In this era where reading is so ubiquitous, we forget that literacy was at one point the sole provenance of an established elite. Despite the democratization of literacy how, and why we read is as crucial as what we read. As The Untold Story of the Talking Book demonstrates the division of reading has become one of the primary methods by which we classify the educated from the uneducated.
Tracing the historical roots of the spoken word, or audio book, Matthew Rubery succinctly demonstrates the artificial divide that arose when the printed word became more readily available. Whereas spoken word pieces were once the norm and accessible to all within hearing distance, the printed word allowed the construction of artificial barriers and gatekeepers. The rise of both the industrial and information ages required the opening of the gates and of particular note is this dismissal of the audio book as being somehow less.
This is inherently a bias of neurotypical individuals as Rubery points out. As the book of John so aptly put it, “in the beginning was the word”. Spoken language was the first abstraction, and so of course eventually manifested in the spoken word narrative. It is such a critical part of our comprehension that it even manifests itself in how we perceive the world. The phenomena of onomatope is fascinating, but the truth is that language goes beyond even this literal abstraction. We say a world like bitter and just in saying the words our mouths mechanically need to almost pucker to say it. Did the etymology evolve as a consequence of this movement or was it created, that is this movement created by this definition? There would seem to be an inherent relationship between sound and language that shape and define one another. Such is our natural bias towards the spoken word that Rubery says that deaf children have a far more difficult time learning how to read than do the blind.
Even “silent reading” incorporates an element of the audio as many people read by hearing the disembodied narrator’s voice in their heads. We are all in essence listening to an audio book if we have an inner monologue. The difference between the reader providing the voice versus that of an artificial narrator in an audio book may lie less in the audio book format and more in the subtle nuances of meaning and who provides it. Whether the audio book changes the authorial intent is irrespective, as the reader will always alter the writers meaning to fit their own interpretation. It is no more difficult for a listener to alter an audio books meaning than it is for a reader to alter the writers meaning if this is our intent. Arguments that suggest audio books are somehow more prone to this than the written fail to account as to how even video footage can be altered in meaning and even in literal content by a viewer’s memory. This bias may arise from the fact that audio seems so much more ephemeral because it has no physical presence but it is in fact no less verifiable than a written note.
Rubery goes on the cite how neurological evidence even seems to confirm the lack of distinction between audio books listening versus reading the printed word. To dismiss the audio book then as lesser is to demonstrate a desire to delineate valid from invalid. There is little basis to do so beyond a need to divide. As we begin to understand reading as a process of abstraction and informational transmission and less as the literal act of silent phonetic recitation we approach the realm of Digital Humanities. This middle ground retains an appreciation for both the end goal and the process by which that goal is met.
A couple years ago, I read Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones for an 18th century British novel class. One aspect about that work that interested me was how the protagonist is repeated on the edge of entering a duel or engaging in a fistfight, mostly as a result of his philandering. The framing of this dynamic in most scholarship revolves around Fielding’s abhorrence of the honor culture amongst the aristocracy in Britain, and its deleterious effect on the English soul by way of escapades abroad that included the colonization of lands and wars. That said, I found that most of his considerations about violence centered on lawlessness within England, where Highwaymen could pillage as they pleased. Fielding’s founding of the Bow Street Runners, what eventually became the Metropolitan Police Service in London, also highlighted for me what seemed an unusual preoccupation with public violence in 18th century Britain.
For this assignment, I wanted to begin interrogating my intuitions about his interest in addressing crime performing a distant reading of Henry Fielding in comparison to a small corpus of 18th century British literature.
Tools
While I played with the Natural Language Toolkit in Python, seeing how I could remove stop words, case everything in lower case, remove punctuation, I felt I’d get tangled too much in tweaking things to get on with the analysis in an initial exploration like this assignment. Using Voyant Tools not only allowed for quicker distant reading, but also serves as an excellent place to develop research questions that could be handled in detail with more flexible tools at another time. I also used n-gram as a gut check against a large corpus than I could put together by hand.
I chose line graphs and stacked bar charts for visualizations, as they are reasonably easy to reason about 😉 .
