Monthly Archives: October 2016

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Developments in Geneseo’s Gen. Ed. Requirements

From the College Archives

From the College Archives

This week I was finally able to visit College Archives, and I found a number of sources that I believe will be very helpful for the website. To start with, I’ve been looking through the undergraduate bulletins (then referred to as “General Catalogs” from 1948-64, encompassing the years in which the G.I. Bill would have had the greatest effect as well as the institution’s transition to a liberal arts college.

I mostly focused on the number of programs and the general education requirements during the years. The first catalog I examined, from 1948-49, listed only four undergraduate degree programs, all in education (18-19). The college also offered a special program to liberal arts graduates quite similar to our current education programs in a post-war teacher shortage: “Emergency Preparation of Liberal Arts Graduates.–In order to augment the supply of available elementary school teachers and to certify good quality teachers, liberal arts college graduates whose personal characteristics are wholly satisfactory may qualify for elementary school teaching by engaging in an appropriate summer educational program” (24). 

While no specifics of general education are mentioned, the requirements for each program contain courses that we

From the 1948-49 catalog

From the 1948-49 catalog

would consider as such, including Biology and “Appreciation in the Arts” (39). These courses are quite similar in each of the four programs, with minor variations.

The next catalog, from the academic year of 1950-51, was the first to mention SUNY, established in 1948. The statement about SUNY included a mention that the  “State University [was] exploring … the broadening of the curriculum of the teacher colleges,” perhaps hinting at the 1951 directive for all state teachers colleges, including Geneseo, to transition to liberal arts schools within the coming decade (18). In a supplement dated October 1951 (a complete catalog was not produced in ’51-’52), there was a mention of  college requirements : “education- 18 hours, English- 14 hrs; social studies- 14  hrs; art- 7 hrs; science- 3 hrs; music- 2 hrs; and health and physical education- 8 hrs” (8-not officially numbered). Until the liberal arts curriculum is implemented in the fall of 1962, these requirements remain generally the same, with slight variations, but they seem to be program requirements rather than college-wide requirements because of how they are listed. They are first listed as “General Education” in the ’55-’56 catalog.

55-56

The catalog from 1952-53 includes several hints at the coming transition to the liberal arts. A required minor in liberal arts subject was added to all programs except for library education, but I could find no mention of this requirement in any of the other catalogs prior to ’62, so I’m not sure if this was only required for this one year (17). A statement of support for the liberal arts was also added to the “College Program of Instruction” section: “Students will find that, although this is a professional school, the area of liberal or general education receives great emphasis. A good liberal arts education is a necessary basis of effective teaching” (29).  This was also the first catalog in which the areas of study were listed as departments (English and Foreign Language Department, Education Department, etc) (36-55).

The 1962-63 catalog unsurprisingly contained the most widespread changes to the curriculum, as this was the first year the liberal arts curriculum was implemented. Noting the change as part of SUNY’s “master plan,” the purpose statement declared that “the College [became] a multi-purpose institution with broadened curriculums in the liberal arts and sciences along with a strengthened program of professional preparation for the teaching of secondary English, social studies, mathematics, and the sciences” (22). A college-wide Common Core was put in place, and many of the programs are similar to what we have today, including elementary education programs with a required liberal arts concentration and secondary education programs with subject certification (today, the degree is awarded in the liberal arts discipline with teaching certification) (60-67). I’m planning to look through the undergrad bulletins through the addition of the Humanities sequence, in the mid-’70s.

I’ve been approaching these catalogs as something of an unbiased baseline in terms of the curriculum, and while this may be true to a point, they were also primarily created as a resource for students. I’m also planning to look through Faculty Senate records as well as archives of the Lamron, the student newspaper, from the same time period to create a more compelling narrative for the website.

Weekly Updates

Listening and Making

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In our class meeting this past Thursday John and Casey described the arc of their research. With Abby unable to make class due to sickness, Mark reported on her first interview. We look forward to hearing from Julia, who had technical problems accessing the network while away from campus.

