Are Digital Humanities “White”?

*Note: This will be a short post because I am currently working on my final project using Voyant, which I am very excited about!! But I felt compelled to make a post about the current debate surrounding Tara McPherson’s article.*

According to Tara McPherson’s article titled “Why are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,” the answer to the question in my post title is “yes.” There has already been much debate on this article not only from critics in the field, but also in our Digital Pedagogy classroom. From the question of “is there anything real thing as an ideology?” to “What is she even talking about? Technology can’t be racist.” Some of the major points she brings up are the people that write about the computer industry and the fact many of them are white man, and the fact that, overall, the Digital Humanities doesn’t talk about race too much. The question of gender has been raised every so often, but not race.

I’m not sure that I am in as much disagreement with McPherson’s points as my classmate, Mark, but I do think the problem may be that McPherson’s argument is clear enough. I found myself thinking while reading the article: who is at fault here? Is it the people that create the machines? Or is the people that consume technology? McPherson cannot blame computer/IT workers who create technology for being white if they are white or for being black if they are black- they just are, they just exist. This may sound like I am making a “color-blind” statement, but that is not what I am trying to imply. Rather, I am trying to state that the market tends to embrace whiteness- white people are educated in these fields, white people are hired, white people develop the technology. So, what can we do about this? I don’t think we can blame the people who have already paved the way for the development of technology. However, we can start bringing technology and opportunities to study and develop new technologies to inner-city students and colleges, where much of the black population tend to reside. This may finally bring race to the conversation in a way it hasn’t existed before.

An interesting question, though, is is it too late? Is the DH community permanently color blind? If this is a problem, can we reverse it?

I think that our future discussion on this article, and watching the development of race in the field, will be quite interesting.

Digital Pedagogy Mini Project

In class we have been discussing how the digital humanities should be incorporated into the classroom. What does digital pedagogy look like? and furthermore, how do we convince departments and administrators to take the leap into the 21st century and fully embrace the possibilities of including digital pedagogy on an Intro to English syllabus, for example.

For this mini-project, I chose to create a final project that would provide students the relative freedom to incorporate a digital tool or social media of their choosing. The students will “perform” the role of a character from a text we have read and create that character’s “digital footprint” through close reading exercises that reveal the wants, desires, values, and ethics of said character. The following is the assignment that I have created:

Course: Humanities-Literature 121

Final Project: Students will pick from a character from one of the listed texts (all of which have been selected from the syllabus) and create their digital footprint using social media outlets (such as Facebook or Instagram) or other digital humanities programs (such as Omeka or a WordPress blog). Using close reading skills, the students will decide what aspects of their character (their actions, interactions, dialogue, or even appearance) will inform how their character would use digital media. For example, what would Iago, from Othello put on his facebook page? He might include articles on how to achieve the best revenge, links to personality tests, and maybe even posts about anti-feminism protests. The point is that the students will first read the text for an initial understanding of how their characters would use digital media to their benefit, and then read the text again but this time against the grain. What is not said about their character might be as useful as what is revealed.

Activity Objective:
The objective of this activity is to demonstrate to students how digital tools can create engaging activities with the text that require more than just simple journal or blog entries for analyzing texts. By “performing” the characters, students will be encouraged to use their critical reading skills to fully understand the motives, values, and ethics of their character. Students will simultaneously demonstrate the current relevancy of issues that when read through the text may only seem significant to the plotline itself. Using Othello as an example again, if a student chooses to create Desdemona’s digital footprint, they may want to consider what the best digital platform would be to demonstrate issues of gender in Desdemona’s life. Would she use a blog post to talk about her relationship with Othello? Or would she be more of a visual person, using Pinterest to share pins that represent the challenges and joys she faces. It is assumed that the student will use their imaginations to view the character through a modern lens but without undermining the significance of the text.

Texts:
Othello-Shakespeare (or another Shakespeare play which must be approved by me)
“Winter Dreams”-Fitzgerald
“The Yellow Wallpaper”- Gilman
“Bartleby the Scrivener”- Melville
“A Rose for Emily”- Faulkner
“The Dead”-Joyce
The Coquette-Hannah Webster Foster

Requirements:
• If using Facebook, Instagram, or another type of social media, you must have 7-9 posts by your character. They should be critical in nature (for instance you can’t just update their status to say “Having bad day, locked away by my husband”) but rather, a well-structured, insightful post that considers the various elements of how that character functions. If one of your peers has also created a social media page for their project, you may interact with each other online but it must be in the form of your characters.

