Teaching with Scalar

Home About Submit Beyond The Page ASA September 2018 This special issue explores digital humanities as a designation, as an associated constellation of technologies and practices, and as a site of convergence for inter-, multiand transdisciplinary scholarship. Rather than defining and policing the boundaries of American studies and digital humanities, which thrive precisely because they are complex and not easily disciplined, this special issue is more interested in what it means to bring these fields, methodologies, and communities together toward a critically engaged digital practice. The special issue is divided into four sections: articles, digital projects, forums, and a review essay. The first set of articles offer alternative and transformative approaches to digital humanities, while the second cluster of articles examines digital engagements with race, ethnicity, and disability. The third and final set of articles focus on materiality, the virtual, and metadata. The second section of the special issue features overviews of eight online digital projects. The third section of the special issue features several forums on the topics of Methods, Institutions, and Forms of Knowledge & Practice. Finally, the fourth section is a review by Jason Heppler of "Renewing Inequality: Family Displacements through Urban Renewal" and "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America." A Children’s Book, Nineteenth Century-News, and Multimedia Approaches to American Studies Sara L. Schwebel This article discusses the multimedia strategies employed to bridge the gap between the scholarly study of children’s literature and the use of popular children’s books in K-12 schools. The Lone Woman and Last Indians Digital Archive, the Channel Islands National Park subject site on Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader’s Edition (University of California Press, 2016) together provide primary source material, interactive tools, teacher lesson plans, and accessible scholarship that invite students, scholars, and the larger public to explore a familiar text in new ways. As a public humanities project, the digital and print resources strive to develop more complex understandings of the United States as an empire and settler colonial society, as well as a land in which vibrant Native communities persist, despite centuries of oppression and dispossession. The multimedia materials interrupt ideas about Indian Vanishing embedded in narratives of the Lone Woman’s story (including in Island of the Blue Dolphins) and introduce, in the curriculum portal, topics that are underrepresented in textbooks, including Native cultural and linguistic persistence and the Pacific maritime trade that pre-dated California’s Gold Rush. There is also a sample syllabus for an undergraduate course centered on Island of the Blue Dolphins and the Lone Woman of San Nicolas that can be used in conjunction with service learning initiatives. The Channel Islands National Park subject site on Island of the Blue Dolphins additionally serves as a forum for the presentation of new research on the Lone Woman. In 2009, archeologists uncovered two redwood boxes containing a range of raw and manufactured materials of Native Alaskan, Native Californian, and European origin, suggesting that they were stashed by the Lone Woman during her eighteen years of island isolation (1835-53). Jon M. Erlandson describes some of the objects found in this brief conference presentation. Just three years later, in 2012, a team led by U.S. Navy archeologist Steven Schwartz located the opening of a cave likely used by the Lone Woman, and by her ancestors long before her (see conference presentation). Both findings attracted great interest among researchers and the public, and they also raised concerns in Native communities. San Nicolas Island has been controlled by the U.S. Navy since the 1950s, and thousands of artifacts and ethnographic objects are stored on the island, which is inaccessible to civilians. Following demands by the federally-recognized Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, excavation of the Lone Woman’s cave was halted, as the L.A. Times reported. On the mainland, new archival research in the papers of California anthropologist John Peabody Harrington and in Los Angeles-area baptismal records yielded both Native accounts of the Lone Woman’s story and the identities of other Nicoleños, members of the Lone Woman’s community, who arrived on the California mainland in the 1830s. Academic articles reporting these findings have been published and are forthcoming, but details of the new research also appear in easily accessible formats on the Channel Islands National Park’s Island of the Blue Dolphins subject site: in “Voices from the Field,” where researchers from a range disciplinary backgrounds describe their efforts to better understand the Lone Woman’s story; in the Peoples and Cultures section; and encoded (via TEI) in the historical annotations of nineteenth- and early-twentieth century documents collected in the Lone Woman and Last Indians archive. In each instance, efforts have been made to restore the Native identities and perspectives omitted or obscured in early accounts of the Lone Woman’s story. The digital archive also draws attention to the mechanisms of omission via data visualizations and an essay detailing the mythic tropes that have operated in more than a century of popular and academic writings about the Lone Woman (including in the recent L.A. Times article linked above). New textual scholarship on Island of the Blue Dolphins and on the sources Scott