The Research Reflections continue to be an important dimension of your work. We all benefit from your thoughtful and timely reflections on what you are doing as you move along your research timeline. In our class meeting we asked everyone to look over the reminder in the post Good Housekeeping.

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With three weeks before we gather for a preview of the project sites (November 15 and 17) we talked about interviews and interviewing. Mark described Abby’s “test” or pilot interview and the value of doing a lower-stakes interview. Both technical and methodological questions will come up and we want to work through these questions together. In addition, the Resources page now has links to materials that will prove useful over the next few weeks. Please make use of them.

We agreed in class that next week we will debrief our first interviews or a test interview. So here is what you need to do:

  • Conduct an oral interview
  • upload the digital file to Soundcloud or Audacity and, if necessary, edit the file
  • Post the audio file on your blog by Thursday morning
  • listen to the interviews and take notes in preparation for debriefing and discussion

Our class session on Thursday October 20 will begin with the interviews.  You will share your thoughts on the interview, the questions you have about recording, the digital tools you are using, and/or your methodological questions about conducting an effective interview. We will then debrief as a group as you look ahead to a couple of weeks of interviewing.

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Over the next few weeks you will be working on your project sites as well. The sites are now live and listed in the sidebar of the NAPLA site. These sites are “under construction” and we look forward to seeing you on the job site and to the progress you are making. One of the questions is how you plan to present the interviews on the site. There are many options and we need everyone to be thinking about these kinds of questions as you go about the interviewing process.

At any time please be in touch with Cole and Mark if you have questions. We are available on Tuesdays between 2-4 for individual or team conferences.

 

Digital Projects, Digital Tools, Weekly Updates, Writing Prompts

Telling Stories

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In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on A Road, the American anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston writes, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

Our growing archive of Research Reflections on this NAPLA course blog is an example of curiosity finding a shape. Your poking around in course catalogs and yearbooks is fascinating; and is it not interesting to pry open the at times rough-and-tumble curricular histories of your college! Liberal learning and the liberal arts, we are documenting here, is deeply and intimately bound up in the histories of the educational institutions at which we are all at work.

As we embark on the second part of the course, and you each move through the stages outlined in your self-designed project timeline, your purpose is shifting to stories, specifically personal narratives: to the work of collecting and publishing the stories that capture the identities, cultures, histories, and environments related to a public liberal arts education. The personal narratives you are gathering will use stories as a way of knowing the world—of making sense of history through lived experience and memory.

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So here we are. It is week seven of the semester. You have constructed a course blog that is documenting your research process. You have learned to navigate Word Press and are experimenting with tools to customize your site and organize the content. You are thinking about data and design and audience. You have sought out permission to do your interviews following IRB protocols. You have identified interviewees, begun to experiment with the technology you will be using to record oral interviews, and you most likely have in hand a release form for your subjects and drafted the questions for the interviews.

On Thursday this week we will devote our project charrette to the practical questions you have about the process of conducting oral interviews. As you continue to go about your work, we are asking you to be reflective practitioners—that is, you will be doing your research and also writing your weekly reflections on what you are doing, and what you are learning to do. To help with both the practice and the reflection on that practice, we offer some readings for you to situate your work in the methodology, theory, and practice of oral history. This material will help you with your work and will give you thoughts and ideas to incorporate into your weekly research reflections.

