I think I’ve actually finished my research. After our class discussion on Thursday, I decided to limit my most in-depth research to 1948-1979. Within these years, Geneseo transitioned to a liberal arts college (1962) and later substantially revised the Common Core general education requirements(throughout 1976-79). These two events are of the most interest to me, and I’ve yet to decide how much information about the curriculum prior to 1948 I will include. I also found a flip-book plugin (WP Booklet) that I will experiment with next week after I start scanning the relevant pages from course catalogs, Faculty Senate minutes, etc.

Additionally, I decided to present the general history of Geneseo solely through a timeline, using TimelineJS. I think this is a more visually interesting way to display this information, and it gives me further encouragement to incorporate images. I currently have a draft of the text for the timeline completed, and on Monday, I’m meeting with the special collections librarian to go through images from the archives that I plan to incorporate into the timeline. I’ll also be looking for anything that could be used or incorporated into a header for the website.

This week we have two interviews scheduled, both with professors who frequently teach the Humanities. While our first interview was great (better than I expected), I would like to be a little more organized and have more scripted questions for these interviews–I expect little variation will be necessary between the two. I’ll also be scheduling firm times for two other interviews: one with a music professor who teaches several general education classes and is fairly new to Geneseo and the other with a student. I would also like to start preparing for these interviews this week (although they likely won’t happen until next week), since we are approaching these interviews from very different perspectives than the others.

I’d like to have a completed draft of the timeline and some form of the flip-book of gen. ed. requirements up on the website by class on Thursday. I’m imagining some amount of text will accompany the flip-book, but I will base that on how the flip-book comes out. As reflected in the title of this post, I feel like I’ve been making actual progress this week and that’s really encouraging. I will also be perfectly happy if I never have to go through Faculty Senate minutes ever again.

I think I’ve actually finished my research. After our class discussion on Thursday, I decided to limit my most in-depth research to 1948-1979. Within these years, Geneseo transitioned to a liberal arts college (1962) and later substantially revised the Common Core general education requirements(throughout 1976-79). These two events are of the most interest to me, and I’ve yet to decide how much information about the curriculum prior to 1948 I will include. I also found a flip-book plugin (WP Booklet) that I will experiment with next week after I start scanning the relevant pages from course catalogs, Faculty Senate minutes, etc.

Additionally, I decided to present the general history of Geneseo solely through a timeline, using TimelineJS. I think this is a more visually interesting way to display this information, and it gives me further encouragement to incorporate images. I currently have a draft of the text for the timeline completed, and on Monday, I’m meeting with the special collections librarian to go through images from the archives that I plan to incorporate into the timeline. I’ll also be looking for anything that could be used or incorporated into a header for the website.

This week we have two interviews scheduled, both with professors who frequently teach the Humanities. While our first interview was great (better than I expected), I would like to be a little more organized and have more scripted questions for these interviews–I expect little variation will be necessary between the two. I’ll also be scheduling firm times for two other interviews: one with a music professor who teaches several general education classes and is fairly new to Geneseo and the other with a student. I would also like to start preparing for these interviews this week (although they likely won’t happen until next week), since we are approaching these interviews from very different perspectives than the others.

I’d like to have a completed draft of the timeline and some form of the flip-book of gen. ed. requirements up on the website by class on Thursday. I’m imagining some amount of text will accompany the flip-book, but I will base that on how the flip-book comes out. As reflected in the title of this post, I feel like I’ve been making actual progress this week and that’s really encouraging. I will also be perfectly happy if I never have to go through Faculty Senate minutes ever again.

I’ve had an incredibly hectic week for reasons unrelated to the project, but the chaos has managed to find its way into my research and other work for the course.

John and I decided to narrow the scope of our website even more and focus on general education and especially the Humanities sequence (HUMN) at Geneseo. Due to this change, we are planning to eliminate the local history page noted in the project contract and add a page specifically about general education and HUMN. I plan to include the most relevant aspects of local history into my page about the college’s history. We also discussed the role of the timeline, which we still need to figure out. From what I can tell, TimelineJS, while very user-friendly, won’t do exactly what we explained in the contract. I still think a timeline of some sort would be a helpful visual on the site, even if as a general introduction to some topics. I’ve yet to work up the courage to check the schedule laid out in the contract in the past few days because I know I’m so behind, but I’m hoping to finish my print-based research by the end of this week and start creating the pages next week.