O’Dell used in writing the novel appear in Island of the Blue Dolphins: The Complete Reader’s Edition, which includes two chapters cut before O’Dell sent the typescript to Houghton Mifflin (notably, these chapters include Karana’s captivity and the threat of rape). A blog on textual variants and errors in editions and printings of the novel provides some advice for those who might include Island of the Blue Dolphins (or for that matter, other works of twentieth-century children’s literature) on their syllabi. Scott O’Dell wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins in a beautiful stone house that formerly served as an apple storage and packing facility in the Gold Rush town of Julian, California. The documentary film West of the West: Tales from California’s Channel Islands (2016) captures the setting— which looks remarkably the same today as it did in the late 1950s. The “tale” in which the O’Dell’s Stoneapple Farm is featured also summarizes recent research on the Lone Woman’s story. In 2016, Heyday Press published Dear Miss Karana, by Eric Elliot. Like countless American ten-year-olds, the protagonist is studying Island of the Blue Dolphins in school. Equipped with knowledge and insight from her Luiseño community, however, she questions some of the ways the Lone Woman’s story has been told, even as she finds herself forcefully drawn to Scott O’Dell’s character Karana. As we engage in desperately needed conversation about whose stories are told, whose are silenced, and by whom, Dear Miss Karana serves as a helpful companion text to Island of the Blue Dolphins. Digital Paxton: Digital Collection, Critical Edition, and Teaching Platform Will Fenton Digital Collection: Approximately 2,500 pages of free (CC 4.0), print-quality images contributed by a dozen archives, research libraries, and cultural institutions. About one-third of the corpus is fully-transcribed, with new transcriptions added regularly. Art: 14 engravings, maps, and photographs. Books: 3 sets of long-form printed materials, including treaty minutes, an historical narrative, and a play. Broadsides: 16 contemporaneous broadsides. Manuscripts: 111 manuscripts and correspondence authored by various figures directly and indirectly involved in the Paxton debates, including Benjamin Franklin, Israel Pemberton, and Thomas Penn. Visitors may filter manuscripts using the Edward Shippen, Timothy Horsfield, or Friendly Association sub-paths. Newsprint: 26 curated issues of newspapers and periodicals, including 22 issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette, spanning Pontiac’s Rebellion through the 1764 election. The Gazette situates the Paxton massacre within in wider context of indigenous warfare through a rich, weekly record of affairs within in the colony and across the Atlantic. Issues were digitized by the American Antiquarian Society with the support of a Lapidus Initiative Digital Collections Fellowship from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture. Pamphlets: 69 pamphlets, 15 of which are available in multiple editions. Political Cartoons: 7 political cartoons, some of which had not been previously digitized. Scholarly Edition: The project includes two forms of critical context: historical overviews and conceptual keyword essays. Historical Overviews: When visitors access Digital Paxton, they automatically enter an introductory pathway, which provides an overview of the project and a series of historical contexts related to the Paxton massacre and pamphlet war. Kevin Kenny, “Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Riots:” In an essay that abstracts his larger argument from Peaceable Kingdom Lost (2009), Kenny demonstrates how the Paxton Boys repudiated William Penn’s “holy experiment” when they murdered Conestoga on government property. Michael Goode, “Pontiac’s War and the Paxton Boys:” Goode highlights an early context for Paxton violence, Pontiac’s rebellion, in an excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Jack Brubaker, “The Aftermath of the Conestoga Massacre:” Brubaker, author of the Massacre of the Conestogas (2010), provides a granular of the Paxton massacre and expedition drawn from magistrates, colonial record books, and correspondence. Darvin L. Martin, “A History of Conestoga Indiantown:” Martin historicizes the site of the first massacre, Conestoga Indiantown. Far from some random target, Conestoga Indiantown occupied a central place in Native American-colonial relations in the eighteenthcentury mid-Atlantic. Will Fenton, “A New Looking-Glass for the 1764 Paxton Pamphlet War:” In an multi-path essay, Fenton considers the Paxton debate as a political crisis of representation that culminates with the Northwest Ordinance, which both conceptually and practically resolved the grievances of the Paxton Boys. Keywords: Modeled upon the work of Raymond Williams, and more recently Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, keyword essays provide conceptual and interdisciplinary approaches to the Paxton corpus. Similar to historical overview essays, all five keywords develop or extend arguments that authors originally pursued in books or journal articles. James P. Myers, Jr., “Anonymity:” Using the anonymously published Conduct of the Paxton Men as a case study, Myers finds evidence of Thomas Barton’s hand in its form, style, and rhetorical duplications. Benjamin Bankhurst, “Anti-Presbyterianism:” Bankhurst explores the origins of anti-Presbyterian sentiment, which he traces to post-Restoration Britain and Ireland. Nicole Eustace, “Condolence:” Eustace shows how EuroAmericans and Native Americans diverged in their conceptions