Oral History Reading List and Resources from a one-week advanced institute on the methodology, theory, and practice of oral/video history at the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley

A couple of excerpts should suggest the value of these readings. In his essay “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History” (The Oral History Review 2007 34: 49-70) Alistair Thomson captures the major shifts in oral history in words that are already dated by emergent technological tools:

We are in the middle of a fourth, dizzying digital revolution in oral history, and its outcomes are impossible to predict. E-mail and the Internet are certainly fostering oral history’s international dialogue. But, more than that, new digital technologies are transforming the ways in which we record, preserve, catalogue, interpret, share and present oral histories. Very soon we will all be recording interviews on computers, and we can already use web-cams to conduct virtual interviews with people on the other side of the world. Audio-visual digital recordings will be readily accessible in their entirety via the Internet, and sophisticated digital indexing and cataloguing tools—perhaps assisted in large projects by artificial intelligence—will enable anyone, anywhere to make extraordinary and unexpected creative connections within and across oral history collections, using sound and image as well as text. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software can already be used to support, extend and refine the interpretation of large sets of oral history interviews, and will, inevitably, become more sophisticated and powerful.

Michael Frisch argues that the digitization of sound and image will challenge the current dominance of transcription and return aurality to oral history, as digital technology makes it easier to navigate audio (and video) material, and as we extend our text-based literacy to new forms of literacy with sound and image. Furthermore, non-text-reliant digital index and search mechanisms will enable users to find and hear the extracts they are looking for in their own interviews—and across countless interviews from other projects—and will enable imaginative, unforeseen interpretations.

And Valerie Yow, in her “Introduction to the In-Depth Interview,” Recording Oral History (Altamira Press, 2005: 1-34) offers insight into what she calls “The Use of Narrative as a Research Strategy”:

But even before the narrative form of research became acceptable, many oral historians and humanist psychologists and sociologists sought in the individual life story a specificity and a richness of experience that general accounts did not offer. Anthropologist Ruth Behar says that life histories give us the information that general studies, supposed to be typical accounts, obscure: “Rather than looking at social and cultural systems solely as they impinge on a life, shape it, and tum it into an object, a life history should allow one to see how an actor makes culturally meaningful history, how history is produced in action and in the actor’s retrospective reflections on that action.” Even if scholars in the past regarded work based on narrative as simple, many believe now that narratives are not simple and they are not innocent either because there is always an agenda. Bruner asks, “Why do we naturally portray ourselves through story, so naturally indeed that selfhood itself seems like a product of our own story making?” He argues that narrative expresses our deepest reasonings about ourselves and our experience.

Oral history is inevitably subjective: its subjectivity is at once inescapable and crucial to an understanding of the meanings we give our past and present. To reveal the meanings of lived experience is the great task of qualitative research and specifically oral history interviews. The in-depth interview offers the benefit of seeing in its full complexity the world of another. And in collating in-depth interviews and using the insights to be gained from them as well as different kinds of information from other kinds of records, we can come to some understanding of the process by which we got to be the way we are.

Yow’s reference to the work of the psychologist Jerome Bruner is worth elaboration. For over the next few weeks you will be doing what Bruner calls the Narrative Construction of Reality. Surely professors and students of literature will recognize the correlations between the stories we tell to make sense of our lives and the stories that are handed down over time that fall under the term literature, perhaps by having read the work of the sociolinguist William Labov (Language in the Inner City 1972), the linguist and literary critic Mary Louise Pratt (A Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse 1975), or Bruner (Actual Minds, Possible Worlds 1985) or, more recently, Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Turner’s book, in particular, reminds us that stories are a basic principle of mind. “Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories.” And, indeed, stories help us make sense of other stories, including codified or accepted stories, including institutional histories.

Please have a look at the Resources page for links to oral history resources on the web that will most likely be useful for your work.

Uncategorized

The Progression of a Project

 

My research from the past week has kept the process of our project moving along nicely.  I’ve been looking into documents concerning the IRB at UNCA, and it seems for the sake of our project, we are exempt from having to fill out any requests.  Going off of that, we are preparing for our interview with Dr. Darin Waters next week, the first step in our process of meeting our timeline goals.  As hypothesized in class, these deadlines are already shaky, as our original interview time has been rescheduled for next week.  However, after that interview, I think I’ll feel much more confident with how the project will be formatted in the long run, as we’ll have a reference to go off of for our subsequent interviews.   As for how this relates to the humanities, I feel that the opportunity to interview people in the university and the community about the history of our city and campus is definitely an example of an education fueled by the humanities.  The continuing integration of the digital aspects of the humanities into our course should also factor into our interviews, especially with professors, as it seems to be the natural progression of the liberal arts education.
Sources:

