Monthly Archives: February 2016

Questions on Berube et al., “Community Reading and Social Imagination”

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  1. What did the authors learn from the experiment in collective reading of Colston Whitehead’s novel with readers who have no relationship to the “ivory tower”?
  2. What does the article say about the common lament that the Internet (or whatever) is killing serious reading, that the novel is dead, etc.?
  3. What are some of the social antagonisms that the concept of “serious” books or “serious” modes of reading conjures up? Who or what gets relegated to the realm of the “unserious”? What do the authors think about these divisions?
  4. What did “community reading” look like in the past? What are some of the spaces in which reading happened, and what surprised you about the authors’ account of these spaces?
  5. What’s special about convening around literature as opposed to (say) sports or politics or shopping? What does reading “literature” together teach us? What kinds of desires does it instill in us, according to this argument?

Melville lives!

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Since we’ll start discussing Melville’s work next week, I thought I’d mention two Melvillian manifestations in culture today. First, the excellent publisher Melville House, a scrappy outfit that publishes an amazing list and has had the courage to tell Amazon to go %$#^ itself. If that wasn’t enough, well looky here:

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Some of you will get this on the way home, as it were, but trust me: it’s pretty funny.

Second, enterprising academics have created a (decidedly adult) game out of the text of Moby Dick. Especially interesting looking forward to our “playing” Billy Budd via the Ivanhoe WordPress theme in a couple of months.

What is DH?

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As you may have noted, one of the hallmarks of “digital humanities” is that it expends a lot of energy trying to figure out what exactly it is. Is it a new discipline, emerging the way English emerged in the mid-19th century as a subject of serious academic inquiry? Is it a diffuse movement within academia, advocating for free and open access to scholarly and pedagogical materials and a democratization of the highly hierarchical structures of the academy? Is it an intrusion of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) into the humanities, replacing traditional humanistic methods with those of the hard sciences and technical fields?

One of my favorite ways to answer this question (besides the two pieces we’re reading for tomorrow) is the wonderful site created by Jason Heppler that displays random answers to the question “What is Digital Humanities?” compiled from answers generated by the annual “Day of DH” event from 2009-2014. Every time you refresh the site, you get a new response, and the net effect is of diversity, egalitarianism, and innovation (since the site itself is an example of what it’s talking about). So go ahead: let 1,000 answers bloom.

annotating readings with hypothes.is

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As I mentioned briefly in class, we’ll be using hypothes.is frequently to share our thoughts and reflections on course readings. I’ve left a few annotations on the two readings we’re discussing on Tuesday. This is optional–and we’ll do an annotation exercise in the ICIT lab on Friday for those who need more help–but if you can figure out how to sign up and use the platform, feel free to read my comments and make your own. We will use the tag <allred399> on the platform so we can filter out our own discussions separate from those of the free world: kind of like a hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.

A couple of ways to get your feet wet: a) the tutorials page and b) the FAQ sheet.