Hello from NCUR!
Where apparently it is going to take me three tries to post this to the correct blog.
Well, we made it to Lexington safe and sound. Drew ended up reserving a party bus to take us from airport to hotel, which was a big hit, and we had a great Macaulay team dinner tonight, at Cortland’s Southern Kitchen–just a short walk over from the hotel.
We haven’t yet been over to UK to experience the conference proper, but it is already apparent how big and well-organized this event will be. There are NCUR info stations set up at the airport and in our hotel’s lobby, and even the key cards for our rooms come in an envelope with the NCUR logo pasted on it… I’m a big fan of quality informational signage!
Because we left NYC early, I’ve had a lot of time today to start to get to know all of the other Macaulay students on this trip. This is a wonderful group of students, researching diverse and cool topics–and as much as I like getting to know them better, I’m enjoying watching them get to know each other as well.
One of the ongoing topics of discussion at Macaulay is common events–how many should we have, what should they look like, how to get students to invest in the cross-campus experience. If we could find a way to send our students out into the world like this, though, I think we’d see some of the bonding we hope for when we organize common events. Down the table from me, a neuroscience student from Hunter and English and engineering students from CCNY are getting to know each other over a game of cards. Everyone took selfies in the party bus earlier–Laura brought a Polaroid camera of some sort (genius idea!).
I know that in a lot of ways an event like NCUR is a reward for our hard-working seniors. But it would definitely be nice to see more cross-campus mixing in a field trip/expeditionary direction, in smaller groups. Cost would be an issue (the students down the table are keenly aware of how much Macaulay has invested in bringing us to Kentucky, and we are all hugely appreciative), but it’s worth thinking about further.
All smiles over a card game
Resources for Week #10: Audience, Your NCUR Mission
Overlapping Audiences
Article Comparison on Questions of Audience
Your NCUR Mission
- Enjoy the trip!
- Document the experience as much as possible: take photo, videos, even just straight audio (your phone may be able to record this)
- At the end of each day, write down your thoughts and impressions (do this either by hand, on a device, or through blog posts–whatever works best for you. Lindsey is going to try and blog to the class eportfolio daily.)
- Finally, please interview the other Macaulay attendees about the topic of presenting itself. What tips would they have for other Macaulay students presenting at conferences? What have they learned from attending NCUR? What would they do differently next time? Interview your colleagues on video, take photographs of their presentations, write down notes. Make sure that some of your data collection is specifically geared towards this question of effective presentations.
Schedule for 3/25
Hi everyone,
Here’s our updated plan for next Tuesday, which I worked out with Colby and Laura at the end of today’s session.
2-3 PM: Colby and Laura have one-on-one meetings with Jenny (Reading Room)
3 PM: Kerishma gives her draft presentation (3rd Floor Classroom)
Following presentation/feedback, we’ll use the classroom as workspace. I will endeavor to meet with everyone one-on-one. You can stay all the way until 5:40, or you can move on once you’ve had a one-on-one with me.
Bring stuff to work on: presentation materials primarily, and digital project materials if you want to work on that at all.
I hope this works for everyone–if not, let’s figure out changes in the comments.
See you all next week!
Resources/Notes for Weeks #8 & #9: Practice Presentations and Individual Consults
Week 8: Practicing for NCUR
This Week’s Location: 2nd Floor Classroom, beginning promptly at 3 PM
Order of Presenters: Kerishma, Colby, Laura
Presentation Length: 15 minutes (we won’t cut you off if you go long, but we will tell you just how much longer you went, and give you advice on where and how to cut your material)
We will have an overall feedback session and discussion after all three presentations. Jenny will record your performances and post them (protected) on the eportfolio for your review. We will finalize our plans for 3/25.
Week 9: Individual Meetings
Date: Tuesday, March 25
Assignment: Meet with Jenny for 30 minutes, use the feedback from that meeting to work for 30 minutes, then meet with Lindsey for 30 minutes.
Meeting Location: 1st Floor Reading Room
Topic: your NCUR presentation or your digital thesis project, whichever needs more attention
Ideal schedule:
- Student #1 meets Jenny at 2 and Lindsey at 3
- Student #2 meets Jenny at 2:30 and Lindsey at 3:30
- Student #3 meets Jenny at 3 and Lindsey at 4
To-Do for Week 10 (April 1st)
Read one article on audience:
- Colby reads Jenny Kidd, “Digital Storytelling at the BBC: The Reality of Innovative Audience Participation”
- Kerishma reads Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience”
- Laura reads Peter Levine, “A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education”
Continue revising and preparing your NCUR presentation, as well as developing your digital thesis project as appropriate.