UNCA IRB

Research Reflections

Geneseo’s Liberal Arts Claim to Fame: The Humanities Sequence

As I got into my research this week, I was really focused on the Geneseo Humanities sequence (HUMN).  Because my project with Emily revolves around Geneseo’s status as a liberal arts institution—and how Geneseo liberal arts reflexively interacts with the SUNY institution—I figured that the humanities sequence (Geneseo’s focal point for the liberal arts) was a good place to start.  And with a base knowledge of the discourse surrounding our humanities courses, I was seeking to answer this question:  with the highly politicized and seemingly controversial nature of the Geneseo Humanities sequence, why is it so hard to find a written argument making the case for the humanities sequence at Geneseo?  In my experience at Geneseo—and many of my colleagues concur—it seems to be imprinted in the collective conscious at Geneseo that the humanities sequence is Geneseo’s claim to fame as a progressive liberal arts institution.  While there are certainly students and staff who would disagree, the two humanities courses are the only two required courses for every single person that receives a degree from Geneseo, so one would think the importance of these courses would be made more readily available to students.

Although many schools have similar courses, the Geneseo humanities sequence is unique in its focus, breadth, and as a graduation requirement.  Humanities 220 and Humanities 221 are part of Geneseo’s general education and “liberal arts breadth” courses.  Accordingly, these courses, with other gen ed requirements, are expected to provide students with the knowledge to “participate ethically and intelligently as informed citizens of [their] communities.” More specifically, these courses “search for moral, social, and political alternatives and meaning as embodied in the institutions, culture, and literature of Western Civilization.”  The first course begins with Ancient Greek writings and progresses to the 1600s, while the second course begins in the 1600s and progresses to the “present.” Learning outcomes from this sequence include the ability to think critically about current sociopolitical events and to “consider moral, social, and political issues from an interdisciplinary perspective,” among others.

The humanities sequence is perhaps the most controversial course offering at Geneseo.  Students resent it because it makes receiving a degree more rigorous, and many students are equipped with the critical reading and writing skills to perform as well in Humanities as in the course of their major.  Many faculty are critical of the sequence because it reinforces Western ideas instead of exposing students to a multicultural education; yet, the humanities sequence remains a defining characteristic of the SUNY Geneseo liberal arts education.   As one student on a Geneseo Humanities forum put it, the humanities sequence is “the basis of the liberal arts education that we student come to Geneseo to get.”  Clearly, students feel that understanding the tradition of Western thought is important—if not necessary—to became a capable citizen in today’s society.

As a result of polarized opinions regarding HUMN, the humanities sequence has been in a constant state of critique.  In 2008, The Geneseo Provost issued a “Curriculum Task Force,” to (among other things) determine how to make the humanities sequence better.  The task force resolved—after contemplating similar courses elsewhere—to leave the humanities sequence as it was.  Yet, for all I read, I couldn’t find any executive reasoning explaining why HUMN should not be revised.  Many students—myself included—feel that as Westerners, we are  have been so entrenched in Western thought since our birth that we are already familiar with the ideas set forth in the course; the course simply provides a language with which to discuss Western ideologies—so why not explore non-western humanities in an attempt to broaden our horizons.  While this line of thinking is certainly problematic in that it assumes both that no students at Geneseo grew up in a non-western culture, and furthermore, that all students shared the same educational upbringing, this line of thinking does a good job of exploring the true liberal arts experience:  to think critically through many perspectives—especially those that are not your own.

