounds, Big Tent DH. Linguistics, Hispanic, Francophone, comparative literature in translation. Can we get the group in the same room, and hopefully people who do that same thing in the same room. Expand the conversation--building bridges is the title--see how we do work, how we're using tools.

So I've linked to the actual proposal. One of the things who struck me is how Anglo-American the center of DH has come-=not true for people coming from Europe and other places--the center of DH has become English and American/north American. I think the best illustration of that could be the famous or infamous article "What is Digital Humanities and what is it doing in English department," appeared in ADE. It's now included in the recent publication debates on DH, and I think that DH has become houses in different departments (English, history), and historians have different perspective, but again, it has seemed to become something that is very focused on the language English and English departments.

Problems with that status quo: one of the dangers of being limited to any disciplinary department--it can limit the reach of the tools.

Visualization software: Voyant Tools. Popular tool, upload texts, multiple languages. Asked if the program allowed comparing texts n different languages--nobody had ever asked for it before. The single language per tool is not appropriate (comparative literature, translation studies). Accessibility of tools in multiple languages, and between languages, can be very powerful in understanding of literature, and translations. How do we work in DG on translations -- changes over historical periods, and geographical spaces ("world author" and how does translation impact that, and different translations, impact that).

Many of these tools are being developed in English in America with English professors in mind, and Ernesto P. writes about Globalization" (cannot make pane): it's not just about openness, but if people in developing nations cannot access the material if it's not in their language, it doesn't help. Need reliable multilingual metadata. Free/open access not solution to lack of translations. How do we translate DH?

Google Translate: this dream of the machine that can translate. L. worked for Nortel, and their dream was to develop translation software, and in the process of producing their very thin dictionary (approved usages). Can we get a machine to translate accurately--humanists need to be skeptical about this, so how do humanists and linguistics and people who specialize in different languages groups, how do we work together to make DH accessible to the most amount of people regardless of what language(s) they speak?

This question hasn't been talked about enough yet. One great example: a place that is doing just that. The CulturePlex at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). Brainchild of modern language department. Doing great stuff including the Silver Product, database management system, and all of their stuff is available bilingually, currently English and French, with goal to be available in Spanish as the other official language of Canada. Faculty and grad students working to adapt, connect, and create new tools, and the important connections with DH communities in Mexico and Latin America.

Always a danger in this: comparatists aware of limitations that are placed on us when we stray outside disciplinary boundaries--MLA Job Information List broken down by English and Foreign Language departments, traditionally how we understand disciplines is embedded in the Job Information List. Pragmatic about the realities of trying to get a job vs. utopianism of dream of working in multiple languages.

She closes on a downer note: it's important to say that these bridges being built come with a price--the bridges lead nowhere unless skills are valued by departments, hiring committees, and academia.

NEXT: Build on Lee's idea that we need to break language barriers and disciplinary barriers, and geographical boundaries. Been working in Caribbean, trying to bring some of the exciting DH work here, there--Puerto Rico, in November, helped INCA group and that ADHO organize a conference in Cuba, and we just got approved at the Alliance of the Humanities for a special group that we call Global outlook DH. It's a sort of meta group, to figure out what's going on in medium and low income countries in Latin America, Africa, Middle East, etc. and build bridges with these folks, try to establish communities of engagement and practices, so we can bring a more international crowed into the DH conference, into the DH communities which are mostly Canada, US, Europe, Australia, now Japan.

That work will depend a lot on translation, yes, and while there are great tools that combine automated work with wiki style crowdsourcing elements that also have a revisioning process so we can keep track of how translations change over time, and we need repositories to build international repositories. Tools are present, but building communities is really hard. Most of us in our disciplines are catching up with technology; the hard part is we shave communities, but we don't understand how to link communities. Need to build a truly global HUMANities (all of us, not just the United States). In order to really understand humanity, we must engage with humanists everywhere.

A call for arms: help build bridges with the low income to middle income countries--through Global Outlook, or other projects-to start building partnerships with people outside the usual areas.

Language: Open Source Tool Travel Wiki (French developers).

Building Networks: DH's Global Perspectives (start pressuring them)
Get graduate students who are working on postcolonial and comparative literature involved in the digital scholarship produced.

Some of that stuff doesn't even look like the DH we have around here.
Tendencies to reify as a sort of practice now in the profession--this is a good opportunity to do more than the Big Ten.

Puerto Rican scholar building live narratives online, an archive of folks recording their stories, in a small town in Puerto Rico. Live narrative becomes a really great resource for anthropologists, sociologists, but the humanities people don't do anything with this sort of unfamiliar projects.

Come to conferences outside the US (announces one he doesn't want to put on Twitter).
Release will be announced after this panel.

This is truly moment of opportunity for our profession: we got the theory; it's time to now build something.

(Cannot get name): Life stories, working on Quebec author who was anthropologist, something in Canada project (modernist Canadian texts in digital format) (Voice fairly low) Working with anthropologist who produced text on life narratives from indigenous communities in the northwest. Five sections, including main narrative, stories, index, including stories from (painters?). What he's found in working the last three or four years, and attempt to digitize it, and bring all this information together, when we talk about expanding access, we have to be careful about who has access? In relation to indigenous communities: I cannot make this project work unless he has the full support of community. It's also making connections between indigenous communities. The text was written in English, from translations from (cannot spell cultural names), ethnographic and literal/linguistic translations. Both are problematic. Linguistic based on colonial orthography, created to produce religious texts to convert indigenous peoples into Christians/English. Orthography shifts in the 1960s in order to politicize the language which means that the (SP?)Gicksan doesn't exist anymore not used by the community. The Giksan is used today is read to become endangered, but it's close. The access to the language its precarious; the elders in those communities are the only ones really working but save it this moment. Little work being done on language because pipeline is scheduled to go through their territory, so they are not interested in putting together colonial mentality text. Cultural translations, the stories that were recorded, are oral in nature, they're not print stories, so how do you digitize a text, and use translated documents to put up for others to read when that's not how they're supposed to be read. The Gicksahn community agrees it is necessary to do it because of the loss of their language, but there are recordings at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, hundreds of them, the text is produced from many different versions (Boaz, Sapir, Scarbo, and author of novel). The novel combined it into one story, authoritative text, against the nature of oral texts and community's wishes. I have been in contact with them, and the main character in the text is alive today, and he has agreed to do this. But after four years, he doesn't think it will ever be produced in the way he wants to make it. They're one person's stories, and it's up to that person whether that information goes up. Politicization of information and access to that information. Going to DSI this summer (?) to see what he can learn/expand on for indigenous digital archives and what can go up. Doing this work today is to consider the fact that the copyright and ownership of information that could be used by the state to well control indigenous community members.

Next: Moffat, Associate Professor of Quebec literature, at director of NT2 (Nouvelle technologies, novellas textualitis). Today I am going to talk to you about the (Gabrielle Roy project--novelist, 1909-1983. Mostly known for her first novel published in 1945 which is the first social novel in French Canadian literature. This is part of NT2 project. Design and maintenance of a site which includes academic editions of author's manuscripts, a critical analysis; bibliography and eventually a space for discussion. Gathers geographical and biographical information. Site is followed by virtual community dedicated to dissemination of knowledge about her work. One of this project's objectives is to make use of the platform for editing and publishing--contribute to greater knowledge about her work, and certain ideas of literature research, and translation studies as well. She (author?) considered English translations equal to French originals. We also hope to contribute to the development of certain areas of literary research, history and working of Quebec, and Canadian literature in French and English. The site is designed according to an open source philosophy: it is designed to be a dynamic space, administrative changes, as the discourse progresses, and as more work appears. Sharing of knowledge is not just the object of study, but designing the virtual space. The general thesis underlying the project is that development of systems that allow access to knowledge will lead to different kinds of scholarship. Access to primary object of research seems to promote of innovative reading strategies and to anchor virtual communities around work of other authors. The biggest part of work involve electronic editing of manuscripts and files of published and unpublished works Most are in archives of Canada (missed name of archive). The (offline)?community is voluminous contains twenty meters of textual records-the digititalization offers free access and brings more attention to her work. Important issue about electronic publishing of her works: canonical and unpublished texts. Many projects (name of one in French): the trend of electronic editing is becoming a recommended means of publishing --but not the same as traditional critical editing. Specific protocols need to be defined and established for this method.

In case of Roy's work, well known, the two approaches are not conflict: use electronic editing for the minor and unpublished works (stories, letters, etc.)--the issue of whether she intended them to be published or not, but she did place them into the archive, meaning them to be read. Allows comparison between published works, and the other work.

Specific case of online publication of her autobiography (she began writing four parts; completed two of them) published posthumously. The third part, unfinished, was published after. Fourth (?) about 100 pages, published electronically. Image on screen of the two manuscript drafts--handwritten in blue ink scanned onto it, and then a manuscript draft, also includes critical and explanatory notes, which provide details about people, places, intertextual references. Able to reproduce long (extracted?) works which explain certain passages. An exhaustive report of variance to see all three versions of the same text.

Index of names, people, places, references to other works.

We are trying to wipe up the electronic edition….four thousand pages of manuscripts to process, and over 15,000 variants.

Go back to aims of broader electronic and publishing project: work on the manuscripts is a part. The editing and analysis work performed within the context of this project, and the fact that electronic resources are used as the main means of presentation, will ensure a wider presentation and understanding of her work and writing process, and also Canadian and Québec literature, and pave way for major scholarship on the work, pub an unpublished, of Roy.

Some this documentation has not been used and may add to scholarship. Explore the documentation and make it available. Another challenge we are facing is the translation; bilingual version is goal in next few years.

Brian Larson: this roundtable arose in part out of a blog post (name?) raising cultural critique of DH. The "cultural and political problem of software platforms almost exclusively produced in the American environment." Wants to point out the way Anglo American researchers who have created the programs for natural language processing have worked to make work accessible through the world. Rhetoric and scientific communication, cognitive science, copyright linguistics lawyers. Uses computational linguistics but in rhetoric because computational linguistics methods are not rich enough. Not a DH (mentioned book must check out). I read them as saying DH describes the OUTPUTS, rather than INUTS and TOOLS.

Is it using digital tools applied to humanities--computational tools applied to rhetoric? I'm not quite a DH, and it's weird to be with people who are such a good vision of what DH should be from a broad sense.

I want to make the argument in contrast to (blog post): researchers have done a lot to make tools accessible to developing world. Alex's comments connected--tools are available.

First: if you're looking at using natural language processing in your research, much of the tools are open source, and the literature is open access. Natural language processing experts seem to be prepared to attempt to bridge the gaps.

Leading international association for NLP is association for computational linguistics; committed to open access (Computational Linguistics) and has been for years. ACL anthology (decades of presentations and publications): the heart of that literature is open access and widely available. Conference papers are important in light of fact that presenters must submit completed papers, not just proposals, so there's this rich literature of the kind of things that get lost. There's also some junk, but it is available free of charge. Pretty much all published in English, so colonization by English of the rest of the world, I cannot defend it against that.

So that's the literature.

Doing NLP requires software tools--open free widely available. Describe: General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE), and another whose name I didn't catch--sheet is at back of room, with link to website.

Any of ALP tools are language dependent, part of speech taggers rely on a dictionary of works from language they are processing, and has to be trained on a corpus that has been tagged for parts of speech by linguist.

Lemmatizing: it's how we tell the fact that woman and women are two forms of the same word (singular and plural); relatively simple process in English because morphology is simple, but in Portuguese, and Arabic, with multiple verb forms, more complicated. With regard to Arabic, the tools have been deployed, but in GATE and Stanford MLP.

