Printable Pedagogy and 3D Theses: ACH’s CfP for MLA 2018
Posted by Brian in Announcements, Research, Teaching on February 28, 2017
Over the last decade, at roughly the same time that digital humanities methods and tools have appeared in language and literature classrooms and research, universities have made investments in 3D printing and makerspaces. And in a similar way to digital humanities, those working in modern languages might not immediately see how they could use fabrication technologies in their teaching and research.
For its session at the 2018 MLA Convention, ACH invites proposals that highlight how 3D printing, soft circuits, or other methods of physical fabrication are used to teach languages or literature or to conduct linguistic or literary research. Speakers will give brief talks (4-6 minutes, depending on number of participants) that address the praxis of printing and the metaphysics of physicalization. While a discussion of what you made and how you made it will naturally feature in these talks, it is more important to discuss how the act of making contributed to the understanding of languages and/or literatures. In this way, this session is cousin to the ACH’s 2014 session at the MLA.
Please send abstracts of 250 words (not including references) to brian [dot] croxall [at] brown [dot] edu. Abstracts should be received by 5pm EST / GMT-5 on 15 March 2017. N.B. All accepted panelists will need to be current MLA members—or have their membership waived—by 7 April 2017.
Since the ACH is an allied organization of the MLA, this session is guaranteed to be accepted for the 2018 MLA.
Cross-posted from ach.org.
Screwing Up DH101: My Talk at MLA 2017
Posted by Brian in Presentations, Teaching on January 23, 2017
tl;dr: I gave another talk about digital pedagogy. Here it is.
About two weeks ago, I spoke at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia. I was part of a panel titled, “DH 101: Revisiting the ‘Introduction to Digital Humanities’ Course.” The panel was organized by Matt Gold and Lauren Klein on behalf of the MLA Forum TC Digital Humanities. My co-panelists included:
- Janelle Adsit, Humboldt State University
- Daniel Anderson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- Christina Boyles, University of Iowa
- James E. Dobson, Dartmouth College
- Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State University
- Carly Marino, Humboldt State University
- Laura Sanders, Portland Community College, Oregon
I was particularly excited to present with Kathi, as we co-organized a panel on digital humanities pedagogy for the 2012 MLA. But it was great to get to know the work of these colleagues, and the exciting and different ways they are leading development of digital humanities pedagogy at their different schools, ranging from Ivy Leagues to community colleges.
There’s a part of me that hesitates to put this talk up because I talk (at least in part) about an assignment that I have discussed in a previous talk that I’ve published here on my blog. But this presentation gave me a chance to talk through the changes that I had made over the years to the course, and to do a little bit of theorizing—a very little—about what it is that I think matters in digital humanities pedagogy. Spoiler: it’s the last sentence. There’s an essay or blog post to be written about my resistance to “doing things twice,” as that has been an animating tension for me in the development of this and other courses. But I’ll have to save that for another day.
As always, my work is Creative Commons-licensed. Let me know what you think!
Announcing Like Clockwork
Posted by Brian in Announcements, Research on June 24, 2016
A few years ago, my good friend and colleague Rachel Bowser and I put out a call for papers for an edited collection on steampunk. Today, we are pleased to say that Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, and Futures will be published this fall by University of Minnesota Press. In fact, you can order it now. And check out this cover!
In many ways, our book leaves the question of “what is steampunk?” aside as we already tackled that question in our special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies. Like Clockwork asks a different question: “why steampunk?” and, perhaps more importantly, “why steampunk now?” why did steampunk explode in popularity in the first years of the twenty-first century? What is it about the aesthetic, the themes, or the crosscutting of anachronistic technologies that speaks to so many around the globe? Why did steampunk only become a thing—and a thing that IBM’s social analytics predict will continue to grow—more than 30 years after its invention in the early 1970s?
Perhaps it’s not surprising that a genre that celebrates the similarities and disjunctures among times took a while to find its own moment, but our collection identifies specific trends and events to which steampunk as a genre, a fan culture, and art movement respond. The essays in the book address these subjects as well as disability studies, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, Victorian culture, urban studies, performance, graphic novels, film, cultural trauma, and even the question of whether steampunk is “punk enough”:
Introduction
Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall, “It’s about Time: Reading Steampunk’s Rise and Roots”
Steampunk Spaces and Things
David Pike, “Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse”
Roger Whitson, “How to Theorize with a Hammer; or, Making and Baking Things in Steampunk and the Digital Humanities”
Catherine Siemann, “The Steampunk City in Crisis”
Steampunk Bodies and Identities
Kathryn Crowther, “From Steam Arms to Brass Goggles: Steampunk, Prostheses, and Disability”
Stefania Forlini, “The Aesthete, the Dandy, and the Steampunk; or Things as They Are Now”
Diana M. Pho, “Punking the Other: On the Performance of Racial and National Identities in Steampunk”
Steampunk Reading and Revising
Mike Perschon, “Seminal Steampunk: Proper and True”
Lisa Hager, “The Alchemy of Aether: Steampunk as Reading Practice in Karina Cooper’s Tarnished and Gilded”
Joseph Weakland and Shaun Duke, “Out of Control: Disrupting Technological Mastery in Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of the Air and K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices”
We’ve been thrilled to work with great authors throughout the project and the fine folks at Minnesota. We can’t wait to see the book in print and to be throwing out to the rest of y’all from the sides of the book-tour dirigible.
Assignments and Architecture: Pedagogy in the Digital Age
Posted by Brian in Presentations, Teaching, Technology on January 28, 2016
tl;dr: I gave a talk about digital pedagogy.
Today I want to share a talk. That’s not all that unusual, as I’ve been in the habit of posting such presentations since I began blogging here in 2009. What’s unusual about this one—at least for me—is that it’s a talk that evolved as I gave it as a keynote at three different universities.