Analyses
Tom Jones
My first stop was to add a text file version of Tom Jones via Project Gutenberg, a ready at hand source to compile corpora for Voyant Tools to consume.
Searching with the wildcard violen* when compared to happiness, happy and joy reveals the prevalence of violence mentioned throughout Tom Jones. From memory, I can imagine the highest peaks of violence revolving around (1) when Tom saved Jenny Jones (Mrs. Waters) from Northerton attempted rape. As each of these search strings represent about 1% of unique words in the text (13,019 unique words in total), comparing the relative frequency of these terms seemed useful, without major distortions in scaling. It seems as though violen* features heavily in the text, though one might assume that it is as equally represented as happiness/joy if combining words with like sentiments. The idea of symmetry between these terms dovetails well with Fielding’s love of symmetry in plotting.
Violen* vs. Happy, Happiness and Joy in Tom Jones
Joseph ANdrews
I have also read Joseph Andrews, another novel by Fielding, and outside of one particular scene where Highwaymen rob a carriage Joseph is on, and strip him naked, I couldn’t remember there being too many threats of violence.
Two points to make when viewing Joseph Andrews work frequency for similar strings. One is that each of these search strings make up less of the unique words in this text vs.Tom Jones (each less than .3% of the 9454 unique words). However, we do is the same sort of symmetry, with the terms connoting joy and violence showing similar parabolic shapes in the middle of the document segments.
Violen* vs. Happy, Happy* in Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding
Corpus of other 18th British Novels
At this point, I wanted to see these terms in relationship to each other in a larger corpus. I created small corpus of other 18th century British novels I’ve read over the past few years, including, in this order:
This corpus represents as broad cross section of published novels during this time, from the scandalous (Lewis) to the popular (Burney and Richardson) to the less canonical (Lennox and Radcliffe). It also delivers an order of magnitude higher number of words when compared to the individual Fielding novels (millions vs. hundreds of thousands). I found the line graph of violen* and the happy keywords to be a little harder to read in this instance, though it certainly seems like violence hovers below the peaks we saw in Fielding’s novels, and the trend is downward over even later part of the corpus, which includes some of the more grift spectrum of the corpus (order of the texts masters in this context). If I had to generalize, Fielding looks more concerned about violence instead of happier words,
Our keywords from a larger corpus of 18th century British novels
Stacked Bar charts of Fielding Novels
Viewing these keywords across reading time in Tom Jones offered an insight into the plot structure of comedy, though I suppose this is not something that distant reading alone as uncovered by comedy as a genre.
Violence is overrun by happiness over time in Tom Jones
What was more surprising is the persistent of violen* in Joseph Andrews. I wonder if this is because this novel revolves around Joseph trying to “preserve his chastity” through a series of encounters with desirous women. In the case of Tom Jones, the protagonist is having sex throughout the novel, with only occasional spikes in violence during his expulsion for his adoptive father’s estate, and the incident with Northerton and other encounters with violent men.
Violence persists throughout Joseph Andrews
N-Gram Viwer
As a further point of comparison and perspective, I looked at my keywords in Google Books N-Gram Viewer in British English from 1600-1900. I’m struck by the increas in happy, happiness and violence starting in the mid 1750 (around the time Fielding was writing). Given this larger corpus, I find it hard to dismiss the null hypothesis: that Fielding wasn’t more preoccupied by violence than his peers.
Reflections
I will share three reflections having completed this exercise
It is definitely the case that even a cursory exploration as shown above can generate more specific research questions. For instance, does the relationship between sex-seeking (Tom Jones) vs. sex-averting (Joseph Andrews) account for the differences seen temporally in each of those texts? How is that related prescribed gender expectations of men and women in 19th century England? Some of the critiques of distant reading straw man the method as an unreflecting and totalizing effort. But there are a number of sophisticated text analysis methods to perform, not contemplated here, that could be enlightening in conjunction will closer readings of each text.
