LITE Workshops@Addlestone Special Instruction Session

April 5, 2010

Presenters:
Jolanda-Pieta (Joey)  van Arnhem | vanarnhemj@cofc.edu
Jared Seay  | seayj@cofc.edu

Download the Session Handout: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B29rc1l_5uzpMDcxNGE5N2UtMjQ5Zi00ZGIyLTgwNmItODY3MGI1MmI4Zjhi&hl=en

URLs

• Diigo Group URL: http://groups.diigo.com/group/slis220
• Diigo Easy Blog: http://message.diigo.com/user/Jpvanarnhem
• DimDim Virtual Meeting Session URL: http://my.dimdim.com/all/jpvanarnhem/default/?action=start&scheduleId=fc6ae284-d99c-4e23-a6b7-02402a02dc8e

Please Fill out the Session Evaluation: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dFRPQlhlTFVGdk5XUGNLZThZUGNhRkE6MA

References
Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/index.html

Special LITE Guest Star Megan Holt

AmeriCorps VISTA for the College of Charleston Center for Civic Engagement

Presents: RU Ready to Facebook!

Do YOU want to be one of College of Charleston’s Officially Recognized Social Media Sites?

Creating a Facebook Page for your class or department can be the next step to help you better connect. Join us for a hands-on workshop where you can create or enhance your current Facebook page. Have an account? Bring it with you!

Thursday, March 25
Addlestone Library, Rm. 120
3 – 4:30pm

REGISTER TODAY
for Thursday’s session at 3pm!
Want to know what’s next? Visit our Spring 2010 Schedule!

Special LITE Guest Star Jared Smith
ReadWriteWeb Extraordinaire: Web Developer and Social Media Experimenter!

Presents:

Harnessing the Real-Time Web – or -
New Frontiers in historical and humanities Research

Beginning in Summer 2008, CHNM will undertake a major two-year study of the potential of text-mining tools for historical and humanities scholarship. The project, entitled “Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research With Text-Mining and Analysis Tools,” is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The project will first conduct a survey of historians to examine their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. It will then explore three main areas where text mining might facilitate the research process: locating documents of interest in the ocean of online materials; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations. The most promising approaches will inform two case studies, one based on Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, in collaboration with the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago, and the other on the correspondence of Victorian mathematicians.

Center for History and New Media: http://chnm.gmu.edu/text-mining/

Download the Session Flyer!

Give Twitter a Try!

Still haven’t given Twitter a try? Now is the time! This hands-on workshop will make you a Twitter pro in less than an hour. This free, easy-to-use social networking service is a great tool to help energize and engage students.

This weeks special guest start lecturer is Megan Holt, who upon completion of her Masters in Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina committed one year of her life to volunteer service through the AmeriCorps VISTA program at the College of Charleston.

We hope to see you there!

Download the session flyer as a PDF to handout at class or send to friends:)

This is an open letter to the administration of my alma mater, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, in regards to the recent and sudden departure of co-founder and personal mentor Jessica Lutz, and its implications on the future direction of this unique program.

Dear Tom and Gary,

The recent news that Jessica Lutz has left VCFA amidst an apparent change of direction in a program so dear to me has given me, like many of my fellow alums, no small concern.  I have held off in making any public comments or inquiries as announcements and responses have come in from all sides.  I have to say that I am not satisfied so far with the administration’s responses.

This unexpected change has prompted me to personally evaluate the current institution’s values, vision, insight and ability to provide the quality of experiential education that did so much to shape us during our time at Vermont.  I am left unsure as how to proceed.  I certainly would not wish to champion or provide support to an institution that does not share my personal values and ethics.  I am therefore very eager for some disclosure about all the situations at hand, both because of my professional and personal respect for Jessica, and no less out of concern for the future direction of my alma mater.  I realize that when people leave an institution, there may be matters that the institution cannot rightfully or ethically discuss, as you alluded to in Tom’s email earlier today.  I think, however, that transparency and openness in relating the future direction of the program to its alumni is not at all too much to ask.