While I didn’t find what I was looking for in this research expedition, I did discovery two incredibly important pieces of information regarding HUMN at Geneseo:  our recently appointed interim provost—the person responsible for investigating curricular revision—was my professor for my course on Charles Dickens, as well as the person who suggested I apply for NAPLA.  Additionally, the director of HUMN taught my course in literary theory.  I’m in the process of reaching out to both professors to gain a better understanding of exactly why Geneseo has been so set on seeing the humanities sequence as the focal point of our liberal arts education.  I’m hoping that a few conversations with these professors will allow me to return to this post with a detailed examination of the humanities sequence.

Research Reflections

The Place of Curriculum in Yearbooks

This week I’ve been looking at yearbooks from years that I feel are most relevant to changes in Geneseo’s curriculum and higher education in general, as determined by my previous research. I’ve started with the yearbooks from 1949, ’51, ’61, ’62, and ’76. These are years that, respectively, were affected by the GI Bill and the end of World War II and then the transition to a liberal arts curriculum were made, and, by ’76, in fuller effect. Since most of these changes were gradual and not fully felt in a single academic year, I may go back and look at other yearbooks from the same time periods at another time.

1949, '51, '61, '62,and '76 editions of Oh Ha Daih--the name adopted after Geneseo became a state teachers college recognizes regional Native Americans (Mahood, 130)

1949, ’51, ’61, ’62,and ’76 editions of Oh Ha Daih–the name adopted after Geneseo became a state teachers college recognizes regional Native Americans (Mahood, 130)

My current interest is the curriculum, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this was not a major focal point in any of these yearbooks. While not unacknowledged, the curriculum is primarily noted in the pictures of the faculty, divided by department.

The English Department's pages in the 1961 Oh Ha Daih (40-41)

The English Department’s pages in the 1961 Oh Ha Daih (40-41)

 

 

 

 

The pictures are accompanied by short blurbs about each department, and while some include changes made to the specific curriculum of the department, such as English in ’61, it is difficult to discern any changes made to the college’s curriculum as a whole. While I didn’t read every book cover to cover, I didn’t even find a mention of any form of a liberal arts curriculum in the ’61, ’62, and ’76 yearbooks.

Changes in the English Department noted in the 1961 Oh Ha Daih (41)

Changes in the English Department noted in the 1961 Oh Ha Daih (41)

 

This academic reorganization could perhaps be attributed to Geneseo's transition into a liberal arts college, but no such assertion is made in the yearbook (1972 Oh Ha Daih, 37)

This academic reorganization could perhaps be attributed to Geneseo’s transition into a liberal arts college, but no such assertion is made in the yearbook (1972 Oh Ha Daih, 37)

Of course, the point of a yearbook isn’t to provide detailed descriptions of the curriculum, but rather to capture the culture, community, and personalities of the college in that year (likely in a positive and nostalgic sense). Before I approach that aspect of my research, I want to have a firmer grasp on the changes in Geneseo’s curriculum, which I will hopefully have in a greater sense after I visit the archives later this week. While the source I have mainly been using in regards to the curriculum (Mahood’s ) is incredibly helpful and comprehensive, it has its own narrative, and I would like to go through old undergraduate bulletins and other primary sources to create my own narrative for the website. Currently I think that the curriculum will be the most important aspect of my (print-based) research, and I plan to allow my findings in this area to inform how approach the greater college community and culture that the yearbooks are more concerned with.

Beyond my research, I started playing with themes on the website and added a placeholder title and header. I found several themes that I didn’t like and one that works for now (Datar), although since we don’t have anything of any significance up yet, it may need to changed in the future. I do like the theme’s minimalist layout and flexible header, so I will probably look for themes with similar features should the need to change it arise.
I’m expecting my visit to the archives to be the highlight of this coming week in research, and I also hope to move forward in the process of planning and scheduling interviews—pending, of course, on IRB approval.

Weekly Updates

Good Housekeeping

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Project Web Sites are Live!

Our amazing COPLAC program associate, Leah Tams, has set up your web sites:

geneseo.napla.coplacdigital.org
keene.napla.coplacdigital.org,
unca.napla.coplacdigital.org

You should have received an email yesterday from WordPress about their your status (same usernames as on your blog and we recommend the same password). You can login to your subdomain by adding /wp-admin to the end of the URL.

