A manifesto

I've recently contributed to HASTAC'S Future of Higher Education Forum, "inspired by a recent workshop called Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education, which was organized by the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)" (hastac.org).

We were asked, 

"If you could change one component about your own academic program, what would it be, and why?"  

You can bet your next holiday Starbucks drink that I was (and have been for some time) quite ready to answer. 

via Debra Rae Cohen

Here's a brief run-down of my experiences, disappointments, and minor miracles over the past few years. At the end you'll find my mini-manifesto on graduate education. 

What do you think? What would you change? I open these questions to those within and outside of academia because I think it's an important question to raise about one's professional development track, no matter what the profession is. 

Answer: coursework/exams

I  had a great two years in my master's program, but found my PhD program difficult from the very start. I've spent the past two and a half years taking courses of no interest to me or relation to what I'd like to study. Perhaps I should have spent that time trying to publish something that didn't matter to my future work, but frankly I was so disheartened that I spent most of my energy just convincing myself to stay in the program. With little faculty support and a massive, hard-to-navigate administration (who three years later still has my last name wrong), I passed these years in social and academic isolation. 

If the emotional toll that this system has on us is extraordinary, the anxiety is made even more accute by the exam process.

I don't mind that PhD exams exist, of course. But I do mind that I'm responsible for the equivalent of 2 years of coursework in material that I've had to read on my own, outside of my classes. If courses don't matter to my exams,  I shouldn't have had to take them-- or not four semesters' worth, anyway. And now that I'm interested in pursuing digital humanities, I feel that I've run out of time to commit to classes on programming or other interdiciplinary integrations to my field.

The members of my exam committee have been extraordinarilly understanding about my situation, and I'm quite grateful for their support. Still, in a conversation about funding by, support in, and general funcitonality of higher education, my case illustrates the too-frequently ignored example of an outdated system that costs the university money and the students time-- time that is especially precious to those who want to have families, and whose biological clock seems occasionally at odds with our professional plans.

I am not as productive (and by that I mean as published) as those who had the luxury of faculty support during their coursework years. Indeed, of the three medievalists in my cohort, I'm the only one who made it through to the exam stage. And now that I'm here, and now that I have a bit of support, I wonder if it will all be worth it in the end, given what so many people in the third year of their PhDs have already accomplished.

This is not a situation unique to my program or even my school. There needs to be a re-evaluation of what's expected from PhDs and a re-assesment of how programs can position us to be successful-- within and outside of our programs.

I call for a radical streamlining that promotes faculty-student interaction and mentorship, interdisciplinary graduate courses, and a plan of study tailored to students' scholarly interests and professional goals. Such a system would be inherently and necessarily transparent; it would reduce administrative red tape and demystify the process of applying for fellowships or assistantships. This new system would require and reward mentorship by making it easier for students to participate in professors' research or teaching. By inspiring and fostering collaboration, this system would make candidates and professors more productive and more valuable. 

Most importantly, a new system would help students spend less but better time in their programs. 

Until next time, stay radical, readers.

HASTAC post

Thanks for returning, kind readers!

I've been delightfully busy: conference abstracts, baby showers, cross-country birthdays, digital humanities meetings, TEI presentations, Chaucer lectures, Chronicle mapping, and perhaps most importantly, becoming a HASTAC scholar! 

I'm thrilled to be joining "a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities."

As a scholar, I will "blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events...around rethinking pedagogy, learning, research & academia for the digital age."

Hooray!
I've just posted a couple of entries on their website, so I thought I 'd try cross-posting myself, in the spirit of experimentation and sharing (it's pasted below). 

Until soon, promising a much-sooner next time!

"Pinterest. Instagram. Steampunk. Cosplay. Food trucks. Mumblecore. Anti-perfumes. World of Warcraft. Plus, typography goes shopping; Apple and value; True Blood and queer brand communities; and place-making and food ways at a Filipino restaurant near you (or not)."

What an opener, no?! Julia Lupton continues the blog post about her design and marketing courses here: http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2012/09/29/design-writing-and-marketing-fictions/

She really got me thinking about the connection between how and why I've been hoping to integrate new technologies into my own classroom.

I came to medieval literature through medieval architecture (thank you, Annabel Wharton), and I've maintained an interest in teaching my students about how we interact with texts as well as in space. In fact, I recently learned about a fascinating social sciences unit taught by some of my colleagues in first-year composition. During a few class visits to the Chapel Hill cemetery, students take notes on the gravestones, focusing on desciptive writing. They later read social science journals and ultimately write a conference paper on their own "reading" of the cemetery as cultural record. 

Professor Lupton's courses focus on the newest technologies with which we interact;  the cemetery unit uses old stones and epitaphs as the objects of study. But is there a way to do both? If so, it seems that would involve more than just following an archaeologist on Twitter. But what would it look like for freshmen in college to conduct field research, engage in secondary readings, and join interdisciplinary (or at least multimedia) communities-- all for an English class?

Like Lubpton, I "believe that courses in the writing and the humanities that engage with the designed world can matter immediately to how all of us make our livings, in the broadest possible sense."

And at this stage, I'm wondering what I can do about it. 