of condolence ceremonies. Whereas Native Americans sought to use shared grief as a way to promote harmony prior to negotiations, EuroAmericans regarded these rituals as displays of dominance. Scott Paul Gordon, “Elites:” While modern readers might assume the Paxtons railed against Philadelphia elites for greater political power, Gordon shows how the frontiersman used violence to compel local authorities to protect their settlements. Gordon has also authored several brief, Wiki-style explanatory tags for “Christian Indians,” “Edward Shippen,” and “Moravians.” Judith Ridner, “Material Culture:” Ridner examines how pamphleteers use objects of eighteenth-century consumer culture to attack opponents. Close-reading pamphlets and political cartoons, she finds Scots-Irish associated with tomahawks, Germans with blindfolds, and duplicitous Quakers subjected to the scrutiny of magnifying glasses. Teaching Platform: Digital Paxton hosts several lesson plans designed for secondary and post-secondary educators. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, “Native AmericanEuropean Contact in the Colonial Period:” A multi-part lesson designed by educational specialists at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, this unit is tailored to high school teachers with discussion questions, core concepts, competencies, background information, expansions, vocabulary, primary source materials, and assessments. Montgomery Wolf, “Podcasting the Paxton Boys:” This lesson asks undergraduates to critically and creatively engage primary source material through a role-playing podcasting assignment. Benjamin Bankhurst and Kyle Roberts, “Transcription Assignment:” After a short introduction to transcription platform FromThePage and a crash course in eighteenth-century cursive, students learn to transcribe letters from the Friendly Association papers. Over the next two years (2018-2020), Digital Paxton will expand significantly as an educational resource, thanks to a generous grant from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. To learn more about the next chapter ofthe project, visit the grantee page for Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America. Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: The American Prison Writing Archive Doran Larson Due to the US prison’s sheer size, recent public conversation about the effects of mass-scale incarceration has been carried on largely by social scientists using quantitative methods. The voices of incarcerated people are often lost amid their very status as units of a mass population. As the largest and first fully-searchable digital platform for essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons and jails, the American Prison Writing Archive seeks to disaggregate this population into singular minds and ideas; at the same time, broad reading in the APWA reveals cohesive sets of problems experienced by incarcerated people across the American archipelago of over 6,000 carceral facilities. The APWA presents the voices of distinct individuals, facilitates collective witness to current carceral conditions, and it brings into the digital age a history of US prison witness as old as the prison itself. Only incarcerated people understand the full sweep and causal momentum of the failures of public policy and civil society effecting homes and communities, and resulting in policing, judicial, prison practices that maintain US incarceration at its current mass scale. This 1,000-word abstract briefly describes the history of The APWA and its mission: to aid the broad public, scholars, students, and lawmakers in understanding the capacity of incarcerated people to document the human costs of the carceral state and to map the way beyond it. By hosting a living, growing, and inclusive literature of prison witness, the APWA hopes to show the service that incarcerated people can render to attempts to create a fair, humane, just, and democratic society. Teaching with Scalar Genevieve Carpio In my American Quarterly piece, “Toward a Digital Ethnic Studies: Race, Technology, and the Classroom” (September 2018), I discuss teaching with an open-source publishing platform with eBook and blogging qualities called Scalar. Academic publishing platforms have great promise for scholarship growing out of the classroom, such as blogs, online exhibits, and collaborative projects. This essay shares resources I developed for teaching with Scalar and links to assignment prompts that can be adapted to a range of online publishing platforms. How is Scalar a Useful Platform for Course Adoption? Scalar has multiple features that can be applied effectively towards use in the American studies classroom, including: Holds direct partnerships with online archives, helping to ensure students’ work aligns with fair use; Tracks individuals’ contributions, enabling effective evaluation and grading of collaborative projects; Allows users to comment on each others’ work, facilitating an online conversation among peers and a larger digital public; Embeds media rich content, including photographs, maps, online articles, and videos, without requiring a personal server; Space for long-form writing, as opposed to platforms with restrictive word limits; Does not require membership fees to create an account, comment, or create a project; Requires no coding experience, making it a useful first project for students without previous digital platform experience; And, more. How to Prepare Students for Using Web Authoring Tools I begin my courses with a Scalar workshop that introduces students to its capabilities and its differences from other blogging