San Francisco Renaissance Assignment

If I was teaching a class on the Beat generation, specifically the San Francisco Renaissance, I would spend the semester having the class create a digital archive. Why? Because I could not find a comprehensive, quality archive about the San Francisco Renaissance! - and the internet needs one.

I do not have the tech-saavy know-how to take on such a project, but here's what I imagine the steps to involve...

1. Information Absorbtion: Students spend time learning about the San Francisco Renaissance, reading texts and cultural/historical context - similar to what we did in class. Each student would be assigned a writer to be in charge of. By the end of the year they will be experts, more or less... perhaps there would be a group for history/culture of the time.

2. Data Collection: Students collect images, and information on their writer- as many primary sources as possible. They can either download images, texts, sound clips (Howl reading) online AND do outside library research - a scanner should be available for the class to import images and primary texts.

3. Organization of Data: Much of this would involve the teacher (me) to create sections for the archive. I would organize it by writer with subcategories (biography, images, poetry, texts, etc.) and have a section on context - cultural norms at the time, historical events, etc.

4. Finalization: Editing the archive - cleaning and quality controlling links and images, further organization of data.

This is clearly hypothetical, though a cool idea, me thinks. Copyright issues would surely arise, along with limitations of time along with technical ability.

Here's some of material I would want students to gather...

Allen Ginsberg reads Howl

Pictures of writers - Rexroth

Scanned images of manuscripts - Kerouac's journal page

Assignment: Quicksand - Helga's time in Naxos

Hello, Class. Please take some time to look at the glog.

Write a paragraph on your visceral reactions to the glog. Interact with all the components of the glog - read the quote from Quicksand on the poster, listen to the song by the Women of the Calabash (2002 recording), listen to the W.E.B. Dubois clip and observe the pictures. What can you infer about Black education during the 1920's?

Now pay attention to how people are dressed in the photographs - are they predominantly wearing dark or light colors, same articles of clothing - any of the pictures stand out in terms of attire, diversity? If you did not address this in your first paragraph, do so now in a second paragraph. Do some extra research into 1920's African American education paying attention to the Tuskegee Institute (which is reminiscent to Larsen's Naxos).

Get into groups of three or four and answer these discussion questions:

1. How do the images on the glog compare to Helga Crane's time in Naxos?

2. What do you think about Helga Crane's dislike for Naxos - is she justified? are her feelings relatable to historical institutions such as Tuskegee?

3. What does color say about individuality in an educational environment? What effect might a uniformed look have on a public institution like a school - what about in Larsen's historical context? Consider schools that enforce uniforms versus schools that allow students to wear what they want.

5 Essentials Re Harlem Renaissance

1. History that led up to the Harlem Renaissance
2. Jazz
3. Artists
4. Writers
5. Social atmosphere during the Harlem Renaissance

Backward Design, meet Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, meet cultural object. Cultural object, meet Backward Design

A little beefier assignment now...

Intro: A major structural component to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” is his use of lists. A major theme in this so-called American epic is about opening his arms to everybody in society, including those on the bottom rungs of the ladder, like the prostitute. The Victorian era had some strict gender notions, for example, “the angel in the house,” yet prostitution was one of the most prevalent jobs next to tailors, showing the polar opposites in extremes: one side being very conservative and oppressed and the other side as a socially unacceptable career but with more freedom and independence. Look at my previous blog post to get more background on Whitman's New Yorker prostitutes.

Some questions: How gender is treated in the poem in terms of masculinity/femininity and gender regarding social order and customs? Think about how Whitman perceived the prostitute. Considering the context of the poem, is he inclusive of the prostitute? What do you think womanhood meant to Whitman, to the generalized Victorian society? How did women end up in prostitution - by choice, force, desperation? The prostitute is mentioned a couple times in the poem here:

Page 22:

The camera and plate are prepared, the lady must sit for her daguerreotype,

The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly,

The opium eater reclines with rigid head and just-opened lips,

The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck,

The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other,

(Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you,)

The President holds a cabinet council, he is surrounded by the great secretaries,

Page 29: Through me many long dumb voices, Voices of the interminable generations of slaves, Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons, Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs, Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, And of the threads that connect the stars—and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff, And of the rights of them the others are down upon, Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised, Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung. Assignment: Consider the questions above. Free write for about fifteen minutes (using a computer on either a word doc or blog entry) on what your conceptions of womanhood during the Victorian era are and how Whitman would have been accepting or critical of the prostitute. Do some further online research (because the internet is fast and convenient!) on the gender roles during the 19th century, the links above are only a start- consider how women lived in both the "angel in the house" world and the brothel world. What was the typical upbringing of a woman who ended up in either situation? How might womanhood and the controversial issue of prostitution relevant today? At then end of your free write you will get into groups of three or four and discuss what you wrote. BE SURE TO FREE WRITE AFTER THE RESEARCH SO THAT YOU HAVE A GOOD IMPRESSION ON WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT. *I've suggested using a computer for the free write because I think most people write more using a keyboard than with paper and pen - A little word vomiting is okay because the idea is to have an open-ended discussion afterwards.