Gate==UK, University of Essex.

Distribute under general public license.

Largely free to nonprofit an academic uses. Runs in JAVA. Can be used easily and widely with old machines.

Development community for GATE has plug ins for non-western language (Arabic, Chinese, India, a Philippine language, didn't get the name). Also European languages.

Stanford MLP runs in java, general public license, although identifies itself as being focused as processing texts on English language, there are resources for processing Chinese and Arabic.

NLTK (Python) Natural Language tool kit

Weka (suite of machine learning tool, University in New Zealand).

Availability of NLP tools does not address all the problems (scholar) raised--training languages for programing languages are built on English's

Examples of the use of these technologies that bely complete lack of critical awareness of their applications--NLP is seeing substantial work around the world, and the researchers at the Anglo American center of the field do appear to be making efforts to make work accessible.

QUESTIONS: 25 minutes

Invited to share own work.

Computer scientist attendee--using NLP tools--names them--word net?--tool are out there, and important thing is to use correctly. If you use the tools under the assumption that tools are not perfect, you can accomplish a lot. Have to bring together different tools to work with on projects.

BL: Dangerous to assume that tools for one project can work with other projects, especially around the world, is not best approach. People cannot decide in advance what is needed.

CS: problems faced by computer sciences. Great idea of TOOL, but question is who will be using it.

Participant involved in Caribbean: mail chains and exchange articles--networks of information in Cuba that operate because of low percentage of people on the internet. How do you build this sort of commons in this situation (no T1 communication). You cannot take the access to technology if you take for granted that people all over the world have the same level of access as the Anglo American areas. Need first.

Audience member: all sorts of work being done that isn't known more broadly--lots of examples. We lack big tent structure for scholars working in DH to look at and know what others are doing--global and smaller scale. Lots of misconnections.

Lee: we're taught to narrowly specialize in disciplinary terms--cannot go to all presentations. One of the challenges DH faces is that we're supposed to process narrowly. Especially need to get programmers and humanities people together.

Sarah: University of Chicago--there are at least two major projects building bridges to Latin American communities. Speaker knows those folks International Association of Librarians.

Lee: learning curve issues regarding Digital Humanities. More stuff to read and attend.

Caribbean: Not only working with generalists, but DH feeds and information gives whole world of view.

SMALL COLLEGE ISSUES:

Lee; small, geographically isolated. Has reached out.

I talked about need to get together with other small universities.

Another member: Throw up a wiki--share--collaborate -- libraries not always the best, and people don’t' always maintain links to libraries once they leave.

DH Commons.org

Tenure.

Challenge to librarians.

Subject guide of 20th century is in flux..

Language and multilingualism In theory, there isn't actually multilingualism.

What is the role of language requirements and language training in this? Institution required to have two languages other than English but there is no support for getting it--very little support in English programs. If I cannot get support to learn French in Canada…

Lack of immersion schools, language acquisition, not easily accessible.

Arguments on academic levels about who controls what material via discipline.

Belgrade DH, Serbia -- rain on parade--try to explain to customs people that you do DH in Serbia (second level of questions). It's not only about languages, it's not only about culture, it's about MONEY. Inequality that all this good will will not be able to change; we have tried to do work with DARIA , European project, when you have people who have huge budges, and we're doing everything on the shoestring.

LEE: you raise a very good point, and thank you for saying it. It needs to be said.

Other; need to involve capitalists.

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About to head off to 2013 MLA but not presenting

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 17:40:18 GMT

My Dean started a College IT committee, for faculty in our college to develop projects that are disciplinary specific and informed by technology (of all sorts). So he's funding us to go to an appropriate professional conference, develop a pilot project, and then teach it. I have two ideas (will talk about a bit later!), but here's a list of the MLA conference sessions I'll be attending over the next few days. I plan to post notes from the sessions here as well!

THURSDAY

22. Expanding Access: Building Bridges within Digital Humanities
Thursday, 3 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 205, Hynes
Presiding: Trent M. Kays, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.
Speakers: Marc Fortin, Queen’s Univ.; Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia; Brian Larson, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Sophie Marcotte, Concordia Univ.; Ernesto Priego, London, England
Digital humanities are often seen to be a monolith, as shown in recent publications that focus almost exclusively on the United States and English-language projects. This roundtable will bring together digital humanities scholars from seemingly disparate disciplines to show how bridges can be built among languages, cultures, and geographic regions in and through digital humanities.

60. Learning Outcomes in Online Second-Language Environments
Thursday, 3 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., 206, Hynes
Presiding: Sébastien Dubreil, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
1. "Teaching Language and Culture through Social Media and Networks," Edward M. Dixon, Univ. of Pennsylvania
2. "Developing Pronunciation Skills at the Introductory Level: Motivating Students through Interpersonal Audio Discussions," Cindy Lepore, Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
3. "Español Two Hundred: Bridging Medium, Collaboration, and Communities of Practice," Adolfo Carrillo Cabello, Iowa State Univ.; Cristina Pardo Ballester, Iowa State Univ.

129. Teaching in the Shallows: Reading, Writing, and Teaching in the Digital Age
Thursday, 3 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., Berkeley, Sheraton
Presiding: Robert R. Bleil, Coll. of Coastal Georgia; Jennifer Gray, Coll. of Coastal Georgia
Speakers: Susan Cook, Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Christopher Dickman, Saint Louis Univ.; T. Geiger, Syracuse Univ.; Jennifer Gray; Matthew Parfitt, Boston Univ.; James Sanchez, Texas Christian Univ.
Responding: Robert R. Bleil
Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains argue that the paradigms of our digital lives have shifted significantly in two decades of living life online. This roundtable unites teachers of composition and literature to explore cultural, psychological, and developmental changes for students and teachers.

167. Digital Humanities and Theory
Thursday, 3 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Riverway, Sheraton
Presiding: Stefano Franchi, Texas A&M Univ., College Station
1. "Theoretical Things for the Humanities," Geoffrey Rockwell, Univ. of Alberta
2. "From Artificial Intelligence to Artistic Practices: A New Theoretical Model for the Digital Humanities," Stefano Franchi
3. "Object-Oriented Ontology: Escaping the Title of the Book," David Washington, Loyola Univ., New Orleans

FRIDAY

209. Humanities in the Twenty-First Century: Innovation in Research and Practice
Friday, 4 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., Commonwealth, Sheraton
Presiding: Christine Henseler, Union Coll., NY
1. "The Promise of Humanities Practice," Lynn Pasquerella, Mount Holyoke Coll.
2. "Making the Humanities ‘Count,’" David Theo Goldberg, Univ. of California, Irvine
3. "The National Endowment for the Humanities," Jane Aikin, National Endowment for the Humanities
4. "The Humanities in the Digital Age," Christine Hensele

239. Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities
Friday, 4 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Gardner, Sheraton
Presiding: Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey
Speakers: Moya Bailey, Emory Univ.; Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Hussein Keshani, Univ. of British Columbia; Maria Velazquez, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
Responding: Alondra Nelson, Columbia Univ.
This panel examines the politics of race, ethnicity, and silence in the digital humanities. How has the digital humanities remained silent on issues of race and ethnicity? How does this silence reinforce unspoken assumptions and doxa? What is the function of racialized silences in digital archival projects?

307. The Dark Side of Digital Humanities
Friday, 4 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Back Bay D, Sheraton
Presiding: Richard A. Grusin, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Speakers: Wendy H. Chun, Brown Univ.; Richard A. Grusin; Patrick Jagoda, Univ. of Chicago; Tara McPherson, Univ. of Southern California; Rita Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
This roundtable explores the impact of digital humanities on research and teaching in higher education and the question of how digital humanities will affect the future of the humanities in general. Speakers will offer models of digital humanities that are not rooted in technocratic rationality or neoliberal economic calculus but that emerge from and inform traditional practices of humanist inquiry.

353. Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication
Friday, 4 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Republic Ballroom, Sheraton
Presiding: Michael Bérubé, Penn State Univ., University Park
1. "The Mirror and the LAMP," Matthew Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
2. "Access Demands a Paradigm Shift," Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ.
3. "Resistance in the Materials," Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia
The news that digital humanities are the next big thing must come as a pleasant surprise to people who have been working in the field for decades. Yet only recently has the scholarly community at large realized that developments in new media have implications not only for the form but also for the content of scholarly communication. This session will explore some of those implications—for scholars, for libraries, for journals, and for the idea of intellectual property.

401. Digital Archives and Their Margins
Friday, 4 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., Berkeley, Sheraton
Presiding: Alan Galey, Univ. of Toronto; Katherine D. Harris, San José State Univ.
1. "Echoes at Our Peril: Small Feminist Archives in Big Digital Humanities," Katherine D. Harris
2. "The Archipelagic Archive: Caribbean Studies on a Diff Key," Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia
3. "Universal Design and Disability in the Digital Archive," Karen Bourrier, Univ. of Western Ontario
4. "Digital Humanities and the Separation of Access, Ownership, and Reading," Zachary Zimmer, Virginia Polytechnic Inst. and State Univ.

SATURDAY
425. Numbers and Letters: Empirical Method in Literary Studies
Saturday, 5 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., Jefferson, Sheraton
Presiding: James F. English, Univ. of Pennsylvania
1. "Enumerating and Visualizing Early English Print," Robin Valenza, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
2. "The Imaginative Use of Numbers," Ted Underwood, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana
3. "Being and Time Management," Mark McGurl, Stanford Univ.

486. Games for Teaching Language, Literature, and Writing
Saturday, 5 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Commonwealth, Sheraton
Presiding: Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.
Speakers: Evelyn Baldwin, Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville; Mikhail Gershovich, Baruch Coll., City Univ. of New York; Janice McCoy, Univ. of Virginia; Ilknur Oded, Defense Lang. Inst.; Amanda Phillips, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, Univ. of Baltimore; Elizabeth Swanstrom, Florida Atlantic Univ.
This electronic roundtable presents games not only as objects of study but also as methods for innovative pedagogy. Scholars will present on their use of board games, video games, authoring tools, and more for language acquisition, peer-to-peer relationship building, and exploring social justice. This hands-on, show-and-tell session highlights assignments attendees can implement.

550. The Classroom as Interface
Saturday, 5 January, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Hampton, Sheraton
Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California
1. "The Campus as Interface: Screening the University," Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego
2. "Being Distracted in the Digital Age," Jason Farman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
3. "Virtual Classroom Software: A Medium-Specific Analysis," Kathi Inman Berens
4. "The Multisensory Classroom," Leeann Hunter, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

584. Accessing Race in the Digital Humanities: An E-roundtable
Saturday, 5 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Commonwealth, Sheraton
Presiding: Roger Whitson, Emory Univ.
Speakers: David Kim, Univ. of California, Los Angeles; Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Michigan State Univ.; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.
Responding: Tara McPherson, Univ. of Southern California
This roundtable addresses how applications and interfaces encode specific cultural assumptions about race and preclude certain groups of people from participating in the digital humanities. Participants present specific digital humanities projects that illustrate the impact of race on access to the programming, cultural, and funding structures in the digital humanities.

