Blog Post Five

I think that poetry workshop is a beneficial form of collaborative writing. I share poems with other poets in the workshop and they comment on my work, letting me know how the poems succeed or don't succeed. They provide suggestions as to how I can improve my poems. I use my classmates' suggestions to revise my poems. So, taking their feedback into account, I suppose poetry workshop is, indeed, a form of collaborative writing. Although I retain credit for my poems. In the blog post, "Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanties Projects," William Brockman asserts that "at times, the dependence of humanities scholars upon their colleagues can approach joint authorship of a publication." I wonder if at any point in poetry workshop I will feel as if I'm participating in such joint authorship. There are some poetic forms that, by definition, are collaborative. The renga is an example of a collaborative form. Soraya points out that peer input is a valuable asset to the art creation process. Another way that I "collaborate" with other writers is by reading books of poetry. For example, when I was reading Tomas Tranströmer's poem, "The Bookcase," I got an idea for a poem. "The Bookcase" begins: "It was brought from the dead woman's apartment. It stood empty a few days, empty until I filled it with books" and I had the idea to write about my receiving a dryer from my neighbor after she died. When I used the dryer I wondered if some part of her clung to it. I wondered if some part of her came off on my laundry. I think that my "collaboration" with Transtromer helped me to open a memory. I often find that I will read poetry and be inspired to write a poem. Today, for example, I read a poem by James Tate, "Recipe for Sleep," in which he writes: "knit the mosquitoes together / beneath your pajamas / let a stranger suck on your foot / reach inside yourself / and pull out a candle / clutch the giant shrimp tighter". When reading "Recipe for Sleep," I thought about how one of my cats has stopped sleeping on top of the bed with me and has started sleeping under the bed. So I wrote about that, although instead of a cat, I wrote that a human partner had stopped sleeping with the speaker and had started sleeping under the bed. And I describe the shape the partner takes under the bed as a "shrimp shape." So I believe that whether with people in a room or with words on a page, collaboration happens in many different ways.

BP5: Nial C. DeMena

Collaboration, as it is defined in OED is to "work jointly on an activity, esp. to produce or create something" and secondarily to "cooperate traitorously with an enemy." These are funny to juxtapose. They also highlight two schools of thought alluded to in the question asked of us.

Up to a point, collaboration works. You trust the editors, your peers, and whomever you worked with on whatever scholarship or project brought into being. It is, suffice to say, a novel use of technology. Having read many pedagogical essays co-authored by two, three, sometimes even four separate writers, I can see the value in establishing consensus and in clarity, after all, who isn't going to jump ship if their ideas are not expressed patently in a piece with their name on it. Similarly, if ten or fifteen of your peers disagree with you wholesale, your work probably shouldn't for the time being be published. Collaboration, though, is not quite crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing I like better; Android applications work this way as do video game mods as does level design for video games in certain situations, e.g. LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2. even the army has crowd sourced some of its tougher problems to the public. It works better because its collaboration with direction, it saves money, time, and engages the public (or discourse community) in a way that's new and exciting.

Like Meaghan says, the system of citations under which we work as scholars constitutes collaboration. If there was some stable build of a visual archive, where one could see in unity a discourse, its off-shoots, and all the scholars responsible, that would be amazing as it would be railed against. Insofar as we do and are constantly producing, I think collaborative scholarship should include crowdsourcing problems as well as the General Public License (GPL)  model of property licensing. That way, scholars working under the same general discourse at the same time could communicate, elaborate, and collaborate with each other in real time as they were constructing their final essays or books. One could open up, free, oneself from the scholarly boundaries of irrelevance and obsolescence by picking up the tempo, and engaging more in the process of scholarship, which is way, way to product oriented. The group will always be smarter than the individual, and having these living works of scholarship, while allowing for the protection of your specific intellectual property/contribution to the field, will be better for everyone, as Robert has too argued.


The one concern I have is when one man or woman comes along with a game-changing idea, if it's still possible. That person will no doubt, due to the extreme position of disagreement with the establishment and the canon, have a tough time under such a rubric.