• If you are using Omeka, you must create two exhibits that surround the interests of your character. Each exhibit must include up to 5 items with well written descriptions.

• If you choose the blog option, you must also have 7-9 posts that are well-written and thoroughly demonstrate your character’s potential to successfully express his or herself through digital media.

• All students must write a 2-3 page reflection paper, double spaced that includes how they approached the project, the reasons they used the digital tool or social media they chose, an analysis on what was included in their projects. The reflection paper may be from their point of view, or if the student wants to practice their creative writing skills, they may write it from the perspective of their character to keep in line with the rest of the assignment.

Remember: This project requires you to look outside for different sources that you may think your character would read. For instance, would Dexter from Winter Dreams be more interested in an article published by the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times? It is absolutely necessary that students use their imagination for this assignment.

I made an example of what an Omeka page from a character’s perspective might look like. I used Dexter from the short story by Scott Fitzgerald titled “Winter Dreams.” It’s just a small example of how students would begin the project- I would expect more from them in the final draft.

http://earlyamericanwomen.omeka.net/

Digital Humanities and Undergraduate Education

Reading Tanya Clement’s “Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum: Skills, Principles, and Habits of Minds” certainly raised some new questions in my mind as to how Digital Pedagogy has been considered in Higher Education in regards to undergraduate curriculum. Clements points out in her history of the Digital Humanities as a subject, there has always been a debate among humanities scholars, community experts, and administrations on how it should be taught. Clement writes “Twenty years later, the conversation has in some ways evolved minimally. For instance, in an exchange on the Humanist Listserv in April 2010, Alexander Hay asks, ‘What would be the bare minimum any would-be Humanities Computing researcher should have in terms of skills? By that, I mean what should you know in order to be eligible for most jobs, funding opportunities, etc?’… “Willard McCarty replies that a question concerning skills ‘is a question implicitly at least asked and answered by those who set up programmes in the field, especially undergraduate programmes,’ since a question of skills “becomes less important the more academic and the less professional the training becomes.”

She continues to point out that some professionals believe that undergraduates should be taught the skills necessary to become an expert in the Digital Humanities while others do not. Although discussion on this topic has not progressed much over the pass few decades, there seems to be a broader agreement among scholars that students should engage in multiliteracies that will make them marketable to an evolving society that is primarily based in technology. So why the hesitancy to incorporate the Digital Humanities more fully into undergraduate curriculum? The answer is partially in the fact that there are multiple perspectives as to what should be taught in Digital Humanities programs. As Clement points out “What and how digital humanities students learn in order to achieve these multiliteracies is under considerable debate from a variety of perspectives.” “What and how” constitutes Digital Humanities studies? Also, as Clement writes, many disagree over what constitutes the difference between undergraduate and graduate studies in the Digital Humanities? Celment states McCartney as claiming “the difference between undergraduate and graduate work as one determined by learning technical skills and professional training on the one hand (undergraduate), and learning to think or do academic research on the other (graduate).” Why does there have to be a difference between undergraduate and graduate Digital Humanities curriculum? Shouldn’t the graduate level just offer more intense, complicated studies on the same subject, as it functions in other humanities programs such as History or English? Separating the undergraduate and graduate curriculum this greatly would raise issues of what department a Digital Humanities program should fall under. By McCartney’s definition, the Digital Humanities would be best situated in a science/technology related department while the graduate description falls more generally into the Humanities on a whole.

Considering it is 2015, and this conversation has been occurring since the 1980’s, it might be time to find an answer. Evolving technology, and forms of multiliteracy will not stop evolving just so scholars can figure out what is best on an academic level. I say this, hypocritically, of course, since I don’t know that I have my own opinion on what the solution should look like. Many aspects of the Digital Humanities are more “techy” in nature (yes, I’m aware that Webster has not made “techy” an actual word yet) and seems less likely to fit within a Humanities umbrella; however, it is not so much in the way that the Digital Humanities work (in terms of learning how to make programs work) but in how it is applied. For what reasons is a student or scholar using a digital programs? Does it have to do with literature, history, biology, etc…? Of course, this may just bring us right back to the problem- how do we define it? How do we categorize the Digital Humanities? Hopefully we are getting closer to finding a solution to the conversation.