639. Two Tools for Student-Generated Digital Projects: WordPress and Omeka in the Classroom
Saturday, 5 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., Back Bay B, Sheraton
Presiding: Gabrielle Dean, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD
Speakers: Amanda L. French, George Mason Univ.; George Williams, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg
This "master class" will focus on integrating two digital tools into the classroom to facilitate student-generated projects: Omeka, for the creation of archives and exhibits, and WordPress, for the creation of blogs and Web sites. We will discuss what kinds of assignments work with each tool, how to get started, and how to evaluate assignments. Bring a laptop (not a tablet) for hands-on work.

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Finally, a new post!

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 02:28:21 GMT

Since the MLA conference, I've been doing a lot of other work, including administrative stuff (mostly, writing reports after being on committees, or sometimes, just writing reports).

Grant writing is much more fun! I'm teaching a graduate course on grant writing this fall as well which is very exciting--no textbook--there are none for academic grants that I've found that I've liked--so I'll be directing students to all the resources online, and helping them find grants that apply directly to their scholarly and or creative work that they can apply for, and then that will become the basis of their work for the class. We have a new Vice Provost for Research (Compliance) and Dean of Graduate Studies, and I'm excited to be working with her--she was interested to hear about the grant writing class since that's something she started at her previous university.

The other day, I got together with my linguist colleague to go over, in detail, the reader reports from the National Endowment for the Humanities on our (unfunded) Digital Humanities Grants. The reports, as is always the case with NEH, are incredibly useful, and we brainstormed a whole bunch of changes, and assigned some writing tasks.

Behind the cut are my drafts for the Abstract; Statement of Innovation; and the Significance and Contributions to the Humanities. I'm posting this small amount of text with the permission of my colleagues.

Mapping (Virtual) Worlds: Intersectional Identities and Social Justice Communities Online

Abstract

This Level I grant will fund an innovative collaboration between linguists and new media scholars to apply new digital technologies to the search, retrieval, and categorization of internet texts. The purpose of this project is to test the applicability of the questions and conclusions that have been developed in humanities-based cultural studies scholarship on constructions of identities. The earlier work, which addresses significant gaps in internet studies, follows humanities methodologies by analyzing a small and discrete number of texts, often professionally produced. The major question that this project addresses is how will the results gained by the earlier work scale up when applied to the big data contained in a corpus (a searchable database such as those used in corpus linguistics) of natural language texts downloaded from the internet. While the current focus of the PIs is primarily on social justice communities online, the methodology can be applied to any public internet site, and our team will be open to hosting materials for other scholarly projects.. Our focus reflects current and ongoing projects in the team. The corpus, which will be publicly searchable, will be analyzed using existing open-source programs and new schema drawing on cultural studies scholarship in order to create an interdisciplinary project analyzing data through a variety of methods from cultural studies and linguistics (including computational, corpus, and socio-linguistics).

Statement of Innovation

This project explores how new digital tools in data retrieval can facilitate collecting data from the internet which will solve traditional limits faced by humanities scholars when addressing the huge breadth of data accessible to them online. A corpus (a searchable database) of texts generated by internet users in social justice communities online that can be analyzed using existing computational linguistics programs as well as new schema created from earlier cultural studies scholarship can offer valuable approaches to major questions in the humanities concerning the intersections of languages and identities on the internet. To our knowledge, no such corpus currently exists and no equivalent methodology has been proposed in any other forum.

Significance and Contributions to Humanities

Brainstorming:

Addresses inability/reluctance of traditional humanities scholarship to deal with big data;

Scales up important scholarly arguments on identities from small groups of published texts to corpus of natural language texts culled from the internet;

Focuses on internet communities doing social justice activism and education as part of participatory democracy?

Internet studies lacking robust and complex concepts of "identity"

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Grant Writing and my Tolkien Corpus Project

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:27:17 GMT

I am teaching an undergraduate grant writing course for the second time, and will (perhaps! depending on scheduling issues) be teaching a grant writing course on the graduate level (humanities, social sciences, and arts only) next fall. One of the discussions that comes up a lot with my students is the frustration many of the best students have at not getting it "right" the first time. I talk about the process (and my grading is based on a modified portfolio version where the first drafts, worth very little in point value, are given 100% for effort, and lots of feedback for revision--multiple revisions). I am planning on sharing the link to this post with my current (and perhaps future students), because it concerns a grant project that I have been working on for some time: a Tolkien Stylistics Corpus project.

I might have just posted in the class, as I've done before with work, but I think there is so much mystery about the grant-writing process in general that the materials here might be of interest to other humanities scholars who want to work on grants.

I include information on the NEH grant categories I wrote for; my grant narrative; some screenshots of what the data looks like in the UAM Corpus Tool which I'm using; and the reader reports--direct from the NEH (they are anonymous of course) that explain the reasons my first draft (and by "first draft" here I mean "first draft submitted" not first draft written--I probably wrote about six drafts along the way--I'm not as careful as I used to be about saving each distinct draft with a number) were not funded. One of my linguist colleagues who is working with me on other grants was surprised at the tone of the comments--apparently linguist evaluators are nicer! I've been hearing since 1965 how trashy and popular and bad Tolkien is, and since the early 1990s how crappy my scholarship is for dealing with science fiction, fantasy, etc. that I'm more or less immune to it, so don't mind sharing. Additionally, in between some of the people who clearly think Tolkien OR stylistics OR both are worthless are some excellent responses that give me a lot of ways of re-conceptualizing and re-working the project (I always tend to take on TOO MUCH) over the next few years.

I like that the NEH sends the reader reports out on request--though odds are the review committee for later grants will be different, there are useful suggestions here that will apply no matter the make-up of the committee.

So, without further ado, my Tolkien Corpus Grant Materials!

The two grant programs are: First: Fellowships: This grant is the ultimate humanity grant, supporting up to a year of full-time scholarship. As you can imagine, the competition is fairly stiff. The information I received from the NEH (when I requested the reader report/evaluations, which the NEH will send out to people) is that: "The Endowment received 1,339 applications; the budget allowed for 80 awards." About a 6% success rate.

Second: This grant is the summer stipend, i.e. the Fellowship support for a summer of research. I was told that "The Endowment received 992 applications. Given the available resources, however, we could offer only 84 awards." So, 8.5% success rate.

Some sample Fellowship awards and A sample summer stipend award

My project deals with a text that embodies a foundational literary problem concerning canon formation. The problem is the fact that a beloved work which has influenced creative productions for decades can be mostly ignored by literature departments. Specifically, the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien is often dismissed by scholars in the U.K. and the U.S. (notably Harold Bloom) as badly written escapism. This academic dismissal stands in sharp contrast to the respect of medieval scholars for Tolkien's scholarship on Beowulf and other medieval texts.

The argument which underlies my Tolkien Corpus project is that The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien's Legendarium (his fiction and poetry dealing with Middle-earth) are not bad modernist literature but excellent postmodernist texts. My argument can best be supported by stylistics. Stylistics applies linguistic principles to literary texts; corpus stylistics makes it possible to work with large amounts of text in an electronic format and to generate empirical data. The first step for my five-year project is creating a literary corpus. The stylistic scholarship which will result from this project will challenge widespread attitudes about Tolkien's writing style. I build on existing stylistic and rhetorical scholarship by major Tolkienists (Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, Michael D. C. Drout) but apply linguistic methodology and digital technology to a larger amount of text to develop a stylistic analysis on a level that has not been hitherto been seen in Tolkien Studies.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, published in the 1950s, has been enormously popular. Its success contributes to the controversy of its literary status since some critics refuse to concede the possibility of any aesthetic or literary merit in popular works. Initial critical response to The Lord of the Rings was mixed. The harshest critics are those trained in the modernist aesthetic; they judge the novel against criteria developed for the genre of realism and find its medieval romantic elements confusing, distasteful, or simply childish. The novel's association with The Hobbit, categorized as children's literature, and the persistent belief, developed during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, that "fairy-tales" are for children are responsible, in part, for the categorization of The Lord of the Rings as a simple children's tale about good and evil. Yet even at the time of original publication, critics such as C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden saw something more in Tolkien's work, as their praise shows.

In the latter half of the 20th century, medievalists (Flieger, Shippey, and Jane Chance) argued the need to understand the influence of medieval source texts on the novel. However, analysis by medievalists has had little impact on the modernist canon, and the controversy over the literary merit of Tolkien's work continued into the 21st century. Although scholars in myth, folklore, religious studies, medieval studies, and linguistics have published widely on Tolkien, modernists, as a rule, have not. Critics specializing in 20th-century literature have ignored Tolkien or dismissed his work as "medieval manqué" created by a writer who retreated from the modern world into an imaginary past. In recent years, the question of Tolkien's work as postmodern has begun to be explored by a few scholars (Gergely Nagy, Flieger, Ralph Wood), but relatively little work has been done to develop postmodern readings of the Legendarium, nor have major postmodernist literary critics considered Tolkien's work.

There are signs prevailing attitudes may be starting to shift: Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, a well-respected literary journal focusing on canonical and emergent texts, devoted their Winter 2004 issue to Tolkien's work. This issue shows that the vanguard of academic scholarship is prepared to move beyond a dismissal of Tolkien's work as "popular culture" or "trivialliteratur" (light fiction) and to contemplate its place in categories such as "modern fiction" or "literature." Michael D. C. Drout and Hilary Wynne, authors of "Tom Shippey's J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982" (2001), argue that the "biggest failing in Tolkien criticism…is its lack of discussion of Tolkien's style, his sentence-level writing, his word choice and syntax'' (123). As Drout has argued in "Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects" (2004), the result of Tolkienists ignoring the question of the critical assumption that Tolkien's writing style is poor, i.e. not consistent with the criteria of realistic novels, "has had the unfortunate effect of ceding important ground to Tolkien's detractors, who, with simple, unanalyzed quotations, point to some word or turn of phrase and, in essence, sniff that such is not the stuff of good literature'' (137). A primary goal of my project is to begin to take back that ground, to challenge the too-easy assumptions of such criticism.

In order to fill the gap in Tolkien stylistics, I draw on Roger Fowler's Linguistic Criticism (1996) and a M. A. K. Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994). Fowler argues the problem with most attempts to analyze literary style is the lack of a consistent methodology. Linguistics provides a consistent, external methodology. Linguists tend to approach language descriptively rather than prescriptively, viewing language as a set of systems. Halliday's functional grammar offers a model which can be applied, word by word, clause by clause, to generate a quantitative analysis of a text. Applying a linguistic methodology to Tolkien's work serves the dual purpose of interpreting his work by a method seldom used and providing quantitative evidence to support an argument for the existence of a range of aesthetic effects and discursive elements in the work.

Existing stylistic or applied linguistic scholarship on Tolkien's novel in literary studies is limited; more work has been done on Tolkien's invented languages. The major literary scholarship consists of monographs by Verlyn Flieger, Brian Rosebury, and Tom Shippey. A handful of articles have also been published. One, the probable the basis for many dismissals of Tolkien's style, is Burton Raffell's 1968 essay, "The Lord of the Rings as Literature" in which he argues that the novel is not literature based on his comparison of a few passages from The Fellowship of the Ring to excerpts from D.H. Lawrence which are labeled by Raffell as "literature" without any justification than, apparently, his personal preference. More relevant work on Tolkien's style has been done by Elizabeth Kirk and Drout. The 1971 essay by Elizabeth Kirk, "'I Would Rather Have Written in Elvish': Language, Fiction, and 'The Lord of the Rings,''' argues against the assumption that a modernist aesthetic prioritizing individualistic and particular styles is universally good. Tolkien's choice to set disparate styles and registers against each other (the modern diction of the Hobbits, the archaic language of Rohan and Gondor) creates the sense of what Kirk calls a "communal consciousness," a style Kirk claims is "as different from the epic as it is from the novel'' (10). The only scholar besides myself to use Halliday in an analysis of Tolkien's work is Drout whose stylistic analysis focuses on two passages (Éowyn's fight against the Nazgul and Denethor's self-chosen death) and explores the intertextual parallels with Shakespeare. Both Drout's work and mine analyze only brief excerpts, a few hundred or thousand words. Analysis of greater scope requires a corpus, and digital tools.

