Teaching

“It is because of visiting forces that we suffer”

December 10, 2020 by Suzanne Churchill Leave a Comment

Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher who helped introduced Buddhist practices to the U.S. in the 1970s, offers this lesson from the Buddha in her “On Being” interview with Krista Tippett:

That was a very important image for me, out of the Buddha’s teaching, where he said the mind—your mind, my mind—is naturally radiant and pure. “The mind is shining.” “It is because of visiting forces that we suffer.”

The visiting forces that cause us to suffer are not inherent or intrinsic in us, Salzberg explains; they’re not who we are. When they come knocking at our door (and they will come knocking, sometimes very loudly), instead of trying to ignore them or shut them out, we can learn to open the door, invite them in for a meal, and have a conversation—always remembering they are visitors, not permanent residents.

sketch of a person's head with visitors approaching a house in the brain area.

This idea of welcoming the visiting forces struck a chord with me, because I have learned to think of my anxiety as a pesky little sister, who shows up at the worst possible times and demands my attention. I can’t get rid of her, and as annoying as she is, she makes me a better person. So instead of trying to ignore her or make her go away, I have to say, “Oh, of course you’re here, because this is something I care about, so hold my hand and let’s move through this together.”

Exam period ended this week, meaning it was time for me to start grading student work, an activity that always excites my needy little sister. On the evening after my first day of grading, I started to notice some negative voices knocking around in my head. They sounded too deep to be my little sister, so I decided to try Salzberg’s method, and address them as “visiting forces.” I pulled out a spiral notebook and began writing:

I am entertaining visitors telling me of my inadequacy and uselessness, my lack of skill and knowledge, my inconsequentiality as a teacher and scholar. Why are they visiting today? Let me ask them.

Why are you here? Is it because I’ve been grading and am disappointed in the quality of some of the work? Is it because I got angry and annoyed with a student who, once again, failed to submit assignments? Is it because I’m comparing myself to colleagues who sing the praises of their students’ work on social media? Why can’t I see my students’ work as just as marvelous? And why do flaws in their work reflect on me as a teacher? See how the questioning so quickly turns to my failings and inadequacies.

Dear Visitors:

Thank you for showing up for something I care about: the measure of my students’ learning and achievement. Thank you for reminding me to be humble, to accept less than perfection, in myself and them. Remind me how to evaluate the work, while still loving and appreciating the person who did it. I know you’ll be hanging around this week, casting shadows around the room. Here, have a cookie. You can stay, but please lower your voices. I have work to do.

The Political Afterlives of Poems

September 10, 2019 by Suzanne Churchill Leave a Comment

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
– William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955)

It may be “difficult / to get the news from poems,” but you can get poems from the news. Just last month, a sonnet made headlines after the Trump administration announced a new policy refusing green cards to anyone who relies on government assistance. At a press conference, a reporter asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Director Ken Cuccinelli whether the new policy necessitated the removal of the famous lines engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give use your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to be free” (Giaritelli).

Those lines come from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which she composed in 1883 as part of a fundraising campaign for the statue’s pedestal. The journalist invoked the poem as representative of time-honored American values, but Cuccinelli offered a different spin: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge,” he asserted. Later, he insisted that the poem referred to “people coming from Europe” (Fortin).

The trouble is, they’re both wrong. Lazarus’s poem did not represent the dominant sentiments of American people at the time it was written, nor does it refer to Europeans who can take care of themselves. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Although today, the sonnet is celebrated as an expression of the America’s inclusive, democratic ethos and melting pot character, its origins tell a different story, as Professor Emeritus Esther Schorr explains. The highly educated daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, Lazarus was a radical thinker and social activist. She wrote the poem in an era of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in America. The Immigration Act of 1882 set a head tax on immigrants, putting restrictions on criminals, insane, or “any person unable to take care of him or herself,” effectively establishing the first federal immigration bureaucracy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration, marking the first time a group of people were excluded from citizenship by nationality or ethnicity.

But Lazarus wasn’t thinking about these exclusionary acts when she wrote the poem, according to Schorr: she was more concerned about a wave of Eastern European Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Russia. These desperate refugees were definitely not the “people from Europe” Cucinella was referring, and they certainly weren’t in a position to take care of themselves. Lazarus worried about their welfare, as well as that of her own, established Jewish community. She was concerned that a tide of anti-semitism would rise in America in response to the influx of Jewish refugees. Rather than representing the highest ideals of the American people at the time, then, “The New Colossus” fights against their basest fears and xenophobic impulses, invoking the “Mother of Exiles” to urge maternal compassion for the tired, poor, and “tempest-tost.”