Concluding, I think crowdsourcing academic and/or scholarly problems needs to happen as much as scholarship need to open up and collaborate with the world. The GPL model works especially well for this type of scholarship, and seeing how it would make us better, faster, and allow us to communicate our ideas as they happen, transparency, why not do it? Collaboration as we see it--two or three people banging heads over one paper--is dated but collaboration in terms of crowdsourcing and, more importantly, in terms of the opening up of process in scholarship to other scholars who might be interested, has a definite future in the academy.

Blog Post 5: Kevin Thinks Power Should Always be Cautiously Decentralized

As I read Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities, by Lisa Spiro, I definitely found myself in agreement that some subjects are so expansive they require multiple points of view for the fullest understanding. Certainly digital archives like Valley of the Shadow, which compiles information pertinent to the Civil War, would be the sort of herculean scholarly effort that would defy the notion of a lone scholar.

Of course, other collaborative forms, from simple group presentations to serious scholarly essays that draw from multiple perspectives, quickly overtake the more traditional model. It also occurs to me that seeing a scholar as an island defies the idea of the invisible college that we discussed in Module 3.

Like Robert and Nial, I am optimistic about the opening up of the (often seen as) elitist ivory tower to such communal notions, though cautiously so (because de-capitalizing an industry and relying on government funding of research can potentially become politically sticky in several degrees of adhesion). For example, the elitist ivory tower might become more readily recognized as the socialist elitist ivory tower, rather than the decentralized, ubiquitous ivory tower.

Soraya's Post

As a writer, I have always found my art form to be one built out of solitude. Writing differs from performing art in the way that most writing and creativity has to happen alone rather than collaboratively. I find that many of the MFA students hold on to solitude as a part of our artistic identity, so to speak. However, it is interesting that even within this definition of our artform we have all chosen to step out of our solitude to join a community and write together. The value of a supportive community of writers is priceless in the type of feedback and growth you are able to receive that you absolutely cannot achieve alone. I have found that although I need to write alone, the collaboration with other writers is what shows me what I need to work on as a writer, how to look at my work in terms of its audience and how its work is communicated to others. All writing in that sense is an imaginary conversation with the writer and its audience. Therefore, I think all writing is inherently collaborative. I think few writers are ever successful without the help of other writers. The same is certainly true for academic writing. My goal in academic writing has always been to try to communicate to more than just other academics but to the community I am writing about. Academic writing that doesn’t consider how to communicate to larger audiences often comes across as though the writer is merely speaking to him/herself.

I agree with Jess that the Souda Online project was a great example for how collaboration can enhance academic scholarship with regards to history. I think of history as being made up of not facts and dates but of people’s stories and feel that the SOL’s indicates the many voices that are inherent in any historical event or document. I also agree with Mike that Digital Memory Banks, such as The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, are useful in allowing larger audiences to “know a lot about a lot.” Technology makes education more accessible and therefore makes learning less tyrannical (by allowing everyone to learn about the histories and politics that are marginalized by many print presses).

Blog Post #5

Humanities projects, specifically those that relate to the creation or analysis of literature, are collaborative by nature—creative and academic/analytical works exist within and draw upon a tradition, anticipate and address a specific audiencehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif, etc. The digital collaborations explored in this post and module are concerned with explicit collaboration, but all writing is implicitly collaborative, according to some, because knowledge is socially constructed. Besides, at what point does influence become authorship? Was Marlowe’s Barabas in The Jew of Malta merely an influence on Shylock? Or does Marlowe share authorship of the character? Where academic publications in the Humanities are concerned, authors frequently incorporate previous research in the form of reference, extend or dispute work done by their peers in the field—all of which, in my mind, constitutes a sort of collaboration. The digital age simply expands our ability to network with peers who might influence our research and, potentially, our framing of the collaborative endeavors we all already undertake. The digital age just might make us more honest and less vain about the brilliant insights we develop on the backs of others’ ideas because, more and more, we will be able to trace our influences and to rethink what authorship and “intellectual property” implies.

Blog Post 5 - Hockman

The term collaboration means to work jointly on an activity especially to create or produce something. Thus, I find it fitting that any project done collaboratively will decrease or expunge knowledge limitations. Our discipline requires more conceptual collaboration that most because we write and we study writing.