Voyant Visualization

For my final Voyant visualization project, I chose to consider the six depositions, by men, testifying to Bridget Bishop’s guilt as a witch when the Salem Witch Trials were occurring. Specifically, they are titled “The Deposition of John Bly” “The Deposition of John Louder” “The Deposition of Richard Coman” “The Deposition of Samuell Gray” “The Deposition of Samuell Shattock” and “The Deposition of William Stacy.” I have been interested in these particular texts in relationship to a larger project I am working on regarding language and the representation of women in early American legal documents. One of the first words I noticed re-appearing several times is the word “bed.” At first this seemed odd, but another look at the list of word frequencies also showed the re-occurrence of the word “night.” Perhaps, than, “bed” is not so odd a word if many of the men are describing their “attacks” as occurring at nighttime.

I decided it would be interesting to see if there was any relationships between the amount of times “night” is used compared to the words “day” and “awake.” The entire corpus shows that the word “bed” is used 13 times, “night” is used eight times, “day” is used seven times, and “awake” is used six times. Although “night”, “day” and “awake” are used relatively close in the number of times used, the Word Trends graph demonstrates how “night” and “bed” seem to be used together at the same times in most of the depositions.

Here is what the Word Trends graph looks like:

WordTrends

So, why does this matter? We have to think about how these words look in relation to historical context. Emerson Baker, author of the book A Storm of Witchcraft considers that men like Richard Coman may have been experiencing sleep paralysis when describing women like Bishop attacking him in his sleep (108). This is an interesting theory that has much merit, but the sexual imagery that is clear in many of the testimonies supports the fact that Bridget Bishop was one of the victims who was often looked upon by others as a sinful because many considered her over sexualized. Maryilnne K. Roach, the author of The Six Women of Salem notes that she would dress outlandish compared to her neighbors, causing a lot of unwanted attention. I propose that it is possible the word “bed” and “night” are frequently used by the men in Bishop’s depositions because part of the reasons for their accusations are coming from a place of sexual deviation. They feel guilty for their physical attraction toward her, and this may be one of the reasons several of the men claim her “spectre” attacked them in the middle of the night. Baker reminds us that Coman says in one of his testimonies that Bishop “so oppressed him that he could not speak not stir no not so much as to awake his wife although he endeavored much so to do it” (108). Sounds like a guilty conscience to me! Does the re-occurrence of the word “night” and “bed” prove this? Probably not. However, it does make an interesting find when considering how men are viewing and talking about women in legal testimonies during the U.S. colonial period.

*Please note that this research is very much in the developing stages*

Voyant Playtime and DH Project Love

Recently we have been playing with Voyant in class and so far I enjoy it. I’m worried about my project though as I am not sure that it will reveal much about the text that I am using. I want to input all of the testimonies against Bridget Bishop as recorded during the Salem Witch Trials to see if there is anything in the language that reveals how women are represented in legal documents throughout the colonial period in New England. Hopefully it will show me something interesting- even if it’s just a really neat word cloud I can share on this blog later on.

Anyway, I want to talk about some of my favorite Digital Humanities projects and why I love them so much! The first one actually has to do with my voyant topic: it is the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. Hosted by the University of Virginia, it offers access to all court records, letters, record books, sermons, and diaries that were recorded during the time period of the trials. They also offer access to maps that shows where the lines are drawn between counties, a very significant point of query when researching the trials. If it wasn’t for this archive, the only access to Salem Witch Trials records would be through a typical, codex book (which is not very convenient when you just want to look at one transcript) or through the Massachusetts Historical Society (which not all people have access to at all times). The project doesn’t have a fancy structure or display, but user interaction is simple and the assets are indispensable for early American scholars like myself. Overall, I appreciate its simplicity and effectiveness- there is nothing better than a super useful, non-overwhelming DH project.

Another one of my favorite DH projects is called Mapping the Republic of Letters hosted by Stanford University. The structure of this project is much more intricate and interactive than the Salem DH project. MRL provides several case studies on different men of the times, including Franklin and Locke, that analyzes their correspondence through letters. Some of the questions they pose, and provide answers to, for example, include “Who were Franklin’s top correspondents by volume of correspondence?” A graph, organized between the years 1756 and 1763, than visualizes where and how many letters were sent to Franklin between these years. The user interaction is fairly straight forward and the project offers links to publications and a blog.