As for my print-based research, I’m still buried in the archives. While I’ve been fairly productive, there’s a lot more I want to get to (mostly Faculty Senate records and newspaper archives) that I feel like I won’t be able to move through quickly. I’m also worried that there won’t be a natural stopping point to my research and I’ll miss something important. Hopefully any gaps in my research will be filled by the interviews (which will hopefully be completed by the 18th–scheduling is a nightmare).

I’ve also become slightly concerned about the visual appeal of my pages on the website. I’ve mostly been going through course catalogs and faculty bulletins, which are very informative but aren’t visually interesting. I’d like to avoid a wall of text followed by a picture of another wall of text. Photos of the campus are always an option, but I’m not sure how appropriate sunset pictures (of which there are an abundance at Geneseo) would be for a page about gen. ed. I’m planning to ask Liz Argentieri, the special collections librarian, if she knows of any images in the archives that might be useful.

In addition to continuing (hopefully finishing) my research this week, I’m hoping to go back through my blog and make any changes I feel necessary, including changing post titles and maybe adding a few pictures. I’d also like to change the name of my blog, which I’ve never really liked, and get a new header–hopefully I’ll remember to take a picture on a day with good weather.

My “research” this week was conducted, to be frank, all over the place.  I didn’t do any “formal” research–meaning I didn’t grind through academic articles detailing national trends in education or the how the liberal arts mission is changing in the neoliberal climate.  Instead, Emily and I recorded our first interview, so a lot of my time went into developing questions pre-interview, and transcribing the recording post-interview.  Transcribing may be the bane of my existence;  however, I downloaded some transcription software, “Express Scribe Pro,” which allows me to slow down the speed of the recording so that I don’t need to rewind and pause every five seconds.  Instead, at 44% speed I can type almost continuously, only pausing once or twice for each minute of the interview to make sure I heard a phrase correctly.  Beyond the interview, I’ve spent some time curating my blog.  I added some pictures to previous posts to get rid of the ugly default featured image.  Even that proved painful–the images get pretty distorted on the blogs home page, so they take a lot of tinkering.  And, as I’ll spend most of this post discussing, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating how to organize and build our project website.  I’m a huge fan of the Swarthmore Black Liberation website, so I’ve taken a lot of cues from that project.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize our website so its both aesthetically pleasing and highly functional.  And during our class on Thursday, I really enjoyed what professor Woodcox said about finding quotes in our interviews that can be used as titles or subtitles for posts or sections of our website.  I like the idea because I think a good quote–or a good picture–can really grab a person’s attention and make them want to investigate more thoroughly–which is precisely the function of a title.  So I’ve been contemplating the possibility of using a quote as an organizing piece of information on the website; that is, using quotes to create layered narratives.  Instead of being organized by pictures with a text title, like the Black Liberation Archive, the page would have several different quotes on it representing different topics of discussion.  Running the mouse pointer over a quote would yield a short description of the topic, and clicking on the quote would bring the viewer to a page that delves into the actual narrative.

Here’s how this format is used on Swarthmore’s Black Liberation website:

Instead of the squares saying, “photos from Black at Swarthmore,” “Swarthmore College Halycon,” etc., the squares would have a quote in them.  Like I said, moving the pointer over the square would reveal a small description of the topic that the quote is meant to interrogate.  And when the square is clicked on, it would take viewers to an integrated narrative; that is, rather than the squares taking readers to transcriptions of individual interviews, the actual page would be an integration of several interviews, as well as scholarly essays, newspaper articles, and pictures/data from Geneseo’s college archives.  In this way, we would have a multi-layered narrative that demonstrates how all of the smaller components of our research project come together.

For instance, something that I feel is very important to our investigation into the humanities sequence at Geneseo is the desire from both students and faculty to make the humanities sequence a global investigation, instead of just an examination of Western beliefs.  I’ve tended to sympathize with these desires, as does Ken Asher, the professor we interviewed this week–but he brought up a really interesting point regarding this issue:  academic responsibility.  When we were discussing the possibility of making the humanities a non-western course, he responded that while he sympathizes with this effort, the adherence to Western philoshopy isn’t out of a “conservative Western point of view,” but the necessity of being knowledgeable and “academically responsible” about teaching global philosophies in order to respect the subject matter.  Professor Asher added that Geneseo just doesn’t have the faculty to achieve this goal:  “we don’t have anybody in Chinsese philosophy here.  We did at one time, but we don’t anymore.”  If Chinese philosophy was added to the humanities sequence, Asher asked, “who would be knowledgeable enough to staff 26 sections of this?”  His ultimate point was that Geneseo doesn’t hire professors who teach these global philosophies–so while it would be great to have a global humanities, we just don’t have the staff to do so with academic integrity.  We had a lot of great discussion on this matter, and I think that once we have several more interviews, and some formal research into the matter, this could yield a really interesting page on our website–especially regarding how the course is staffed and what other courses the college teaches.  Possible organizing quotes from the interview could be “it really isn’t out of a conservative Western point of view,” “you have to be academically responsible,” or “who would be knowledgeable enough to staff 26 sections of this?”  And the short description could read:  “An interrogation of the tension between teaching Western Humanities and the desire to teach Global humanities.”  Or, it could be much more argument based; the description could read, “how Geneseo’s hiring practices unintentionally reinforce the Western Canon.”

