Author: Christy Pottroff

Getting DH Fever

(Reposted from maryannemyers.org)DHwordle3

Throughout this academic year I have been hovering around the Digital Humanities (DH), trying to see what it is all about and whether I might get involved.  I have learned a lot from Fordham DH-pioneers Elizabeth Cornell and Patrick Burns, who lead the grad student DH group; I participated in the Digital Pedagogy unconference workshop at MLA; and I incorporated ideas from Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It into my classes.  Finally, as of last week, I can say “I get it.” My former obstacle is now my motivational challenge:  I am going to learn to code.

Two inspiring events at Fordham last week have forged my commitment.  The first was a lecture on “Teaching to the Network” May 1 by Matt Gold, an associate professor and person of many titles at CUNY, as well as editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays published in 2012.  Gold showed and described projects such as Looking for Whitman, which created “permeable classroom walls” and brought together students studying Whitman in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Camden, N.J.; and Novi Sad, Serbia.  Gold’s other examples–including DS 106, a digital storytelling class; Dialogues on Feminism and Technology; and Davidson’s plan to offer a Coursera MOOC on “The Future of Higher Education”–drove home to me the point that DH can be connective, creative, subversive, and consoling, much like the literature I have read, studied, loved, and taught.

I am a Romanticist, with all of the ambivalences and ambiguities that vexed term embraces.  Call me parochial, but it was the Keats-Shelley Association of America symposium, “Romantic Manuscripts in a Digital World,” held at Fordham Lincoln Center on Saturday May 4, that–combined with Matt Gold’s lecture–made the value of DH unquestionable to me.  This event, chaired by KSAA president Stuart Curran and hosted at Fordham by professors Sarah Zimmerman and John Bugg, brought in teams of scholars to present three enormous DH projects in Romantic studies. Morris Eaves and Rachel Lee of the University of Rochester presented The William Blake Archive, whose inception predates the advent of the Internet. They shared the challenges that have emerged throughout the project, including the most recent efforts to decode and encode Blake’s manuscript “Vala” (aka “The Four Zoas”). Laura Mandell, Associate Director of NINES, and Lynda Pratt of the University of Nottingham described their efforts to digitize the 7000 letters of Robert Southey on Romantic Circles. Mandell demonstrated a tool designed to map relationships among the people Southey wrote to and about so that we might apply principles of network theory to confirm and challenge our views about Romantic sociability.  Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, along with David Brookshire and Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, took us behind the scenes of the Shelley-Godwin Archive project, which among other things will bring Mary Shelley’s hand-written Frankenstein into public view.

Thanks to these projects, crumbling manuscripts that were once available only to credentialed scholars will now be on line and, if all goes as apparently planned, open to all at no cost beyond an internet connection.  For the most part, the people who spoke at the Keats-Shelley symposium are not emerging scholars trying to make their mark in a competitive field.  Rather, they are accomplished professors who could easily have had a comfortable tenured existence in the ancien régime of print.  They are acting on a vision of different possibilities, and their efforts represent the perfect Romantic paradox of conservation and radical change.  They admitted challenges and risks, including: the high cost of “hidden labor” that makes these sites look deceptively easy, the frequent disconnect between technological ambition and resources, and the possibilities of unintended consequences.  (Allusions to Frankenstein’s creature abounded.)  But their generosity in opening their worlds and inviting others in with no fears of what Edmund Burke referred to as the “swinish multitude,” was beautiful and Romantic in all the best ways.  When the speakers displayed a page of .html code, it no longer looked like Greek to me, but rather like a poetic language I wanted to understand and use.