Bringing the digital into our world (our discourse community) is both necessary and obligatory. (Yes, I did it. I dropped the DC bomb. Dr. Carter-Tod will be proud.) The passage that we read for this blog post highlights the progressive ways in which humans can collaborate from a distance and compose in different environments. I particularly like the point made about knowledge dissemination. The larger the population of individuals that are able to access and contribute to knowledge, the better. Likewise, there's a lot of nonsense on the internet; by disseminating good stuff, there's a chance we can reach those that seek good stuff, and that good stuff can further be use collaboratively to disseminate real good stuff. (My back-up plan after graduate school is to get a job with Snapple.)

The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank for Katrina victims and others is a great way to apply scholarship in digitial humanities. I am grateful to have learned about this project.

Hope you guys have a great week.

Blog Post 5: Jessie Cohen

I am of two minds when it comes to collaboration and academia. As a student I always dread group projects, but as a future instructor I understand, at least theoretically, the rewards of collaborative learning. Needless to say, I was skeptical about what I would find in Lisa Spiro’s blog post Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities. Like Michelle, I find working collaboratively on a single piece of writing difficult and frustrating. So although Spiro began with a critique on the dearth of co-authorship in the humanities, I was happy that she did not limit her discussion of collaboration to that critique. Spiro emphasizes, in fact, that she “interpret[s] the word ‘collaboration’ broadly; it’s a squishy term with synonyms such as teamwork, cooperation, partnership, and working together.” With this in mind, I found the Souda Online project to be the best example of how the digital humanities can incorporate collaborative scholarship to overcome “the limits of our own knowledge.” The Souda Online project, also known as SOL, brings scholars together from all over the world to help translate a 10^th century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia known as “The Souda” into English. According to the project’s website, over 170 scholars from eighteen countries and four continents have contributed their expertise and research. Aside from making large-scale projects more manageable, collaborative endeavors such as the SOL also prevent history from being a single narrative colonized by one voice claiming superlative authority. Ultimately, Spiro’s blog post helped me see practically rather than just theoretically how collaborative digital humanities helps redefine scholars as democratic “co-creator[s] of knowledge” rather than its tyrants.

"Uren" Blog 5

“You need a team,” Marc Parry writes in “The Humanities Go Google,” referring to the task of data mining a thousand books for thematic and stylistic trends. I've found myself curious about how true this is generally. Even without an enormous undertaking, even when considering a mere paper, say, I'm thinking that other people are as responsible as I can rightly claim to be for my thoughts and how I process and communicate them. For a long time it's felt dishonest to me to present an argument without pointing out where I think I picked it up. DFW, usually, if it concerns fiction. Jim Collier if it's about academia. And so on. At any rate, like Michelle, I've thought about our look at collaborative learning—and I want to add social-constructivist theory—in SC-T's pedagogy class. Some time later, I talked to Jen Schrauth about this: I've been thinking about the ethics of staking a claim to thoughts and texts and it's made me want to publish anonymously. I've actually held on to stories from my MA thesis because I want to formulate a vision for my career going forward before I haphazardly start down a trajectory that looks a lot like it shares a deep structure with stuff I don't like that much (e.g. consumerism, understanding people according to stuff and stuff according to ascribed value). In the case of scholarship, I (perhaps romantically) like the idea of open source, digital publishing. It just seems to have a lot more in common, philosophically, with stuff that leads me to read and write what I read and write in the first place: community, conversation, experimentation, etc. So there's some personal stuff that the prompt for this post isn't really asking for.

Yesterday afternoon I listened to part of an interview on The Thomas Jefferson Hour about a project out of Dickinson State University to collect material on Theodore Roosevelt for an online presidential library. The project has required the involvement of many organizations, from national parks to Harvard. The result will be, in the next ten years, the digital equivalent of other presidential libraries. I'm also familiar with Jason Mittell's online, open source activity as a TV scholar and (see his blogroll for the similarly minded) Flow, a site of UT's RTF program that joins academic inquiry with “real world” conversation to facilitate meaningful discussion of media. If scholarship isn't a conversation among the curious and variously informed about matters that impact our lives, then I don't know what it is or why it matters. So I'm drawn to these movements to relocate the sites of academic writing, to open projects to input, to bring that conversation that must be the substance of scholarship into the digital age by placing it in the community available online. Obviously there's a place for the solo scholar who meditates for extended periods of time on issues she wishes to grapple with prior to entering conversation or even embracing a community—in fact, one knock against trends in academia regarding tenure and, subsequently, publishing is that they occlude deep and extensive reflection; they mandate production the way a factory mandates production. However, I remain optimistic. Some of us may operate best alone, but isn't it cool that the rest of us don't have to?