Sepia photo of Statue of Liberty on Ellis island — Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. “Statue of Liberty from the harbor” *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*. 1890. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/1dda7040-83b3-0132-0d80-58d385a7bbd0

II

“The New Colossus” is not the first time a poem has been brought back to life in ways that involve colossal misunderstandings of its origins. A hundred years ago, during the so-called “Red Summer” of 1919, another leftwing activist—Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay—wrote a sonnet called “If We Must Die.”

Armed white National Guard officer confronts African American soldier. — White National Guardsman confronts African American soldier.

McKay was responding to the race riots that broke out around the country in the summer of 1919, most famously in Chicago in reaction to the drowning of a black teenager name Eugene Williams who swam into the “whites only” side of Lake Michigan Beach. The ensuing violence did far more damage to black bodies and neighborhoods than to whites (Green). McKay connected the racial tensions to economic ones, explaining that WWI’s “end was a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored folk and white…It was during those days that the sonnet, ‘If We Must Die,’ exploded out of me” (qtd by Thompson). Here’s his explosive sonnet:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

McKay’s near-perfect Shakespearean sonnet has no explicit race markers, but rather articulates traditional British values of noble self-sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself—values that can traced back through English discourse all the way to Shakespeare’s St. Crispin Day speech in Henry IV. But in the heated context of the Red Summer of 1919, historian Nathan Huggins argues, “no one could doubt that the author was a black man” (qtd by Jenkins).

White mob attempts to pull black man off a bus. — White mob pulls African American man off a city bus.

So powerful was the rhetoric of communal courage, legend has it, that Prime Minister Winston Churchill read “If We Must Die” in radio broadcast to British people during WWII, to bolster their spirits and inspire their patriotism. Or did he read it before the American Congress in an effort to enlist them to join the war effort?

So inspiring was the rhetoric of noble self-sacrifice, legend has it, that a WWI soldier was found dead in the battlefield with sonnet folded in his pocket.

So powerful was the rhetoric of racial protest, legend has it, that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. (or was it his grandson Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.?) read the poem in the Congressional Record, citing it as an example of “Negro extremism,” and Lothrop Stoddard quoted poem in his best selling, white supremacist screed The Rising Tide of Color (1920) as evidence that McKay hated America (presumably like all liberals today).

As thrilling as these legends may be, there’s no evidence that any of these things happened. There’s no evidence that Churchill or Cabot Lodge read the poem in any context, and a WWI soldier couldn’t have had poem in pocket, because it wasn’t written until a year after the war ended. Stoddard did quote McKay in The Rising Tide of Color, but he singled out another sonnet, “The White House,” as the target of his racist attack.

The Churchill appropriation legend appears to have been instigated by African American poet Melvin Tolson, who perhaps was attracted to the story because it provided evidence both of McKay’s poetic power and of white imperialist appropriations of black art. And while these legends attest to the poem’s power, what gets lost in them is its roots in the Red Summer of 1919—a specific, historical instance of white violence against black citizens.

III

New York skyline with huge black cloud emerging from World Trade Towers — Smoke billows from World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

My final example of the political afterlives of poetry takes us back to 2001, the year that my current first-year students were born. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” circulated widely by email. Here are the first and fourth stanzas of the poem, whose title marks the date of Germany’s invasion of Poland and start of WW II:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
. . .
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

“With its references to skyscrapers, dazed citizens, and the approach of war, ‘September 1, 1939’ seemed less a poem than a news bulletin,” observes Scott McLemee. (Maybe Williams was wrong and it is possible to get the news from poems.) McLemee explains that the poem resonated with people after 9/11 because it articulated a “complex, disturbed reaction to historical event.” It signaled a deep crisis of confidence in its recognition that the ideals of freedom, liberty, and rationality can’t prevent violence, evil, or war.

Yet as much as readers found solace in the poem, Auden repudiated and came to loathe it. He was disgusted by the sentimentality and false consolations of lines such as:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden, who admired discretion, ambivalence, and irony, grew embarrassed by the vatic confidence of these lines, which seem to say: Here I am, the wise, all-knowing poet, telling you the shining truth. “I don’t want it to be reprinted in my lifetime,” he later said, admitting, “It may be a good poem, but I shouldn’t have written it” (qtd by McLemee).

