ThatCamp Philadelphia: Digital Humanities Integration Into Regular Literature Classrooms

The final session I attended at ThatCamp Philadelphia was run bu Janine Utell on integrating the digital humanities into regular literature classrooms.

  • Amanda French defines the digital humanities as “open access”
  • How can student work be put online? WordPress, PBWorks, etc
  • Digital Humanities Quarterly given as example of open access
  • Should give students option to take down work at the end of the semester
  • I am going to try out commonplace blogs with my eng102 classes next semester
  • Utell: Digital humanities is essential to keeping the humanities alive
  • Some discussion about establishing comment policies
  • Crowd sourcing comment policy to students
  • Peer review is important before work goes online
  • Instructor comments on blogs tapers off as semester goes on
  • French and Siobhan Phillips bring out Google’s ngrams, wordles
  • I’ve had students A/B an Obama speech to a Jefferson speech
  • More incorportation of audio, video, etc into literary classes
  • Modernist Journals Project
  • Amanda French stresses the need to teach bibliographic software like Noodle, Evernote, and Zotero

NJCEA: Chaucer, Linguistics, & Parentage

Perhaps the most interesting presentation I saw at NJCEA was Glenn Steinberg’s on Chaucer, Linguistics, and Parentage. A lot of very interesting data mining in this presentation.

  • Chaucer doesn’t stylistically deviate from his peers.
  • There were some interesting handouts about The Book of The Dutchess and Daphnaida.
  • Handout compares number of word uses between Spender, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.
  • I would love to see wordles of these. That might make for an interesting student project. Maybe each wiki page needs a wordle.
  • Spenser has more phrases in common with Lydgate than Chaucer, but could be because of evolving language.
  • Spenser’s claim that Chaucer highly influenced him greatly exaggerated.

Thomas Jefferson Wordles

Earlier this semester in Composition I I had students read one of Thomas Jefferson’s State Of The Union addresses and annotate it as part of our early discussions on literary research. What I wish I had thought to do was create a wordle of the address to see how that changes/helps student’s annotation and close reading. Recently, after I mentioned this on Twitter, another Twitter user pointed me to Governing Dynamo, a website that archives every president’s inaugural addresses but also offers wordles and other assorted new media.

The wordles are very insightful and I think can help students narrow in on what the focus of a piece of writing. I think in the spring I will use Jefferson’s first inaugural address for the annotation assignment. Wordles will add an interesting new aspect to student reading and my teaching.

 

MA Thesis Wordle

I’ve heard a lot about Wordle lately and after seeing Prof Hacker’s recent post about I thought I would create a Wordle of my Master’s Thesis from last year. A lot of pretty obvious words come up highlighted or repeated enough to take up a lot of space in the Wordle. Prof Hacker has some links to more textual analysis webpages and articles; eventually, I’d like to look into this more when I have the time.