Connecting Classrooms through the Digital Humanities

“Looking for Whitman: A Multi-Campus Experiment in Digital Pedagogy” by Matthew K. Gold was a really great article and poses some interesting questions about co-scholarship among students through the use of technology. The literary aspect of this project alone made it an interesting one. Geographically mapping Walt Whitman’s life and work opens up new ideas and questions about the time and period in which he lived. Adding the DH component makes the project even cooler! Gold discusses how students from different classes in different schools were able to connect their work and reflect on their findings through the projects multiple websites, blogs, etc. Each student received their own blog space to work in, or as Gold called it a “a domain of one’s own” but ultimately all the work was combined into one space in order to see how each class approached their own part of the project (each class focused on a different time and place in Whitman’s life). I agree with Gold that the most rewarding part of this project (and just in general using DH in the classroom) is that students at different points in their education, at different places throughout the country (and later on in the project, internationally) with different interests could come together and exchange their scholarship. However, this may be the major fault with projects like this as well. How ironic! Gold suggested that many of the students were frustrated with other students lack of ability in certain areas, and over time what was meant to be an interactive project became  stagnant due to lack of interest. Gold writes:

“As Groom points out, mixing a heterogeneous set of students together in a single online space—especially one that places a great deal of emphasis on social interaction—might seem to some observers to be at best a bad idea, and at worst a dangerous one. What could graduate students studying literature learn from undergraduate students taking general-education courses at an urban school of technology? Would undergrads be intimidated by the work of more advanced students who were working within their fields of specialization? Would undergrads engage in flame wars on the course site?”

While Gold doesn’t report of any undergrads beginning flame wars, it does seem like the levels of education and preparation between graduate and undergraduate students may have created an area of tension. Still, that does not mean that projects like this should  be attempted more often. I think that this is one of the reasons that I am very interested in pursuing more in the Digital Humanities. We are living in a world where people are connected to other people, ALL THE TIME! Why not take advantage of this and apply it to our scholarship? Why should developing technology be left out of the classroom? There will always be problems with something that is new and up and coming, but the more we practice it the better it will become overtime. I believe this applies to multi-class/user DH projects as well.

With it being said that these are the type of things that I really love about DH, last Thursday’s class was really rough for me. I couldn’t get things to work, upload, download, whatever…and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of colleagues who seemed to know what they were doing without any struggle at all. Sometimes this class feels like Drawing II all over again. I am amidst a group of people who technology just comes naturally to, just like drawing came naturally to all the budding artists in that damn art class. I know that I have to face the technological aspects of this class head on and not be afraid to dive in, try something, fail, and try it again. But man, sometimes it’s just really hard.

Data Mining, Visualization, and Other Things that Sometimes Make Book Lovers Angry

Over the course of my time as a student, from working on my B.A., to finishing my Masters work and now beginning my Ph.D., I have always found myself in a conversation with someone who things that technology is ruining the literary field, specifically their relationship with physical, codex books. I remind myself that these people are only concentrating on some of the negatives that come with joining together the world of literature and technology; because as Tanya Clement describes in her article “Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship” some pretty cool things can and are being done.

Overall, I understood the main point of Clement’s essay, and I agree there is a lot to be done, especially through text analysis. I am fascinated with how far technology has come; today we can simply type in a word and find out how many times it was used in comparison to some other word in every book by an British author during the 1800’s. This has been done, as Clement’s article points out, with Jane Austen’s work and other scholars have used similar programs to track really neat things in Shakespeare’s plays as well. I’ll admit, though, that Clement’s essay also left me very confused. She uses a lot of technical jargon that I am not familiar with and left me feeling lost as to how she really understands the relationship between literary scholarship and technology (though I get the feeling that she overall likes it). I wanted to comment on this problem that I had specifically because I feel like technology can be really overwhelming to scholars who do feel distant from and unsure of how to use, or even discuss how technology works in their own fields. Sorry for the tangent, I just felt the need to point out some of the hesitancy that people still have concerning literary scholarship and technology. Much of her article relates the in’s and out’s of popular programs that people use to make really cool things: here’s the problem, I don’t know how to use those programs! So while I can understand how technology can help literary scholarship open new doors, it’s hard to really wrap my head around the plausibility of it because I know I will probably never have the technological skills needed to be successful.