IV

What lessons can we take away from the chaotic political afterlives of these three poems? Their complicated histories demonstrate that there is no single moment of truth for a poem. The poet’s original idea or intention does not set limits on what a poem can mean or do in the world. Poems are active, living texts that continually generate new meanings in new political contexts. As Auden himself wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats“:

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

Acknowledgements

Grateful appreciation to Lee M. Jenkins, University College Cork, who did the painstaking research to explode the myths about Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” compiling his findings in the excellent article, “‘If We Must Die’: Winston Churchill and Claude McKay, ” Notes and Queries (September 2003): 333-337.

Oh the places they’ll build!

December 11, 2017 by Suzanne Churchill Leave a Comment

If you talk to almost any professor at Davidson, we’ll say that our students are the best part about working here. I’ve got to agree (though I’ve got some pretty inspiring colleagues, too). And while lots of folks like to bemoan the decline of Generation X, Y, or Z in the age of smart phones and social media, I’ve seen them do some remarkable work with their new-fangled gadgets.

On or about December 2013, Davidson College unfolded “Davidson Domains,” an initiative that “allows students, faculty, and staff to register their own domain name and associate it with a hosted web space, free of charge while at Davidson College. With their Domain and corresponding web space, users… have the opportunity and flexibility to design and create a meaningful and vibrant digital presence.” The website you’re reading now is hosted on Davidson Domains.

To encourage students to build in their domains, I’ve begun to assign more digital projects, with groundbreaking results. Because one good project inspires another, I’ve finally created a page with links to a sampling of their work. This post is really just a way to announce that I’ve added this page to my website (which, next to my students’ projects, is looking sadly in need of a major reno. I wonder if Property Brothers do digital.)

I hope you—and future students—will have fun exploring these projects. The quality, difficulty, and sophistication vary, and you can’t always tell just by looking which projects required the most ingenuity and effort. But sometimes a project’s limitations can be more instructive than its smooth operations. This is a principle embraced in Digital Humanities (DH): failures and mistakes are opportunities to learn. In fact, if you haven’t failed at something, you probably weren’t taking big enough intellectual or creative risks.

The other thing you can’t always detect when you look at these projects is the collaborative effort that went into them. Creating digital scholarship almost certainly requires collaborating with others who have the expertise you need to realize your vision. And collaborating with others means practicing good, clear communications and negotiating the inevitable conflicts, hiccups, and frustrations. Successful digital projects require good project management and effective teamwork—skills that aren’t always developed in the individualistic, competitive framework of academia. My students haven’t just learned to make cool stuff online, they’ve learned to make cool stuff together.

So I feel the love for all these projects—warts, glitches, broken links & all (okay, some of the obvious typos bug me). Of course I’ve got a few that are especially close to my heart. Since 1991, dozens of students have contributed to the ongoing construction of the Index of Modernist Magazines, with several major overhauls along the way. The most recent incarnation, which is something like the Index 5.2, was designed by Peter Bowman and Sabrina Shepherd, who picked and customized the theme. You may think it’s a significant achievement because it looks so good, but just as astonishing is the fact that I, who might be a bit of a control freak, let students take the wheel. That’s another principle of DH: let go of the controls. Because as I’ve learned (the hard way), things will quickly spin out of control, and you won’t even know why.

My mantra has become: In DH, there is no expertise, only courage and resilience. Oh, and a lot of Googling around to see if someone out there in the interwebs can answer your question.

There are lots of other projects I love—Ela Hefler’s photo essay on Killed Negatives slays me; the photographs themselves are haunting and her insights illuminating. Leah Mell’s digital remediation of Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes tries to realize Loy’s vision for her long poem. Casey Margerum brings her musical ear to her project, Sight and Sound, making audible the importance of dialect in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, while Sarah Gompper and Maura Tangum devote their artistry to Reviving Frances Simpson Stevens.

Charlie Goldberg and Erin Golden apply their interdisciplinary intelligence to George Schuyler’s 1931 satire Black No More in Schuyler’s Economic Allegory, exploring the economic validity of the narrative and its relevance today. I have even less acumen for battle histories than I do for economic models, but Henry Meza Flores, Cole Moore, Jeffrey Peng, and Lucas Tanaka’s StoryMap of “First Sino-Japanese War” rivets my attention, pairing a detailed narrative with ukeyo-e prints depicting each battle scene in horrific splendor.