Blog Post 5 - Mike Roche

Some of the pedagogies we learn about in ENGL 5004 seem to be based on a lot of the same ideas implicit in the examples cited in the Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects article. I do in fact think these projects can help people "overcome the limits of [their] own knowledge". For example, The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank makes researching Hurricane Katrina much easier and more convenient and this, in turn, allows people to make efficient use of their research time. However, I can also see why digital memory banks like these can be troubling to humanities scholars--especially with regard to the increasingly blurry distinction between scholarship and journalism, which the article is sure to point out. Like Jamie and Michelle I do not want the "Lone Scholar" to cease to exist in favor of one big collaborative one.

I'm a curious person and I think the ease of access to information in our era serves a curious person like myself well. I dedicated a good portion of last night to youtubing Groucho Marx skits and interviews and reading articles that have been written about him. However, am I a Groucho Marx scholar? NO WAY. The night before I was watching ODB interviews. It's very characteristic today, I think, to know a little about a lot. With the efficiency of digital memory banks, it seems possible to get to the point where we know A LOT about A LOT. Is this a good thing? I guess so but I think people who consider themselves scholars must find a way to keep deliberateness and thoughtfulness and intentionality about their work.

Blog Post 5: Collaboration --Jamie Rand

I have to admit that when I read the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article, I didn't expect to see a section dedicated to World of Warcraft. Since I have extensive (read: shameful amounts of) experience with that game, I want to use it as a jump-off point to answer this week's question and to make some long and abstract metaphor.

It's amusing to me to think, academically, of playing World of Warcraft as a collaborative experience. Mostly what I remember from playing is sitting in a dungeon waiting for thirty-nine other people to get their act together and try to fight a boss. What that means, of course, is inefficiency. You'd spend an hour waiting for everyone to show up. Then another twenty minutes while they put their kids to bed or let their dogs out or ask their mom for some meatloaf. And when things were finally in order, when you were ready to go fight, chances were you'd have that one guy do something dumb, like stand in fire, and the raid, because of his idiocy, would utterly fail. Everyone dies. Then, while you're running back to resurrect, people let their dogs in, tell their kids to go to sleep, ask for some more meatloaf (or chopstick Cheetos into their crumb-covered maws) and the whole process begins again. Then at 3 AM you go to bed and cry yourself to sleep.

Like Michelle, I feel that it's important to have lone scholars. In point of fact, I've never had much use for collaborative learning. The article, however, pointed out something that probably should have been self-evident: collaboration isn't just waiting for the guy next to you to get his head and his ass wired together. Places like WoWiki, Wowhead, and Thottbot are collaborative projects: articles written by the player base that help other players through the game. In that aspect, I suppose, collaboration has its place, and it does, like your question stated, help us overcome the limits of our own knowledge.
I suppose that makes a pretty good allegory for academic research. It's nice to rely on the knowledge of others, on "theory-crafting" and research people have done, but that theory isn't especially helpful if the priest is alt-tabbed out and reading reddit when he (or she) should be healing. In short, knowledge is good, but application of that knowledge is more important.

Post #5: Collaboration in the Humanities

The blog post, Examples of Collaborative Digital Humanities Projects, reiterated some thoughts explored in the composition pedagogy course I am currently taking. In this course we explored tenants of collaborative learning, discussing how collaboration allows students to create their own knowledge by contributing their individual perspectives and experiences to a group. Collaborative writing projects coincide with the aforementioned blog post's discussion of co-authorship. Personally, I have a hard time working collaboratively on a single piece of writing. However, as the blog post suggests, collaborative writing does not necessarily mean co-authorship, but incorporates research from others, those who ultimately publish the work, and those who potentially read it. The "limits of our own knowledge," expressed in the blog, is a critical notion. , in order to overcome the limitations of working alone, no matter what medium they employ, lone writers should use research, others' opinions, workshops of their work by other peers and professionals, and consider their readership while composing and editing.