My eventual goal is to prove the extent to which Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings reflects a postmodern aesthetic by means of stylistic analysis. At the most basic level, in Tolkien's created universe, reality is patently constructed by language. Instead of proceeding from the modernist assumption that language merely reflects reality, Tolkien began from the premise that the language of a people structures their culture. He created more than a dozen new languages in order to compose the mythology of Middle Earth which grounds The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, The Lord of the Rings is abundantly self-referential and inter-textual with Tolkien's other fiction as well as with the worlds of early Germanic mythology and religion and the world of modern fairy-tales and folk-tales. Both the self-referential nature of The Lord of the Rings and its heavy dependence on language are often commented upon, although rarely explicitly connected with postmodernism. A characteristic less noted but still telling is the novel's heteroglossic nature. The Lord of the Rings cannot be easily categorized as either epic, or saga, fantasy, mythology, romance, or boys' adventure story (all applied to the work by genre scholarship) because Tolkien utilizes such a wide variety of discourses. Substantive proof of these claims can only be supplied by a wide-ranging, quantitative methodology which can encompass the 1200 pages (plus appendices) that make up The Lord of the Rings and which can then go on to consider his other fictions which are increasingly the focus of Tolkien studies.

Methods and Work Plan: This project is scheduled to take five years, with the final result being one or more monographs offering a comprehensive stylistic analysis of Tolkien's major fictions. The first year, which will be funded by the Fellowship, will be spent creating a Tolkien Corpus consisting of annotated texts of his major fictional works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and his major short fiction and poetry). At least one article will be completed in the first year as well, an analysis of deictics (spatial indicators) in the novel.

This project faces a unique challenge: while it is possible other Tolkien corpora at various stages exist, the current copyright and intellectual property (IP) laws do not allow circulation of a corpus. I am working with my university's IP lawyer to gain permission from the Tolkien estate to create a corpus which will be stored on an external hard drive with a single back up (a different external hard drive) locked in my department office. The material will never be put on a computer, stand alone or networked, and the corpus will never be shared. I believe that the limits described constitute fair use of the work since it is for a scholarly purpose. Since creating a corpus requires hand-scanning thousands of pages of text, the creation of the corpus and initial levels of tagging will take the greater part of the first year. Additional levels of tagging will occur in later years. Saving the scanned pages as plain text files and then uploading them into the free program I will be using for annotation will take relatively little time and can be done immediately after a section has been scanned.

I will be using the UAM Corpus Tool, a free program created by a linguist, which be customized for various types of linguistic or stylistic analysis. My previous stylistics work required highlighting typed or photocopied text by hand to show different elements by color-coding, and then counting the results; the UAM Tool allows for complex and multiple layers of annotation that produce quantitative results that can be analyzed for significance (http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/) .

The next major task will be annotating uploaded text files, marking, or tagging, distinct elements of the text in .xml. I estimate based on tests I have done that it will take 5-10 hours to mark, or tag, one layer, and an average of 40-60 hours to mark the most important grammatical elements, depending on the length of the chapter. The marking is done in layers, i.e. one layer will consist of marking and identifying all the clauses in a unit of text; another will be identifying categories of verbs. Halliday's grammar has six categories of processes (verbs). A decade ago, I read photocopies with a highlighter in hand, marking important elements; with the new programs, I still read through the text, highlighting and (most importantly) annotating, but the results are statistical tables generated by program; an example from a previous project can be seen in Appendix A. Annotation can only be done to a plain text file; the final version, viewed through the UAM window, is an unformatted chunk of text with green highlighting, not enjoyable to read for pleasure, but able to be analyzed statistically (examples in Appendix A).

Competencies, Skills, and Access: Since 2007, I have completed three (and published two; the third has been accepted by an editor of an anthology) stylistic analyses of Tolkien's work. These articles have mapped out a number of questions for my corpus stylistic project: for example, the question of how religion and myth operate in the text; the question of how male bodies are constructed as well as female bodies; the question of the variety of styles Tolkien worked in not only in his other published work but in earlier drafts, leading to my major claim concerning postmodernity in Tolkien. I have been co-teaching Tolkien's work since 2004 with Dr. Judy Ann Ford (a medieval historian) in both undergraduate and graduate courses on Tolkien. We have collaborated on several publications, including an essay on our online Tolkien graduate seminar that has been accepted for publication in the MLA anthology on Teaching Tolkien (ed. Leslie Donovan, forthcoming in 2012). Dr. Ford and I co-directed two summer NEH Institutes (2004, 2009) on Tolkien for school teachers. I have integrated stylistics work on Tolkien in all the classes and Institutes. I teach a graduate seminar on Stylistics and have integrated Tolkien's work into the class. I have served as the organizer of the Tolkien At Kalamazoo group for five years.

Final Product and Dissemination: Corpora are usually published online, but the typical corpus does not contain copyrighted material. A Tolkien corpus could not be published online. However, I plan to create a blog that covers the process of creating the corpus and discusses the process and developing scholarship. I have a current blog at <http://robin-anne-reid.dreamwidth.org/profile> that covers current corpus work I’m doing. A Corpus Stylistics Blog would be of interest not only to academics working in similar areas (Tolkien Studies and Stylistics) but to teachers and to fans. Academic publication in peer reviewed journals and an academic press would also be sought.

Copies of the panelists' ratings and written evaluations of your proposal are included with this memorandum. The range of possible ratings is Excellent (E), Very Good (VG), Good (G), Some Merit (SM), and Not Competitive (NC). Please keep in mind that panels are one stage of NEH review. The panelists provided both initial comments on each application before their panel meeting and final comments after discussion of each application during the meeting. Panelists' opinions and ratings may have changed in the course of the deliberations.

The panelists' names and references to other panelists or applicants have been omitted. Additional excisions reflect the Endowment's policy to hold in confidence the contents of letters of recommendation.

Panelist 1

This may be a worthy project in some respects, and its author understands and appreciates Tolkien’s works, but as presently conceived it has several limitations.

First, the idea that Tolkien’s works are good post-modernist literature is intriguing and probably correct, but follows in the wake of other claims that the literature of fantasy and other forms of non-realist writing are appropriately appreciated through the lens of post-modernist critics such as Deleuze and Guattari, etc. As popular literature is increasingly studied, the case for examining hitherto non-canonical literature seems more self-evident.

More important, the writer does not clarify sufficiently what kinds of stylistic features she expects to find, or their significance. I question, in any case, whether computer-generated data applying a quantitative analysis of the functional grammar of a text is the best place to go for subtle and analytical understandings of narrative prose, or that “the existence of a range of aesthetic effects and discursive elements in the work” is a sufficiently specific conclusion.

At the least, this seems an indirect and labor-intensive way of approaching topics which could be studied through close stylistic analysis. The sample page which the applicant provides convinces me that she will be able to reach some conclusions, but that these may not relate very centrally to the issue of whether we should admire Tolkien’s creative works.

And finally, this is a multi-year project in an early stage. It would certainly not be completed within the grant period. In the first year she proposes to complete “a Tolkien Corpus consisting of annotated texts of his major fictional works,” so she would not have begun the stylistic analysis by the end of the grant period. Moreover, if she has not already done so, she may underestimate the time and effort in “hand-scanning thousands of pages . . . and initial levels of tagging. . . . [and] Additional levels of tagging [which] will occur in later years.” The actual results in projected publications also need to be worked out more fully.

If the writer wishes to reapply, she should be encouraged to frame a clearer set of questions and possible results based on computer data, or to expand her notion of stylistics so that the computer portion of her project is more specific and perhaps less central to the outcome.

Preliminary Rating: NC: Not Competitive
Additional comments after panel discussion:
Final Rating: NC: Not Competitive

Panelist 2

The technical aspects of the proposal seem to be in line with what is required to establish electronic corpora, but the work plan for a five-year project is not suitable for this competition. The feasibility is doubtful at this stage and the material to be completed during the grant period is not specified.
Preliminary Rating: SM: Some Merit
Additional comments after panel discussion:
Final Rating: SM: Some Merit

Panelist 3

I do not see the value of rescuing Tolkien for scholarly or pedagogical use through computational stylistic analysis. If Tolkien is valuable, Reid and other scholars should continue researching his work (and they do; Tolkien research may not be on a par with Shakespeare, but he is not totally excluded from the field). More to the point: rescuing Tolkien by performing a statistical analysis of his style is misguided. Style is impossible, utterly impossible, to quantify in the manner proposed here. This form of analysis may be acceptable to linguists, but it is totally inappropriate for literary studies, which demands close attention to detail--to individual passages--not to accumulated data about the frequency of words or semantic units.
Preliminary Rating: NC: Not Competitive
Additional comments after panel discussion:
Final Rating: NC: Not Competitive

Panelist 4

This project seems to be a promising one that could one day receive NEH funding. The proposal is professional and well articulated. The candidate has the relevant experience and publications to make this seem viable. The project promises to lay the groundwork for future scholars, including the candidate herself. Nevertheless, there are some difficulties with funding this project at the moment. Most notably, its very viability now appears to hinge upon whether the Tolkien estate grants permission for the work to be done. This is no small barrier. The NEH cannot give upwards of $50,000 toward a project without the certainty that it can legally proceed. Secondly, while this proposal makes a powerful claim that Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings are “not bad modernist literature but excellent postmodernist literature,” it needs to do more to show how this statistical analysis will (or could possibly) quantify what is modernist as opposed to what is postmodernist. That link is difficult to make but crucial again to proving the viability of the work; some detailed examples could be helpful.
Preliminary Rating: G: Good
Additional comments after panel discussion:
Final Rating: G: Good

Panelist 5

1-Reid’s project “Tolkien Corpus Project” proposes to counter the view that Tolkien’s “Legendarium . . . are not bad modernist literature but excellent postmodernist texts.” She intends to do so by applying “linguistic principles to literary texts, [and to gather empirical data to support her argument]; corpus stylistics makes it possible to work with large amounts of text in an electronic format and to generate empirical data.” This will certainly generate a great deal of information about Tolkein’s use of language, to create his fictional language[s].

No negative aesthetic response can be countered and overturned by mere data; hopefully the information will lead to an understanding of a Tolkein aesthetic.

2-Reid has been engaged in has published the results of some of this research that have been apparently well received.

3-Reids plans are long range (five years) “offering a comprehensive stylistic analysis of Tolkein’s major fictions. . . . The first year, which will be funded by the Fellowship, will be spent creating a Tolkien Corpus consisting of annotated texts [nature of annotations not specified: inter-textual? extra-literary? Etc.] of his major fictional works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and his major short fiction and poetry). At least one article will be completed in the first year as well, an analysis of deictics (spatial indicators) in the novel.” This seems too ambitious enough.

4- I think there is more than one project at hand here. The annotation of the major fictional works and short fiction and poetry is already quite an undertaking, which is barely addressed, though it is intended to be the immediate focus of the grant year. The linguistic analysis is another. The various elements of this very large and complex project need to be discreetly separated, and individually submitted for funding.

