Topics in the Digital Humanities

Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Jennifer Travis, Jessica DeSpain, Jennifer Travis, Jessica DeSpain

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780252050978
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain present a long-overdue collection of theoretical perspectives and case studies aimed at teaching nineteenth-century American literature using digital humanities tools and methods. Scholars foundational to the development of digital humanities join educators who have made digital methods central to their practices. Together they discuss and illustrate how digital pedagogies deepen student learning. The collection's innovative approach allows the works to be read in any order.

Travis and DeSpain curate conversations on the value of project-based, collaborative learning; examples of real-world assignments where students combine close, collaborative, and computational reading; how digital humanities aids in the consideration of marginal texts; the ways in which an ethics of care can help students organize artifacts; and how an activist approach affects debates central to the study of difference in the nineteenth century.

A supplemental companion website with substantial appendixes of syllabi and assignments is now available for readers of Teaching with Digital Humanities.

PART ONE

Make

1.Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy in the Classroom Laboratory

Ryan Cordell, Benjamin J. Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood

The name Kaleidoscope, which I have given to a new Optical Instrument, for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms, is derived from the Greek καλός, beautiful; εἶδος, a form; and σκοπέω, to see.

—David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (1855)

IN RECENT YEARS, the term laboratory has become a keyword in discussions of digital learning environments in the humanities.1 The laboratory is not an entirely new concept to humanities education and pedagogical models, as discussions of writing laboratories in rhetoric and composition indicate.2 However, the term laboratory is increasingly posited and applied as an innovation in instructors’ and students’ approach to humanistic inquiry. We seek in this essay to delineate a more deliberate application of the term that does more than rhetorically align the humanities with the sciences. In fact, we argue that laboratory can connote a deeply historicized and media-focused learning environment for studying the nineteenth century. To frame this conversation, we propose a model of laboratory-based learning we are calling a “kaleidoscopic” pedagogy, which emphasizes not only the site of a laboratory space but the experiences that such a site engenders.

In a science laboratory, students might use a microscope to more closely investigate an object of study. A grain of pollen, for instance, becomes delicately intricate, complicated, unnerving. By contrast, we draw our central metaphor for the laboratory from a nineteenth-century tool: the kaleidoscope. Whereas the microscope, as both tool and metaphor, enables the researcher to see and know what they could not see or know before, the kaleidoscope fractures an otherwise singular entity into an array of seemingly disparate parts that remain in intimate relation. In literature classrooms, students and instructors are familiar with the microscopic framework, which we engage through close reading and related interpretive practices. In this chapter, we propose a complementary kaleidoscopic framework for the laboratory classroom. Adopting a kaleidoscopic perspective, we argue, productively unsettles our and our students’ familiar ways of knowing and doing literary studies. A kaleidoscopic pedagogy adds building and experimentation to reading and interpretation, blends digital and analog media as tools and objects of our analyses, and repositions students as necessary and integral collaborators in the knowledge-making processes of the field.

The kaleidoscope offers a deeply humanistic metaphor for imagining classrooms as laboratories. In David Brewster’s account of his invention of the kaleidoscope—quoted above as our epigraph—he describes it as “a new Optical Instrument, for creating and exhibiting beautiful forms.”3 It is, in other words, an instrument that blends optics and aesthetics, symmetry and surprise, structure and creation. A kaleidoscopic laboratory challenges students to both “explore unfamiliar technologies” and to “defamiliarize those we think we already know,” such as the book.4 In such labs, students build in two distinct ways: as an experiential learning practice (e.g., understanding early nineteenth-century book production by setting type and operating a letterpress printer) and as a method of knowledge production (e.g., from bibliographic metadata research to mapping the movements of an enslaved person using geospatial software). Such acts of making can bridge rhetorical divides between the digital and the analog, help students understand nineteenth-century technologies, deepen their engagement with books as material and technological objects, and push them to think critically about both the words and the media through which they present their own ideas about the period. Indeed, many debates that seem unique to the twenty-first century—over privacy, intellectual property, information overload, and textual authority—rose to prominence during the nineteenth century. By engaging directly with the technologies that spurred such debates then and now, students come to insights unavailable through reading alone.