Some of Voyant tools are helpful, while others seem to represent spaces for further analysis. One example: the context table is hard to make sense of in the tool as opposed to the visualizations. Though I suppose Voyant Tools is aware that they aren’t the last word in text analysis
Call me old fashioned, but a purely distant reading of any string of characters is missing the point of what a text is. As Roland Barthes put it in the opening of S/Z:
There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole landscape in a bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model, then out of these models we shall make a great nar- rative structure, which we shall reapply (for verification) to anyone narrative: a task as exhausting (ninety-nine percent perspiration, as the saying goes) as it is ultimately undesirable, for the text thereby loses its difference.
And this is explicit task of distant reading: to lose the difference of individual texts and align them in larger sociologies of literature. Like Barthes, I view a text as product of the interaction of a reader with the work presented. I certainly couldn’t have reasoned about the “temporal” changes in the keywords in Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones having not experienced these books through reading.
As someone who works in the restaurant industry, I am always thinking about food and dining. The COVID Pandemic had, and continues to have, a major impact on the industry, so I was excited to dig deeper into its effects, particularly in New York City, through this project.
Coming out every week, The New Yorker “Tables for Two” restaurant reviews have remained a staple in New York City food writing, even through the pandemic. While it might not be the most robust writing on the state of food more generally, I thought it would be a good place to start for analyzing trends in dining. It also has a dramatic impact on restaurants, and is sometimes responsible for huge booms in visitation.
As I’ve shared in class, I have trouble coming up with research questions, but always know the sorts of topics I’m interested in. I shared this with Filipa and she noted that sometimes with text mining, it’s best to simply upload the corpus in question and see what comes up. I chose to work with all of the “Tables for Two” reviews of 2019 and 2020 in order to have a bigger corpus to work from, and to be able to compare the before and after effects of the pandemic more specifically. I knew I wanted to focus more deeply on the corpus rather than learning a new software/tool for the assignment, so I choose Voyant for its ease of uploading and working with texts.
Starting with Voyant
Getting started, I tried simply uploading the links to all of the reviews, but came across a mess of words. Each New Yorker digital review contains links to other articles published in said edition, along with dozens of links to various New Yorker digital features and common website lingo. After inputting the webpages for analysis, the most common words that appeared in the word cloud were not very helpful:
While words from the site and related articles could certainly prove interesting to explore (and definitely heightened the use of the word pandemic), it proved too time consuming to try and remove each repetitive word using Voyant’s “Define” option. I also found that said option was not very successful, and often kept words and variants of words I hoped to remove in the cloud. In turn, I went the old fashioned way of cleaning my data, and copied and pasted only the text of each article into a Word Document. Of course, this still required some cleaning, so after some more massaging of removing words like “new” “restaurant” “food” and “yorker,” I got started exploring my texts.
(As a quick aside, I took some time to really think about what it means to remove words from a textual analysis. Every text comes with context, and it felt a little like cheating to be removing the reviews from their origin point – especially if I wanted to compare the state of dining to the rest of the world in 2020. That said, it ultimately felt like doing so would create a different project altogether — or maybe, could be something to focus on for my final project.
Before getting started, I also wanted to learn a bit more about the different features that Voyant offered as a new user, so I watched a few really helpful YouTube videos. I posted them below for anyone interested:
Most commonly used words in 2020 “Tables for Two” reviews
Most commonly used words in 2019 “Tables for Two” reviews
I wanted to start easy – what words have become more common in restaurant reviews this year than in the previous year? Unsurprisingly, words like “pandemic,” “home,” “frozen,” “closed,” “cooking,” and “takeout” came to the top in 2020. Alternatively, “pandemic” “frozen” and “closed” were not featured in any 2019 reviews, and “home” was only used in relation to discussing a chef or restauranteur’s “hometown”.
The popularity of the word “chicken” in 2020 was a surprise, so I did a bit more research, and came upon articles on the chicken shortage in America during COVID-19.Here, I was able to see popularity of an item during COVID that correlated to a larger food shortage in the country. Interesting! The popularity of the word “people” in 2020 also caught my eye, so I looked to compare its use with 2019 using the “Context” feature:
20202019
I’m not sure if you would call this a “sentiment” analysis, but you can certainly see the growth in relating the word “people” to more complex issues in 2020. In other words, concepts around “people” in dining and restaurants in 2020 has expanded beyond the world of food in 2020 into conversations of equity and need. Seemed like a plus!
