6 atr

As Nial and Kevin previously articulated, I feel that my time here has oscillated between a frenzy and a drone.

My place as a student has been constantly redefined and repurposed from the time that I started school. I feel most comfortable in this mindset but also the most limited. It is easy to assume a way of thinking wherein you are basically a worker bee.

I have not felt out my role as a teacher. At this point I feel that I am going through the expected motions. I have only taught one lecture here, it went well but I did not feel any different after than I had before. I think the teacher mindset is really just a 180 from the student one, populating the power instead of being subservient to it.

Independent scholar is probably my favorite mindset. I have always placed high value on striving to be self reliant and there is no pursuit more independent than digging through the library stacks in search of knowledge.

Research collaborator is a mindset I can say I have hardly inhabited and don't know much about. I suppose this only goes as an example of the liberal arts people to work independently. I have never liked to ask someone for help, I don't like being beholden to someone, even if it is just in perception or act.

Life is complicated but trying to split everything into equal points of value will lead nowhere. So I believe that we all will believe what we want, and that the framework of it all can hardly be affected by one individual.

5

Discussing collaboration and it's different mediums of presentation led my interest to peak when the blogpost discussed the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. I agree with Nial in that crowdsourcing is the best way to establish a uniform trust, but have to say that traditional collaboration represents a more important position in the University.

I believe the discussion on co authorship in the liberal arts is spot on. The traditional understanding of writing is that it is a solitary thing. Lonely and alone you are meant to face your thoughts and be able to produce. Unlike the ordered Sciences, where different technicians can work out different aspects of a problem, in liberal arts the author controls all means of access. The privacy involved and the loss of potential collaboration is sad, but hope remains in things like instant visual translation technology and other methods of instantaneous, non mutual language discourse.

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.

Blog Post 3 - Rittenburg

Because my classmates Cassandra, Nial, and Kevin articulated their thoughts so well on the Dalton reading, I thought I could avoid recapitulation and write instead on the article that I enjoyed the most; the New York Times article, "Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered" by Patricia Cohen.

The main source of enjoyment I found throughout the article was a sense that I was reading the work of a peer. The kind of investigative work done through an examination of two disparate texts to discern a sort of general creative intent is interesting. The work done here concerning the deconstruction of Faulkner's themes and set-pieces as related to the diary is very similar to the kind of work that I am doing for my English 5014 Class.

The article resonated with me by establishing a sense of the importance of the work done in both finding and preserving historical documents such as these. The work done in preserving, examining, and extrapolating from the diaries is admirable in any sense, but when it can be applied to an author such as Faulkner to derive a new understanding of his work, you can see how valuable it really is.