We conceive of these activities under the term laboratory not to mark off a separate, more “objective” space for humanities work. With Amy E. Earhart, we believe “it is important not to romanticize the [scientific] lab.”5 In some classroom or institutional contexts, the more familiar studio or workshop might be equally effective spaces for fostering the activities and learning goals we describe here. Indeed, our central metaphor deliberately troubles such distinctions. The kaleidoscope itself was, through the course of the nineteenth century, a scientific instrument, a device for creative provocation, an objet d’art in Victorian parlors, and, just as importantly, a toy. As Jason Farman describes, Sir David Brewster developed the kaleidoscope during experiments on “the relationships between optics, light, and mirrors,” and it was soon adopted by scientists who “found it useful as a tool to visualize massive numbers.”6 From the optics laboratory, the kaleidoscope flourished in studios, workshops, and even industry, where it was used to create patterns for cloth and housewares. Indeed, Farman demonstrates how the kaleidoscope became a popular mobile device, critiqued for distracting the public in ways analogous to critiques of mobile computing technology today. Ultimately, however, Farman argues, “it was the way that this new mobile device brought together these elements (the science of optics, industrial utility, and symmetrical beauty through a visual instrument) that captured the attention of the nineteenth century.”

Likewise, the kaleidoscopic laboratory encourages students to experiment—often beginning in quite procedural ways—to foster work that refracts into analysis, creativity, building, and play. In the following pages, we first outline discussions in the digital humanities community (and beyond) around ideas of building, making, or tinkering as both research and pedagogical practices. While acknowledging the political and epistemological limitations of these conversations thus far, we advocate a vision of building in the classroom that we see as liberating and generative for students. Echoing Earhart, we advocate the kaleidoscopic laboratory as “a space into which we can imagine our hopes for new practices” in the classroom.7 In the rest of the article, we delineate the kaleidoscopic outcomes a laboratory-oriented course can meet for students, illustrating each point with examples from our own classes. We offer these points as provocations, not inflexible principles, and hope they can generate discussion within the context of particular courses and curricula.

Building the Kaleidoscope

In a fall 2014 class, we accompanied a group of undergraduates enrolled in an upper-level English course, Technologies of Texts, to the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Massachusetts, a twenty-five-minute bus ride from Northeastern University in Boston. While there, students set lines of movable type, which they then printed on nineteenth-century proof presses under the supervision of museum volunteers. By the end of this brief letterpress laboratory, students had composed and printed a single word or phrase, which they could take with them to hang on a dorm wall or give as a present. To complete the letterpress assignment, students published lab reports on the course blog in which they “use[d their] brief experience working in a print shop to think about very small details of printing and compositing work.” We asked them, “What is apparent to you now that wasn’t before this trip, and how might those details help you (re)consider class concepts and/or texts?” The assignment encouraged students to focus on specifics, write about observations rather than emotions (e.g., “the type was smaller in size than I had imagined” rather than “I really had fun at this lab”), and to use the environment of the print shop to consider the material aspects of printing.

One student, Lauren Smith, wrote the following in her lab report:

A lot of what I learned at the Museum of Printing were things that we had already covered to a certain extent during class, but were really cemented in my mind while we were there, and the implications of them became clearer. … [For instance,] the only interaction one has with the ink with modern printing is buying a new cartridge, and then once it’s already dry, or mostly so, on the printed page. For this lab, I had to roll out the ink on a roller and roll it onto the type. Where most errors with a printer would only come from a broken printer or low ink, here, there are more variables. If I missed a spot while rolling the ink, it wouldn’t show on the printed version. Some errors in my pieces of type meant that there were some slight imperfections in the printing. The second print of one came out lighter, which implies that not only does the ink have to be reapplied frequently, but that it’s very unlikely that any editions of a book are exactly identical. Also, there’s much more room for error–I not only decorated my hands with ink, but also my sweatshirt. (It’s okay. Now it looks more vintage.) But it’s surprising to me that the books we’ve seen at the Rare Books Room weren’t more smudged with ink and makes me wonder if printers were so adept that they didn’t get ink on their own hands, didn’t get it on the printing, or if there really is no such thing as an identical edition.8