Meredith Foulke and Ellie Rifkin’s ingenious project, Sleeping with the Dictionary, may not look as slick as some of the others, until you realize that these are English majors who know how to code and built their site from HTML scratch, developing an interactive poem generator that I can now use whenever I want to teach Harryette Mullen. The best part: I don’t have to know how to code to use it!

But truly, I love them all, and as soon as I start to list my fondest, I just want to add more and more. So check out my new webpage of student work and see which ones you like the best.

Serendipity

March 1, 2016 by Suzanne Churchill Leave a Comment

Long ago and far away in a land called Persia, there were three princes who spent their days traveling the world. As they roamed far and wide, thither and yon, across amethyst mountains, emerald valleys, and sapphire seas, the princes “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right.” Another one, after a long day of travel that left him aching and sore, lay down to rest upon a bed of soft, wooly leaves of arnica, only to discover that the plant had a marvelous capacity to relieve sore muscles. And the third prince, having recently attended the grape harvest in the hills of Tuscany, sought out a goldsmith in Germany to help him repair his family ring. The goldsmith was building a printing press at the time, which reminded the prince of the wine press he’d observed in Tuscany. He told Gutenberg about what he’d seen, and thus movable type was born.

The Persian fairy tale of The Three Princes of Serendip found its way into the English language via Horace Walpole (1717-97), who, distinguished by birth as the fourth Earl of Oxford and son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, became famous for his best-selling Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (London 1765). Walpole recounted the tale in a 1754 letter to his friend Horace Mann to illustrate the concept of serendipity—”a very expressive word” he coined to describe “the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description).”

Serendipity is the term we still use today to describe those happy accidents of creative insight: the phenomenon of “making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” And the term is making a comeback. Steven Johnson dedicates a chapter to the concept in his dazzling book Where Good Ideas Come From (2010). On January 2, just in time for new year’s resolutions, Pagan Kennedy published an essay the New York Times Review on cultivating “The Art of Serendipity” (2016). I read Kennedy’s essay first, before serendipitously encountering the concept again in Johnson’s book, which I’m halfway through. A Google search led me to Richard Boyles’ detailed account of the term’s origins in Walpole’s writings (2000).

I’ve embellished Walpole’s story with fictional examples of arnica and Gutenberg because I want to emphasize that serendipity is not merely good luck; it’s not just ideas dropping into your head “out of the blue.” Rather, discoveries come “by accident and sagacity”—by a combination of chance and intelligence. Serendipity, Kennedy writes, is not something that just happens, it’s “something people do.” It’s also something people do together, when minds and imaginations meet in print or in person. Like the Princes of Serendip, we can cultivate serendipity by being sharply observant of the world, following threads, and making connections between ideas, phenomenon, and people. It’s no accident that there are three Princes of Serendip traveling the world, not one lone, tortured genius holed up in an attic.

We don’t have to travel far to cultivate serendipity, Steven Johnson explains: “Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives” (112). Far from seeing the digital age as a dark age for serendipity, Johnson says the the world wide web has moved a “fringe experience” to the “mainstream of our culture.”

I traveled along an archipelago of serendipity this morning, beginning with the New York Times daily briefing, which offers “what you need to know” to get through the day. Today’s briefing led me to stumble upon some word-image stories from the archive produced for Black History Month, which led me to this educational initiative, “What’s Going On In This Picture?” We often think we’re wasting time surfing the web, but maybe it’s better to think of it as diving into an ocean of ideas, stories, images, videos, games, tools, platforms, and resources, guided by passion and instinct, and rewarded by serendipity.

What Poetry Doesn’t Tell You

February 16, 2016 by Suzanne Churchill 2 Comments

Ok, this morning’s earlier post was the public story, but as you might of guessed, there’s a private story lurking behind it. Or more accurately, a story “Formerly Known as Private,” since I’m about to tell it. The public story was proper and tidy. This story is going to be messy, because I’ve just gotta get it down and then get on with grading all those papers.

