Pedagogical Case Study: One Student's Portfolio

Mediated Textualities Assignment 

While completing his mediated textualities assignment, Philip John visited the Texas A&M Special Collections at Cushing Library to view the first edition of The Hobbit, then compared different digital and print editions of it. As he completed it, he asked for a longer amount of time for completion after being shown the assignment sheet; with the visitation of the archive, he requested two full weeks for drafting the assignment. The student also suggested that a teacher might allow students to use poems or short stories as the basis of this project in case there was not enough time in the course to devote a three-week unit to the project. Shawna also found out that some students may prefer to complete the projects on audiobooks, film, or other visual media, so if you are adapting this assignment, you may want to decide in advance these questions about assignment length and the appropriateness of selecting non-books for analysis. As Shawna and the student discussed his work, they were able to have productive scholarly questions about authorial intention, about ideological assumptions regarding authenticity, and about the institutionalization of books (who is allowed to view a library's special collections?)
 

Archive Review Assignment

As Philip John completed his archive review assignment, Shawna also realized that she had to explain how to find, use, and cite digital images responsibly, as well as the difference between adaptation (e.g., a theatrical performance of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) and edition (a first edition versus a mass market paperback of Frankenstein). The student also asked for further clarification about the difference between the material and semiotic analysis of certain texts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the type of consumer-based reviews (such as a movie review on Rotten Tomatoes). These questions led to a productive conversation about how to analyze how a film, book, or other media object without thinking in terms of quality ("bad" or "good") or fandom (what the student personally likes); the student was encouraged to think not in terms of what was "bad" or "good" about how a text is being mediated, but rather in terms of cause and effect (why might this book look a certain way?)
 

Timeline Assignment

Philip John completed a Sutori timeline on H. P. Lovecraft and reported that it was easy to use. As he completed the assignment, Shawna realized the importance of stressing to the students that they should identify a thesis or purpose for their timeline. The word "timeline" often makes students think of the "A to Z," "alpha to omega" ideal of timeline that they encounter in history textbooks. Unless you ask groups of students (or an entire class) to collaborate on a single timeline, stress that the students don’t do everything, but instead be strategic, being very conscious of what goes in and what stays out. John Philip used his subtitle ("From Writer to Legacy") to help provide focus for his timeline.

As Philip John completed his timeline, interesting questions about the political contexts of his subject (Lovecraft) emerged. What would he say about Lovecraft’s racial politics? The student was aware of Lovecraft's racial anxieties—of the bigotry in Lovecraft's letters and stories, of how Lovecraft acknowledged (and sometimes criticized) his own racial prejudices yet continued to express them—and did not want to erase these problematic aspects of his life and writing. Yet, at the same time, he wondered how he could make a coherent timeline that dealt with his literary legacy and his racial politics at the same time. He and Shawna discussed how problematic it was to perceive the topic of racism as a "distraction" from the "main" argument and strategized how to create a timeline that did not ignore the issue.
 

ScannerPro (Digitizing a Text Assignment)

Shawna's student enjoyed using the ScannerPro app but acknowledged that he would have enjoyed the process more if he had been asked to pursue a specific research question. In this Web Companion, we have focused on creating a ScannerPro tutorial that explains how the technology works to your students, so if you decide to use this activity in your class, you will likely want to combine it with a longer project or activity, so that the students are adequately motivated to go through the imaging and OCR process. Alternately, the student suggested to fashion a quiz to see if they have sufficiently gone through the text, as you might assign any reading quiz. If you want to students to learn the technological process (e.g., this assignment is more about technology than it is about the text being digitized), you might actually ask the students to image and OCR the text as a mode of reading in and of itself. Another use that he found for ScannerPro that enhanced the usefulness of the activity was converting texts he was reading for other classes (in his case, Romeo and Juliet) into iBook form. This gave the student a heightened sense of control over the textbooks he uses in his other classes, and he now uses the program as a convenient way to access course texts in forms that are more suited to his preferred modes of reading and studying.

As Shawna's student completed the ScannerPro assignment, he noted that he was bothered by the curve of the page (he wanted to "correct" it even though the resultant OCR was sufficiently accurate) and frustrated by the need to correct the "dirty" OCR that resulted. Asking him to work in a team of two students would have presented the former problem (if your students are also inclined to perfectionism!). Regarding the latter problem, Shawna asked him what he was learning about the text as he corrected the OCR. He answered that he recognized a new motif that he had never perceived before (Lovecraft’s use of stars, water, dreams traced over many different stories and settings), despite having read the OCRd text multiple times before. Thinking about the issue of dirty OCR over the next few days, he realized that the  errors in the OCR seemed to invoke Cthulhu’s own appetite for destruction and for distortion, and he was inspired to write an analytical essay about what Lovecraft's most famous character can tell us about digital textuality. Shawna had never considered asking the students to draw thematic parallels between the content of the texts and the digitization process and is now forming a new assignment that will ask students to consider just such parallels.

VideoAnt (Annotated Video Project)

In the Web Companion, we have chosen VideoAnt as a platform because of its ease of use; it use an intuitive interface, and it uses clips from YouTube, with which our students are likely familiar. Shawna's student reported that he would be willing to use a more difficult tool if it allowed the user to annotate directly on the actual image. As you choose a platform for your video assignment, you will want to size up your particular student body (perhaps using the beginning-of-class survey we recommend in the book!) to discover if your students believe that a steeper learning curve would be worth the results. The other remaining shortcoming of VideoAnt is the difficulty of sharing results with the public; to view a video, one must be a user with a (free) account, and the creator of the video must share the video with the user who wishes to view it. This is why we cannot share a link to our student's sample video, which annotated a parodic music video about an important historical event. Like the clip itself, the student took a humorous approach to explaining the historical allusions and slang terms that the viewer would need to know in order to understand the video clip that was being annotated.

The student reported that the single longest task he completed the annotation project was simply the time he spent choosing the video. Warning the students that selection may take longer than they expect will help them to manage their time; alternatively, you could draft a list of video clips (or topics that the video clip should cover) for students to choose from. He also advises that students very carefully choose the times in the video clips during which the annotation will be visible in order to avoid "spoilers" and to ensure that the annotation does not flash on the screen when the frames related to the topic have passed on long ago. He found himself caught between two approaches—to use many short (in terms of word length) annotations or to use very few (but longer) annotations—and decided that he had better results with the second options. Fewer annotations that stay on the screen for a longer time allow the reader the best chance of keeping up.

Other issues you may want to explain when assigning this activity is to decide whether students should choose a video about which they already know quite a bit (so that the annotation assignment is focused on the student's expertise in annotation and video editing) or one that they do not know (making the assignment essentially a fun way to ask students to complete new research or to demonstrate that they have learned some concept or subject that you are teaching them in your class). If you will ask students to complete outside research specifically for this assignment, make sure to specify how much research you expect and explain how much of their grade will be focused on the depth and quality of the research, as opposed to the creation of the annotated video clip.