That said, I was surprised to see the lack of conversations on racial equity in particular, given the BLM protests in 2020 that sparked discussions of white supremacy in the industry. Here is where I wished I would have done things differently, but kept my mistake for the sake of learning:
I was hoping to see if there was a trend in speaking about black-owned restaurants during the BLM protests that did not continue into the rest of 2020. As we’ve discussed in class, that summer often resulted in lip service to black populations, rather than actual moves towards equity. Since I did not categorize my reviews by month (which would have required separate Word Documents per month), I was only able to analyze trends as a whole in 2020. This made me realize that Voyant is really a tool used best when comparing different texts as whole units rather than comparing a single text as a unit. Since I didn’t go the time route, I looked at how the word “black” was used in the reviews in 2020 vs. 2019:
2020
2019
The screenshots are unclear since Voyant could not seem to finish loading this analysis, but it shows that in 2020 the word “black” was used with the word “entrepreneur” and “lives” matter” vs. 2019 with “tart” “avocado” and “pepper”. Of course, these results don’t look so good for The New Yorker, and I’m not surprised.
As a final exploration, I went to another corpus, Whetsone Magazine, and their 2020 digital articles on food during the pandemic. Whetsone Magazine is a black-led publication on food by Stephen Satterfield. Whetsone’s 2020 article word cloud did not even contain words like “pandemic” or “takeout” but rather words like “family” “father” “women” and “love”. This reminded me of conversations that we’ve also had in class around what types of content is shared by communities facing trauma, and where words like “joy” and “love” fit in. That said, of course it’s important to also mention that Whetsone’s 2020 articles range in content other than just restaurant reviews, but it shows a different sort of focus on eating during a global crisis.
Whetstone Magazine’s 2020 Articles
Where to go from here
Overall, I struggled with this project in that I felt the tool really just helped to prove assumptions I had about texts, rather than surprise me with new learnings. Of course there is always a use case for proving yourself right! Next time I use a tool like Voyant, I would try to focus on further categorizing texts before I upload them for analysis by things liketime, genre or author, in order to get some more nuanced readings of subjects through comparison.
If I were to continue this project for my final project in the course, I would be interested in comparing reviews from either different publications, cities, or topics rather than years…asking research questions like:
Which cities saw the biggest changes in approaches to dining out in 2020?
What publications most holistically reviewed the impacts of the BLM movement on restaurant equity in 2020?
How did changes in dining out compare to other service industries like theatre, film or hospitality more generally?
Very often one sees the words “games” or “gaming” in phrases along with the words “learning” and “education.” Gaming is no longer a synonym to entertainment (or least, no longer one of the synonyms) but an area that has become a significant tool in (digital) pedagogy. Teachers, scholars, and practitioners of gaming who use it as a scholarly instrument typically are affiliated with English departments, Media studies, Communication studies, or Journalism. (Apparently, one can also get a Ph.D. in gaming now, too.) It’s fascinating to observe how and which games might be used in the classroom, library, or school programs–useful books are written on this topic including, for instance, the recently published volume Learning, Education and Games (2019), edited by Karen Schrier. It’s already the third book in the series and is available in open access here.
With that in mind, I registered for the workshop “Intro to Educational Game Design” facilitated by Zachary Loyd and offered by GC Digital Initiatives at CUNY. The workshop was based on several main goals. First, it was decided to discuss how games can lead to new learning outcomes; (2) explore some of the foundational concepts of game design for educational purposes and its implementation; and (3) provide an overview of the game design landscape–meaning, tools and software used for this.
One of the first questions discussed gaming is its relation vis-a-vis education and entertainment. Apparently, even when one plays for entertainment, one is still learning to do things–i.e., learning how to play and also develops a sense that allows one to retry, keep making efforts, and not to give up immediately (almost like a famous Samuel Beckett motto: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”). Another important component is that one is also learning to navigate and use skills in one system (for instance, video games) that can have a beneficial effect on one’s learning in other areas, like history, literature, or science.