What set off the explosion of gloom I alluded to was simply a bombed class. I had high hopes for a fun, lively debate about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (an overturned urinal), William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” (a refrigerator note), and the limits of art and poetry. But whether I pitched it wrong, blithered on too long, or failed to account for the dreary weather, my students wouldn’t play. I called on one, wrapped up in her shawl, who confessed she’d been falling asleep. Later, I called on another, who had lost track of the discussion because he was reading his classmate’s blog post.

Don’t make excuses for me: these are the telltale signs of poor teaching. Which means I suck as a teacher and the class is a failure. I can see the rest of the semester trailing ahead as the barometer of student engagement continues to fall steadily, relentlessly. One corner of mind flings about wildly for ingenious games and activities I might use to win them back, while the other sulks in despair, contemplating early retirement.

Thanks in part to writing this blog, I’ve learned to recognize that when I find myself caught in such cycles of self-loathing and recrimination, there is usually something deeper contributing to my distress. For the past few years, that something has been grief about my losing my Mom, which is apparently a pain so unfathomable that I can’t confront it directly. Until I dig it out of hiding, I remain tangled in exhausting spirals of anxious thinking.

The pattern is now familiar, and it didn’t take much digging this time. I knew right away that my over-reaction to a bad class was triggered by my Dad’s announcement that he and his new lady-friend Ruth were planning to move in together. This isn’t a secret or a surprise: Dad has brought Ruth to church, introduced her to my siblings and their families, and taken her out to dinner with his closest friends. By all accounts, she is a lovely person. Although I haven’t met her yet, Dad told me about her, and I knew things were headed in this direction. Still, the news hit me with a wallop, and it didn’t help that he made the announcement by e-mail.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to the lady-friend or even to the apartment-share. A little over a year ago, when Mom turned catatonic and was lingering on her deathbed, I secretly hoped that Dad would find a lady-friend to keep him company and hold his hand. Actually, I didn’t even keep my hope secret: I told Dad he had my blessing.

Retrospectively, I think that what I really wanted was relief from his misery—relief for me, perhaps, more than for him. It was so hard to see him weeping and wracked with grief. I felt awkward and helpless. It was much more pleasant to imagine him enjoying the companionship of a new lady friend—and much less of a responsibility for me.

At the time, Dad couldn’t even fathom my suggestion, and he grieved so hard all year that I decided that maybe he would do so for the rest of his life—that being wedded to Mom was his identity and life calling. So when he told me his feelings for Ruth had turned romantic, I felt my guts lurch. Why? Rationally, I knew Ruth could never replace Mom in our hearts, and she has no desire to do so. I was happy for Dad—I’m happy for them both that they’ve found each other. Yet in the days following his revelation, I was swept over by waves of grief, missing Mom more than ever, wanting to call her, talk to her, and have her back in my life.

It seems too fast for my grieving heart that their relationship has moved so quickly from romance to live-in partnership, but who am I to judge time for septuagenarians? If they were in their twenties and had their whole lives unfolding before them, maybe it would be appropriate for me to caution them to slow down. But I don’t sit at the seat of 75; what seems fast to me at 49 may seem to them like wasted precious time.

I’m trying to take a broad view, one that encompasses my own grief, acknowledges Dad’s and Ruth’s perspective, and incorporates my 14-year-old son’s point of view (but excludes my shitty teaching). When we told Zac that Granu had a new girlfriend and they might be moving in together, he smiled and said: “Good for him. It was a lot harder to see him suffering than it would be to see him happy with a new girlfriend.” He’s right. Good for him is good for us, too. I’m pretty sure Mom would smile and say the same thing.

The Work of Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction

October 11, 2015 by Suzanne Churchill

Introduction

Who, What, and How

My title makes an appeal to humanities scholars who are uncertain about the survival of time-honored, print-based scholarly practices in the digital age of information abundance and attention deficits.

The argument laid out before you concerns not only the eponymous subject matter of the work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction, but also the potential for undergraduates to make original contributions to humanities research. My focus on undergraduate participation is likely to appeal to a smaller subset of humanities scholars who are eager to involve students in research in their fields. Yet this more narrow focus is, in fact, a gesture toward a wider audience. Because undergraduates qualify as “non experts,” my emphasis on their participation is tied to a crucial component of my agenda: re-imagining humanities scholarship in the digital age to involve a broad public of experts and non-experts—and in the process, to dislodge hierarchies that currently divide these constituencies.