Reconfiguring “Song of Myself” Using the Walt Whitman Digital Archive

I’ve had a lot of negative emotion surrounding the assignments for this poem. As acknowledged by Professor Hanley and greatly addressed by the class, Diigo, while a great idea in theory is terrible in execution. Just thought I’d join the collective – done and done.

During lab on Tuesday I “explored” the Whitman Archive by mostly peeking over Joseph’s computer because my “workstation” (can you believe that’s what office people call it?) was slow. One of the things that I saw him try was using Token X to do word searches. The results would show the line in one row after another with the highlighted keyword within the line centered so that the lines on either side would be asymmetrical. Here’s a picture to better illustrate what I just said:

LEAVES OF GRASS [1855]

... probably the fullest poetical	nature	. The United States ...
... The largeness of	nature	or the nation were ...
... the citizen. Not	nature	nor swarming states nor ...
... and the motion of	nature	and of the throes ...
... sea, Master of	nature	and passion and death ...
... flow out of the	nature	of the work and ...
... of the oneness of	nature	and the propriety of ...
... my soul reflected in	nature	. . . . as I see ...

This was a cool way to recreate the poem. It was automatic – no printing out a hardcopy, no manual highlighting, cutting and pasting. Seeing how lines were broken up, what was included and what was left out by ellipses was interesting as well. I’m sure there’s some logical way the computer figures it out using punctuation but hey, I enjoy a lot of science fiction so why not think that a computer (or compy as I like to call it- thanks, Strongbad) can create something that would make me go, “interestiiing.” Talk about FREE VERSE, having a keyword centered wherever it occurs in the line?! On a side note I was surprised by how little some of the keywords that we tried came up in the poem – “Kiss,” for example only had ___ lines.

There’s a lot of well-organized material on this digital archive. Well-organized and digital archive doesn’t go hand in hand very often, either. Stephanie was looking at some poetry where the original scanned manuscript was on the left side of the window and the typed, legible version was on the right, which is a simple idea that would make exploring digitized documents A LOT easier and more interesting. This should be essential for the people working with archives and primary documents online. Yes, Leaves of Grass is a long one, but it would be very cool to read the poem in such a format rather than have a clickable icon above each section to get to the original page – I want to see that pretty handwriting that is much better than mine.

The BIG question we have on our Wiki is, “What is the relationship between the self and the other, the you and the me, etc.?” The first thing (and kind of obvious) idea that popped in my head was to use word searches to take all the lines in the poem where Whitman talks about himself (or uses the I/me pronoun) and do a sort of conversational, call-response weaving of the poem with all the mentions of the you. Somewhere the blending sections of “we,” “us,” and “all” would get pushed somewhere, maybe at the end. Then again, if this idea were put to music, I’d have all those we/us/all’s as a chorus with one consistent melody, the you’s to another melody and the I/me’s to another – hmmm, that was very tangential.

This project got me thinking about the quality of digital archives and how much better it could/should be. I did a lot of competitive analysis one summer for an online advertising company, which sounds fancier than it is – looking at similar websites and reviewing them. We looked at online archives and it seems like the better they are (Whitman archive) the more one could do with the work – reconfigure “Song of Myself.” I can’t imagine doing something like this with a poorly constructed site with non-enlarging images, side by side comparisons of primary and typed versions, and keyword searches.

Archives - Something big, old[er] and local

My three blogs are the Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collecttion, Immigration in the US, 1789-1930 and Charles Bukowski.

How is the archive portal designed? text-based? image-based?
What kind of use and users does it seem to invite? those who already know what they're looking for? those who are just exploring?
How easy is it to search the archive? how flexible are the search tools?
How structured or open is the archive interface? does it guide the user through the collection? does it offer few guided paths for the user?
How are the primary (archival) materials presented? with lots of context? without any context? are the primary materials manipulable? i.e. zoom in and out? with and without fram

Backward Design

I first thought backward design was partly just forward design in disguise. The first step of content-focused design versus results-focused design seemed the same. Teaching a lesson on racial prejudice was the same as the more results-focused, "What are the consequences of racial prejudice?" Bottom line: racism bad. What was interesting was when Professor Hanley advised that the point of the first step isn't so much as to plainly state what we want students to learn but to open the topic up so that the students could THINK about the lesson and not just binge and purge lectures and activities. This was difficult to do as a group because I didn't quite grasp this idea till the end of class. The next two steps were also difficult to do as a group because we tended to slip into forward design by thinking of actual activities tasks before coming up with the evidence - did these two steps go hand in hand or is it strictly one then the other? I'm still struggling with this.

Given the difficult climate teachers and students have to deal with I don't see backward design as a practical method of teaching despite it being ideal - time consuming, really hard. However, I do think the thought process of backward design is a healthy way for teachers to engage their students and I'm glad I learned about it now rather than when I'm a grumpy, old teacher set in my ways.

I'd be curious to see how backward design could be executed on all levels besides literature. Can it work for something like math, where there usually only one answer? What about learning how to bake a pie, a very step-by-step process? It seems like for these kind of subjects forward design would be the go-to method, just a rambly thought.