When discussing the approaches to education game design, two significant areas were pointed out: gamification and game-based learning. The key conceptual differences between the two are the following. Gamification is about adding to a scenario that can be called a non-game; game-like elements are there to improve a lesson. Whereas game-based learning makes use of games to construct the course from the very beginning. In other words, with gamification, as summed up by Michael J. Cripps elsewhere, one establishes Experience Points (XPs), badges/levels, and leaderboards whereas game-based learning usually embeds learning with game-like structures. While teaching and choosing a particular direction, both approaches might be considered and could be fruitful; things to think about in advance include one’s interest in the students’ specific learning outcomes as well as how an assessment can be incorporated. Not to forget: accessibility — are all students able to find tools, access, and work with them?
In 2013, James Gee published a piece “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” In it, the author pointed out sixteen principles of game-based learning: identity; interaction; production; risk taking; customization; agency; well-ordered problems; “just in time” or “on demand”; situated meanings; pleasantly frustrating; explore, think literally, rethink goals; smart tools and distributed knowledge; cross-functional teams; and performance before competence.
While talking about tools and software, the following are suggested for interactive stories (both have pros and cons):
I’m finalizing our readings in Sound Studies/DH for next week, and I just received (as did many of you, I’m sure) a list of upcoming meetings of groups hosted by the GCDI. Among them is a “sound studies” group that may interest some of you, so I’m throwing it out there:
Sound Studies + DARC
Working on a Sound or Digital Archiving project? Come to the upcoming joint Sound Studies + Digital Archives Working Group meeting on Wednesday Nov 10 at 12pm! This is an opportunity to build community and learn together about designing a variety of different kinds of projects including audio production, oral history recording, podcasting, digital archiving and curation, web design, database management, and so much more! Please join the Sound Studies and Digital Archives commons group to find out more and get the zoom link for the meeting.
I recently listened to a podcast which highlighted the prevalence of Link Rot in websites. A member of the Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab mentioned in the podcast examining more than two million links in New York Times articles found that
“25% of all links that were used on the New York Times were completely inaccessible”.
I wonder if there is some connection, perhaps racial, between the care and maintenance of websites and the prevalence of Link Rot? The problem with this question is that it is my assumption that individuals typically maintain websites and not Institutions. The question of an unbalanced maintenance of websites which deal with non-white content and then choking it up to Institutional bias is difficult to pinpoint. My initial guess is that if Link Rot happens to a website it is because the author/creator of the site has deemed it defunct and moved on to other things. But not always.
I think it still would be interesting though if the Harvard U team filtered down to which websites had higher rates of Link Rot based on the subject matter/author. Perhaps they would find out that articles on Race/Gender issues were relegated to a certain server which didn’t receive the same amount of care as other articles. Perhaps it would be the Opinion pieces? I wonder if there isn’t some bias that could be identified in the storehouse of large Institutional websites.
Still, the analogy of care for websites and the “A Pedagogical Search for Home and Care” article is a bit thin. When is a website dead? When does it require care? I identify Link Rot in this analogy because it the most obvious form of decay that websites endure. It is also the most revolting to our senses. We shudder at outdated websites in the same way facing death agitates us. But yet, wouldn’t it be better to define these websites as dying, and isn’t there a place for dead sites: https://archive.org/?
How would we go about thinking of a thanatology of websites?
This week, I was struck by Ryan Cordell’s piece “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities” given its approach to questioning basically the structure of our own DH Intro course. I have been finding some DH readings difficult, especially those that play “inside baseball” and position entry-level scholars to save a field they have yet to enter (a trap that Cordell falls into himself). I have been asking myself, outside from the academic context, why is DH important?