Design and Customize: Plugins, Themes, Widgets

The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington is a useful site to explore. In particular, have a look at Jess Reingold’s recent Jess’s Quick Guide to Plugins, Widgets, and Themes. Her post includes a list of best practices for choosing themes and plugins. Mark and Cole are available at any point to troubleshoot, or answer questions about themes and blogs.

 Class Schedule: Part Two of the Course

We have designed the course to give you ample time to do independent work on your projects. We will therefore meet once per week, on Thursdays, during the next four weeks. Our weekly project charrettes will give everyone a chance to ask questions, resolve challenges or problems, and learn from one another.

We will meet twice during week 10, before we break for Thanksgiving. Your project timelines should align with the expectation that our meetings on Tuesday November 15th and Thursday November 17th will be dedicated to previewing your institutional sites. It is imperative that the sites be developed and refined at this point. For when we return from the holiday break we will only have one class before the Project Presentations begin on Thursday December 1.

Research Reflections

There are nine “Research Reflections” required in the course. The first three Research Reflections were the product of writing prompts: 1) on September 11th “What’s the Story?; on September 25th “Reading and Writing,” about higher education in the US and your local institution; and on October 2nd, “For Me and For Someone Else,” about the digital humanities and your projects.

From your fourth Research Reflection last week to your final reflection due on Sunday November 20th your Research Reflections will be a product of the intellectual work you are doing—reflecting on the process of research, interviewing, and building a digital home for your work.

Each of your blog posts should make visible what you are doing, how you are learning, or what you are discovering in your research. Our expectation is that you will produce engaging and professionally presented writing. We want to give you the opportunity to “curate” your Research Reflections. And so at any time you may revise and/or update what you have written.

Nota bene: Because this “Monday Update” is posted on Thursday, and we are moving into Part Two of our course, I am going to change the Category on our NAPLA blog to “Weekly Updates.”

 

Research Reflections

Digital Humanities—The New Frontier: “To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before”

I’m not a huge Star Trek nerd, but I really like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Reboot.  I like it, in part, because there are so many aspects of each film that communicate emotion synergistically; in other words, no one aspect of the film overpowers another.  As a result, viewers can synthesize the many stimuli of the movies—the action, the cinematography, the music (my favorite part), the character relationships, the well-placed and all-important silences, the gestures, expressions, and humor—into one dramatic experience. 

Last week, we read about and discussed the digital humanities.  Throughout our conversations, I had a revised version of the Star Trek slogan running through my head:  Digital Humanities—The New Frontier.  Perhaps it would be more accurate (and less aesthetically pleasing) to call it, “The New and Ever-Evolving Frontier.” While any implication of Star Trek will struggle with traditional gender biases and the colonialist/industrialist “Star Trek Syndrome,” I find the Star Trek slogan apt for many reasons, and in this post, I seek first to discuss Star Trek as a structure for exploring digital humanities, and then to discuss how Star Trek affected my research process this week.  Here’s the full slogan:

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

So what is it about Star Trek that I find to be an apt metaphor for DH?  In part, it’s the exploration of the unknown.  DH isn’t always about discovering the unknown; it’s about making knowledge accessible to people on a transparent level so they can use it to their own empowerment.  Or, alternatively, DH is meant to re-articulate the information we already have access to  in ways that change our phenomenological experiences of a presupposed episteme.  In this latter understanding, DH has the potential to illuminate episteme that we didn’t know we could know; DH allows one to experience something anew and elucidate new depths of an episteme that we believed we understood completely.  At the least, this aspect of DH asks us to consider the possibility that we don’t have a complete understanding of the world—and at best, DH turns our attention to other humans, and how the phenomenological experience of another person (especially those not represented by traditional methods of learning and traditional presentations of knowledge) can inform our worldview.

