listening to repeating

What is critical thinking anyway?

Oh the meta-pressure of critical intervention: identifying what is missing from a field and explaining why it matters and how you’ll add it.  It’s not a bad situation to be in; however, it’ll keep you awake at night, inattentive during any given conversation, drinking gallons of coffee, and narcissistically festering over your own self-worth.  Or maybe that’s just me, since, for the last week or so, I’ve been refining why and for whom I’m writing my dissertation.  (Ok, ok, I’ve been doing that for over a year now.  Interventions are slippery, and fields are expansive.  Give me a break.)

At the same time, I’ve had a few chats this week, including one in the classroom, about a humanist fixation that so often rears its balding head: Why bother with English?  Why study literature now?  (And, by proxy, why do we lit nerds exist, especially in a “digital age”?)  One common response is plainly put.  You study literature and write about it because—but of course!—they foster critical thinking, which I’m all for.  Yet once I hear that term several times, the jargon accrues, and the vacuous cliché gets set for mass production.  I then start to wonder what people imply by “critical” or “thinking” and, better yet, how to concretely identify, practice, and assess either of them.

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For today’s Information School Research Conversation on “Project-Based Approaches to the Digital Humanities,” Matt and I whipped up a website.  It has links galore, as well as some talking points on why we are choosing “mapping” as a framework for articulating English and Geography through the Digital Humanities.

Feedback’s welcomed!

For the technoculture studies course I’m teaching in the fall, I’ve been working through ways of prompting different trajectories for cultural work in the class, appealing to varying student interests and investments, and stressing how cultural studies can be enriched through diverse mobilizations.

That said, I’m thinking of circulating three prompts for quarter-long inquiry.  Drafts of those prompts—as rough as they are—appear below.  Your comments are welcome, especially if you are a teacher person and/or a student.  Thanks!  I’m honestly in a liminal space here.

Option 1: The Digital Humanities: Texts, But How to Perceive Them?

This approach to English 207 asks you to mobilize digital technologies in a humanities context. For this project, you should select some material (from or related to the course) and “remediate” it in your own innovative digital project.  Possibilities include, but are certainly not limited to, Flash animations of a journal article, mapping a novel using Google Maps or Google Earth, and visualizing a text differently through WordsEye or Wordle.

Whatever the technologies you choose, the ultimate goal is—to borrow from Andrew Ross—for your project to understand technology as “a lived, interpretive practice for people in their everyday lives.”  It should not only suggest new ways of reading and engaging the English 207 course material, but also pose new questions about how people perceive it.

For this project, at the end of the quarter, you will be asked to submit:

(1)   A file or URI for your digital project,

(2)   A project description (of no more than 250 words),

(3)   A statement of methodology (of no more than 250 words),

(4)   An analysis (of no more than 500 words) of your project, to include how it engages the course material and to what effects, and

(5)   A bibliography of works consulted.

The project will be evaluated on:

(1)   How persuasive are its intersections with the course material, especially our conversations about technoculture studies and the senses.

(2)   The degree to which it enables new ways of reading, engaging and perceiving your selected material.

(3)   How your writing demonstrates both an awareness of your methodology and a complex analysis of that methodology.

(4)   The stakes of your project, or the degree to which it makes your material matter in new ways.

(5)   How your project understands its audience—both for the digital project and the writings associated with it.

Option 2: Humanities Research: Practices, But How to Contextualize Them?

For this approach to English 207, you are asked to select a topic related to the course material and research it extensively over the course of the quarter.  Through the lens of cultural studies as your critical framework, your research should contextualize and—to quote Meaghan Morris—unpack “the historical and social constraints on interpretation.”  The interpretation of what, exactly, is the next question, one which you are free to answer.  Still, to facilitate the process and augment our conversations about technoculture studies, you might attend to how technology is culturally embedded, for whom, how, and for what purposes.  Example topics include the digitization of race, the historical gendering of technology, depictions of sexuality online, and—per Miriam Hansen—the “political ecology of the senses.”

This project is essay-based.  That said, at the end of the quarter, you will be asked to submit:

(1)   An academic print paper or an academic webtext of approximately 2200 to 2500 words in length,

(2)   A works cited page for the paper, and

(3)   An annotated bibliography of at least ten works consulted (at least five of which cannot be from the assigned course material).