Risam offers a few ideas, particularly when around with DH x Postcolonial education:
Understand the politics of knowledge production and how print, and now digital, cultures marginalize communities outside the Global North
Become critical tech consumers, which can help transform into skepticism into action
Engage with the “core concepts that undergird modernity and alternative perspectives on community formation by considering instantiations in the digital cultural record”
In terms of a pedagogical approach, Cordell gives a few reasons as to why readers like me tend to not be engaged; a lack of attention to case studies in class, teaching DH to DH (rather than to a specific discipline that could benefit from digital tools/theories), and general undergraduate technological skepticism. All of these resonated, and made me question: Where was the digital in my undergraduate liberal arts degree? Should I now just be studying Art or History and use digital tools rather than studying DH itself? Cordell lends a few suggestions that I particularly agreed with (and wish had been shared with me, especially at the undergraduate level):
“You do not need an entire DH curriculum, or even a designated DH course, to introduce substantial digital pedagogy into your classes: Teach distant reading alongside close reading and do not worry about proving how revolutionary the former is.”
“Teach new technological tools as a development in the range of human technology: By contextualizing our moment of digital remediation historically, as but the latest phase in a long history of textual reinvention, help students understand why assignments ask them to experiment across modalities [and] consider the medium as well as the message of their own research and arguments.“
However, beyond pedagogical suggestions Cordell leaves us at a dead end. He writes that once the DH mania is over, there must be “more productive rapprochement with the larger humanities fields.” Where is that? Is the DH mania over? If so, what are these rapprochements, and how can I, as a new student, start from these rapprochements rather than helping to define a field that may one day eclipse itself? I tend to think that this answer lies in practice, and so I look forward to continuing these thoughts and questions as I work on my text analysis project, and into my final work for the course.
It is believed that Franco Moretti, a philologist, and literary scholar, came up with the term “distant reading” sometime around 2000 when he published a piece in one of the academic journals. “Distant reading” is an antonym to “close reading.” If you need to provide a very brief definition of both phrases and underline their difference, it is probably safe to say that “close reading” means one deal directly with a book, they attentively (closely) read the book to figure out the meanings of a literary text, define its metaphors, unearth hidden linguistic riddles, decipher the key idea—anything while working on, or with, a text. “Distant reading,” on the other hand, can be defined as a process of working with a text without reading the text. You don’t need to read the actual text, all kinds of digital toolkits and software will do that for you.
After Moretti’s published his initial article, he kept developing his ideas, first and foremost, in Graphs, Maps, Trees and, after a few years later, in Distant Reading—these works have been regarded by some as path-breaking as well as widely used and discussed in the scholarly fields other than DH. In addition to Moretti, another significant volume on “distant reading,” titled Macroanalysis by Matthew Jockers. On the other hand, there are scholars who have a different take on the history and timeline of “distant reading” and question its inception just some two decades ago advocating that earlier models of “distant reading” were created in the past, but of course not called that way yet.
In his piece, Ted Underwood discusses the history and trajectory of the term “distant reading” and—while relying on some previously published scholarship—poses questions about when the studies of “distant reading” really began. The scholar also asks what parallel, related fields were—and mentions the concepts spearheaded by others: “textual interpretation (reading)”; “sociology of literature”; or “cultural analytics.” Underwood points out that Moretti’s works are important, “not because they invented the idea of macroscopic literary inquiry, but because they galvanized an existing project by infusing it with a new sense of possibility and a new polemical rationale.” Indeed, Moretti’s concepts and approaches to a history of British novel and its classification and division into subgenres, in one of the chapters in Graphs, Maps, Trees, seemed novel. The question some scholars keep asking is related to Moretti’s dataset—all details about datasets (most likely, the most important part of any DH project)—their origin, fullness, etc.—were not shared or revealed. In general, it seems that the question of researching, aggregating, composing, editing, and sharing datasets is yet another fundamental point as we discuss “distant reading”. What also seems especially appealing is that this whole concept of “distant reading” is being discussed from various standpoints, it’s interesting to observe that its pre-history may be dated before the year it was actually coined, it’s being discussed as well—which only means that the field keeps breathing and is far from being fully understood.