“To Boldly Go Where No [One] Has Gone Before:”  in addition to the potential of DH to expand one’s worldview, DH constantly questions the structures and technologies we use to understand information.  What I find most fascinating about DH—and what makes me wish I had a more technological background—is its imaginative potential, it’s insistence that knowledge should be re-articulated in new and exciting ways, and most importantly, the value it places in the creation of new technologies.  Have an idea that would express your project in an original and startling way, but there’s no existing way of making it happen?  Digital Humanities advocates for the creation of technologies that allow us to probe the depths of both new knowledge, and the knowledge we’ve already taken for granted.

I could write about Star Trek and DH all week, so I’m going to move onto the question:  what does this have to do with my own research project?  This week, my research was to explore tools that I think will allow me to articulate my discoveries in the most expansive ways possible.  Finding tools was easy enough:  a google search of “digital humanities tools” yields several great websites that explain tools used in popular DH projects.  One website listed hundreds of tools in areas such as “storyboarding,” “annotation,” “editing,” “exhibitions,” “research tools,” “text analysis tools,” and tools that assist in “text preparation in digital work,” among others.

I’m still sorting through the list, but here are a few tools that I think are pretty cool:

Voyant Tools:  Voyant is a text analysis program that is incredibly easy to use.  At its most simple, one enters a website URL and Voyant analyzes word usage, frequencies, and links between words.  It presents information as word clouds, charts, lists, and several types of graphs.  But paraphrase is heresy—go check it out yourself.

Sentiment Analysis:  This tool creates “Recursive Deep Models of Semantic Compositionality.”  Put more simply, it analyzes how positively or negatively one feels about something.  I think this is an incredibly interesting concept, which is why I included it. BUT it seems like it has the potential to be very troublesome in projects like we’re doing—especially because it makes a potentially flawed analysis of another person’s feelings.  Regardless, this is another simple tool: enter the text you want analyzed and the program does the rest.

Odyssey:  I’m not going to say much about this one because I think people should check it out for themselves.  It’s an awesome medium for presenting interactive, multi-layered narratives using technologies beyond the written form.

History Flow Visualization:  This tool documents the evolution of a project by separating edits into layers.  Definitely a good tool for analyzing the process of creation.

Scraper:  See something you like on a website or DH project?  Scraper allows you to highlight the part of the page you like and scrape it from the page to be exported for your own use.

Overview:  Overview may be a little more than we need, but the idea is helpful.  The tool helps organize and visualize many different stories.  I think it’s meant for more data than we’ll be dealing with, but who knows!

OpenCalais:  I find this tool fascinating because of its focus on metadata—something I see as vital for transparency in a DH project.  OpenCalais allows for the annotation of content “with rich semantic metadata.”  In terms of our project, this gives us another venue, or point of access, as Dr. Woodcox likes to say, for how we communicate our information.  Instead of one jumbled and complicated body of text that desperately tries to convey the totality of context, this tool allows for several bodies of text surrounding a piece of information. And who doesn’t love “rich semantic metadata?”

Express Scribe:  This tool probably has the most practical implications for us.  Express Scribe “assist[s] the transcription process of audio recordings.”  There are probably other tools like this, so checking out our options would be helpful.

Like JJ Abrams, I’m seeking the culmination of these tools; the synthesis of a layered narrative interface, multiple venues of conveying context and data, visualizations of linguistic connections and personal anecdotes, and organizations that allow for the experience and re-experience—and re-experience—of my story.

Research Reflections

This Week in Research: Women’s Work to Women’s Studies

When I went to the archives on Tuesday, I found a course catalogue from 1912 with the overview of credits needed for a young woman to get a teaching degree at Keene Normal School:

1912
Requirements to Become a Teacher: 1912

Among the course requirements were to be expected: pedagogy (the methods of teaching), school law, and sociology. However, this overview also included courses under the heading of “Household Arts.” These courses covered cooking and sewing. Most of the women attending this institution were straight out of high school, likely unmarried, so they needed an education in how to manage a household after they married and ended their teaching career.