5. Reid is undertaking a lifetime project. Let her begin.

Preliminary Rating: NC: Not Competitive
Additional comments after panel discussion:
Final Rating: NC: Not Competitive

As with all applications submitted to the NEH, your proposal was read and discussed by knowledgeable persons outside the agency, who advised the Endowment about its merits. The NEH staff commented on matters of fact or on significant issues that otherwise would have been missing from these evaluations and made recommendations to the National Council on the Humanities. The National Council meets at various times during the year to advise the NEH chairman on grants. The Chairman took into account the advice provided during the review process and made all funding decisions, as is prescribed by law.

Copies of the panelists' ratings and written evaluations of your proposal are included below. The range of possible ratings is Excellent (E), Very Good (VG), Some Merit (SM), and Not Competitive (NC); (REC) indicates a panelist Recusal. Please keep in mind that panels are the first stage of NEH review and that the panelists sent us their evaluations and comments online.

The panelists' names and references to other panelists or applicants have been omitted. Additional excisions reflect the Endowment's policy to hold in confidence the contents of letters of recommendation.

The application deadline for the next NEH Summer Stipends competition is September 27, 2012. Application guidelines will be posted on the NEH website in May 2012.

Panelist 1

This project has some merit, but, while it aims to mount a defense of Tolkien's corpus on literary--that is, stylistic--grounds, its planned method and argument sidestep the question of literary value. Its focus on proving that similar stylistic constructions are to be found in Tolkien and in the great canonical writers is fine as far as it goes, but one could conduct the same exercise on any pair of texts without taking account of, or illuminating, their relative literary value. One could calculate, for example, that chimps with typewriters could collaborate on a work that, pursued over a billion years or so, would contain the entire works of Shakespeare; but if that work were also to contain much else, would it be Shakespeare? or comparable to Shakespeare?

Rating: SM

Panelist 2

Robin Reid's proposed "Tolkien Corpus Project," a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Tolkien's corpus, possesses a certain appeal for its thoroughness and rigor. The author's interest in defending Tolkien's work, on stylistic and rhetorical grounds, from its detractors also is understandable in the light of Tolkien's mixed critical reception (however popular his work may be with readers). The project strikes me as solid and thoughtfully laid out. That said, a five year project whose goal is to demonstrate that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the rest of his Legendarium "are not bad modernist literature but excellent postmodernist texts" does not inspire confidence. Not only are these two terms highly contested ones but there is little in the proposal to suggest that the author has anything approaching a nuanced grasp of the distinctions between and interrelations of modernist and postmodernist fiction.

Rating: SM

Panelist 3

Interesting attempt to redefine Tolkien as a proto-postmodernist, rather than a "merely" popular writer. However, it is not clear why an electronic "corpus" is required in order to conduct the stylistic analysis the applicant proposes (why can't existing e-books be used? concordances of Shakespeare and the Bible were compiled from hard copies of much larger oeuvres), nor, if the project were to be funded, how could the copyright issues be resolved. It's also not clear whether such an analysis would be likely to rehabilitate Tolkien's reputation.

Rating: SM

Panelist 4

Tolkien is perennially popular on college campuses among student readers if not on syllabi. Reid's plan to use stylistics sounds promising for quantifying Tolkien's aesthetic and rhetorical moves. Her extensive teaching and publication experience with Tolkien demonstrate her quality as the interpreter of this project, and the previous NEH seminars for high school teachers on Lord of the Rings show her longstanding dedication to the material. As she notes, this project is enormous and will take many years, far beyond the scope of the Summer Stipend. She is also forthright about a significant concern: not being able to circulate the corpus she creates. While discussing this matter on her blog will bring it out into the open, I can't quite determine whether that action will help other Tolkien scholars in their own analysis.

Rating: G

comments

An Actual Survey (on women and Tolkien)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:22:27 GMT

I am doing a presentation in the 2012 Tolkien at Kalamazoo area, at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, in May, 2012.

The purpose of this post is to invite women who are 18 and over and who are readers or fans of Tolkien's work and/or teachers who have taught Tolkien's work, and/or scholars who have published on Tolkien's work to answer a few open-ended questions about their reasons for enjoying his work.

By "women," I mean anybody who identifies as a woman.

By "Tolkien's work," I mean any of his published novels, stories, poems, or academic essays.

I will not be collecting any personal or identifying data, nor will I be attempting to make any correlations or connections between people's identity or social group and their enjoyment of Tolkien's work in this study.

Participants may reply anonymously, use a pseuodonym of their choice, or provide their legal name (or any variant of it) on the Dreamwidth site set up in connection with this project (http://women-and-tolkien.dreamwidth.org/278.html).

This project has been reviewed by my university's Institutional Review Board; full information is available on the home page at the Project journal.

comments

Survey: Women & Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, and Slashers

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:03:04 GMT

Sorry: go to this journal to respond to the survey:

http://women-and-tolkien.dreamwidth.org/278.html

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MLA, Grants, and Other Fun stuff

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:59:29 GMT

Behind the cut is the text of my MLA 2012 presentation that was part of a special digital humanities session I organized--it reports on the work I've been doing with colleagues the past year or two, mostly connected to grants which have been submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities (rejected!), and grants which will be submitted in the next year to the NEH, and the National Science Foundation.

Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus

For Humanities Research

The majority of scholarship on how people use the internet has tended to ignore the medium of the internet as a context shaping communication and to focus on it as a tool for accessing study subjects. Social science methodologies identify user demographics; focus groups are asked for their perceptions; the "digital divide" has been analyzed as have consumer buying patterns. Pedagogical research focuses on what does or does not work in incorporating the internet into education. Internet users are treated as objects of study in ways that reflect traditional disciplinary assumptions. The growth of Web 2.0 which has seen an explosion of user-generated content published not solely for marketing or educational purposes shows just how great the gaps in existing scholarship are. Additionally, scholars are daunted by the sheer amount of information available on the internet and the problems of gathering or quantifying it. This practical problem is crucial: How can we aggregate the huge variety of texts created by groups of users on the internet? What tools can be developed to find and mark relevant texts to generate specific data?

The original proposal for this paper was tied to an NEH Digital Humanities grant involving linguistics and computer science. However, a research problem resulted in changes in technology and in personnel. The changes in technology are moving from a conceptual search engine to a customizable web-crawler. The changes in personnel involved the creation of a more interdisciplinary and larger team consisting of humanities, social and behavioral sciences, and computer scientists. The single unchanged factor is the goal of the multi-modal corpus.

The original collaborative project computer scientists working in data retrieval and humanities scholars working in linguistics and stylistics involved sharing expertise in interdisciplinary methodologies of analyzing data. The proposal was to develop an initial prototype of a conceptual search engine to use to develop a multimodal corpus of texts from online communities. The project plan was to illustrate how methods of data retrieval in computer science can be applied to the specific concerns of humanities scholars. But the computer science faculty member who was working to create a conceptual search engine was unable to continue work on the project.

As a result, while the new team continues to work on elements of the original linguistics project, our scope is now widened to make use of more interdisciplinary mix of scholars to develop grants for projects that will be submitted to both the NEH and the National Science Foundation. One reason we are able to widen the scope of our grant writing activities is that "linguistics" can be defined either as a humanities field or as a science! The NSF grant will have a primary focus not on the creation of a prototype web-crawling program which we have created this year, but on the creation of a collaborative and interdisciplinary research team to develop new theories and methods of scholarship and teaching.

The multimodal corpus from the original project will be created using the new spider-bot program. Corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics utilize and prioritize language analysis based on databases of collected samples of language created in natural language situations. These databases, or corpora, can be based on transcriptions of spoken language, or scans of printed or published works. However, corpora have not typically included language directly culled from postings by internet users until recently, and the growing scholarship on computational linguistics and corpus linguistics published in the last few years tends to a limited focus, either in terms of the data used (solely from Usenet, or Twitter, for example), or in terms of the questions asked/element analyzed (grammar checking).

For example, Sebastian Hoffman in "Processing Internet-derived Text--Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages" worked with posts taken from 12 Usenet sites; Jonas Sjöbergh's article on "The Internet as a Normative Corpus: Grammar Checking with a Search Engine," used a single search engine to check grammar in internet texts in Swedish. Other linguists have constructed corpora from specific sites (such as drug information websites). Corpus linguistics and computational linguistics are beginning to conceptualize the internet as a pre-existing immense corpus in its own right, one which is comprised of textual, graphic and audio files existing on multiple social networks and blogs, a range of difficulties in accessing and analyzing data exist. Ongoing development of the new search tools, whether interdisciplinary teams are creating them in digital humanities work or whether the teams are using existing freeware or commercial programs, is an area that requires research and collection of information on what tools are already available, and how accessible the corpora are (i.e. free use, fee-charging, etc.). Part of our new interdisciplinary team's work will involve gathering information about and testing the new programs and tools as we develop and test our own.

With internal grant support from Texas A&M University's Office of Sponsored research, I have been working with linguists, a psychologist, a psychologist graduate student, and two computer science graduate students on our spider-bot project. The collaboration involved the creation of a prototype software program to gather, categorize and store information from Internet based message boards and communities. Unlike existing open source crawlers or the commercial products (not accessible to general users), the spider-bot we have developed is developing is customizable. It can be adapted to search a variety of different internet sites (via specific URLs), and, even more importantly, can be customized to perform secondary analysis in much more detail than usual when the data is saved in themed databases that will become part of the multimodal corpus. While our prototype works only with text data at this stage, we plan to incorporate ways of collecting graphic and audio material in the future.

After a semester's work, we're currently at the point where the spider-bot program exists and has been tested by the team on a limited basis. Further testing will take place over the next semester by individual members, as we develop a Data Management plan and work with our university and library specialists to arrange for storage and access. The spider-bot program is written in .NET and is able to access Internet based information using any of the popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. In addition, the bot is cable of being run from the Windows or Mac platforms. The Linux OS may also be capable of running the bot program; however, at the moment, the program is developed only for Windows and Mac. Currently, the primary function of the bot is to gather pre-defined public information from Internet-based bulletin boards. The information gathered by the bot will be public information; that is to say, anyone who goes to the sites where the bot gathered its information will be able to see the same information the bot recorded. Any information that requires a username and password is out of the scope of this project.

Some of the information targeted for gathering at this stage is: username, date, time, word count, words over six letters in length, words six letters or shorter in length, icons, unique words (e.g. LOL, OMG). One of the team members in psychology will use James Pennebaker's Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program. This validated program provides empirical results based on word categories that are considered psychologically meaningful. The LIWC can be customized, but only with specific words entered into a dictionary (rather that with parsing elements such as grammatical categories) which means that the linguists on the team are planning work using some of the linguistic parsing programs that exist. Part of the process which has already begun in the weekly meetings we held during Fall 2011 is the ways in which interdisciplinary conversations involve questioning of methodological assumptions.

The information will to be stored on a SQL database administered by the Texas A&M University-Commerce library system. Access to the stored information will be allowed using role based access control (RBAC). Administrators and principle investigators will have full control to the information in the data repository. Others who want to access to all information in the data repository will be granted access by submitting a request to the library system administrator. Users who want general access require no special permission. A web portal will be used to specify the information from the database. Users will go to the web site select from available categories from a drop down list and submit the request. The output will be displayed in HTML, PDF, .txt or .csv format and will be available to save or print.