The project will be evaluated on:

(1)   How persuasive are its intersections with the course material, especially our conversations about cultural studies and technoculture studies.

(2)   The degree to which it contextualizes (and politicizes) the issues relevant to your material.

(3)   The complexity of both your research and your argument.

(4)   The stakes of your project, or the degree to which it makes your material matter in new ways.

(5)   How your writing understands its academic audience.

Option 3: The Applied Humanities: Theory, But How to Make It Move?

As an approach to English 207, this project asks you to propose institutional or social change—to, in the words of Ien Ang, conduct cultural research that has the “capacity for conjunctural questioning,” through which people can “invent common grounds within which social futures can be imagined and worked towards.”  That said, this project should be motivated by theory, but with practice in mind.  For it, you are asked to identify a cultural issue that you think warrants more attention in the Seattle area (or, if you prefer, on the UW-Seattle campus).  You should then research that issue—perhaps, in tandem with the course material, through interviews, archival work, and/or community-based inquiry—and articulate how, with collaboration and new partnerships in mind, that issue might be addressed, problematized, and unpacked.  The proposal may emerge from community-based work that you are already doing, have done, or want to do.  The aim here is to generate conversations about an issue and how it matters for different people differently.

For this project, at the end of the quarter, you will be asked to submit:

(1)   A statement of motivation (of no more than 250 words),

(2)   An articulation of relevant background material and events (of no more than 250 words),

(3)   A statement of theoretical framework for cultural research (of no more than 500 words),

(4)   A statement of methodology or “intended course of action,” (of no more than 500 words),

(5)   A statement of concerns and questions (of no more than 250 words), and

(6)   A bibliography of works consulted.

This proposal can assume the form of print or a webtext and can be augmented with media (e.g., sound files, images, and video).

The project will be evaluated on:

(1)   How persuasive are its intersections with the course material, especially our conversations about cultural studies and cultural research.

(2)   The degree to which it contextualizes and problematizes your issue.

(3)   The complexity of your research, motivation, and methodology, how your concerns and questions demonstrate awareness, and the plausibility of your proposal.

(4)   The stakes of your project, or the degree to which it makes your issue matter in new ways.

(5)   How your writing understands its audience and context.

Recently came across this ten-minute excerpt from an EGS talk by Sandy Stone. For those of you who are interested in digital humanities work and teaching through technologies, the talk gets particularly interesting around minute three: “Don’t teach skills. Teach competences. . . . Computers can do better things than that.”

So, during the spring, I’m teaching a 100-level English course tentatively titled, “Animating 1919.” I’m fleshing out the course website, syllabus, policies, and prompts next week; however, I’m 90% sure the following texts will be required reads:

Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” (including each version, beginning with the first published in 1919)

Selections from John Dos Passos’s 1919 (published in 1932)

A selection from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (probably “Hands,” published in 1919)

T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (published in The Egoist in 1919)

Since the class is a composition course, I need to keep the number of texts to a minimum. And the trajectory of the texts? Students will explore literature’s relation to history (in the first half of the quarter), to then use digital media to animate that relationship (in the second half of the quarter). With the texts I already have and 1919 as the example year, I’m pretty much equipped to teach:

Questions of literary intent and revision and their relevance to making history (through Moore),

The representation of historical and cultural events in literature (through Dos Passos),

Literature’s correspondences with the documentation of place and space (through Anderson), and

The debate between literature as timeless and literature as historically embedded (through Eliot).

As per usual, I want students to work through a variety of media, and today I recalled the Library of Congress Flickr pilot, through which the Library is inviting the public to meander through history and tag it. Perhaps my next move was obvious, but I searched Flickr for “1919.” The search results? 32,847 photos! True, most of them are most likely not from 1919. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of rich visuals to peruse, and I see an in-class exercise in Flickr exploration as a productive bridge into collaborative digital humanities projects and archival work.

The pedagogical long and short of “Animating 1919″ is asking students to synthesize close reading of Anglo-American modernist literature with hyper-attention to digital media. (See Hayles, in particular, for more on this one.) Indeed! They will be producing digital things here, and, during the second half of the quarter, I’m trying to leave the exact digital approaches and ideas to them.

If you know of relevant 1919 artifacts or inspiring digital work that is also literary, then let me know! In the meantime, I’ll just toss some scandalous Sox in your general direction: