My final project is a multi-linear narrative, called Family: a pictorial history, because I use my old family photos to tell the story. It’s more of an art project than a scholarly work. I coded the pages using html, css, and javascript (that I learned from Codecademy.com), because I wanted to use some special effects that Twine does not offer. First of all, I used randomized text, meaning that the computer chooses between three different lines of text for each picture. These lines have links to other pages, so the path may change upon subsequent visits. I got the idea from web artist J.R. Carpenter, who uses this randomized effect in much of her digital literature. I also use a mouse-over effect, which causes the pictures to change when you hover the cursor over them. Many times the faces in the pictures will either age or get younger. This is all meant to be kind of disorienting. I link to outside websites, such as Google Maps and Wikipedia, appropriating them into my own story. It’s not as long as it probably should be, but I put a lot of thought into it, and a lot of coding work. I hope you like it.
Using Google Docs in the Classroom
We use Google Docs a lot in this class, but we rarely discuss its possible applications. In this blog post, I give some ways in which I would use this tool in an undergraduate literature class.
1. Creative/Cathartic Exercise
A good example of this is from Dr. Sherwood’s Postmodern Lit class, where everyone collaborated on a creative response to the text in a short amount of time. Being a postmodern class, the result was very weird (here’s the link). I think this kind of exercise is a good way to begin class, and to get everyone’s creativity flowing. I have had professors in the past do this in non-digital ways. For instance, one professor asked us to sum up the reading in a single word, then go around the room and have everyone share their word. The benefit of using a Google Doc is that it gives us a product that we can save and refer to later.
2. Class Discussion
Answering questions or writing prompts collaboratively is another use for Google Docs. As we have seen in this class, students can all type simultaneously, which may be more productive than waiting for your turn to speak, or maybe not getting a chance to speak at all. I also think that the quieter students may have much more to say in this format than in oral discussions. As mentioned before, we would also have a convenient record of our discussion.
3. Group Projects
Google Docs is a great tool for group work. In another class, I am preparing for a group presentation, so I created a Google Doc to share ideas and comments without having to meet in person (here is what that looks like). Next, we will pare them down into bullet points to display during the presentation, and embed links to videos and other material.
This is a versatile tool. As we have seen in this class, it can even be used for simple functions, like signing up for presentations. Familiarizing students with Google docs will benefit them in future classes, as well. No one in my group of graduate students, for example, had used this tool before. In a past class, a student wanted to use Google Docs for group work, but we rejected the idea, because we thought that we would all have to have a Google account to use it. Getting students to use the tool early on will open up many possibilities for future applications in their own particular disciplines.
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DH Pedagogy
I was first struck by Clement’s quote of Bauerlein, who called today’s students “the dumbest generation,” which is a harsh criticism. But, it does seem that people are reading less these days and playing with their phones more; and I’m not sure that Twitter feeds really count as quality reading. If students want to become good writers, they have to read works by other good writers. That is not to say that those works cannot be in electronic formats. As with printed books, it is the teacher’s job to curate a reading list that will benefit students, and give them some styles to emulate while they discover their own voice. The emphasis should be on preparing students to produce their own writing. Clement, as well as Bjork, argue that digital technology actually provides a better medium for students to create their own works, even if those works seem strange to those who have resisted changing technology.
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Up and Running with Omeka
I had trouble figuring out what I wanted to do with Omeka, so I decided to archive some of my old books. (You can check it out at bensbooks.omeka.net) For the most part, I collect these books to look at, not to read, so I scanned the parts that are most interesting visually (the cover, title page, and any inscription or signature). I set each book as a collection, and the individual pictures as items. I simplified the look of the description page by taking out the words “Dublin core” and the empty categories (under appearance, settings, uncheck the two boxes at the bottom). To take full advantage of Omeka’s tools, I feel like I should create an exhibit that tells a story about each book, but I don’t really have a lot to say about them (I bought most of them at the Goodwill). I’m starting to see how Omeka can be useful. Maybe if I had a bigger collection, for example, it would act as a way to organize and search through it. I also thought about adding electronic versions of the texts that are in the public domain, just to add some other kind of content besides still images.
Data Visualization Project
I have to admit that I had a lot of difficulty with this project, and I think it stems from the fact that I had trouble finding significant meaning in word frequency, at first. I decided to look at The Great Gatsby, but after uploading the text and taking out all of the proper names, nothing really stood out. It was only after I plugged in four more Fitzgerald books (The Beautiful and the Damned, Flappers and Philosophers, This Side of Paradise, and Tales of the Jazz Age) that I came up with something noteworthy. You will notice from the following word cloud that man, men and Mr. are some of the most frequently used words in the collection.
This, of course, led me to take a feminist approach to the interpretation of the data (which is more familiar to an English student than reading graphs and looking at numbers). Woman is not even on the list, although girl is, which points to the infantalization of women in our culture (unless Fitzgerald is literally writing about female children, which we can check by looking at the following table).
I copied all five texts into a single file, so that I could graph the occurrence of these words and look at the raw data. The following graph shows the prevalence of girl over woman or lady.
Finally, we can see how man and men dominate the text overall.
These graphs can’t tell us whether Fitzgerald’s books are feminist or not. What they can tell us is that women seem to be underrepresented in these texts, and I think the overwhelming use of girl instead of woman is very significant to a feminist reading.
Literate Programming
From the readings this week, I found the bit about literate programming (in Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis) fascinating. This is the first I have heard of the practice, but this is the theoretical stuff that I love about the digital humanities. The idea is that instead of writing code, and maybe adding one or two simple phrases (comments) as a note to yourself or other programmers, you write mostly prose, with a little computer code added to make the thing work. Knuth says, “Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.” It is important, I think, to show the human influence behind everything computers do. There is a sort of ideology that is popular these days, where people (very smart people) think that computers will someday become smarter than humans, or that we will somehow be able to download our consciousness onto computers and live forever. I think this point of view devalues human intelligence and fetishizes technology (and maybe even misunderstands how computers work). Literate programming reminds us that we are ultimately working to benefit humanity, not the machines.
Tools vs. Machines
I wanted to talk briefly about Raymond Queneau’s book, “Cent mille milliards de poèmes,” because it came up several times in our readings. What is interesting about this book is that it is pretty much a non-digital hypertext, created before personal computers even existed. People have since made digital versions, which are not as impressive (I imagine) than seeing the actual print codex. Queneaus’s book is also relevant to our upcoming discussion of Paul Fyfe’s “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged.” Concerning our last discussion, I’ve been thinking a lot about tools vs. machines, and what that means to the user. The important difference being that a tool can be used for a variety of tasks, which depend upon the user’s own goals, and a machine has a set function that the manufacturer designed it to do, and the user has very little say in what it does. I think it is important that the user be allowed to actually create material with an electronic device, not just to use it as the manufacturer intended. I am concerned that our devices are becoming more like machines that we have to fit our needs to, rather than tools that we can use to suit our needs.
Fictional Worlds
I found Marie-Laure Ryan’s “Fictional Worlds in the Digital Age” very interesting. I have been fascinated by imaginary worlds since I was a kid, and read Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia (also C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, of course). Apart from this literary world-building, I hadn’t thought much about fictional worlds being created on-line. The article talks about how things in the fictional world can sometimes creep into the real world. What I especially found interesting is the criteria that we have for something to be considered real: it must have monetary value. Once something in the imaginary world – say an item that your character has acquired in an on-line game – is able to be bought and sold for real dollars, we consider it real. I think that shows an underlying trend in our society, how we value things by how much they are worth in dollars, over other forms valuation.
What makes a DH project unique?
It seems that what distinguishes a DH project from an ordinary website is a spirit of collaboration and interaction. Many DH projects are not only designed and built by a group, but the user is often involved in the creation of the project in some way. This can be something as simple as adding a comment on a discussion thread, or actually contributing to the content of the site, in the case of an archival project. These interactive elements give the user a certain amount of ownership of a project, which is very different from typical websites, most of which are designed to sell something to the user, either directly or through advertisements. It also seems that DH projects are involved in the movement to make content free and available to everyone (or at least to the middle and upper classes), which creates some interesting tensions for capitalists. Our textbooks for this class, for example, are all free to access online, which is very unusual for a college course.
Blogging in the classroom
I have been in classes before where we were required to post on a discussion forum site, and it always seemed like a chore. I think allowing students to create their own blog for class discussions is a much better idea. First of all, a blog gives students their own creative space. The discussion forum is owned by Blackboard, or whoever, and students don’t have much control over the look and function of their posts. The discussion forum is also under the professor’s control, who sets up the categories under which students are allowed to post. A blog, on the other hand, allows students to organize their thoughts in any way they choose. They can also link to other information on the web, or other students’ pages, and create a more interactive web than the bulletin board style that is used on most discussion forums. The freedom of a personal blog will not only make students more invested in their work, but will hopefully foster meaningful discussion, instead of just posting to fulfill an assignment.