My work in this larger project is primarily that of fan studies expert who has done a number of pilot presentations drawing on sociolinguistic methodologies applied to fairly small (in internet terms) amounts of text. The multimodal corpus and our work will not be limited to fandom sites: however, since fans have been early adopters of technology and have been actively creative internet communities since the earliest iterations of the world wide web, their production are, as Henry Jenkins has argued in Convergence Culture, useful to study as early models of what has become more mainstream and commonly seen on Web 2.0, especially with the explosion of social networking sites and special interest communities. My work has focused on analyzing discourses of minority and majority fans in online communities, specifically fandom communities. As an active fan in online media fandom since 2003, as well as having been active in fandom during the 1970s, I have been immersed in some fan cultures. The debates that began to be widely held on the social networking LiveJournal site during 2006 and 2007 took place in a variety of media fandom communities: StarGate: Atlantis, Dr. Who, and Life On Mars, Harry Potter, and even multi-communities community. Debates over racial and class stereotypes in fan fiction, as well as racial and class stereotypes in the canon texts of the fandom, including racist terminology being used by fans that embodied histories and etymology not widely known outside the United States, and, finally, ignorance of a Jewish religious practices were hotly debated. Additional levels of conflict occurred because of the international demographic of online fandom, with debates over the history and contemporary racial attitudes in the primarily English speaking fandoms of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Other disagreements concerning anti-racist strategies and rhetorics, including the issue of what "tone" can or should be taken when noting the existence of racist language, imagery, or characterizations, reflect different activist theories and practices. The issue of intersectionality (questioning the single focus on "race" or "gender" while ignoring class, sexuality, or ability status) has also affected the nature of the debates in online (and, increasingly, offline) fandom cultures.

I argue that how the internet shapes communication, and, specifically, how different internet sites shape communication differently, played a major part in how the debates spread. In later years, especially 2009, the differences between LiveJournal (and its clones, such as Insane Journal, and the fork, Dreamwidth) and blogs were highlighted by participants. In the LiveJournal debates, a single event (a story, a post, an announcement) could initiate a rapidly moving stream of posts which rapidly moved outside individual fandom communities because of cross-fandom communities dedicated to posting news and linking to posts across fandoms and because of fans' participation in multiple online fandoms. While many white fans criticized such debates as something new and unusual in their fandoms, often insisting that the conflicts were quote "harshing their squee," there was and is widespread agreement by some fans of color and allies that the events were simply the latest in an historical and consistent on-going pattern of white privilege in science fiction culture. That pattern included a range of racist behaviors that institutionalized marginalization and discrimination against fans of color; the problems, which had always been there, were only now becoming visible to the dominant majority (white fans) on the internet in ways that differed from what could be "seen" in the offline, con cultures, or, alternately in the earlier periods of online fan culture that were predominantly book oriented and existed on centrally controlled listservs and archives.

LiveJournal (which was begun in 1999) changed fandom structure from centralized listservs and archives to a web of individual journals and multiple communities. The ease of setting up LiveJournal communities, as opposed to maintaining the earlier listservs and archives, allowed for distinct differences between having a few listservs for a fandom. Fans who felt marginalized or ignored in the central or major listservs moderated by a fan or a group were able to leave and start others, or multiple others. With less centralization, discussions move rapidly across a number of individual journals, branching off rapidly. While there are lists of the debates (often called "Linkspams" made by fandom newsletters or individual fans), there is no guarantee that all posts relevant to the discussion were linked, or that people entering the discussions after some time has passed will be aware of the earlier discussions.

While discussions about race and racism in fandom and in the book and media texts is not new, or limited to LiveJournal (or currently, the newer social networks such as Tumblr and Twitter), I would argue that the discussions between can be relatively more easily accessed and viewed (compared to earlier print 'zines and listservs which may have been locked and are not easily accessed). Since my scholarship on literary texts already involved critical race theories as well as gender and sexuality topics, I became interested at how the freely available online texts by internet users might contribute to the scholarship in these areas. My original focus was debate known as Racefail 09, a wide-ranging series of posts in LiveJournal and on blogs that took place during the first three months of 2009. The major Racefail linkspam (by rydra_wong) lists 1000 plus posts (many of which have hundreds of comments) by science fiction fans and professional authors and editors. The sheer amount of data in Racefail taught me early on that it was impossible to work with traditional methodologies of rhetoric or discourse analysis. I began to explore the possibilities of a corpus which allows inclusion of a wider range of discussions that can grow in future to include a range of internet communities as well as those relating to online fandom. A corpus linguistics methodology analyzes patterns in large collections of text rather than individual intent, resulting in a pattern analysis of aggregated data. As the development of computational linguistics shows, not only are digital tools an absolute necessity when working with the huge and messy corpus that is "the internet," but so is an interdisciplinary approach that can only be gained by working with academics trained in multiple disciplines.

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Announcement

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:19:29 GMT

As of January 1, 2012, I will be posting only on my Dreamwidth account.

The Livejournal will be inactive.

All entries here will continue to be public.

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Dr. Stella Ray Memorial Endowment

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:30:37 GMT

This post is very different than the other posts in this journal, but I want to spread this news as widely as I can.

Last July, one of the students whose doctoral dissertation I directed (and who had lined up a university position) was shot by her ex-husband. She had three children, and worked fulltime at a high school and community college to support her family while she completed her doctorate.

I've worked on my campus to set up a memorial endowment fund in her name, to provide support for single mothers doing graduate work in our department in the future.

If you are interested in her story and might consider donating, information is behind the cut.

Stella Ray was a member of Literature and Languages at A&M-Commerce for fifteen years. She began her undergraduate work while carrying her oldest son who then attended her doctoral graduation in December 2010. Her family and friends, however, had been calling her "Doc" since she was four years old and came home from kindergarten to announce to them all that was was a Doctor!

During her time with Literature and Languages, she worked in the Communication Skills Center with Basic Writing students and then as a tutor, and eventually as an assistant for faculty teaching the Children's Literature courses.

Stella moved on to teach first year Composition and our Introduction to Literature course. She then taught at the high school and community college level, including dual-credit courses, while pursuing her doctorate degree and raising her three children.

Stella's scholarly interests were primarily in children's and British literature. Her doctoral dissertation was originally planned as an analysis of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from the perspective of children's/YA literature. But the more she researched the text and developed her work, the more she was drawn to a gender analysis focusing on four key characters from The Silmarillion as well as The Lord of the Rings: Ungoliant, Shelob, Galadriel, and Varda.

These female characters are all spiritual powers, including one of the Valar (Varda), the planetary deities of Middle-earth; Elven (Galadriel, who appears in both texts), and evil spirits who took the form of spiders (Ungoliant and Shelob). While there is a growing amount of gender scholarship on the female characters in The Lord of the Rings, little has been done with characters in other volumes of Tolkien's Legendarium. Stella's work is an original and important contribution to Tolkien Studies.

Stella's dissertation was completed and defended in Fall 2010; she then began a university-level job search, and was hired at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. The administration there was so impressed with her interview that the Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Ernest Plata contacted the Department to compliment us on graduating such a fine professional.

Tragically, her plans were cut short in July when she when she was killed by her ex-husband. A benefit account for her children has been established at Alliance Bank in Greenville, Texas, and Dr. Robin Anne Reid plans to develop Stella's dissertation for publication under her name, with royalties earned going to Stella's children.

Knowing how the need to work fulltime to support her family affected her progress toward her final degree, The Department of Literature and Languages has decided to establish an endowed scholarship in memory of Dr. Stella Ray.

In the next five years, we will need to collect $10,000 for the endowment to be large enough to support an annual scholarship. The Stella Ray Memorial Endowment will generate at least one scholarship to support a single mother doing graduate work in English. The donations are tax deductible, and can be sent either by postal mail or via an online form.

To mail your gift, please send it to:

A&M-Commerce Foundation
P.O. BOX 3425
Commerce, TX 75429

Please make the checks out to the A&M-Commerce Foundation, but write "Stella Ray" on the memo line of the check to make sure it is deposited in the correct account.

It is possible to donate online, but because the university is rebuilding the online gift page, it will take some time for the Stella Ray accont to be listed on that page. However, it is possible to donate to the memorial endowment in her memory.

Access the online gift from by following the link below:

http://apps.tamu-commerce.edu/advancementGiving/giving100.asp

Under gift designation options select Endowment/Excellence Fund.

In the drop down choose Arts & Sciences

In the second drop down choose Literature & Languages Excellence Fund

Under the Optional Designations heading indicate that the gift is in memory of Dr. Stella Ray.

We have lost Stella from our Fellowship, but we will keep her memory green through this endowment, and the gifts in her memory to help single mothers with their education.

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Internet Corpus UPdate

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 19:27:16 GMT

I haven't posted in a while--our house flooded in April, and the summer was made even busier by dealing with ALL the stuff (new flooring installed in July!). But I've not stopped working on my projects relating to fandom, imbroglios, and digital methodologies.

I have been working on a number of smaller projects the past five years that focus on the rhetorics (written and visual) of racism in debates that have been occurring in online media fandoms located primarily on the social networking sites of LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. This larger project involves collaborative work with colleagues at my university in computer science and linguistics and is the subject of a grant we submitted earlier this year to the National Endowment of Humanities' (NEH) Digital Humanities program. This grant was not funded, but we will submit a version reflecting the feedback we received next fall (2012), as well as submitting grants relating to the same project to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
This interdisciplinary digital project will focus on a collaborative effort between computer scientists and humanities scholars to apply new digital technologies to the search, retrieval, and categorization of written and graphic materials on the internet: an internet corpus. Our corpus in the early years will focus on online fandom communities. Since fans were early adopters of new technologies, their interactions can show how people employ new technologies to participate in political and social action relating to identity.

While my original projects focused on constructions of race and racism, the database that results from our work can be analyzed from any of a variety of critical methodologies, and can also provide the basis for later, intersectional work. The majority of scholarship on how people use the internet has tended to ignore the medium of the internet as a context which shapes communication and to focus primarily on it as a tool for accessing subjects to study.
Social science methodologies identify user demographics; focus groups are asked for their perceptions; the "digital divide" has been analyzed as have consumer buying patterns. In the majority of computer science, social science, and business scholarship, internet users are treated as objects of study in ways that reflect traditional disciplinary assumptions. The growth of Web 2.0 which has seen as explosion of user-generated content published not solely for marketing or educational purposes shows just how great the gaps in past scholarship are.
Humanities research concerned with topics such as the mapping of cultural constructions of individual and group identities exist but the work has rarely been informed by the inexhaustible supply of freely available online texts by internet users. Scholars are daunted by the sheer amount of information available on the internet and the ways it can be gathered. This practical problem is crucial: How can we aggregate the huge variety of texts created by groups of users on the internet? How can this very messy data be processed, i.e. cleaned and converted, so that standard corpus tools can be used to analyze the textual messages.

My part of the larger project is primarily that of fan studies expert who has done a number of pilot presentations drawing on sociolinguistic methodologies applied to fairly small (in internet terms) amounts of text. This work is necessary to generate terminology for tagging and parsing that can be integrated into the programs developed by the computer scientists. My colleagues (a psychologist and linguists) bring their own disciplinary knowledge to bear in a collaborative process that expands the possible research questions that can be considered. I'm also trying to organize a series of presentations/workshops on our campus concerning digital methodologies.