On Onus of Ownership

I've enrolled in Fiona Somerset's "Radical Textualities" at Duke this spring, and I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to get some real manuscript experience!  This week we are reading about variance, censorship, and the "great editions" of multi-layered medieval texts.  In an article resisting the bibliographic obsession of previous Wycliffite scholarship, Somerset writes: "In lollard textual culture's mood of radical variance, every version of a text interpolates, excises, or modifies the content they have in common, or else lifts part of it into a different setting.  Often it is impossible to trace how the work developed, in its remaining copies." She focuses on different kinds of books than others working in lollardy usually have; she therefore appropriately hones in on different modes of book production, "that began in the earliest phase of the [lollard] movement, but persisted when the more organized activity that produced large-scale collaborations in England had come to an end"whose "products are more idiosyncratic and decentralized... [and whose] most common venue of assembly is the personal or household anthology..." which was truly piecemeal.
As most of you know, I've had a hard time pinning down a dissertation topic/genre/century, but I do keep returning to manuscript work.  As most of you can imagine, this presents any scholar with the genuine issue of accessibility.  Although Duke and UNC have great collections, getting to them can be more difficult than first supposed.  I'll come back to the accessibility problem soon.

We spent the first couple of classes hashing out ideas about cutting and pasting, remixing, refiguring, re-apropriating (and no, that's not redundant here) manuscripts, printed books, and digital media.  Where do processes overlap?  What do reworking poetry or biblical exegesis, say, have to do with remixing music or other media?  And how does any of this matter now, and to whom?
A visual break from coolest-gadgets.com, to prevent any rabbit-hole vortex of crushingly deep ponderings on this topic:

Of course, central to these questions of remixing is ownership, which I like to distinguish from authorship.  Somerset articulates resistance to a bibliographic impulse in literary studies that coincides with a lesson I taught last week.  I assigned Hegel to my freshmen (muah-ha-ha) to get them into an appropriate mindset about the nature of the course.  I intentionally left off the title and the author so they wouldn't just say "hey, this is boring/difficult/whatever-- I'll just Google it."  Some of them, I found, had pasted in parts of the passage in order to identify the author, and we had an open conversation about this urge to know about the author in order to feel equipped to read the work.  Incidentally, this was the same day as the Wikipedia blackout-- a coincidence whose coolness was sadly lost on some of them.  

Nevertheless, it seems that authorship is visiting some sort of vengeance upon me for all those papers I wrote that "killed the author."  In a time when so much information is free, freely edited, and freely exchanged across different media, what does it mean to be an author, a commentator, a cut-and-paster, a plagiarist?  Authorship isn't always ownership, and that could create great demands on all the other stewards of texts.  What do we owe to audience?  To the text's author? And how much do economic elements of textual production affect its "authenticity" or reliability?  What does the author owe the rest of us?  How influential is money-making to text-making, and why?

Moreover, what are we to make of our transition from this:

No CTRL + C here.

to this?

Inquisitr.com

Is free and full access even conceivable?  At what cost? 

How do we move between prosperity of resources nearly impossible to find (or even to know exist) in our world's best libraries and responsible, equitable accessibility?

Bodleian curator, looking far too cool to let us see this book from the Mary Shelley exhibit.   

Could it be that those Stanford professors have it right after all?

Let's do this thing

I'm determined to make this blog work.  Here we go again.

The semester has begun, and I'm on UNC, but not Duke, fall break.  At least I have Friday off!

Some non-academic highlights of the semester:
trying to get involved with Second Chance Pet Adoptions
helping pups get adopted through Middle Mutts (love-out to Nicole Fisk!)
chatting with Brianna about dresses
an amazing weekend in the mountains with Emily, etc.
planning a trip to DC (now postponed until December)
celebrating Tabitha's first birthday with best sister-in-law of ALL time and Drew
started allergy shots-- in a year my eyes might not be puffy all the time!

Teaching this semester has been rough, not least because my class starts at 8am.  And we all know how much of a morning person I'm not.  But I've also tried a lot of new things which have proven less productive than I'd hoped, like my visual analysis of comic books unit.

William Morrow Paperbacks, 1994

I had expected the rhetoric of news unit, which we're in the middle of right now, to be better than it is, but it's an improvement for sure.  Also, we've had our first round of conferences and I always feel like I have a little better grasp on things once I speak to everyone face-to-face.
Sadly, some of my students have had some serious issues, whether personal or physical, and that's been hard to keep track of.  Nevertheless, they are all great, great kids who are tolerating this class admirably.

M Nagle, New York Times

I've really enjoyed my 17th century class at UNC, which is a total shock.  We started with Donne, who usually drives me crazy.  But somehow he was different this time, and that is no doubt due to Dr Barbour's teaching. Un-freakin-believable, this guy.  I could listen (and watch-- his lectures are highly dramatic) to him talk about anything.  He's electric. Even our meetings are awesome.  He is the most thoroughly engaged, inspiring professor I've ever had, and has done more than accommodate me in a class that's so many centuries ahead of my own interests.  I'm totally, totally stoked that he'll be on my minor committee!

The Duke class is challenging, which I love.  Dr Aers leaves it all to us-- here's a recommended reading list, do what you will-- and there's a lot to be said for that kind of self-starting scholarship.  The seminar has warmed up a bit, though it's still a bit awkward at times.  The biggest perk so far is that my new hero, Michael Cornett, gave a presentation on ALL the English (or Latin, written in England) confessions.  I emailed him to follow up and the man replied by sending me his entire nearly 900-page dissertation.  At this point in my career, every book I want to buy is close to $300, so getting his unpublished but invaluable research over my computer rocked my life.  He just sent me this damn thing, and then recommended a seminar paper topic!  Here's the real closer, though.  He scanned a 16th century confession manuscript that follows quite closely an 8th century confessional prayer by Alcuin.  He sent me the images and I'm transcribing it now.

Speaking of book accessibility, I received my Kindle (and its burnt-orange cover) and am loving it!
More details on what I'm reading, how I'm cleaning up a massive, massive pen leak (courtesy of Tabitha) on two carpets, and how we're spending the weekend to come.