I feel that the "lone scholar," may be more comfortable expressing his or her ideas without the immediate input and perhaps judgement of collaborators. Thus, sometimes it is good to have "lone scholars," who honestly and frankly express their thoughts, and later submit them to the collaborative public for commentary, expansion, and improvement.

I think technology is helpful in allowing the "lone scholar," to easily communicate his or her thoughts without feeling the immediate presence of the collaborative public, but still having their presence available. Google, and other collaboratively constructed tools allow "lone scholars" to participate in a collaborative environment, while still feeling in control of their own projects and ideas.

BP4: Nial C. DeMena

I wish my research in my classes were all tied together in some real way but they are not.

I can't say, and this is no affront to Prof. Miller, GRAD: 5124 has been helpful to me in any way whatsoever. In fact, it has eaten up a number of Sunday night hours doing things I've already done on my own but in a more prescribed way that makes me either have to go back to the articles I've found of the course of the week and log them into some sheet, or think of article headings to type into a database that I will never help me, nor be read, as it is a matter of budgeting my time regarding the fact that I'm doing "research" when I need to be writing a paper due on Monday or Tuesday.

Topics I wish were covered in the first weeks are "Why are we taking this class?" and "Is there a way to prove proficiency in research so as to place out of GRAD: 5124?" I mean this seriously. On a side note: Prof. Miller has done an excellent job in rehashing all the stuff I've learned and accumulated re:research, so I applaud her in her endeavor to teach this class. However, what I take issue with is the bureaucratic mass-sanctioning of it to all incoming GTA's. It is just silly if we've made it this far and did not know how to use databases, or library resources. For me, a person whom knows how shitty the outside world is and who is trying to be as efficient and through in taking advantage of his funding and opportunity, GRAD: 5124 is a pain in my side because I've literally done these things over and over again since I was in undergrad. This class just teaches me how, in exercise, to spend as little time as possible doing busy work. Part of the problem is that I see plenty of stuff I could be learning about but am not (keep reading...).

Perhaps, to make a constructive criticism, I'd like to know how Prof. Miller made her instructional screen-casts in the first week (now that is interesting!). Or how to set up and maintain a blog on Blogger (though I already know how to do this, it might be helpful for others). Another topic I'd wish we explore: potential uses of scholar. Or putting together a course pack. Or even a walk-through of classroom technologies in the buildings we'd be teaching in. Or how to use quantitative statistical models in our research from the stats place on campus (I forget the name). Or an overview of data visualization programs and how best to use them / incorporate them into our research papers. Better yet: how to apply to conferences, or conference paper submission guidelines 101. Or getting funding to do research.

Kevin is right: it is easy to be student in the digital age. But by ignoring the more pressing concerns and instead addressing through busywork and module system, Module 1, Module 2, Module 3, etc.., the skills we were virtually born with, we are compromising the integrity of our easy by being lazy an having admin's lay down some arbitrary, though lawsuit and "unfair advantage" preventing, required classwork. Hell, MLA Bibliography, JSTOR, Lexus-Nexus, Project MUSE, RAND public documents, declassified government documents, pamphlets, memos, letters, websites, blogs---these have been stand-by research methods for years! And the persistant problems of what to trust still exists and will always exist, like Cassandra aptly stated.

I'm sorry if anyone is offended. Public outcries on blogs, especially ones linked to our dept., are usually and for good reason frowned upon. But jeepers, can we learn something applicable? Something I don't know, that I'd be thrilled to know is out there but have yet to confirm its existence?

GRAD: 5124 has not, I'm sorry to say, offered me much outside of a constant nagging persistence to haphazardly check in and submit to prescriptive modules. 

Blog Post 4-Kevin is Glad he's a Student in the Digital Age

Like Andrew, I find myself using JStor and Summons (as well as MLA and Muse) almost daily (especially for Engl 5014). As such, I found Modules 2 and 7 particularly helpful, since they provided great detail on the use of each; I feel more adept at navigating databases generally, particularly more efficient at using those aforementioned.

Module 7 came at just the right time--as I gird my mind for the onslaught of impending due dates in 5004, 5014, and 5024; having completed the tutorials on advanced searches, I feel much more prepared to complete the 3 upcoming projects (all of which involve plenty o research).

