Assignment Sequence

This semester, we will be collaborating with the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy to rethink the relationship between undergraduate classrooms and online publishing. The ultimate goal of this collaboration will be discussed during the semester, but I expect that there is a possibility for you to make a significant contribution both to Studies in the 19th Century Novel and to classroom research with technology in general. The course assignment sequence, therefore, focuses on preparing you to curate, edit, and potentially help publish your fellow student’s work. We will be creating content on our blogs and in our projects. The final assignment will be a curated Omeka site that collects and shares the work we prepared during the semester with online academic communities.

Project 1: Reading Out Loud. The first project will ask you to reflect upon the differences between silent reading and public reading for an audience. You will pick one of the chapters of Austen’s Northanger Abbey, each student will pick a different chapter. You must carefully consider some of the ideas about public reading discussed in Edward Cox’s The Arts of Writing, Reading and Speaking. For further advice, consider the post by Mark Sample titled “On Reading Aloud in the Classroom.” You will record this chapter on a computer: either your own or one in the library. Consult this tutorial for advice on how to record audio on a computer. You will also be asked to edit your recording (and possibly add dramatic music) on Audacity. Finally, I will ask you to compose a 2000-word blog post in which you discuss how you prepared to read for the recording, what choices you made to dramatize the first chapter, and how your dramatic reading compared with the act of reading the novel silently and the same chapter read by Elizabeth Klett.

Project 2: How to Not Read a Novel. The second project is taken from a project devised by Paul Fyfe. We will consider the differences between close reading and what is known as distant reading. I will ask you to pick a nineteenth century novel you have never read before from gutenberg.org. Do the following:

Find and download a plain text (.txt) version of the novel from the site. Open and delete everything that is not the novel itself (technical header, legalese, etc). Save it again in .txt.

Make a word-cloud. Use Wordle and TagCrowd. Upload your .txt file. Figure out what stop words you need to exclude (like the, an, a: words that are plentiful anywhere but may not tell you anything).

Play around with visualizations found on Voyant. Here is a tutorial I made on using Voyant.

Now, try to come up with three or four ideas you can gather from these visualizations. What might it mean, for example, if the word ‘romanticism’ appears frequently in the text? Can you find patterns, contradictions, inconsistencies? How do you feel this application fits into models of close reading you’ve been accustomed to in earlier classes?

Write a 1000-word post that discusses your insights on the blog. You need not develop a central argument about your text, necessarily. But you can if you want to. Be sure to include screen-shots of your visualizations. Remember, you might not come up with anything productive to say about your text. That’s fine. But, be sure to show us (with assertions, reasons, and relevant examples) what you learned from this experiment about the process of reading.

Blog posts. See the blog assignment page for more information about this project.

Project 3: Curate the Course. The final project will be a collaborative one involving the entire class. We will take the material we’ve produced during the semester and pick the best writing from the semester. We will get some experience with web publishing, as well as introduce you to the process of curating material in a digital age. The final shape of this assignment will be determined in conjunction with The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, as well as roles and duties. But we will collaboratively write an essay on GoogleDocs reflecting on the class as a whole, and our roles as teachers and students.