In designing a course that I called “Romanticizing Revolution,” I included a unit on today’s technology revolution at the center of the syllabus. It followed a unit on British texts from the period of the French Revolution and another on the American Sixties and preceded units on the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Occupy Movement.  In her introduction to my course’s introductory text, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 1984-1992) Romantic scholar Marilyn Butler suggests that the revolutionary fervor apparent in England in the late 1700s “did not disappear but [went] underground” in the repressive 1790s and was transformed into polemical prose pamphlets and what we now call Romantic poetry. As my students and I read texts such as Eric Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds, the source behind open source software, I began to wonder whether code is our new Romantic poetry. In a manner analogous to Butler’s claim about the emerging print culture, the emerging digital culture marks the return of the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s and 70s after the backlash of the 80s.  Although I hope to keep teaching Romantic literature, I will probably never write like William Wordsworth or Mary Robinson did.  But this past week gave me a Romantic hope that I might one day, as a participatory DH-er, help produce some code that contributes to keeping the works of this period alive.

 

Introducing: The Jesuit Hacker

“The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.”

E. S. Raymond’s insight kept popping into my head this past Wednesday when I had an opportunity to sit in on the most recent Jesuit Pedagogy Lunchtime Discussion. It was an opportunity for faculty and graduate student instructors to talk about effective practices for teaching in a Jesuit environment. Among the many threads in the discussion was the role of creativity as a pedagogical tool. Participants offered examples of creative projects being used to great success in the classroom. My mind, however, wandered very easily from creativity to creation. I can appreciate the mental exercise at work in imaginative assignments, but what are we building from them? What will we do with them? One of the participants at the discussion expressed dissatisfaction with “research qua research” in the classroom. I’m not sure I’m more satisfied with creativity qua creativity. Look at how much talent we have in the classroom. Let’s use this creativity to make something. Let’s work together to solve some “fascinating problems.”

Solving fascinating problems is the first element of the “hacker attitude” as defined by Raymond in his essay “How to Be a Hacker.” The essay is freely available (not an unimportant point, as we will see in future posts) online at: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html. Raymond’s essay contains practical wisdom for coders and people interested in computer work. It also has much practical wisdom for graduate students and instructors, particularly, I would argue, those of us in Jesuit surroundings.

For the moment, I will simply introduce Raymond’s five aspects of the “Hacker attitude.” Before I explain what each of these has meant to me in a Jesuit context, I think it would be a good idea for readers to reflect on whether or not these ideas readily map onto whatever they think the corresponding “Jesuit attitude” would look like.

Raymond describes the aspects of the “Hacker attitude” as follows:

  1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
  2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
  3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
  4. Freedom is good.
  5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

The required reading for you—and only a blog post on Jesuit pedagogy would begin with required reading—is Raymond’s essay. Over the next few posts, I plan to explain what we, as graduate students and educators at a Jesuit institution, can learn from computing culture and I will start by elaborating on each of the five points above. I think there will be real benefits from us all adopting, at least in some part, the role of “Jesuit hacker.” It is my suspicion that Raymond’s essay, in addition to other foundational works on hacker culture which I plan to discuss in future posts, will be unfamiliar to average graduate student in the humanities. I hope that this interdisciplinary clash inspire new ideas and approaches and lead to a deeper understanding of the “digital” side of digital humanities.

Prep for Markup Basics Workshop

I’m really looking forward to next week’s workshop: “Markup Basics: Build an Online CV in 45 Minutes”. We will be meeting Tuesday 10/23 at 3:00pm in Walsh 047.

In order for us to get our CV marked up in 45 minutes, it will helpful to have a few things taken care of before the meeting. The workshop assumes that everyone will be working on their own laptop, but it is not a necessity. If you want to work on one of the lab computers (or do not wish to install any software), that’s fine. Some (relatively minor) parts of the workshop will not be available, but you will still be able to markup your document and leave with an HTML/CSS-based CV.

Note that this is a markup workshop aimed at complete beginners. That said, if you have HTML/CSS experience but do not have a formatted CV, consider using the 45 minutes to get this done. Your shared expertise will no doubt also be appreciated by those sitting around you.

Bring to the workshop:

  • Your current CV. A .doc or .pdf might save you a bit of time, as you will be able to cut and paste.
  • Your laptop. I will be using a Mac but the workshop will work for any platform. You will need to have a browser installed (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) and a text editor (e.g. TextEdit for Mac, Notepad for PC, etc. but see below)

Before the workshop:

As mentioned above, these are not required, but I plan to share a few time-saving hints that take advantage of their features. NB: I will be using a Mac with TextWrangler and Chrome.