As Nial mentioned in Blog Post 1, Wikipedia has plenty of faults, but I think it can be useful as a jumping off point; future incarnations of this course could focus on it briefly and cautiously in that context. However, students should definitely be actively discouraged from ever citing it.

Generally, I am glad to be a student during a time when access to information is opening up and becoming more convenient to access. I often suspect that I would have been a mediocre student (at best) in the age of longhand (I often have trouble reading my own writing) and journals in print only.

Blog Post 4 - Rittenburg

I believe that this class has shown plenty of different ways to access information in the extensive online libraries of the world. This has given me the opportunity to try different programs and judge their strengths and weaknesses. By doing this I have been able to gauge which search engines will serve best in certain situations. I find myself using JSTOR, EEBO, and Summon on an almost daily basis. They have all aided in my research, particularly for 5014.

Like Robert, I found the module 3 readings interesting in their discussion of 'the meeting place of market and humanism'. These readings are quite relevant to my current situation, and will only become more vital as time goes on.

Mike Roche - Blog Post 4

I would say the resources for this class are definitely complementing the research I have to do for my classes. For example, for a research paper in my “New Woman Fiction” class, I needed to find biographical information about an obscure Australian writer named George Egerton. Had I not been familiar with the in’s and out’s of conducting research with Summon's advanced search feature, I would not have found the entry for her in the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography; nor would I have been able to have figured out how to gain access to the Literature Research Center.

One topic I think I would have benefited from learning about earlier in the semester is bibliographic management tools. Like Michelle, I have benefited from using a citation manager, though not Endnote. Prior to last week’s module, I had no idea that tools like that were available for use to students. Using an MLA handbook was my somewhat dated way of making sure I was making proper citations. Zotero seems perfect for my research needs, and has already started to make source citation considerably easier for me. Had I known about this tool earlier in the semester, I would have been able cite more quickly and easily in the (admittedly few) papers I’ve already had to turn in.

Uren Blog 4

A couple of weeks ago I wrote and then failed to actually post a blog entry about which readings for this course had resonated with me. For this blog entry—number 4, about the interrelationship between the content of GRAD 5124 and my current research—I'd like to start with that previous would-have-been post.

I didn’t do the second blog post, but those readings resonated with me most. In Jim Collier’s class Themes and Contestations in Academic Inquiry, we talk about the effects of market logic on the practice of scholarship and, in my case, creative writing in the US university. When Margaret Stieg Dalton writes, “A press looks for manuscripts that have sales potential,” and, “In American society, numbers confer reality,” I hear echoes of Lindsay Waters and Martha Nussbaum, who worry over the fate of the humanities in the neoliberal academy (260, 257). Reading about the death of the author in Theory and collaborative learning in Pedagogy at the same time that I’m asked to interrogate my assumptions about the nature of academic work has left me questioning the extent to which individual authorship (and its tool, the quantified CV) can and ought to be reconciled with those impulses and beliefs that compel me to read, write, and teach in the first place. What I mean is, if I write to create a meaningful, or at least entertaining, experience for a reader, what does that have to do with a line on my CV? If the arts are about communicating toward connecting real people, how can I in good conscience use—which I mean in the worst sense of the word—that most humanistic endeavor to advance my career?

Now onto blog 4. So, I'm worrying over a clash of ethics—the marketing of myself in quantifiable terms—Robert Uren has published in Blah, Blah, and Blah and has won the Blah award and was a visiting writer at Blah (so please [like him/hire him/read him/take his class/apply to the program where he teaches/blah blah blah])—versus the cultivation of myself as an artist, or even as a scholar (because don't the same humanistic principles undergird scholarship?). In this course, I most appreciate the opportunity for that sort of reflection in the Module 3 readings, in which investigation into academic publishing allows room to consider the meeting place of market and humanism (or posthumanism, etc.). Who are we when we run in “the self-congratulatory and absurdly insignificant hamster wheel” of professionalized academic creative writing? These are the questions I'm asking and being asked in Collier's class. And Dalton's article is particularly pertinent for that work, so I'm glad it was here and here early in the semester.