My scholarship has focused on analyzing discourses of minority and majority fans in online communities, specifically fandom communities. The first conflicts I became aware of took place during 2006 and 2007, occurring in specific media fandom communities (StarGate: Atlantis, Dr. Who, and Life On Mars); one Harry Potter community (Daily_Deviants), and an annual gift exchange focusing on rare fandoms, Yuletide. Debates over racial and class stereotypes in fan fiction, racial and class stereotypes in the canon texts of the fandom, racist terminology being used by fans that embodied histories and etymology not widely known outside the United States, and, finally, ignorance of a Jewish religious practices were hotly debated. Additional levels of conflict occurred because of the international demographic of online fandom, with debates over the history and contemporary racial attitudes in the United States compared to the United Kingdom (Dr. Who is a British produced show) as well as other countries (Canada, Australia), and disagreements on anti-racist strategies and practices, including the issue of what "tone" can or should be taken when noting the existence of racist language, imagery, or characterizations.

In all cases, a single event (a fic, a post, an announcement) initiated major debate, news of which rapidly moved outside the individual fandom communities because of cross-fandom communities dedicated to posting news and linking to posts across fandoms. While many white fans see these debates as something new and unusual in their fandoms, often insisting that the conflicts are quote "harshing their squee," there is widespread agreement by some fans of color that the most recent events were simply the latest in an on-going pattern of white privilege, including a range of racist behaviors that institutionalized marginalization and discrimination against fans of color, that the problems had always been there but were only becoming visible on the internet in ways that could not be seen in the offline, con cultures, or, alternately in the earlier period of online fan culture that was predominantly book oriented and existed on listservs and archives which tended to act as centralizing foci of online communication in a fandom.

LiveJournal (started in 1999) and the later iterations of it (InsaneJournal) and the most recent fork (Dreamwidth) changes fandom structure from centralized to a web of individual journals. While social networks allow communities do form around specific fan texts, or specific types of fan production, fans who were active in the listservs note distinct differences between having a few listservs for a fandom, listservs which were moderated by a fan or a group and the current system which makes it easy for someone to leave a community and start another, or multiple others. With less centralized authority, discussions move rapidly across a number of individual journals, branching off rapidly. While there are lists (often called "Linkspams" made by fandom newsletters or individual fans) for various debates, there is no guarantee that all posts relevant to the discussion were linked. While discussions about race and racism in fandom and in the book and media texts is not new, the connections between fans of color and anti-racist actions in LJ can be relatively easily viewed (compared to earlier print 'zines and listservs which may have been locked and are not easily accessed). In the last few years, the migration of fans to other social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr) have added additional electronic spaces to fandom networks that raise new challenges to track how discussions migrate across platforms.

In my work, I define "racist" and "racism" as the institutionalized and ideological patterns of behaviors that have been established for generations in the United States and that affect all people born within the culture. While online fandoms are international in nature, the predominance of US fans as well as my own situatedness in the US culture leads me to focus primarily on the constructions of race in mainstream American culture; the specific outgrowth of Racefail that I focus on in this paper is particularly relevant to highlighting elements of the white American culture which constructs some groups of "immigrants" in racist ways.

The immediate focus of the larger work is the debate known as Racefail 09 although once I decided to do a corpus, the project grew to include a wider range of discussions and might continue to grow in future to consider a range of internet communities as well as online media fandom. The methodology I'm using in the project is a stylistics corpus: A corpus is basically a searchable database of text which has been annotated, or marked in .xml language. That means that certain elements of the text have been tagged and can be quantified. Stylistics is the application of linguistic methods to literary texts, although for this project I'm extending the definition to any written text. Linguistics corpora are databases of various transcribed texts (for linguistic study, it’s often collections of spoken utterances around dialects, or a specific language variety, i.e. not copyright material). Many of these are huge (millions of words), but there are also more specialized, or narrow, corpora. Linguistic corpora are large collections that are often available online, or can be purchased for a fee.

The methodology analyzes patterns in writing rather than intent, resulting in a pattern analysis of aggregated data. My pilot projects involved laborious copying of publicly available materials from internet sites to .txt files and hand annotation of elements through the use of a free program (the UAM Corpus Tool). Marking each textual element by hand can take a hundred or more hours (depending on how many layers, i.e. specific types of textual element, I mark). The goal in our collaborative project is to develop digital tools that can replace some of the time-consuming and human error-prone preparation of text.

Mapping Racial Constructions and Identities on the Internet: Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus for Humanities Research

Keyword-based search engines retrieve millions of internet pages but many are not relevant to the requested search. New conceptual search engines increase the percentage of relevant documents retrieved and allow humanities scholars to analyze texts in-depth. This Level I grant will fund an innovative collaboration between computer scientists and humanities scholars to apply new digital technologies to the search, retrieval, and categorization of texts. The grant will support an on-site workshop and conference and the staff needed to create a conceptual search engine alpha-level prototype used in conjunction with a multimodal corpus (searchable database of spoken and written discourse). Our corpus will focus on online fandom communities as venues enabling new forms of participatory democracy. Fan groups were early adopters of new technologies, and their interactions show how people employ new technologies to participate in political and social action relating to race and identity.

***

This grant was to fund a group project between me, two linguists in my department, and a computer science professor (his main project is conceptual search engines).
We were not funded (given that it was a fairly quickly assembled proposal with two of the people involved being FT administrators and that the majority of first time grant proposals are not funded, I was not surprised--we got some excellent feedback from the readers reports and will be revising, though possibly with a different group, and a different program. See below!)

Title of Project: Identities & Imbroglios: Conflicts in Internet Fandoms

This project focuses on the space where language, identity, and the internet intersect by melding the quantitative methods of Psychology with the linguistic and rhetorical methodologies of English to analyze discourses of minority and majority fans in online communities. Through a partnership with [name redacted] and students in his computer science laboratory we will develop a web spider to crawl the web and collect millions of written texts of interactions between members of online fan groups. These texts will then be analyzed by researchers (the PIs, graduate and undergraduate students) from both English and Psychology to explore online fan group behavior. This study is important to expand the scientific knowledge of group behavior in online computer-mediated environments.

***

We were given a grant of $15,000 which is being used to pay the computer science graduate students to design our web spider. There are a number of web spiders out there (I've heard about commercial ones; I imagine there are open source ones as well), but none of them are designed to do what we want to do. This project was a collaboration between me and a Psychology faculty member (he could not participate in the Digital Humanities one above, because NEH does not allow any social science methodologies!), and he has a graduate student in his department who is doing his work on how communities form on the internet, and what happens to them over time.
We met yesterday with the Library Director and some of the librarians (digital archives, archivist) and one of the Technology staff to discuss the possibility of setting up an Institutional Repository.

Wikipedia's entry on Institutional Repository looks fairly accurate (i.e. does not contradict anything our Library Director told us yesterday!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_repository

The IR here will be much larger than our project, but our project sort of initiative the need to set this up (as with many things, as a small rural university, we're rather behind the curve, but while the Research 1 universities have funding and staff, there are smaller regional universities doing more than we have).

The important elements of an IR are: meeting data management and open access standards (since we plan to write federal grants, we need to have a data management plan and meet certain open access requirements, if we're funded). I'd want that open access anyway because I believe that universities should make research (and other materials) freely available.

The 'product' of our grant will be a database that will be in two parts: a publicly accessible part (accessed through our university library interface), and a part accessible only to researchers (at first, here; I hope, later, to scholars at other institutions).

This process will be a multi-year one--our pilot project with the library will take a year. During that time, we'll be submitting other grants (and while we'll continue to do this work, without funding, it will be a lot slower). We'll be presenting on various 'parts' of the project (I'm talking at the 2012 MLA in January, for example!).

The most exciting aspect is the interdisciplinary issues (putting a psychologist, an english teacher, and two computer science majors in a room leads to lots of confusion--we've been meeting every Friday since classes started, and yesterday, I think, we had a major breakthrough of understanding). The linguistics and I have closer ties, but they haven't been able to make all the meetings (other duties). The recent inclusion of our digital archivist/librarian and a systems engineer tech person seemed to push to a whole new level of excitement: that is, as far as they knew, the sort of project that we're doing is innovative in terms of the technology (i.e. the nature of our spider-bot) and in terms of database and collections issues. This aspect will grow as we build the repository, and are able to invite others to get involved, and see what results.

Some articles I found that are going to be useful, I think:

Sebastian Hoffman. "Processing Internet-derived Text--Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages." Literary and Linguistic Computing. 22.2. 2007. 151-165.

Abstract: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/2/151.abstract

Jonas Sjöbergh. "The Internet as a Normative Corpus: Grammar Checking with a Search Engine."
http://dr-hato.se/research/internetnorm.pdf

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Scholarship: Women and Science Fiction 1995-2009

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 03:24:04 GMT

In connection with discussion over at Nicola Griffith's blog, I'm posting a bibliography of recent scholarship on women and sf! (Link to her blog: asknicola.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-want-this.html

It's long, which is why it's posted here (blogs *sniff* such short comment length limits!), and behind a cut!

Search Terms: Women and SF

Database: Modern Language Association Index (MLA)

Dates: January 1995-December 2009

Search date: June 2, 2011

Results: 271 hits

"Conversations with Scholars of American Popular Culture: Featured Guest: Lisa Yaszek." Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-Present) 7.1 (2008). Print.

Afnan, Elham. "Chaos and Utopia: Social Transformation in Woman on the Edge of Time." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 37.4 (1996): 330-40. Print.

Alessio, Dominic. "Gender, 'Race' and Proto-Nationalism in Julius Vogel's Anno Domini 2000; or, Woman's Destiny (1889)." Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 33.91 (2004): 36-54. Print.

Alverio, Anita. "Banished from Eden: Women in Science Fiction." Fantasy Commentator 9.2 [50] (1997): 104-05. Print.

Amy-Chinn, Dee. "Rose Tyler: The Ethics of Care and the Limit of Agency." Science Fiction Film and Television 1.2 (2008): 231-47. Print.

Andringa, Els. "The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identification in Reading Autobiographies." Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 205-40. Print.

Anthony, Albert. "Menacing Technologies: Counterfeit Women and the Mutability of Nature in Science Fiction Cinema." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 5.1 (2004): 1-17. Print.

Armitt, Lucie. "Space, Time, and Female Genealogies: A Kristevan Reading of Feminist Science Fiction." Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Sceats, Sarah and Gail Cunningham. London: Longman, 1996. 51-61. Print.

Attebery, Brian. "The Conquest of Gernsback: Leslie F. Stone and the Subversion of Science Fiction Tropes." Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Larbalestier, Justine. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2006. 50-66. Print.

---. "Women Alone, Men Alone: Single-Sex Utopias." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 1.2 (2000): 4-15. Print.

Averbach, Margara. "Technology, 'Magic,' and Resistance in Native American Women's Writing." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 2.2 (2001): 7-16. Print.

Ayres, Susan. "The 'Straight Mind' in Russ's the Female Man." Science Fiction Studies 22.1 (1995): 22-34. Print.

Baccolini, Raffaella. "In-between Subjects: C. L. Moore's 'No Woman Born'." Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers. Eds. Sayer, Karen and John Moore. Basingstoke, England; New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000. 140-53. Print.

Balsamo, Anne. "Teaching in the Belly of the Beast: Feminism in the Best of All Places." Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media. Eds. Marchessault, Janine and Kim Sawchuck. Writing Corporealities (Writing Corporealities). London, England: Routledge, 2000. 185-214. Print.

Baringer, Sandra. "The Terror of the Liminal: Silko's Almanac and Klein's Phantasy Paradigm." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 2.2 (2001): 17-32. Print.