As interesting as Clement’s main points were, I really enjoyed Mills Kelly’s essay titled “Visualizing Millions of Words.” He discusses introducing technology, such as text analysis as a way for his students to understand the relevance of words and how they are used and change overtime. But he makes a great point when he says “While such frequencies do reflect something, it is not clear from one graph just what that something is. So instead of an answer, a graph like this one is a doorway that leads to a room filled with questions, each of which must be answered by the historian before he or she knows something worth knowing.” I agree completely with this statement! A point that I feel I had made before, technology cannot just be used to show how flashy literary scholarship can be, instead it should be used to demonstrate all the ways we have not thought to read or approach a particular text. Graphs can show us things that are sometimes hard to visualize without the actual visualization, but what matters more is what the visualization has taught us about the particular text being considered.

 

 

Un-Digital Digital Humanities

In “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged” Paul Fyfe discusses how in some cases it is better for the Digital Humanities to unplug the technology, especially in the classroom. It never occurred to me that DH could be separated from technology. DH is a phenomenon that has really come to blossom during my time as a student in various programs from my bachelors to now as I work on my Ph.D. As the field grows, it seems more and more contingent on advanced technology (and with that advanced technological skills. So much that when I told my significant other I was taking a class in the Digital Humanities, he raised his eyebrow at me and said ‘are you sure about that?’ since he knows I am far from computer savvy). Therefore, when I started reading Fyfe’s article I was really eager to see what he would say about this topic.

Overall, Fyfe makes some great points including the fact that technology in the classroom can quickly become boring. Using powerpoint lectures, he says, “rain down boredom in a hail of bullet points.” By saving the interactive aspects of education, such as discussion and writing, for the classroom and creating a digital community outside of the classroom, it seems more likely the students will be engaged with the material. Also, I really appreciate Fyfe’s point that unplugging the classroom allows students to really understand how much work and brain power it takes to analyze a text. This is clear through his “Pride and Prejudice” example. Using a technological program that can sort out how many times the words “pride” and “prejudice” are used in the text is a great use of technology in the DH field. However, highlighting these words with two different colored highlighters helps students to better visualize the text, not to mention encourages their close reading abilities.

I think it’s really necessary to make sure that the technology we are using when teaching students actually benefits them rather than just entertaining them. In Sinclair, Ruecker, and Radzikowska’s “Information Visualization for Humanities Scholars” they demonstrate how a program like Wordle can show the frequency of the words used in a particular text. The word cloud it creates can be used to make comparisons between two texts. However, it is not the best program when it comes to this type of analysis and is often used because it just looks really cool (I mean, who doesn’t love an amazing looking word cloud? I know I can’t resist them). Actually, the program that should be used is Bubblines, and why it does not look as fun and fancy, it is much better for a comparison of two texts.

As we are now in a place where questions about what and how the Digital Humanities constitutes, we should continue the conversation on how DH and pedagogy will impact our classrooms and our students. It’s a topic in consideration as I write this blog, but I am looking forward to seeing what will become of the conversation in the future.

 

Can the Digital Age Change the “Narrative?”

Good question- my immediate response to this question would be no. The narrative is a solid, old form and there are no more considerable directions to take it. Of course, this was my immediate response and these types of responses are usually not well thought out. After reading “Multivariant Narratives” by Marie-Laure Ryan, I have changed my mind. The Digital Age has offered various new ways to consider the narrative, especially when it comes to reading hypertexts. One of the points that Ryan makes often is that the multivariant narrative does not necessarily have a direct course. When one is reading a typical codex book, for example, Moby Dick (why Moby-Dick, you might say, everyone hates that book! No, actually, they don’t and I’m an early Americanist so don’t make fun of Melville). So say a disgruntled high school student is reading Moby Dick, they only have one direction to go in. They start at the beginning of the book and finish it until the end (unless they take a short detour through sparknotes- but that is a different story!). There is nothing to take them on an alternate path and Melville did not provide his reader with any alternative endings. With hypertexts, however, there are various ways a reader can experience the narrative- and as Laure points out, most people never finish a narrative when they are reading a hypertext because it is almost impossible to visit all the paths involved. A good example of this is the hypertext by Shelly Jackson titled “My Body.” Finding all the paths to read the whole story takes a lot of time and effort by the reader, and after a few “clicks” most will finish when they are satisfied with what they have read. This doesn’t happen all too often when reading a typical codex narrative.