Hence my publishing here, on Atavist, a digital storytelling platform geared toward “a new genre of nonfiction, a digital form that lies in the space between long narrative magazine articles and traditional books and e-books” (qtd by Butler). Can a work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction inhabit such a free, open space?

So much for the subject matter and platform, and on to methodologies. Like a three-legged stool, my argument rests on three methodological principles for humanities scholarship in the digital age:

1. bibliography,2. design, &3. collaboration.

The ideas I am about to unfold are not original to me. Rather, I will gather and arrange arguments made by scholars whose writings inspired me as I began my own path from a solid grounding in print-based scholarship and pedagogy into the uncharted terrain of digital humanities. In curating other scholars’ ideas here, I am effectively doing the work of bibliography, gathering sources on a subject and arranging them in an accessible, intelligible form.

Design is crucial to this effort. If I am going to capture and hold your attention, so that you ignore the new message alert that just popped up on the smartphone, tablet, or laptop on which you are reading, then I must deliver these ideas in a stylish, easily navigable, minimalist, and immersive format that reduces distractions and rewards concentration. (Thanks, Atavist.)

Collaboration will ensue when you use the comment function to critique my argument and make suggestions about how it might be refined and improved. Based on your suggestions, I will make corrections and improvements, so that this argument will remain a living, changing, unfolding statement of principles and practices concerning the work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction.

___________________________________________________________________

WORKS CITED

Butler, Kirsten. “7 Platforms Changing the Future of Publishing and Storytelling.” Brain Pickings. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.

From Print Culture to the Digital Age

The tectonic shift from print culture to the digital age is transforming practices of reading and writing, turning a once solitary endeavor into an interactive, multimedia activity. The shift is also affecting scholarly practices, albeit more gradually. Humanities professors, rooted as we are in print-based traditions and methodologies, tend to approach the digital revolution with attitudes ranging from healthy skepticism to horror. The popular “blog,” for example, seems the antithesis of the thoroughly researched, well-reasoned, expertly vetted analysis that we expect in academia.

As Scott Pound explains in “The Future of the Scholarly Journal,” these expectations arise from a system for producing and disseminating scholarly knowledge that dates back to the seventeenth century and is rooted in print cultural practices and values such as individuality, permanence, hierarchy, linear thinking, scarcity, and depth. According to this model, a lone scholar painstakingly researches and writes an academic book that takes years to prepare and requires the approval of two experts in the field before being published by a prestigious university press, issued in hard copy for $100+, purchased primarily by academic libraries, and reviewed in subscription based, peer-reviewed academic journals read only by professionals in the field.

The digital age has ushered in a new system for producing and disseminating knowledge, and with it, alternative practices and values such as collective intelligence; networks; divergent, lateral, systemic thinking; abundance; and breadth (Pound). In this model, anyone with access to a computer can publish online about any topic—climate change, You-Tube, Twitter, or twerking; research questions can be crowd-sourced on sites like Ask.com; community members can submit content to online bulletin board systems such as Reddit; and the general public can contribute to the expansion and regulation of free, open-access informational resources like Wikipedia, where you can learn about any subject in minutes, click on links, and surf across the World Wide Web to related (and unrelated) sites.

The typical scholarly response has been to resist the tide of information abundance, as Pound explains: “For the most part, the scholarly community has managed to artificially maintain its traditional grounding in information scarcity through hefty subscription rates, low acceptance rates, and slow mechanisms for vetting research.” Innovation in scholarly vetting procedures can a slow, arduous, and painful process, as Nick D. Kim’s cartoon shows.

But not all scholars resist the change. Pioneers in digital studies have begun to utilize digital tools and platforms for academic writing and research, with promising results. These innovators recognize that in the scholarly enterprise, as in book publishing, we must avoid simply relocating print-based practices to the digital realm. In this regard, we can take lessons from non-academics like independent writer, designer, and publisher Craig Mod:

Everyone asks, “How do we change books to read them digitally?” But the more interesting question is, “How does digital change books?” (2)

Academics may be similarly inclined to wonder, “How do we change our scholarship to publish it digitally?” But the more interesting question is: “How does digital change scholarship?” Rather than simply uploading our articles as PDFs, we must put our minds and imaginations to the task of using digital platforms to invent new methods and forms of scholarship—forms capable of presenting long and deep inquiry, fostering intellectual exchange, and maintaining rigorous standards of peer review.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, is a leader in the effort to adapt digital tools and platforms to serve the highest standards of scholarly inquiry and communication. “The blog is not a form but a platform,” she argues, explaining that the blog is not a genre that precludes sustained analysis or concentrated attention, but a “stage on which material of many different varieties—different lengths, different time signatures, different modes of mediation—might be performed” (48).

