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Word Cloud created with Voyant

I often assign literary analyses that ask students to work with data visualization tools such as Wordle, Prezi, Google Maps, Voyant, and Many Eyes. While it’s fun to play around with literary texts in word clouds and word trees, it is much more difficult to use visualizations for an effective “distant reading” to use Franco Moretti’s term. In the brand new online MLA Commons publication Literary Studies in the Digital Age, Tanya Clement writes in the chapter on “Text Analysis, Data Mining, and Visualizations in Literary Scholarship”:

These [data visualization] methodologies defamiliarize texts, making them unrecognizable in a way (putting them at a distance) that helps scholars identify features they might not otherwise have seen, make hypotheses, generate research questions, and figure out prevalent patterns and how to read them.

I imagine this session as a combined Talk/Play session in which we discuss the benefits and pitfalls of using data visualizations in the literature classroom (and in our own research) and play with some of these tools to see if we can come up with new hypotheses, research questions, and interpretations of patterns. I’d also be happy to share what I learned about Voyant at this week’s DiSC workshop.

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There is a bunch of stuff I want my students to know in my literature courses, but that I am not qualified or don’t want to teach- identifying countries on a map, translating key terms from other languages, grasping basic historical information, grammar.  Is there a low-stakes, self-directed, automated, and (maybe even) fun way of doing this?  I am proposing a Talk Session on developing and using online quizzes as games.

I’ve never used quizzes in my classes because I think there are far better ways to make sure students are engaged with the course content.  However, I have come to accept that sometimes we do learn simply by rote memorization. Too often though, quizzes just seem punitive and pointless.  You get one chance to get it right and then we move on.  After attending Katie Salen’s 2012 SXSW session, “Don’t Shoot the Player While they are Learning,” I began to think about how I could gather and create quizzes that taught students material that I wanted them to know, but that I didn’t want to spend class time on.  Also, I wanted to figure out how to make the quizzes feel like a low stakes game.  My approach:

• Students would not be graded on how well they did on any particular quiz.  They got a small number of points by taking any quiz 10 times over a period of at least 3 weeks.
• Students didn’t have to take the quizzes. They had many choices for assignments and could decide for themselves how to get points for the course.
• All of the quizzes were self directed, outside of class, and automated.

I was teaching courses on Contemporary American Ethnic Literature and Comics.  The initial quizzes I linked to or created were:

• A brief Spanish quiz using quotations from Junot Diaz’s Drown
• A bunch of online regional map quizzes
• A grammar quiz I helped create

Students could create quizzes as one of their assignments.  Some of the best ones I combined and let the other students take for points:

• An image-based quiz on Scott McCloud’s theories in Understanding Comics
• A culture, language, and history quiz for Maus

Some possible questions for the session:

• For what types of material is this quiz approach to learning effective?
• Could we create a massive bank of quizzes that students could access on their computers or mobile devices?
• What are possible problems with this approach?
• How would you assess the effectiveness of this approach?

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Much of the conversation on the utilization of technology in the classroom revolves around undergraduate classes, but in this Talk session, I’d like to discuss whether graduate students can or should likewise be asked to use Twitter, ebooks, blogs, Premiere, etc. in their seminars. Should graduate students create posters about Derrida, for instance, or digital stories about a Dostoevsky novel (or a historical, political, sociological text, depending on the discipline)? Practicing the use of particular tools can certainly help graduate students shape their assignments for the undergraduate classes they are set to teach, but many graduate students might (understandably) be wary of the prospect of devoting less time to writing traditional papers.

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Materialist theories in the area of Composition in the last 10-12 years have reveled that much of the way we talk about what happens in our classrooms controls how we act toward our students, how they respond, and what the public sphere thinks about the work we do in classrooms. Linda Adler-Kassner argues in her 2008 book, The Activist WPA, that the way we frame our discussions of writers and writing can have an effect on everything from our day-to-day teaching to the funding that comes from up on high.

I currently teach a New Media Literacy course tied to the required beginning composition courses at Georgia State University. I am constantly embroiled in discussion over how much students already know about new media, and how much they could learn and actually use it in a classroom. These discussions happen IN my classroom, as well as with colleagues, and even with the gentleman I end up riding next to on a plane when I visit my brother for the holidays.

My proposal fits within the talk and play areas of the conference. I propose we have a session to discuss how ‘native’ our young adult learners are when it comes to digital and new media literacy. What do they bring to the classroom, and what is it important that they take away? As we have this open discussion, the group will sit in a circle, with a small gap between the first person and the last. Any time a person in the discussion says something negative about their work, they move to the end of the circle. This way, as we have the discussion, we can also visually see (and stay kinetically interested) what kinds of values we deploy more often as we discuss. The simple rules for this game, of course are up for discussion within the group.

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I propose a session discussing open-source educational materials, particularly open-source textbooks.

What would an open-source textbook look like? What is the difference between open source and open access? What are the advantages of an open-source textbook? What are the potential drawbacks of using an open-source textbook? of creating an open-source textbook? What other types of educational resources could benefit from an open-source model?

Over the past year, I have been building an open-source, online, multimedia textbook on Github for the four-semester Musicianship course sequence that I teach. I would be happy to demo this site briefly during the session, showing how I manage it, and how it can be forked, modified, and redeployed.

For more information about my project, please see this blog post.

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Archives have gone digital. From the Modernist Journals Project to bloggers with a knack for collecting rare books, the archive itself no longer has a stable relationship to space, place, or institution. I propose a discussion about successful integration of online digital archives in the everyday classroom. What do digital documents do that the traditional archive cannot do? How do we as teachers emphasize the importance of such documents when access is at the tip of our fingers? How do you use digital archives in your classroom? How do we teach an ethics of the archive that also teaches respect for copyrighted materials?

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We all may remember this gem from the MLA Jobs List Tumblr last fall:

Many of us will be faced with this task in our job searches, and we should have an answer to give committees who know they want a digital humanist, but aren’t able to articulate what a digital humanist is or does.  I propose a session where we try to tackle this question:  “What is digital humanities, candidate?”  This is a “talk” session.  Anyone who has tried and succeeded/failed to answer this question on an interview is especially encouraged to join!

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Teaching “Academic” Writing in the 21^st Century: a collaborative talking group in which we identify (and perhaps begin to articulate solutions for) the challenges of teaching academic writing in the digital age. Some framing questions might be: What constitutes “academic” writing today? What (and who) determines if a non-peer-reviewed source is “scholarly”? How do we make space for teaching digital writing literacy in a traditional academic writing course? What are the similarities and differences in teaching how to research and write an analog critical essay and a multimodal one?