See you next Tuesday. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.—Patrick

Notes on Paperless Teaching

Patrick Burns
Thanks for all the insightful comments and positive feedback on my talk at Tuesday’s meeting, Eliminating the Handout: Paperless Teaching and the Less-Paper Reality. One things that came through is that we’re in a transitional period and eliminating the handout probably isn’t entirely practical yet. But five years from now—perhaps sooner!—the volume of paper that many of us still deal with on a regular basis will seem extremely old-fashioned. As we embrace this transition, here are a few things worth keeping in mind:

Will having a paperless classroom make your life more difficult?
Paper is a tool and often a very useful one. While I might cringe a bit if an instructor regularly passed out stapled, 30-page, one-sided readings, the occasional handout is not going to hurt anyone. For me, it was a matter of making my teaching style fit better with the rest of my workflow and that meant avoiding paper wherever possible. It also meant that I had many other parts of a rock-solid paperless system already in place. Accordingly, wholesale change might not be practical when you have all of your other teaching responsibilities to take care of. For now, perhaps it would be best to simply become more conscious of your paper needs by asking yourself before heading over to the copier: why do my students need this and why do they need a paper copy?

Are you ready to make your classroom computer friendly?
Based on several conversations I’ve had recently, laptops and tablets are for the most part still an unwelcome guest in class. The main reason given is that they are distracting. It is hard to argue that a student who spends class time on Facebook, or texting, or playing games, or [fill-in-the-blank] is not going to be distracted, or worse, distract other students. That said, I have found that making the laptop or tablet a focal point for in-class work seems to reduce these temptations. (I’m not delusional—I said reduce, not eliminate.) Of course, if the technology makes you uncomfortable, the benefits of a paperless classroom are never going to outweigh the negative impact on your teaching style. Paperless teaching is not a goal in itself, but a strategy for making the best use of your time, energy and resources as a teacher. Make no concessions that do not serve the main goal.

Are your students ready for a computer-friendly classroom?
Of course they are, or so I thought heading into this semester. This one surprised me. I can’t imagine doing seriously work without my laptop and I assumed my students felt the same way. As it turns out, they are in a transitional period too. We are starting to see a handful of students in each class fully committed to taking notes on their laptops and reading articles on their tables, but there many more who instinctively reach for pen and paper. It appears that many of them are open to computer-centric study habits, but for whatever reason—perhaps the no-device policies of other instructors or anxiety about experimenting with a new workflow mid-semester—are slow to adopt them. I have no doubt that this will change and perhaps change quickly. In the meantime, be aware that despite your best efforts at keeping paper to a minimum, you may need to deal with some resistance.

Are you comfortable with online assessment?
With my intro and intermediate language classes, quizzes are the biggest paper burden and finding some other way for regular assessment and feedback is very appealing. I’ll be honest though—I’m not there yet on this one. Still I am willing to experiment. This semester, I’ve begun to administer quizzes through Blackboard. It is too early to report the results of this experiment, but I can say that so far I’ve been happy with two things specifically: 1. quizzes no longer take up valuable class time and 2. I no longer have to manage the non-stop administer-collect-grade-return cycle. I will jettison this experiment in a second if I think that my students are learning less Latin. Again, too early to tell. Look for a future post about what I discover.

I aspire to a paperless lifestyle outside of the classroom. Moreover, I’m at the point where my laptop and my phone are with me at all times. That’s where I do my much of my reading and where I jot down all of my notes. It would feel disingenuous to run my classroom with different priorities. My experiments are going well on the whole and I’m dealing with setbacks in turn. I think it is important for all of us to maintain an open discussion of successes and failures as we adopt the tools and strategies of digital pedagogy. Keep me posted on your own paperless progress in the comments.

—Patrick J. Burns