Blog Post #4

For the Seminar Project using the Digital Humanities, I will revise the existing research project, which is the major project, for my HUC117--Introduction to Computer Mediated Communication course.  As it currently exists, the assignment is as follows:

Digital Course Project

In this assignment, you will construct a reader-friendly, content-focused web site that develops and defends an original argument about CMC theory and/or practice discussed in class or in your readings.  In terms of writing, this assignment should be equivalent to a 5-page paper.  This project shall be composed of:

1. an introduction page that states your thesis,
2. a background page that explains key terms and provides a history of your issue
3. an argument page that persuades your reader to accept your thesis, and
4. an implications page that answers questions like, "what does this mean for contemporary public life?" or "what's the next policy step?" or "how will this affect interpersonal communication in the future?"

I strongly suggest you organize your implications around themes such as technology, identity, and/or culture.  You must also provide a references page that provides links, where possible, to your source material (sites are more reliable when they provide references to which readers can link for additional information).  You should also include hyperlinks throughout your web site to engage the reader.
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I instruct students to publish their project either on ePortfolio (which is cumbersome and presents many problems for accomplishing this project) or on Wix (which is user-friendly and a student favorite).  I currently have exemplars from the fall semester linked on my own ePortfolio page under "courses."

I plan to incorporate the Digital Humanities by asking students to create word clouds using either Wordle or Voyant, for which the corpus will be the sites and/or articles that provide the foundational (historical, key terms, issues, etc.) information for their argument.  Students will then incorporate a page between the "Background" and "Argument" pages that provides a discussion of the key terms that this DH tool illuminated (these may be the same or different from the established key terms, or it may be ideas or issues that were previously unexamined).  This should help students focus their argument and the "Argument" page should, as a result, be stronger.

I plan to use this project as the basis for a pedagogical article I plan to submit to Communication Teacher, one of the journals of the National Communication Association and in which I have previously published.  This journal serves as a pedagogical resource for others in the field and as yet has provided no activities or discussions focused on DH.  Also, because it is pedagogically-focused, it will not only enhance my scholarly productivity, but it will embrace my own passion, which is teaching (I love my research, but my passion is teaching), thereby neatly combining the two into one grand project.

For fun, I visited the exemplar I created for the class (I always model what I expect students to do), visited the foundational sites, and created word clouds for them.  The topic I investigated for the exemplar was Internet Censorship.  I specifically used as the corpus the body of text in each of the links I provided on the "Issues" page (the background page was about censorship more generally, while the issues page focused on the internet specifically).  The resulting word cloud was, to me, quite interesting and I will need to go back and explore the items that were highlighted more closely.

I can honestly say that I am truly excited to incorporate this project and to examine the results.  I am even more excited to share the results and to potentially inspire a new method of inquiry for our students.

Blog Post #3

For the "visualization" activity, I chose to create word clouds for Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a book that literally changed my life and enabled me to focus my scholarly interests.  The book was published in 1899; Chopin died five years later in 1904.  She is one of the most important feminist writers in American history and she captured in this novel the struggle with which I, myself, struggled for most of my life, the struggle between conformity and individuality, between the perceived self and the actual self.  Two quotes from the novel sum this up nicely:

• "At a very early period she had apprehended the instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions."

• "She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." 

I located the text through Project Gutenberg, copied the body of the novel, and pasted it into Wordle.  The word cloud created from this corpus was interesting to me, mostly because it captured the important characters, but not necessarily the important themes (or what I believe to be the important themes):

I then pasted the body of the novel into Voyant.  The initial word cloud was comprised of little more than "and" and "the," so I had to edit it and apply the English Taporware stop.  The resulting word cloud is nearly identical to the Wordle word cloud, with the major difference being that I couldn't figure out how--if it is even possible--to manipulate the font and colors:

The visualizations reveal little to nothing with regard to what I, and scholars like me, consider to be important about this text.  To be sure, the characters are important and Edna is the most important, but the individual thoughts, the internal conflict, the struggle to be an individual in a society that demands conformity for women, are absent.  There are some hints at this conflict as the words "thought" and "think" appear (heaven forbid a woman at the turn of the 20th century should think!).  What I find interesting about the word clouds are the words that, in my opinion, emphasize the constraint that Edna feels, words like "husband," "children," "house," "woman," "Mrs," "Madame," and so on.  Many of these words--and even more in the Voyant word cloud--focus on appearance, which implies conformity and, in Edna's case, constraint.  The one word that stands out to me in the Wordle word cloud and that does not appear at all in the Voyant word cloud is "one."  This, to me, is very telling and suggests (or, at least, implies) Edna's aloneness, her feelings of isolation in a society that demands feminine conformity.  

For my purposes, specifically for the purpose of identifying key terms in texts (I tend to undertake close rhetorical textual analysis with all texts I examine), I find Wordle to be much easier and, for me, more useful in visualizing the important aspects of the corpus.  I also prefer the ability to manipulate the image with regard to its color scheme, font, and layout which for me, as a visual rhetoric scholar, communicates in its own way as much as the text under analysis does.