Gary stated in response to Craig’s questions about the VCFA mission that “while the program surely needs some growth in enrollment, its pedagogy is unchanged…” from its original focus.  I must echo, even after the responses from Gary and Tom, my unwavering support for the school’s original mission to offer artists an experiential, student-centered graduate program.  The highly individualized curriculum, tailored to each student’s needs, is a big part of what made our program successful.  I’ll be frank, responses that marketing, increased enrollment and new faculty recruitment are part of the school’s investment leave me very wary.

It is difficult to reconcile, as rightly stated, our program’s “distinctive pedagogy” with increased enrollments.  The administration’s desire for marketing and growth is understandable, if not agreeable, but the strength of VCFA has always been its focus on individuals.  Developing a personalized educational experience unique to each artist’s vision of themselves, with a focus on process over product, requires smaller enrollments and a cohesive and supportive community of students, faculty and staff.  Any changes to that community must be very carefully measured.

So again the departure of a co-founder is all the more disconcerting.  Even moreso is the sudden and mysterious manner in which it occurred.  As a technologist, it is immediately apparent to me that Jessica has been “disappeared” from our school’s website. I find it reprehensible that Jessica’s long-term contributions to the program have been deleted, as though she and her accomplishments never existed. You should understand how upsetting it is for a group of artists to see her cut off from communication, especially from channels relating to an arts program that she, along with Roy Levin, was a primary force in creating. Of course, Google’s cache or the Wayback Machine quickly reestablish her credentials, as well as her commitment to “directing the MFA in Visual Art program through active participation by all constituents, re-examination of the assumptive norms and practices, and the struggle to keep democracy in play at a time when top down leadership is often seen as normative.”

This is what I’m afraid we are losing.  Considering the rampant proliferation of trade schools and the unfettered expansion of many liberal arts programs in recent years, I was proud of my student-centered graduate education in Vermont and all the individual attention my growth as an artist received.  This is real investment.  I recently read a New York Times article, Peter Goodma’s The New Poor In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt, that highlighted the rise of for-profit trade schools that sell students promises of success but often offer little more than formulaic instruction and high debt.  For better or worse, people form opinions of schools quickly and perceptions are hard to change once made.  I often feel that I have to defend my school and clarify that VCFA is not a distance education art school. I can defend it because I have the conviction that is not.

I really don’t ever want to doubt that conviction, and I implore that you both elucidate these unsettling growth strategies with regard to the concerns voiced since Jessica’s untimely departure.  Artists and academics, and we are both, must remain confident in their art and their education.  I want VCFA to be a place I am proud to say that I attended, and a school I would recommend to any of my students who have what it takes.

I do not want a $40,000 regret that I attended a once unique school that was turned into a well-marketed diploma mill.  I have seen marketing efforts pushed as the last effort of institutions that are losing their valuable assets, like convicted, consistent long-term leaders and supporters.  I hope that you will keep the long-term commitments of current students, alumni and faculty in mind as you plan for the future, and maintain open communication with all of us.

I look forward to hearing your response to my inquiries.

Regards,
Jolanda-Pieta (Joey) van Arnhem, M.F.A.

But the ideas and processes in your head are difficult to hang in a gallery.  Information can’t be framed and left still, deprived of its original context, if it’s going to carry its message.  That context is part of the message.  It can’t be separated.  It is from the cultural context of a work, however shifting, that we separate signal from noise, add the resonance of our own experience, and derive ultimate meaning.

These ideas float around in my head as I get together my syllabus for Art and Anthropology, my web course for summer.  I’m introducing students to visual anthropology, and to a lot of postmodern ideas about culture, context and the construction of meaning.  Instead of treating visual anthropology as the methods of social research applied to artistic endeavors, I will attempt to allow the two to blend into a seamless whole, opening artistic eyes toward new anthropological approaches. I want my students to experiment and be creative as they learn to see in new ways, hopefully changing their ideas about what research and publication can encompass. Anthropologists have made use of photographs and videos as part of ethnographic research for a long time.  The ubiquity of opportunities to create multimedia in our era offers a chance to extend these practices, raising new questions to explore about both the objects of study and the ourselves, the viewers.

The asynchronous, online format of the class will allow motivated students be flexible with their time and their approach to tasks. The course will require a lot of daily interaction, though so we’ll using a lot Web 2.0 tools, including VoiceThread for sharing and commenting on media, GoogleDocs for collaborative writing and a WordPress blog as the class container. As the students go out and do their own research, we’ll come back to talk about what cultural objects and practices they’ve discovered through visual exploration.