Emily and I need to discuss how we see the website functioning, but I think our website currently lends itself really well to the sort of organization I’m discussing.  Here’s how our website looks now:

If we make the changes I’m discussing, I think it would be cool if we had the boxes with quotes at the very beginning of the website (the home page); it would replace the “about” page that is currently up.  Accordingly, the viewer would immediately be immersed in our project.  We could keep the tabs along the top of the page to show the viewers that there’s more than one dimension to the project.  And while this opening page would probably be the most immersive and integrated, the tabs along the top would probably consist of more isolated aspects of our research, like an interview archive and bibliography–but also the isolated elements that will contribute more or less to the integrated homepage:  national trends, SUNY mandates, and our archival research.  Consequently, the narrative–the story–of our project is brought to the fore without compromising the transparency of digital humanities research .

So why am I spending so much time explaining what I want to do with the page instead of actually making the changes?  Making this sort of layered narrative is difficult.  I’ve downloaded a project building software called “Omeka”–the Swarthmore Black Liberation project used this on their website–as well as a wordpress plugin in order to actually integrate this organizational structure with the website.  But Omeka isn’t the easiest to use, and its going to take me some time to get used to it.  I’m hoping that by next weekend I’ll at least have a template of these ideas on the website.  I probably wont have the actual quotes yet, but if I can create a functional place holder, I would be really happy, and I think that would put us in a good position to integrate what research we’ve already done.

I’m going to be honest. In weeks 7 and 8, I really was falling behind. I was feeling so overwhelmed that I became complacent. It was kind of a lull.

I’m turning it around! I became very inspired when meeting with Larry Benaquist on Tuesday with Mark. I felt more confident in myself and my work now that I feel like I have more of a direction with what I’m doing.

On Tuesday, I’m meeting with Norma Walker. I’m looking forward to that interview, because stories like hers are exactly what I’m searching for in this project. Mark and I are also trying to get in contact with Doris Eder, another alumna.

This project is trying me as a student. I’m being pushed to trust my instincts more, and to become more accountable for what I’m doing. It’s hard, but the work I’m doing is so important to me and I’m looking forward to completing the project and being able to share the finished product.

While I initially intended on this post focusing more on national trends in Humanities education in higher ed, the sources I ordered from the library haven’t arrived yet.  Luckily, I anticipated this being a problem, so I made sure I had an alternative topic of discussion at the ready.  My intended post will be pushed back to next week; this way, I can talk to Mark about his sources for humanities in general education.  This week, I’ll continue my discussion of Geneseo’s humanities sequence within the context of the nation’s adjunct crisis.  For my project with Emily, I’d like to be able to interview an adjunct professor or two—if possible—regarding their opinions on the organizational structures of the humanities sequence at Geneseo, as well as their opinions on the place of the sequence in the general education requirements of a public liberal arts institution.  Using the adjunct crisis as a starting point, I’ll discuss an article that explores humanities and general education at the University of Idaho in order to comment on the state of the humanities sequence at Geneseo.  Ultimately, the thinking I’ve done in this post will inform the questions for my interview this week.

“Embedding the Humanities in Cross-Disciplinary General Education Courses” explores humanities education at the University of Idaho.  Recently, the university implemented a new strategy for teaching humanities as a general education requirement:  contrary to traditional methods of teaching humanities, the University of Idaho has created a plethora of “core discovery” courses which teach the humanities in a way that is oriented towards the exploration of contemporary issues.  Rather than exploring time periods or schools of thought, the courses are created topically based on the interests of the professor.  The essay listed three main concerns that administrators had with this revised methodology of teaching humanities:  the thematic focus, the importance placed on developing intellectual skills such as critical thinking instead of mastering content, and the fact that many of these humanities courses are taught by professors with no experience or training in the humanities.  (If I may interject, I think it’s ridiculous that administrators feared that students would “develop intellectual skills” instead of “master content,” and this seems to highlight both the distinctions between empirical/science based disciplines and disciplines of the humanities, as well as the very importance humanities in education).