I have thought a great deal about this with regard to its pedagogical application and have begun to develop what I think will be a spectacular activity for my students in HUC117--Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication.  When I proposed the course for Pathways, I included a research assignment about some aspect of computer-mediated communication that asks students to investigate a particular issue, research it, identify both scholarly articles and credible online texts/sources, and then to create a webpage that presents the research and their argument about it that includes hyperlinks as a means of citation.  Students often, especially in an introductory-level courses, have difficulty articulating arguments.  For the Spring 2014 semester, I will incorporate this visualization activity as part of the student research assignment.  For the different articles and sites student locate, I will have them copy and paste the corpus into Wordle and/or Voyant and create word clouds,  I will then ask them to include the image of the word cloud(s) on the webpages they create and to discuss the important themes or topics that emerge as the result of the word clouds with respect to the topic each student chooses.  For instance, if a student chooses to investigate the possibilities of artificial intelligence, s/he might find ten sources and create a word cloud using the corpus for all the sources.  The words that emerge might lend themselves to a more in-depth discussion about the important issues concerning artificial intelligence.  At the very least, this sort of visualization might spark interest in students who otherwise might not get excited about the research process.

I'm excited to move forward with this and to apply this strategy not only to my own scholarship, but also as a pedagogical activity to facilitate student research and critical thinking.  I look forward to sharing the results.

Blog Post #2

Warwick's discussion centers on the language of the visual and the means by which reliance on the written word has deprived many of us of the ability to read and interpret visual images.  She briefly recounts her visit to Thessaloniki, Greece where she had difficulty understanding the mosaics and marble carvings because she was unfamiliar with the meaning embedded in the images.  She then discusses how technology impacts the notion of the written (and published) word.

Warwick then turns her attention to the various factors involved in reading.  She argues, "reading even the simplest text is a highly complex cognitive task, involving what Crowder and Wagner (1992:4) describe as 'three stupendous achievements':  the development of spoken language, written language, and literacy."  She discusses text-based factors, reader-based factors, and situational factors as elements that influence one's ability to both read and interpret a text, factors that are different for each of us given our life experiences, our racial or socio-cultural background, etc.  This complexity and individuality, she argues, accounts for the intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction derived from reading, which she believes, is "difficult to replicate when computational analysis is used."  She then turns her attention to reading the visual.

Reading the Visual is what attracted me to this particular document.  I have focused much of my scholarly attention on reading the visual to discern the messages embedded in visual texts, messages that are often subtle but highly influential, if not always intentional because many are so normalized, messages that rely for their understanding on discrete textual clues that sometimes only particular members of an audience recognize.  It is precisely beause of this personal experience that I agree with Warwick's claim, "Reading a printed text is clearly a subtle and complex analysis technique.  It is therefore not surprising that scholars have made the assumption that digital resources and computational techniques that simply replicate the activity of reading are a pale imitation of an already successful technique.  To be of use to the humanities scholar, it seems that digital resources must therefore provide a different dimension that may change the way that we view our raw materials."

While technology cannot necessarily assist humanities scholars with the actual interpretation of visual texts, it nevertheless provides access to texts that were previously inaccessible to us.  The Internet has provided access to museums and archives and videos and advertisements and magazines in ways previously unimaginable.  My own scholarship has benefited from this access.  In one award-winning essay, I accepted the challenge presented by John Berger in the influential Ways of Seeing (1972) that asked scholars to continue to compare contemporary advertising images with classical images of the nude to determine whether men are still assumed to be the ideal spectator/consumer and women the object of the gaze.  In order for me to effectively compare contemporary ads with classical images, I needed access to the images,w hcih I found not only through museum websites, but through the Artchive, an art resource that includes most forms of visual art from the classical era to contemporary modern art.  It is a resource that is useful for scholars and provides scholarly analyses of many of the images and artists included in its database.  Without this technology, I would have had to attempt to visit many of the world's museums and requested permission to photograph the paintings (a daunting and pricey endeavor).  The curator of the Artchive, Mark Harden, has done all this for me.  In this way, my own scholarship is the very type Warwick insists benefits form technology.  We both agree, however, that technology cannot do the very personal work of interpretation.  While it can prompt "a fresh approach for consideration," the humanist must still exercise her/his own interpretive faculties to "[determine] the significance of the findings."

So what does this mean for my students and me?  Most of my students are both familiar with and excited about the possibilities of technology, however few possess the critical thinking skills necessary to ask the important questions or engage in the very personal task of interpretation.  I am excited about the possibilities inherent in using technology to assist students with asking the questions of interpreting the visual texts we will examine.  The tools might open up ways of seeing that hitherto seemed too advanced or complicated for many students who fear they may not interpret a text "correctly."  (I should mention that my students typically have difficulty understanding that there is no single "right" way to interpret any text, even if there is an agreed-upon general theme in it.)  As I mentioned in a previous post, I am excited about the possibilities inherent in creating word clouds or, if I can figure out a way to compile something like this, image clouds (repetitive images from, say, a music video, such as fragmented body parts, certain camera angles, etc.).  The possibilities are endless and I think this, in and of itself, will excite even the most apathetic students.