Again, even though the products the students will create will doubtlessly be exciting, it’s really about the process.  Buren would be glad that there are no studios here.  On Kawara would appreciate the ephemeral daily process of it all.  Soleri would appreciate the community and attention to structural and institutional factors that affect us daily.  Much like in a drawing class, visual culture is about learning how to see, how to reframe and reinterpret. This is how our budding artists and anthropologists will learn to actively appreciate the production of knowledge in particular cultural contexts through visual realms.

I find that my day to day life provides me with numerous experiences that influence my art practice.   I strive to situate every aspect of my life  around my guiding principle – be committed to what you believe in.  For me this means have meaningful relationships, creating art within a social context, demonstrating that the process of creating art is as valuable as the product or object itself, and consciously making decisions based on the belief that actions in life should accomplish meaningful social change.  Since I feel this way, I am incredibly happy that I am able to contribute to the field of digital humanities in many aspects of my life, from my work at the Library, to my dedication to my art practice and my fortuitous opportunities to teach information literacy, research methods in expressive culture and computing in the arts at both the College of Charleston and the Art Institute of Charleston.

Today, on Day of DH 2010, I find that I will not be teaching any of these topics.  Instead, I will be answering a large quantity of emails, monitoring library twitter hashtags, promoting LITE (Literacy, Information, Technology, and Education) workshops on Facebook, answering virtual reference questions, assisting students with multimedia projects, and manning the Research and Information desk.  My work at the College of Charleston Libraries continually exposes me to new individuals, questions, information, technologies, outlooks, and perspectives.

The question I found most rewarding today was from a student who had to substantiate their argument that the memorial of Calhoun should not have been erected due to his stance on slavery. It was an interesting argument when taken from their contemporary point of view.  The Civil war and its impacts are a common theme of research at our institution, particularly in light of the layers of history our city is built on.  Fortunately, we have a great Special Collections department with amazing staff.  We were able to locate an original pamphlet containing speeches of John Calhoun and Daniel Webster on the subject of slavery delivered in 1850.  The pamphlet has not been digitized yet for our digital collection but the student was able to physically review the pamphlet in our library.

I’m always surprised how the threads of events lead to more events and how our own actions have subtle yet powerful effects on outcomes.  I like to think of them as if then statements.  In this case the string of events led to a higher probability of the pamphlet getting digitized and put in our digital collections sooner than later, particularily in light of the fact that the student received the assignment from a professor, who assigned it to multiple students and is likely to assign it again.  My interaction with the student led them to the primary source, and their first visit to the special collections department.  The special collections staffs willingness to provide the document when needed influenced the student to choose this resource over a monograph easily located in the stacks at the library.  The demonstrated need for the resource will ultimately get the document archived in the permanent digital collection, making it accessible to even more individuals.

I am grateful for technology and the new methods of interaction it affords. It provides a new canvas for work.  Because of projects like this one, we will see an explosion of artistic creation documenting the contemporary social fabric in the years ahead.  As an artist, I see archives of collaborative digital projects giving us a useful common ground for discussing art and society in the future.

What is it?

Exerpt from: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities_2010

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online.

On March 18th, participants will document and share the events of their day. However participants will also become co-authors, and the direction of the entire project will be influenced by their choices, both before and after the day of documentation. Eventually, the data will be grouped together, undergo some light semantic editing, and released for others to study. We hope that, beyond the original online publication, the raw data will be of use to those interested in further visualization or ethnographic experiments.

In preparation for tomorrow, I am setting up my RSS feed, preparing my blog,   gathering my equipment (flips, digital camera, recorder) and working on a short consent form for photos and videos.  I can’t wait!

- Blog URL: http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2010/jolanda-pieta/

- DH2010 Participants: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/List_of_Day_of_DH_2010_Participants

- How do you define Humanities Computing / Digital Humanities? http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/How_do_you_define_Humanities_Computing_/_Digital_Humanities%3F

- Twitter Hashtag: #dayofdh (note of interest for later/to feed a twitter hashtag replace the # with %23, i.e. http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23dayofdh

- Twitter Sentiment Search: http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=%23dayofdh