“The blog is not a form but a platform.”

El Ponderoso platform shoe, “The Heights of Fashion: Platform Shoes Then and Now,” Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC.

The next two chapters discuss two different applications of blog platforms for academic research involving undergraduates. The first emphasizes the importance of bibliography and the second, the importance of design. But despite the difference in emphasis, both case studies reflect the three methodological principles of bibliography, design, and collaboration. And both offer models that you can adapt to involve your students in original research in your field using digital tools and platforms.

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WORKS CITED

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline.” Profession (2012): 41-52. Web. 15 Sep. 2013.

Kim, Nick D. Peer Review Cartoon. Strange-Matter Archive. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

Mod, Craig. “Post-Artifact Books and Publishing.” @craigmod (June, 2011). Web. 15 Sep. 2013.

Pound, Scott. “The Future of the Scholarly Journal.” Amodern. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2015.

Sapiens de Mitri, Nichola. “Studying at Starbucks.” (2013). Creative Commons licensed. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.

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What did Surrealism offer women like Loy?

Grading with Love: an open letter to my first-year writers

September 21, 2015 by Suzanne Churchill Leave a Comment

I hate grading papers. This revulsion led me to innovate, so maybe misery is the real mother of invention. My thought process went like this:

Papers:
they hate writing them;
we hate reading them.
What’s wrong with this picture?

So I tried to change the picture. I turned to WordPress, a platform whose beauty and flexibility I hoped would make students more excited about writing, so that I could be more excited about grading.

It’s not a perfect fix, but with with practice, I’ve learned ways to use the platform to motivate students to take more interest in their writing. Your curation essays are a case in point: these are interesting essays because you are interested—not only in what you’re writing about but also in how you’re writing.

But I still hate grading. I can step into an essay and immediately get tripped up by tangled syntax, awkward grammar, and improper punctuation, so that I fail to see the idea straining for articulation.

I’m trying to change this process, too. I asked advice from Dr. Elizabeth Mills, a wise English professor who just retired from Davidson.

Me: “How do you approach grading essays? How do you keep from getting irritated and distracted by bungled grammar, clutter, and clichés?”

E. M.: “I try to see the person behind the essay. I try to think about what he or she is trying to accomplish and get across.”

As I turned that idea over in my mind, like a floury wad of dough between my hands, a realization began to rise: Dr. Mills grades with love.

When I read your curation essays, I tried to look for you and figure out what you were trying to say. Because if you have put something of yourself into an essay, there will be something to love in it. There will also be flaws, which are part of your humanness and your growing as a writer, and are therefore also something to love. Poet and playwright Kevin Kling tells a story about a cracked pot that reminds us why we should love the flaws. Listen:

When I read your essays, I look for you. But when I attach the grade, I don’t grade you, I grade the essay, based on the extent to which it achieves the goals outlined in the assignment. You may not have achieved all those goals, but in attempting to meet them, I hope you have discovered something that more valuable than an A on an essay.

The Originality of Ideas and Other Scholarly Myths

July 30, 2015 by Suzanne Churchill 4 Comments

I’ve been sitting with Andrew Rikard (Davidson class of 2017) in a classroom all morning. We’re attending ILiAds (Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship) at Hamilton College to work on our digital Mina Loy project. We’ve spent most of the week attending presentations, exchanging ideas with other teams, and tinkering with our website. This morning, we sequestered ourselves in order to write. We wanted to reflect on the collaborative process and on the ways in which digital tools can transform how we teach, learn, research, and communicate. We each decided to write our own blog posts.

Andrew put in his earbuds so that he could focus and not be distracted when I mutter aloud to myself, as I invariably do when I’m concentrating. But every so often, he’d pull out an earbud and ask me a question, wanting to talk through his argument to make sure it made sense. He would say something that would trigger an idea in my mind or echo something I’d been thinking about in another context. I’d listen, take notes on the white board, ask questions, and map out connections and parallels. Andrew was developing a brilliant argument about how digital domains (students designing and managing their own web presences) could transform pedagogical practices in ways that would allow students to have ownership not just of data, but also of the creative production of original ideas.