 

Fifty years later, when Keene became a Teacher’s College, women were still attending the institution to become teachers (even though men were now attending as well). In the 1964 course catalogue, there were more degrees with specifications in subject matter. One of these degrees was in Home Economics.

1964
Bachelor’s in Home Economics: 1964

This degree program included student teaching, sociology, and principles of education. It also included classes towards the required skills needed of a female “Baby Boomer,” such as interior decorating and the operation of household machinery. My maternal grandmother graduated with a degree in Home Economics from Keene State College in 1968–and she had my mother a month after her Commencement.

One hundred years after the first course catalogue I found, Keene State College offered a Bachelor’s of Arts in Women and Gender Studies. This liberal arts degree is a stark transition from the Home Economics degree.

The BA in Women and Gender Studies in 2011: one of its first years as a four-year degree program.
The BA in Women and Gender Studies in 2011: one of its first years as a four-year degree program.

According to the Keene State website, Women and Gender Studies focuses on “the social origins and related politics of identity.” A student at Keene State is also eligible to add this major to his or her education degree.

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These three degrees, each offered fifty years apart, show both transitions in education and a woman’s role in society. I’m very interested in studying the intersections of gender and education and how it relates to this college. This project is going to focus on stories which made Keene State what it is today, and women play an integral role in that.

Research Reflections

Sympathy/Antipathy in Geneseo’s Humanities

Our class discussion today about the “sympathetic researchers” in Buurma’s article made me think about the Humanities sequence at Geneseo, considered to be (and advertised as) the cornerstone of our liberal arts curriculum. The sequence consists of two courses that examine the development of western civilization primarily through “Great Books,” and are primarily taught by English, history, and philosophy professors (more in-depth description here). Most relevant to our discussion is the fact that all students are required to take these classes as a graduation requirement, and students of all majors and backgrounds end up in the same classes. This mixture of students often produces the variety of insights that Mark mentioned when discussing interdisciplinary classes. I’m currently taking Humanities II, and the range of opinions in what is still mostly an English class (I will admit I’ve purposefully taken both courses with English professors) is refreshing compared to my major classes, where everyone is trained to look at the texts in the same ways (not that this leads to everyone having the exact same thoughts).

In terms of my site, I’m still not exactly sure how Humanities will figure in. I discovered through some (very brief) googling that at least among the SUNY schools, our program is quite unique; several schools have humanities general education requirements, but a number of different courses that fulfill them (including Albany, Binghamton, and Purchase).

Furthermore, the history of the program at Geneseo is more than a little contentious. As I learned when researching for my first blog post about the college’s history, the program took several years to fully establish after its conception. From what I can tell, the curriculum has not drastically changed, but I hope to find further information on this in the archives (which I plan to visit within the next couple weeks). On the first of class this semester, my Humanities professor told the class that since its establishment, various forces have been trying to remove the sequence from the graduation requirements. While I currently don’t have much to back this up, I think it’s entirely believable, because most current students dread taking the courses (I will attribute this partially to traumatic registration experiences).

In my interviews with current students and alumni who took the courses, I definitely intend to address this aversion to Humanities; the requirement certainly isn’t kept a secret during the admissions process, so why choose a school like Geneseo if you know you will hate these classes? I also want to discuss this with the professors who teach the courses. While I’ve gone back and forth on the possibility of interviewing a greater ratio of English professors than those in other departments, I currently feel that interviews with a number of different professors who teach/have taught these courses may be more beneficial to the project as a whole than a more equal spread across the disciplines.

My research has been at somewhat of a standstill this week as I’ve had a number of papers and midterms, but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m hoping to visit the College Archives after my break this weekend. Over the weekend, I’m going to try looking more closely at some of the specifics of the site design—this may be more easily and efficiently done once I’m farther along in my research, but becoming more familiar with WordPress and the like can’t hurt.