Barr, Marleen. "Jews and Independence Day, Women and Independence Day: Science Fiction Apocalypse Now Evokes Feminism and Nazism." Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis. Ed. Seed, David. Basingstoke, England; New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000. 199-214. Print.

Barr, Marleen S. "Black 'Science Faction': An Interview with Kevin Willmott, Director and Writer of Csa, the Confederate States of America." Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ed. Barr, Marleen S. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2008. 236-40. Print.

---. "Goodnight, Gynesis; Goodnight, Gyn/Ecology." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 36.3 (1995): 181-83. Print.

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Wood, Sarah. "'Serving the Spirits': Emergent Identities in Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 46.3 (2005): 315-26. Print.

---. "Subversion through Inclusion: Octavia Butler's Interrogation of Religion in Xenogenesis and Wild Seed." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 6.1 (2005): 87-99. Print.

Wymer, Thomas L. "Feminism, Technology, and Art in C. L. Moore's 'No Woman Born'." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 47.1 (2006): 51-65. Print.

Yaszek, Lisa. "'a Grim Fantasy': Remaking American History in Octavia Butler's Kindred." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.4 (2003): 1053-66. Print.

---. "Domestic Satire as Social Commentary in Mid-Century Women's Media Landscape Sf." Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 34.95 (2005): 29-39. Print.

---. Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2008. Print.

---. "Not Lost in Space: Revising the Politics of Cold War Womanhood in Judith Merril's Science Fiction." New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Eds. Hassler, Donald M. and Clyde Wilcox. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2008. 78-92. Print.

---. "Stories 'That Only a Mother' Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist Politics, and Judith Merril's Early Fiction." NWSA Journal: National Women's Studies Association Journal 16.2 (2004): 70-97. Print.

---. "Unhappy Housewife Heroines, Galactic Suburbia, and Nuclear War: A New History of Midcentury Women's Science Fiction." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 44.1 (2003): 97-111. Print.

Yaszsek, Lisa. "The Women History Doesn't See: Recovering Midcentury Women's Sf as a Literature of Social Critique." Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 45.1 (2004): 34-51. Print.

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Bias in SFF

Sat, 28 May 2011 14:46:37 GMT

Nicola Griffith links to poll in UK in which, no surprise, most of the 'favorite' sf authors listed were men.

She's wanting to work on addressing this bias:

To begin with, we need numbers: ratios of women/men being published as sf in UK, US, Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, and other English-speaking territories. Ratios of historical publication of same. Reviews of same. Of book format. Of cover design. Of sales. Of awards. And so on. Anyone got any of that to hand? Anyone got a platform through which they can put out a call for same?

ETA: Some links I contributed to the discussion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/04/research-male-writers-dominate-books-world

This article and the stats are not specific to sff.

It may or may not be useful to remember that the NYT has a separate section for reviewing sff (and other genre fiction), and also started a separate best sellers list when Rowling's work dominated it (children's best selling as compared to "adult" literature?), there are genre biasses build into the reviewing system.

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2006/08/12/3627.html

Jed Hartman
Still more on gender bias in sf
(Strange Horizons)

He credits Sue Linville's 2002 article on gender bias in sf!

Sue Linville Strange Horizons
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070820/0women-publish-a.shtml

SF and Fantasy in the New Millennium: Women Publishing Short Fiction
By Susan U. Linville

20 August 2007

Here's an intriguing site I found that I'll have to spend some more time exploring:

Gender Bias Learning Project
http://www.genderbiasbingo.com/gender_bias_bibliography.html

It's for academia--but I wonder if some could be applied to this effort!

http://www.genderbiasbingo.com/genderbias.html

Let's not forget the work done by feminists all along:

Laura Quilter's Feminist SF

http://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=Laura_Quilter

Broad Universe

http://www.broaduniverse.org/

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Seattle, MLA, 2012, WOOT!

Mon, 16 May 2011 19:07:52 GMT

My special session proposal for Digital Humanities was accepted by the MLA for presentation at their 2012 conference, in Seattle! I am in shock.

SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSAL: Digital Humanities and Internet Research

Jennifer Sano-Franchini
PhD Student in Rhetoric & Writing
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures
269 Ernst Bessey Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1033

Robin Anne Reid
Professor, Literature and Languages
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, TX 75429
co-author: Dr. Lucy Pickering (not attending/presenting)
robin_anne_reid.dreamwidth.org

John Jones
Visiting Assistant Professor
Emerging Media and Communication
The University of Texas at Dallas
800 West Campbell Road
Mail Stop JO31

AV NEEDS: Projector, screen

Part 1: Scholars' Info

Robin Anne Reid, Ph.D.(panelist), is a professor in Literature and Languages department. Her specializations include creative writing, new media, critical theory, and fantastic literatures. She is currently working with computer science faculty and linguists on a conceptual search engine and multimodal corpus project. Her primary internet scholarship involves corpus and sociolinguistic work on debates about racism in online media fandom, and she is the co-editor of a special Race, Ethnicity, and Fandom edition of an online peer-reviewed journal of fan studies, Transformative Works and Culture. She has published poetry, critical books on Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, and edited the first encyclopedia on women in science fiction and fantasy (Greenwood 2008). Her fan studies work includes publications on fan archives, selected fan fictions, debates about types of fan fiction (female/female slash, real people slash), and racism debates in fandom.

John Jones, Ph.D. (presider and panelist), is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Emerging Media and Communication Program at the University of Texas at Dallas and will join the Professional Writing and Editing program at West Virginia University in the fall as an Assistant Professor. Jones recently received his Ph.D. in English with concentrations in Digital Literacies & Literatures and Rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, _Embodied Rhetoric: Memory and Delivery in Networked Writing_ examines three case studies of networked writing on Twitter, examining thousands of Twitter messages. Jones has previously published on the ways that wiki software influences the revision practices of Wikipedia editors and the influence of network structures on rhetorical practice.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini is a third-year PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing at Michigan State University. She also teaches first-year writing in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures, and she is a graduate fellow with the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative. Her research interests include rhetorics of time, Asian American rhetoric, digital humanities, and the intersection of cultural and digital rhetorics.

Part 2: Detailed Description of Session

Humanities has been slow to recognize the potential of text produced by users on the internet perhaps because of the vast amount of data that is not easily accessed using traditional humanities methodologies. New work in digital humanities allows the chance for scholars in humanities and digital specializations to create interdisciplinary relationships to shape new tools and methodologies specific to the needs of humanities scholars (Hoffman, 2007). THe new tools and methodologies must also deal with new types of problems presented by the combination of permanence and loss that accompany most digital research.

Technological changes like the development of the internet and Web 2.0 have led to ongoing debates in the humanities with regards to changing models of knowledge production (Ball;
Unsworth, et al.; Johnson, et al.). More traditional models of knowledge production, generally consisting of single-authors doing research individually, using alphabetic text in print journals or books with slow turnover, contrast markedly from more recent developments in the humanities including online, open-access journals, unconferences, and collaborative research, which are characterized by use of a range of digital media, widespread collaboration, greater access, and rapid circulation of knowledge. In this and other ways, technological development has required that we reassess the way we understand how we do research and how we teach it to our students. This disciplinary panel discusses specific methods of dealing with problems in digital humanities research and the implications for how we teach research to our students.

Robin Anne Reid discusses an innovative collaborative project between computer scientists working in data retrieval and humanities scholars working in linguistics and rhetoric which will focus on sharing expertise in interdisciplinary methodologies of analyzing data between on-site computer science and humanities scholars and developing an initial prototype of a conceptual search engine and a multimodal corpus of texts from online communities which will illustrate how methods of data retrieval in computer science can be applied to the specific concerns of humanities scholars. This project addresses existing probolems in corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics that utilize and prioritize language analysis based on databases of collected samples of language created in natural language situations. These databases, or corpora, can be based on transcriptions of spoken language, or scans of printed or published works. However, corpora have not typically included language directly culled from postings by internet users; neither has corpus linguistics conceptualized the internet as a pre-existing immense corpus in its own right comprising textual, graphic and audio files existing on multiple social networks and blogs. This is in large part because, given the scope and complexity of the internet, it cannot yet be searched and analyzed in the same way that a controlled corpus text database can be using available tools.

John Jones draws on his work in Twitter research that he has conducted over the past two years to explain techniques and tools for collecting information from Twitter and other social networking sites—Twitter search, Twitter API, TwapperKeeper—while pointing out the ephemeral nature of many of these techniques. For example, changes in the Twitter API and terms of service have lead to the Twitter archive TwapperKeeper being shut down, while other limitations make it largely impossible to access Twitter data that is more than three months old. He points out the difficulties in archiving and sharing collected data in such a way that makes it accessible to reviewers and other researchers and ends by looking at how collecting data and reassembling it for research purposes fundamentally changes the data itself. While historians and ethnographic researchers have always had to deal with the fact that they have a view of their research that isn't accessible to the subjects they are studying, digital research often deals fundamentally with the representation of texts and other artifacts in different media environments. Representing data in new ways gives researchers unique insights into that data, but fundamentally changes it from the artifacts that would be familiar to its original readers. Jones concludes by arguing that digital technologies present researchers with powerful new tools for studying culture and literature, but also present significant new challenges to that research.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini looks ahead, discussing a web-based project that utilizes open source content management systems to develop a resource for college-level writing students and instructors usingcontent management systems like Drupal and Wordpress which offer a way for scholars in the digital humanities to organize the vast amounts of information available on the web for research purposes. The rationales for this project are twofold: 1) that shifts in the broader Academy about how we understand research should come with reconsiderations about what we teach students about research; and 2) that huge changes in information accessibility warrant changes in the way we teach students to do research. Scholarship on how digital technology and the internet impact the way students think and process information on fundamental levels (DeVoss & Porter; Johnson-Eilola; Prensky; Selfe & Hawisher; Selfe & Selfe; Slatin) has created a major point of discussion in education onw how students today “pay attention” differently from students of the past. This project exhibits a way to facilitate student research differently amidst these changing realities and with a mind open to the possible advantages of using digital technology to do so Furthermore, while the primary goal of the project is to facilitate student research and writing instruction, its larger purpose is to facilitate more collaborative understandings of writing, research, and knowledge-production. This project does this through an interface that enables user-contributed links and user participation across institutional and geographical boundaries. Through this project, users will be encouraged to freely draw from others’ work (while, of course, citing their sources), work together to build bodies of knowledge, and add to larger conversations by discussing issues pertinent to those bodies of knowledge.
Works Cited

Ball, Cheryl E. “Show, Not Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship.” Computers and Composition 21.4 (2004): 403-425. Print.
DeVoss, Dánielle Nicole, & Porter, James E. “Why Napster Matters to Writing: Filesharing as a New Ethic of Digital Delivery.” Computers & Composition 23 (2006): 178–210. Print.
Hoffmann, Sebastian. Processing Internet-derived Text—Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages. Lit Linguist Computing (2007) 22 (2): 151-165. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqm002 First published online: February 28, 2007 http://dr-hato.se/research/internetnorm.pdf
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. “Living on the Surface: Learning in the Age of Global CommunicationNetworks.” Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era Ed. Ilana Snyder. London: Routledge. 1998. 185–210. Print.
Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon 9.5 (2001): Web. 28 Jan. 2009. <http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,>.
Selfe, Cynthia L., & Hawisher, Gail E. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Print.
Selfe, Cynthia L., & Selfe, Richard J. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 480–504. Print.
Slatin, John M. “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium.” College English, 52.8 (1990: 870-883. Print.

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