Smith’s reflection aptly illustrates the multiple effects of the kaleidoscopic laboratory. Specifically, we want to call attention to how her experience operating a printing press refracts into insights that connect a range of course materials and allows her to inhabit, albeit partially and anachronistically, the physical and mental spaces of a nineteenth-century printer. Smith recalls the readings and videos we watched about letterpress print practices (“things that we had already covered to a certain extent in class”), but these recollections are extended by observations made in the print shop. By comparing letterpress printing to her own experiences with inkjet or laser printing, she connects her lab activities and readings with in-class discussions in which students paralleled their understanding of modern technologies with historical print technologies. From here she moves to a specific, material observation about the messiness of ink in the letterpress process, which is an element of print that our readings and in-class discussions did not illuminate for her. Finally, Smith links her new synthesis to an earlier class trip to the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books Room. Her comment that “it’s surprising to me that the books we’ve seen at the Rare Books Room weren’t more smudged with ink” surfaces a small but salient material-textual detail that had not been evident to her during the BPL trip, but that became apparent through her work in the print shop. Indeed, Lauren’s final point reaches toward a sophisticated bibliographical question, as she extrapolates from her new insight about ink to wonder “if there really is no such thing as an identical edition.” This one laboratory activity becomes a locus around which Smith can gather a cluster of ideas about the larger course, its activities, and its subjects. The work of the lab allows her to place previously studied materials in new and meaningful configurations by bringing together both familiar and novel facets of print technology and asking her to make something, both literally and figuratively, of them.

But what does this experience have to do with digital pedagogies, and how does it differ from activities or field trips in nineteenth-century literature classes that would not be classified as laboratories? Considered as an isolated class event, the answer to those questions would be “very little”—there is, we suppose, a blog involved—and “nothing.” Many instructors incorporate hands-on activities and field trips into their classes. In the kaleidoscopic classroom we advocate here, however, such hands-on assignments constitute a core, sustained, organizing element of the course. The classroom laboratory spans archival research; hands-on experiments with both historical and modern technologies; and media-focused assignments that ask students to craft arguments in textual, aural, visual, and haptic modes. Though literature is most typically a discipline of the book, we insist that nineteenth-century books are themselves sophisticated technologies—“machine[s] of knowledge”—created through and often composed in response to a constellation of other technologies.9 Within the laboratory environment, the book’s own technologies become more visible and available for critique. Indeed, the larger mediascape of the nineteenth century comes into sharper focus for students for whom its innovations are so routine as to seem, without conscious effort, invisible.

Such ideas of making or building have been central to discourse in the growing field of digital humanities. Stephen Ramsay—whether famously or infamously—argued that a “commonality to everyone who finds their way to dh” involves “moving from reading and critiquing to building and making.” For Ramsay, this movement constitutes “a new kind of hermeneutic” central to the field:

As humanists, we are inclined to read maps (to pick one example) as texts, as instruments of cultural desire, as visualizations of imperial ideology, as records of the emergence of national identity, and so forth. This is all very good. In fact, I would say it’s at the root of what it means to engage in humanistic inquiry. … But making a map (with a GIS system, say) is an entirely different experience. DH-ers insist—again and again—that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. It’s the thing I’ve been hearing for as I long as I’ve been in this. People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table.10

Ramsay’s hermeneutic of building has been vigorously debated, particularly by scholars concerned that it eschews the necessary interventions of critical theory or even reinforces the inequities those theories seek to address.11 Certainly ideas of building or making can reinscribe dominant cultural modes and economic discrepancies, particularly when taken up uncritically, as self-evident goods.

Nevertheless, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Digital Humanities and the Nineteenth-Century American Literature Classroom
• Additional Tags
• Part One. Make
• Part Two. Read
• Part Three. Recover
• Part Four. Archive
• Part Five. Act
• About the Contributors
• Index