platforms and eBooks. This video designed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC), does so succinctly and effectively. Scalar regularly offers free online webinars at two levels. The first provides an introduction to the platform and the second addresses advanced topics. The webinars are particularly useful for an instructor using Scalar for the first time. You can find the most recent schedule here, https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/webinars/. I then lead students step-by-step through the process of creating a profile, for which they can use their real name or a digital proxy. This offers an opportunity to talk through questions of privacy and students’ digital presence, while offering a practical hands-on exercise in using the platform. As students work on their profiles, I add them each as coauthors to our shared Scalar “book.” This allows them to add content by creating new “pages.” I also take this time to talk about copyright, fair use, and the public domain. I recommend Eric Faden’s “Fair(y) Use Tale,” which knits together snippets from Disney films to teach copyright law. How to Design Web-Authoring Assignments For every assignment, I create an online prompt that students refer to as a model. Doing so provides a how-toguide for students new to online publishing platforms. More so, when students know they can expect a guide, it helps dispel anxiety around uneven digital humanities training. And, it helps create cohesiveness between students’ work when we bring their individual pages together into a shared class project. Within each prompt, I include guiding questions, links to data sources, and directions for using new web features. In order to provide examples of what a finished page will look like, I fill them with Lorem Ipsum, or dummy text. Since page limits do not translate to online writing assignments, a Lorem Ipsum model offers a helpful visual reference for assignment length. Lorem Ipsum generators are available online, some with a particularly strong sense of humor. Assignment Examples and Prompts My prompts are all online and available for any educator to use or adapt. The assignments are cumulative and each builds on the authoring tools students used in the previous assignment. Blog Prompt: This assignment examines the intersection of storytelling and digital media. Each week, one student examines one course reading in conversation with a contemporary issue related to race and ethnicity. Online comments from their fellow classmates engage the blog content in relation to course themes. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/race-and-thedigital/media/blog-prompt Research Paper Prompt: Using course readings, statistical data on Internet usage, and their own analysis of a new media source (i.e. a website, app, blog, forum, twitter account), students write a report that describes an aspect of the digital divide. In their evaluation, they consider the ways race shapes the nature of access/participation with information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the broader significance of ICT access or inaccess for communities of color. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/race-and-the-digital/digitaldivide-paper-title-by-joe-bruin?path=joe-bruin Digital Ethnography Prompt: In this assignment, students are asked to consider new media’s potential as a site for critical engagement with race and ethnicity, both on and off the Internet. Using digital ethnography and course readings, students examine how a social movement of their choice is engaging new media. Further, they create a 5-10 source multimedia supplement with resources for a public audience interested in the social movement they have selected. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/race-and-the-digital/creativeproject-final-paper?path=joe-bruin Where Can I Learn More? Race and the Digital course website: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/race-and-the-digital/index FemTechNet Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook:http://scalar.usc.edu/works/ftn-ethnicstudies-pedagogy-workbook-/index Scalar: https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/ Scalar Showcase: https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/showcase/ Doing Digital Wrongly Ruth Nicole Brown, Blair Ebony Smith, Porshe’ R. Garner, Jessica Robinson Our article explores doing digital wrongly as a music-making process rooted in Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a collective space of organizing with Black girls to celebrate Black girlhood. Using first -person narrative, reflection, and photography, our essay highlights a litany of listening practices and responses to our personal lives and participation in SOLHOT, foregrounding how music became a critical iteration of how we worked together. Guided by our love for Black feminist and womanist theories and practices, we demonstrate the usefulness and nonuse of a sonic ritualized creative practice that allows us to critique ourselves, as well as structural conditions, in relation to doing collective work with Black girls, based on how sounds arrived to us and what we brought [to our sound]. As We Levitate gets to know our own creative process better, it’s exciting to bring our music back to SOLHOT and then in turn create new songs. There are many artists who have partnered with us, taught us studio basics, and provided beats for Black Girl Genius Week studio and We Levitate tracks including Miss Air, Plainro, Danitra, Mother Nature, and Rynea Soul. We also invited musicians to perform with us for BGGW: Sammus, Ausar Bradley, CJ Run.