The authors suggest that the revamped humanities education was a result of students complaining that  “’[the humanities] don’t have anything to do with [their] major and [they] just don’t have interest in those subjects” and that “Americans, including Congress, think of the humanities as increasingly marginal contributors to the sum of knowledge and the well-being of society” (279).  I find this fascinating for several reasons:  for one, this conceptualization of the humanities is entirely different from Geneseo’s statement of purpose regarding the humanities sequence.  At Geneseo, the belief is that the humanities sequence provides students with the skills to be a productive citizen.  And additionally, comparing the opinions between the two universities evokes the critical juncture between WEB Dubois and Booker T. Washington; University of Idaho’s stance on humanities connotes—though I doubt they conceive of it in these terms—assimilation into the culture of empiricists, while Geneseo advocates for an education that has potential to challenge preexisting structures of knowledge.

In my opinion, however, Geneseo’s humanities, in its current conception—while an important educational experience in its own right—fails to achieve its mission statement as well as it could.  And understanding the nation’s adjunct crisis as an means of production that ultimately creates intellectual growth could bridge the gap between the humanities sequence and its intended purpose.

In higher education, institutions often hire adjunct professors to teach introductory courses and high-demand courses, like a university’s freshmen writing requirement and other general education requirements.  According to the Atlantic, however, these adjunct professors now make up two-thirds of faculty.  While this statistic is not inherently problematic, adjunct professors often receive incredibly low pay, few (if any) benefits, and institutions frequently limit adjuncts’ teaching hours so that the institution is not required to provide health insurance for these “contingent” workers.  Ordinarily, adjuncts normally receive about $2,000 for each course they teach—or, in terms of the amount of student tuition that goes towards paying adjuncts, about $65 per student per semester.  Additionally, people who wish to make a living as an adjunct professor often need to teach at six different schools in order to put in enough teaching hours for a livable salary.

Research on the effectiveness of adjunct professors as educators (in contrast to tenured professors) is inconclusive; several studies suggest that students learn better from adjuncts, several studies suggest otherwise.  But some areas of research on adjunct professorship yield indisputable results:  learning is improved when adjuncts are treated better.  PhDs who are struggling to gain enough teaching hours to make a livable salary rarely have the time or resources to perform their own research.  While this obviously means fewer scholarly contributions that could expand or subvert our understanding of the world, it more subtly implies that students are losing opportunities to perform their own research, or assist in their professor’s research.  Additionally, because adjunct professors need to travel to other institutions so frequently, students lose access to the potential resources a professor would otherwise be able to give.

While Geneseo’s humanities sequence—with the goal of providing students with the skills necessary to be productive citizens, and the more broad liberal arts goal of preparing students for the workforce— is taught largely by adjunct professors, the humanities sequence does not teach about the organizational structures of utilizing adjuncts to teach the sequence.  In fact, this very line of thinking seems incongruous.  However, I believe that if the Geneseo humanities sequence was taught with the aim of analyzing the organizational structures and philosophies undergirding the school’s stance on liberal arts and general education, Geneseo would better prepare students for both the workplace and citizenship.  While not all of the schools of Western thought taught in the humanities would work well in an analysis of the course and the status of adjuncts—I’m not sure how Hamlet would fit into this, other than in a discussion of the canon—required readings such as the Communist Manifesto, certain passages of the Bible, and Greek philosophy would certainly work well.  In this vein, students would not only learn the content of these texts, but they would learn how to apply these schools of thought in a way that allows for creative re-imaginings of the course they’re currently taking.  Accordingly, students would utilize the classroom as both a microcosm for society and the workplace, thus more readily providing students with the ability to function as students, citizens, and workers.

Even though this post wasn’t what I originally planned on researching, I was glad to read the texts I read and take part in this re-imagining of the humanities sequence.  Doing so brought many interview questions to mind–questions that I feel get to the heart of liberal arts education (and accordingly, this project):  How do we reconcile the ethical ideals emphasized in the teachings of the course with the debatable unethical treatment of those who teach it?  How does the current rendition of the humanities sequence achieve the goal of making students better citizens?  Would a focus on the organization structures of the course improve any aspect of learning?

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.

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)

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 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)

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.