As I continue to look into these matters, I benefit from off-campus access to and improved familiarity with online databases such as Academic Search Complete, wherein I may find relevant material to better shape both my questions and my “answers.” Even more practically, I'd obviously benefit if I could become proficient in the use of bibliographic management programs (I went for the "undergrad-y one"), so I'm glad that I've been introduced to them in this class.

Reflecting on Library Research

Like Jamie, the majority of my courses do not require much research. I believe I've only used one database during my time at Virginia Tech. However, this course has allowed me to feel more comfortable with potential research heavy projects as I have become familiar with many tools such as EndNote and databases other than JSTOR (which is my usual go-to database). I have also become more familiar with smaller tools I never used previously, such as the ability to link within a blogpost (I know...where have I been?).

As I've had to use different tools to complete the assignments for this course, I've discovered just how much research out there is relevant to my academic interests, regardless of whether that research would be necessary for my actual courses. For example, while completing my EndNote assignment last week, I realized that there were several articles about poetry. Perhaps I've always thought that poetry would garner a degree of research, but I had never thought to actually check out the research that's out there. Though my poetry workshop courses will likely not require me to conduct research on aspects of poetry, for my own interest, I am glad that I know I can.

Post 4 - CR Hockman

Hello again everybody! I hope the researching and semestering is going well for you.

I found this week's module particularly helpful; I took advantage of the four research databases and found several worthwhile articles. For those of us in ENGL 5014, this assignment appropriately corresponds to the upcoming Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography. The most helpful part of this course is that it ensures my research work. I HAVE to stay on track, otherwise time will go by and I haven't done squat. Thus, I am glad to have this course to keep me on my toes. (Well, standing up at least.)

The hardest part about research this semester - making time for it! Taking time for our own work is necessary but overwhelming in conjunction with our other coursework. And it only gets harder, yay! I have never harmed a journal article, so why should it make me cry? So much good stuff out there, but how to narrow? At this point, I am comfortable navigating the databases, but I am not quite sure what to keep or discard. Only so much time to read, but alas... we do what we can! Anyone have any helpful suggestions on weeding? What have you done that has helped?

Cheers!

Jamie Rand: Blog Post 4

Discuss what is helpful and what is not so helpful; are there any topics that you wish we would cover in the first few weeks of this course?


To be perfectly frank, while the resources would very much compliment any research I would be doing in other courses, I'm not really doing very much academic research. The assignments I'm given usually require only primary sources--I might throw a secondary source in here or there to lengthen a paper, but as a whole, they're unnecessary for the topics I have to write about.

On the other hand, having access to Gale, Muse, JSTOR, (et. al) makes what research I do much, much easier. My old process was to go to Google Scholar, search for a topic, find the book, go to amazon.com and use the Look Inside! feature, pray that the quote I wanted was actually available in their preview, then use it. Being able to use the new range of academic search engines simplifies that process substantially.

As for what is helpful and not helpful, it's kind of a mixed bag. Like I mentioned before, access to the databases is very, very beneficial, but on the other hand, I found the bibliographical software overly complicated and confusing (especially compared to something like easybib). Not to say those applications were bad, exactly, but they had a steep learning curve, and they were designed for people who do a lot more research than I do. For them, however, I'm sure it's a godsend.

Blog Post Three

Blog Post Three
The New York Times article on William Faulkner is thus far the reading that has most interested me. Faulkner is a huge, thoroughly studied figure in literature. It feels miraculous when information comes out, something new, like the Mississippi Plantation Diary. So many people have looked into so many aspects of Faulkner’s work that finding a new artifact is quite the coup. I bet Professor Wolff-King feels honored to be taking such an important place in Faulkner scholarship. Wolff-King’s discovery inspires me to be more of an archaeologist. I wish I lived closer to the Harry Ransom Center because I am currently interested in Frida Kahlo’s painting and three of her paintings are included in the Ransom Center’s Nickolas Muray collection. Many of Kahlo’s paintings are surreal and I enjoy incorporating the surreal into my poetry. I’ve looked at her work (online) many times for inspiration. In "The Little Deer" painting she has the head of Frida Kahlo with the body of a deer shot many times with many arrows. "Henry Ford Hospital" is another of Kahlo's surreal disturbing paintings. For more information on Frida Kahlo, I would like to check out the PBS documentary. Our past lessons on how to find our way around the Virginia Tech library will be useful if I decide to seek out the documentary.