Laure also points out that the digital world can add sound to the narrative. Old media narratives, also known as books do have pictures and images, but never has sound been available (unless you are talking about one of those picture books for toddlers that has the panel of noises to accompany the text on the side. Always loved those things as a kid- still like them today when I play with my nephews.) Laure ends her essay with this really excellent point:

“The textual phenomena described in this chapter represent two extremes on the cultural spectrum.        While computer games have taken popular culture by storm, generating a billion-dollar industry that rivals Hollywood and Disneyland, hypertext is an arcane academic genre read mostly by theorists and prospective authors. What remains to be conquered for digital textuality is the territory that lies between the stereotyped narrative scripts of popular culture and the militant anti-narrativity of so many experimental texts: a territory where narrative form is neither frozen nor ostracized, but recognized as an endlessly productive source of knowledge and aesthetic experiences” (no page number- this is digital, baby!).

If the experimental text, or the multivariant narrative offers an “endlessly productive source of knowledge and aesthetic” than how do we make it mainstream? Should it be mainstream, and if it does, how will it change the way that people read? How will Barnes and Nobles handle it? I think that these are larger questions about the future of digital texts, digital pedagogy, and teaching digital English that need to be thought about and discussed more often.

*NOTE*: I wanted to touch upon “How the Computer Works” by Andrea Laue in this blog post because I think these pieces work in a nice dialogue with each other. However, I have a horrible sore throat (and although there are no excuses in Ph.D. school, my head feels like it is about to explode. Quite a messy affair, I would think). I will probably relate a little of what I thought about Laue’s piece in Thursday’s post instead.

E-Books: Where Will They Take Us?

After reading Johanna Drucker’s “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space” I contemplate the design of the e-book and how much it can, or cannot, substitute the use of a regular, codex book. The article was published in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies in 2008, and I can’t help but think about all the things that have changed since than. It is 2015 now and Amazon has released several versions of their e-reader, Kindle, that is probably the closest to replicating a codex book. It’s features, on the HD reader at least, definitely try to mimic the look of a regular book. When you swipe the screen it looks as though the page as turning; you can highlight text and add notes as well. One of my favorites features of reading e-books is the search function. I had once been more privy to using codex based books, especially when I was writing a paper. Having the book in my hand and being able to find the sticky note I added to locate what I wanted to write about in my paper was comforting. I find now that with the search mechanism, I can find words, phrases, etc…and that comes in especially useful when I’m writing papers. Kindle (I’m not sure about other e-readers like Barnes and Noble’s Nook) even collects in one space all the highlights and notes you made, so finding those is not any harder than finding them in a regular codex form. I think that Drucker raises an interesting question when she writes “… I return to my original question: What features of traditional codex books are relevant to the conception and design of virtual books?” (1). I would place emphasis on the need for a place to take notes and write down ideas while reading. As I mentioned before, the Kindle device does take care of this need. Drucker answers the question a little more in depth though. She writes “My approach can be outlined as follows: (1) proceed through analysis of “how” a book “works” rather than by describing what we think a book “is”; (2) describe the “program” that arises from a book’s formal structures; (3) discard the idea of iconic “metaphors” of book structure in favor of understanding the way these forms serve as constrained parameters for performance” (1). These are all really good points because as literature majors I think it is natural for us to put the meaning of the story, the theory, the analysis, etc…before what constitutes the actual purpose and design of a book. So many of my friends and colleagues will say without hesitation that they love books, LOVE BOOKS! The smell of a new book, the smell of an old book; the texture of the pages, the thrill of turning a page and knowing they are one minute closer to the finish. I don’t think there will every be anything that can replace this feeling, and thus codex books are not in danger of being replaced by their electronic substitute. I may be committing “literary heresy” here, but I like both equally. I know, I know, send out the guards to bring me to the dungeon now! But really, I find that I love my Kindle for the specific features it offers as much as I love the old fashion version. Maybe someday my opinion will change, but for now I like both. Of course, there is one exception: I like finding old books, primary sources, and of course old newspapers. I’m an early Americanist- I can’t help it. The feeling of finding something really cool in an old newspaper will never be replaced by the benefits of an electronic device.

I did not address the “where will they take us” part of this blog post. I think I need time to ponder some more on this question. They have already taken us so far. Anyone have any ideas?

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