As you know, your second Praxis Project is due next week at class time. All students have chosen this option, so we’ll have a nice cluster of projects to talk about. First, here’s the procedure with a few tips:
choose a text or set of texts (you might start with a pre-prepped corpus like the CCC corpus we looked at earlier or the EEBO corpus Witmore co-created and discusses), and explore with Voyant, Google N-Gram, J-Stor Text Analyzer, Bookworm, MALLET, or another text-mining tool.
Third, explore! Even more than with the mapping project, this can be an exercise in playing around with a tool or tools and reflecting on “what happens” rather than the production of some kind of finished “project”: if you don’t believe me, look at the blog posts from prior students below
Fourth, blog about your experiences. Here are some examples to guide you from prior students in 700:
Matt Rubin’s comparison of Voyant, N-Gram, and J-Stor Text Analyzer. The mapping of different folkloric beasts in N-Grams
Kevin Pham’s comparison of the same text (Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) in English and French, to analyze the work of translation.
Amanda Filchock on relationships within Alcott’s Little Women (using Voyant) and on the intensity of interest in the novel over time (Ngrams).
Yesterday I attended the Asynchronous Interaction in Course Design workshop, facilitated by Seth Graves, a Carnegie Educational Technology Fellow at the GC. The workshop explored integrations of asynchronous engagement into online and offline course design. While the workshop was geared towards educators in undergraduate and graduate teaching and students who have engaged in online learning, I attended this workshop with hopes of learning about strategies that I could share with colleagues from my professional role. I do not teach, however I work for a non profit organization that develops and offers music theory curriculum and courses focussed on Conjunto music to our community. These music theory courses were scheduled to launch when the pandemic first hit, so the courses were re-formatted to be executed entirely online. With this unexpected teaching format, we have encountered some frustrations, so I plan to share some of the ideas and methods I learned in this workshop with my team as we continue to develop our music education programs online and, eventually, in-person.
Much of the focus throughout the workshop surrounded methods of increasing thoughtful engagement in an online classroom setting, however, many if the ideas can be applied to offline, in-person classroom settings as well. Some of the most helpful takeaways I noted are below:
Low-Stakes Communication:
Generating asynchronous check-in spaces and deadlines to foster an environment wherein students can share ideas, feedback, and questions about each other’s ideas and work freely, that is, in a mostly informal setting. For example, a forum, shared document, or discussion board. Some useful tools are Slack, Google Docs, and Discord.
Introduce flexible modalities through which students can engage. Some plugins like Talk and Comment and tools such as Voicethread allow students to share video and audio responses with each other.
Readiness:
Ensure that students have all of the information and tools needed to participate in the class. Consider providing tutorials and helpful documentation if there is a learning curve with any of the integrations used in the classroom.
Provide appropriate contact information if students should reach out to specific personnel for technical assistance.
Break Up The Content:
Outline the material in sections to avoid presenting an overwhelming amount of information to students at one time. Depending on the course platform, the instructor may be able to break up the content into smaller sections. For example, a different WordPress for every week or section of content. The workshop facilitator, Seth, shared his own example that I found very helpful — as a student, it certainly feels easily digestable and not overwhleming to see the content broken up into different pages on a course website. I also want to call attention to the clarification and outlining of all tools needed for the course — an example of ensuring students have all of the information needed to participate in an asynchronous class.
Blog post assignments about the material (i.e. our posts in this course!).
Brief comment-based prompts surrounding the class content.
Additionally, we discussed some common concerns of educators in online teaching environments. Most of the attendees shared frustrations surrounding assessment in asynchronous work. Below are some helpful tips provided by the workshop facilitator, Seth:
Organize how you will assess your students by the stakes of the assignment.
Avoid over-grading. Was it more important that the student practice?
Avoid over-commenting. Can you organize your feedback into key ideas or revision tasks?
Try rubrics. How can a rubric help you provide the right balance of feedback while helping with your time management?
Try peer review. How can you incentivize quality feedback? (try this: give them guided peer review instructions)
Seconding this: Offer short comment-based prompts about the content they just read.
Lastly, I wanted to share some of the other course platforms we discussed. Below are some of platforms and tools most commonly used amongst the workshop attendees, including myself (we use Google Classroom in my professional work):
Email us at [email protected] so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