Although it’s taken me longer to post this talk than I would have liked, I want to share my framework for theorizing digital pedagogy. This is the rubric I use when working with faculty here at Brown to design new classroom research projects. We can create new and exciting, team-based research projects for our students. Once you’ve tried this, it’s really hard to go back.
I first spoke about “pedagogy in the digital age” at Fordham University in November 2013. I was invited by Glenn Hendler, who is chair of the English Department, to give this talk as well as a more practical workshop on teaching with technology in the classroom. It was one of the first times I had been given the opportunity to tackle either subject in such a broad way, and the setting of Fordham in NYC definitely inspired the direction that the talk took—that, and an episode of 99% Invisible that I had just listened to. I very much enjoyed the conversations at Fordham and was glad of the chance to put together my thoughts about digital pedagogy into a more coherent argument.
When I was asked a few months later to give the keynote at the September 2014 Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit (LASTS) at Penn State, I took the chance to further refine the talk and its argument. I was invited by Christopher P. Long, who was at the time Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Education at Penn State and who has since moved to Michigan State as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. I’ve always admired Chris for the genuine excitement and positive energy he brings to conversations, so I was flattered and happy to spend the time with him and the Penn State community. (Also, land-grant schools tend to have the best ice cream.) My visit for LASTS was combined with a talk at the Center for American Literary Studies’s Symposium on #Alt-Ac, which I wrote about previously. My keynote was recorded, if you want to see the high kick at the end.
Shortly after the presentation at Penn State, I was thrilled to be invited to speak at both St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges in Northfield, Minnesota (home of Malt-o-Meal; the whole town smelled like Marshmallow Mateys!). The two colleges have received a Mellon Foundation grant for collaboration between the two schools, which sit opposite one another across the Cannon River. One of the outcomes for the grant was the Bridge Crossings Events, which focus on integrating and supporting digital technologies into teaching, learning, and research. I made some more changes to the presentation, as well as did some research on the architecture on both campuses, and joined faculty, librarians, and IT staff at both schools in February 2015 for a discussion of Digital Humanities on the Hill. I really enjoyed my visit, thanks to the great library and IT staff at both schools, although I was shocked at how little winter gear people in Minnesota needed compared to a guy from Georgia. If you’re into comparative media experiences, you can also watch the video of this version of the talk. No high kick, I’m afraid.
Again, my thanks to Fordham, Penn State, and St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges for inviting me and giving me the chance to pull together years of praxis into three performances.
N.B. It’s worth saying that there are two images in this slide deck that are potentially NSFW: artistic photographs of nude sex workers, circa 1912.
Announcing the Open Peer Review of My “Failure”
Posted by Brian in Announcements, Research, Teaching on November 30, 2015
How’s that for a clickbait title?
tl;dr: You can now do open-peer review on something Quinn Warnick and I wrote, https://digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/keywords/failure/.
Way, way back in what feels like forever ago—and perhaps it was given my two new jobs since then—I attended the 2012 MLA Convention in Seattle. That convention was notable for a number of things for me, including a panel that I co-organized with Kathi Inman Berens on “Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom”; a talk that I gave on #altac and the digital humanities; and the publication of Debates in the Digital Humanities. Note that I didn’t have anything to do with the latter, but it’s a book that changed the field and Minnesota was kind enough to buy pizza for the small but growing DH contingent at the MLA.
Also at that convention, I ended up in a conversation about digital pedagogy and the lack of books on the subject, which was thrown into sharp contrast by the appearance of Debates. The happy result is that in the months that followed I found myself engaged on the advisory board of what eventually became titled, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments. The editors who steered the project—Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers—felt that a publication on digital pedagogy probably shouldn’t be limited to print as it simply didn’t respect the medium of the discussion. And fortunately, they were able to place the project with a press that agreed: the Modern Language Association using its tremendous MLA Commons platform. The result will be a book-like publication that is open access and allows for the presentation of original assignments and student work in relation to those assignments.
Even early on in the process, the editors knew that they wanted to organize the volume by keywords that were central to digital pedagogy. Those who contributed keywords would curate pedagogical artifacts and materials in relation to their term. I was both amused and flattered when I was asked by the editorial team to tackle “failure.” It was only a couple of years since I had flailed and failed very publicly in the pursuit of a job and I had since given talks and written articles about failure of one sort or another. It seemed like the FAIL meme had come home to roost and that I should embrace it.
I might have embraced it a little bit too hard at first, and I failed to make much progress in pulling together my thoughts on “failure.” But last November, I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at Virginia Tech by wonderful Quinn Warnick, whom I had met at the DH Conference in 2013. (Kids, never let people tell you that networking won’t pay off.) Our conversations over my time in Blacksburg led me to think that Quinn could be an ideal person to fail with, and we began to discuss what failure meant in the context of our own teaching and that of people we admired. Eventually, we decided that there were four types of failure in digital pedagogy:
- the technical glitches we have all experienced in our teaching, when something just doesn’t work
- the difficulties students have in implementing tools that are functioning just fine
- when students are directed to find failure in others’ work as an opportunity to do better in one’s own, like peer review
- failure as an epistemology, where students are asked to fail on purpose
Along with articulating how we saw failure working in the classroom, we found assignments or experiences that responded to each of these tiers of failure. We wrote them up and sent it off to our editors.
I’m now proud to say that Quinn’s and my keyword has appeared as part of the open review process for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. From now until 18 January 2016, you will be able to tell us exactly how well—or how badly—we failed at describing “failure.” (Consider it a Tier 3 exercise!) Please join in the conversation and let us know what you think: https://digitalpedagogy.commons.mla.org/keywords/failure/.
Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/phobia/2308371224/ / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
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