Here’s a example of our dialogue:

Andrew: I’m starting to think that a “domain of one’s own” is a misnomer, because it implies an ownership over ideas, which isn’t what we’re actually after. We want more of an emphasis on methods, research, exploration, and process.

Suzanne: That’s right, and the metaphors we’ve been using to describe domains emphasize walled, bounded repositories and individual ownership more than creative processes and collaborative exchanges.

Andrew: Yes, because “domain of one’s own” draws upon Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and she’s not really talking about the same thing. But how can I say that when I don’t know enough about her argument?

Suzanne: Woolf was referring to the way, historically, women have been denied access to the material spaces and economic privileges associated with the production of knowledge: they didn’t have access to libraries, offices, or to the quiet and solitude such spaces provided. It’s not that they didn’t have the intelligence or imagination to write, think, and produce knowledge, but they lacked the material resources to do so.

Andrew: Okay, so this situation is different. I want to emphasize that a “domain of one’s own” shouldn’t be an isolated space for individual contemplation, but a space of connectivity and creative exchange.

In this conversation, whose idea is it that the metaphors we use to describe intellectual property are bound by architectural models of walled spaces and by economic notions of individual ownership? Is it Andrew’s or mine? He was first to protest the limitation of the language, “domain of one’s own,” and if he didn’t say that, I wouldn’t have thought to extend his concern to a more general epistemological problem with how we conceive of originality and ownership of ideas.

Here’s the problem as I see it (after talking with Andrew):

Ideas do not form in my head, and I don’t think they form in Andrew’s or yours either. They form in the space between us—in the synapses between two (or more) minds at work. Andrew was sitting across the table from me when I explained this idea, pointing to the empty space between our two laptops: that‘s where the ideas happen. Ideas occur not within but between minds. If you’re perceptive and alert, you’ll grab the idea as it spawns and put it in a book, article, or blog post. (If, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, you have the material resources to do so.) But the print or digital document you create is not so much your idea bank, as it is a point of contact between you and other minds. When you grab an idea and put it in writing, you’re putting that idea between two minds. It’s not in your head; it’s in a space between you and your reader(s).

Originality means newness and creativity; it’s tied to the notion of origin or source. But if the origin or source of ideas is the space between minds at work, how can we claim individual ownership of those ideas? Everything I’ve ever thought, said, or written has in some way been shaped by something someone else said or wrote. Even if I have a “new” idea about a Mina Loy poem—an idea no other scholar has published—I wouldn’t have thought of that idea if Loy hadn’t written the poem, and probably wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t read what Roger Conover, Carolyn Burke, and Cristanne Miller, and a host of others have written about Loy, modernism, and women writers.

Academic scholarship, especially in the U.S., is obsessed with the idea of ownership and copyright. When I presented our digital Mina Loy project at a recent academic symposium, I was surprised by the level of fear and resistance. The concerns centered on questions of ownership: What if someone steals your ideas? If published online, will your work be protected by copyright? Those are legitimate concerns that I should think about, embedded as I am in an academic economy where status and value are premised upon the quantity and quality of scholarly publications. But what I really wanted to say was: How valuable are my ideas if they don’t exist where others can interact with them? Or if they appear only in a prestigious, expensive, hardcover book owned only by university libraries and a few scholars? And are they really my ideas in the first place? Or are they ours?

Of course, as Andrew points out, it’s easy for me to promote a collective ownership of ideas when I’m a tenured professor. As an undergraduate, he has a lot more to lose if he doesn’t lay claim to his ideas, or if I run off with ideas from our conversation and publish them without attribution to him.

The whole notion of attribution, so central to the scholarly enterprise, is premised on a notion of intellectual property. An original idea belongs to a particular thinker, so you must attribute it to him or her. Attribution is vital to the scholarly enterprise, but perhaps not because an individual originated or owns an idea, but because the apparatus of citation and attribution reminds us that we are all embedded in a network of ideas. We are always in conversation with the people who came before us, are with us now, and those who will come after us.

I’m all for documenting the conversation. What we write and publish is stronger when we acknowledge its ties to others, not when we claim sole ownership. I’m also hopeful that the digital humanities can broaden our understanding of original scholarship in ways that emphasize the collaborative origins of intellectual thought.