{"id":26098,"date":"2018-09-07T16:29:06","date_gmt":"2018-09-07T20:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=26098"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:56:26","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:56:26","slug":"scroll-click-compose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=26098","title":{"rendered":"Scroll, Click, Compose"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a new kind of humanities study that emphasizes construction over criticism, personal interpretation over competitive argument, and serendipity over planned outcomes. Using digital media, Daniel Anderson changes how students and scholars interact with literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"English
English and comparative literature professor Daniel Anderson. (photo by Megan May)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you know Emily Dickinson\u02bcs \u201cThey shut me up in Prose,\u201d<\/a> former undergraduate student Emily Shepherd\u02bcs analysis of the poem for her Introduction to Literary Studies course might take you by surprise. Her video<\/a> opens on clouds at dusk as the Avett Brothers\u02bc \u201cHead Full of Doubt\u201d begins to play. Lines from the poem appear over footage of a single bird flying in slow-motion, then a sky full of thousands of starlings \u2014 evocations of Dickinson\u02bcs birds that \u201c\u2026easy as a Star \/ Look down opon Captivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The takeaways from Shepherd\u02bcs assignment response are not bullet points of information to be memorized, but moments of affect to be intuited.<\/p>\n

To coax such reactions from his first-year writing students, English and comparative literature professor Daniel Anderson often has them respond to a literary work in a medium other than the all-too-familiar academic paper. Some students construct a playlist of songs they imagine a short story character would listen to, or, as in this case, recreate a poem as a video.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will add technology as a kind of challenge ingredient to an assignment that helps students get shaken out of complacency,\u201d Anderson says. The goal is to find the sweet spot of engagement by combining a familiar classroom task with a brain-jogging twist.<\/p>\n

Instead of merely acting as consumers of a text, students are pushed to a new level by taking on a media production role.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u02bcve got tons of reports from students who say, by the time I sliced up all these words and figured out what image to put with them, and why this sound works and that doesn\u02bct, I actually had a much deeper understanding and engagement with that poem than when I went into it.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u02bcs often eye-opening for the professor, too. Anderson learns a lot about his students\u02bc intellectual processes through their projects, and is often surprised by personal touches that they might otherwise be uncomfortable sharing. Shepherd\u02bcs \u201ce-poem,\u201d for instance, includes a photo of a bird taken by her mother.<\/p>\n

Anderson is interested in the way that scholars get locked, unwittingly, into certain patterns of thinking by traditional academic tools. He works to break that spell by introducing unconventional, technology-based approaches in the classroom and through his leadership of campus digital initiatives such as the Digital Innovation Lab (DIL)<\/a> and the minor in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Literacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both ancient and modern theory play a role in what he is trying to accomplish. On the one hand, he believes that by breaking with a strictly print-based way of working, scholars can revive modes of persuasion featured in pre-print communication and rhetoric, where speakers tried to convince their listeners using appeals to the whole person \u2014 not just to their faculties of logic, but also to their emotions, ethics, and sense of beauty.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, he sees in digital media an opportunity to bring to life the deconstructive literary theory of the last several decades. That school of thought shunned the idea of a single, authoritative meaning of a text in favor of seeing literary works as multi-layered \u201cspaces\u201d open to diverse, often intensely personal, interpretations.<\/p>\n

From chaos, opportunity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Through his own published videos<\/a>, such as the series \u201cVideo Scholarship and Screen Composing,\u201d Anderson makes heavy use of screen capture to draw attention to the desktop computing environment and the role it plays in shaping the writing process.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe compose on the computer all the time. And we don\u02bct even think about how that device is shaping what we do,\u201d he says. \u201cSo if you actually see the screen, the menus, and that becomes part of the piece, it shatters that transparency that this is just unmediated composing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he wasn\u02bct always so comfortable with menus and screens. His first encounter with technology as a teacher in the early 90s could only be described as a disaster.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was only the second time I had ever taught a class in my life \u2014 and I went into the computer lab to print the syllabus out beforehand. I had never used computers before and everyone wanted to make me feel really comfortable. So they said, \u2018Don\u02bct worry about the machines, you can\u02bct break them. And if a message comes up just click Ok<\/em>, everything will be fine.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI popped my little PC diskette into these new Macintosh computers that they had, and a message came up that said, \u2018Unable to recognize this diskette, would you like to reformat?\u2019 So I clicked Ok<\/em> and erased my syllabus right before I was about to go in and teach.\u201d<\/p>\n

With no backup plan, he asked the computer lab techs for help a second time \u2014 and they suggested having the students explore IRC, an early internet chat room protocol. What followed was better than anything he had planned for that day. The class struck up a conversation with students in East Germany who had just lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and were looking forward to reunification with their counterparts in the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u02bcs really colored my teaching over the years,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cYou can make mistakes and recover from them. That\u02bcs the philosophy that I want to have as a teacher but also that I want my students to have when they make their projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many projects, one goal<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anderson has published several articles, book chapters, and digital projects documenting his teaching approaches, often with undergraduate collaborators. He and Shepherd worked together to create a portfolio of student e-poems called \u201cI Lit\u201d<\/a> for The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He enables undergraduate research in other ways, too. Through the SITES Lab, he oversees People, Ideas, and Things (PIT)<\/em><\/a>, an undergraduate research conference and journal that has published annually since 2010. The journal features a crowdsourced student peer-review model: Students can sign up to take a class to develop a research project that is then reviewed by all other contributors. It\u02bcs not necessary to enroll to submit to PIT<\/em>, though \u2014 you just have to be an undergraduate researcher at UNC.<\/p>\n

All students in first-year writing courses are now required to complete at least one media production project as a result of the Carolina Digital Literacy Initiative, housed in the Digital Innovation Lab. The effort has pioneered a special relationship with Adobe to ensure that students have access to media editing tools free of charge.<\/p>\n

The lab has also developed Prospect, a web-based software tool for incorporating data-driven methods into arts and humanities scholarship. Anderson provides help to student and faculty researchers who believe data analysis techniques are a good fit for their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you wanted every humanist to be deeply involved in data, you would have to do some serious evangelizing and pushing. But I think it\u02bcs better to say when your project warrants it, or if that\u02bcs a direction that seems necessary or interesting, there are resources available, and people can help you figure out how to do it in a way that is complementary to the intellectual questions you want to ask.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Anderson sees much value in traditional approaches to humanities scholarship, he hopes that digital media can help make room for a new conversation \u2014 one which thrives by building on earlier scholarly work, rather than tearing it down through critique.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u02bcm not opposed to that move, but I think that because we\u02bcre so used to the format in which we write, we just do that naturally without thinking,\u201d he says. \u201cThe nice part about digital modes is they provide this sort of shake-up, whereby you can start fresh in so many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
Daniel Anderson is a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts & Sciences. Emily Shepherd graduated from UNC in 2017.
\n<\/em><\/div>\n
Story by Darren Abrecht, Endeavors magazine<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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