Architecture of a Past Thesis Web Site: Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging
This web site, Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging, was created in 2013 to accompany an English (or English-ish) thesis on cannibalism tropes in zombie comics and movies, with special attention paid to The Walking Dead. The front page jumps directly into the research conducted by the student, with a couple of slides from her presentation materials included, to help explain some of her core theoretical content. The primary navigation for this site is through the slider menu at the top, and includes a set of pages (there aren’t really any “posts” here) that discuss her topics in a way that’s meant for a general audience, a full copy of her thesis, and some biographical data.
How does this site accomplish what it sets out to communicate? I think it uses the slider, more than anything, as its primary organizational tool. How well this works is an open question. It’s very visually appealing, but it doesn’t always seem to have a grasp on its audience (or it is trying to serve multiple audiences).
How do the different sections of this site relate to one another? Again, some of them seem to be for scholarly audiences, some not. There was an effort here to make the site a place where people could dip their toes into the topic or jump all the way into the pool.
What other possible audiences could there be for this site? I think that the visual media could attract the material’s fan base and help them learn something about the tropes the student is examining in her thesis.
What are this site’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses? It’s strength is its visual appeal. But I think the question of just who the audience is didn’t get fully addressed.
Resources for Week #7: Information Architecture
Readings and Resources
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- IA Manages The Relationships Between People And Content (from The Guardian)
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- Here Is The Same Idea In Greater Detail (from Murray Thompson)
- Lindsey’s Google Doc
- Andrew McKinney, “Content Management Systems, Value, and the Interface as a Site of Production”
- “What Is Information Architecture?” (The Guardian)
Facebook Links
- How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? (TIME)
- 75 Amazing Facebook Statistics
- Facebook is collecting your data–500 terabytes a day (GigaOM)
Past Thesis Projects
- Ellen White’s Benevolent Millennialism
- Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging
- Healing in the Abstract
- Hybrid Spaces in Memorial Architecture
- Flip or Swim?
Tools
Resources for Week #6: Preparing to Present
Timeline Tools Venn Diagram, created with Jenny
GIS Revisited
First Encounters with Franco Moretti
We began week five of this course with a sustained examination of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (Verso, 2007). After each of you went off to try and master a chapter of this work (the resulting board work hastily captured by phone camera, above), you came back and created a sample piece, inspired by your assigned chapter, and based on a literary work you know well.
Mapping Sansa Stark’s Travels and Experiences in A Game Of Thrones
The results were naturally unique, but in all cases, you managed to collect data from your source text and successfully visualize it.
Graphing Jane’s Use of Slave & Abolitionist Language Over The Course of Jane Eyre
While this wasn’t a digital project per se, it was inspired by those sets of principles that have guided and/or arisen from Moretti’s own work, and the work of the Stanford Literary Lab.
A “Close-Up Space” Character/Relationships Tree
And whether or not you choose to use a graph, map, or tree in your digital thesis project, I hope that engaging with Moretti’s spatial approach to literary analysis can be a source of inspiration.
P.S. We’re going to make maps and graphs and trees again later this semester, so keep your copy of the book handy. 🙂
InstaGIS and Tri-State Demographics
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- the Bronx
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- Sayville, Long Island
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- Ridgewood, Queens
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- Astoria, Queens
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- near Macaulay
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- the Upper East Side
For this activity, we used InstaGIS’s Infographics tool to take a snapshot of where each of us lives, as well as of the Macaulay area (and the Upper East Side, which is certainly an interesting point of comparison). As we come back together in the first week of March, we’ll further discuss what these GIS-inspired infographics tell us–as well as what we think might be missing or obscured.
Resources for Week #5: Moretti and Maps
- Lindsey’s notes for the week (Google Doc)
- Introduction to Moretti (A.nnotate)
Intro to GIS
Lindsey’s Most Awesome Gliffy Yet!
- Spatial Humanities at the University of Lancaster, UK
- Tooling Up for Digital Humanities: Spatial Analysis
- Barbara L. Hui’s Introduction to Litmap
Resources and Tools
Sample GIS Projects
- ArcGIS Sample Maps
- Lindsey’s Gatsby Map Lesson
- LitMap
- Digital Harlem
- Mapping Norman Nicholson’s Network
- Mapping the Lakes (YouTube slideshow; see also interactive beta)
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