Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Five Lessons from Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom

Guest post by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross

When we began writing Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, our hope for the book was that we could help instructors who were interested in the digital humanities (DH) but did not know where to begin. The idea for the book developed out of a conference session about using digital tools to teach literary modernism. After a particularly intense Q&A session, we realized that the audience showed considerable interest in digital pedagogy but had many fears, questions, and reservations as they began in the field that wouldn’t necessarily occur to DH specialists. We felt that the session demonstrated that a gap in communication was preventing some broadly applicable and generally useful DH methods from making it into classrooms in a variety of fields.

Our book was written precisely to close that gap. Rather than adopt a heavily theorized approach, we focused on the everyday mechanics of teaching. We were reflecting on our own paths of learning from scratch how to teach DH and formalizing these paths into a more organized and purposeful trajectory. As we discussed and wrote about our own teaching experiences and combed through the many wonderful existing resources on DH and teaching, a few unexpected lessons cropped up along the way. A set of guiding principles began to emerge for us as we wrote the book, and we’d like to share these five lessons with you.

Expand your definition of accessibility. Although we are excited by the range of technologies designed to aid users with physical or psychological disabilities, accessibility is not only a matter of using digital tools to ensure that all of your students benefit from your classes. Students facing household- and institution-based economic inequalities, cultural or familial resistances, or social vulnerabilities related to race, gender, religion, or sexuality also deserve careful course planning so they can participate in your pedagogical experiments while feeling safe and supported. Our readings in this area were particularly revelatory for us and will change the way we teach in our own classrooms.

Benefit from collaboration. If you recommend that your students engage in collaborative work but do not do it yourself, give it a try! Collaboration can be fun and productive when you set up a system that works for all involved. Set up regular meeting times to keep one another accountable and motivated, and be willing try out different means of communication. With regard to your teaching, speak with others about your practices, or have them observe you in the classroom. Often, it’s easier for someone else to point out what you do in the classroom than to recognize it yourself.

Embed formalized structure into experimentation. Structure is key during periods of radical experimentation. If you expect your students to wade into the waters of digital mapping, media production, quantitative textual analysis, data visualization, or digital archive construction, you must provide scaffolding. For example, build confidence through repetition and reflection; show models of completed student assignments; construct analytic or holistic rubrics; and involve students in evaluation through iterative, process-oriented, or peer-calibrated grading.

Avoid “tool first, course objective later” thinking. Tools are great, but it’s not (really) about the tools. Digital tools can help you achieve your pre-existing pedagogical goals, they can help you clarify those goals, and they can inspire new goals. But what they cannot do is replace thoughtful course design, careful lesson planning, or subject expertise. Develop—then consistently follow!—course objectives that ensure you always have your humanistic learning outcomes uppermost in your mind as you design and manage digital resources, activities, and assignments.

Recognize and share your tacit knowledge. Perhaps the most important lesson we learned is not to underestimate what you and your students know. Your everyday practices can provide a wealth of inspiration for others’ scholarship and teaching, and your students can teach you a lot by drawing on their own experiences. Everyday tasks build tacit knowledge, by which we mean an often-invisible, experience-based set of valuable concepts and practices. Sharing tacit knowledge is the key to continual, open growth in the digital humanities pedagogy community, so we hope the book will allow others to take advantage of our tacit knowledge—and then pay it forward!

Claire Battershill is Government of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Shawna Ross is Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature and Digital Humanities at Texas A&M University, USA. Their latest book, Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, is now available from Bloomsbury.

Airport Studies

Guest post by Christopher Schaberg

This month my third book about airports will be published. It’s called Airportness: The Nature of Flight.

When I tell my friends and colleagues about this book, they often say something like, “Another book about airports?” A more generous way to look at it is that it is a trilogy which is now complete. And really, these three books are very different from one another—each one has approached the topic in a unique way.

I’ve been reflecting on these books, and I think I can summarize their different approaches like this:

The Textual Life of Airports is about how airports appear: how they appear in literary texts, visual art, and contemporary culture at large—and what these appearances say about how modern humans travel by air.

The End of Airports is about how airports work: how they operate, how they function on the tarmac and in terminals, and what they make passengers and workers do.

Airportness is about how airports feel: how we experience them as travelers and as a species, and how they insinuate themselves into everyday life on this planet, especially at this particular moment.

Airportness follows a single day of flight, from the early morning ride from hotel to the airport, all the way back home at the end of a multi-leg journey. This book really challenged me to think carefully about narrative, form, and emplotment. Writing Airportness pushed me in new ways, which was a good feeling. Sometimes we get into ruts with our writing—writing for the same basic audiences, article after article, essay after essay, book after book. Since I began working on the Object Lessons series, I’ve thought a lot about ways of writing for crossover audiences—ranging from general readers to students to colleagues to academics in other disciplines—and I incorporated a lot of this thinking into Airportness as I revised and organized it. (At one point, shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I nearly re-conceptualized the book drastically—but fortunately my calm, measured editor Haaris Naqvi talked me back from the ledge, and the final book is so much better because of his keen advice. Take note: thank your editor today!)

But so with Airportness I was trying to gear my airport studies to a broader audience—while still drawing on various critical traditions and concepts throughout the book. I was also trying to push the envelope in terms of what nature writing can be. I’ve written about the weird ecosystems of air travel before, but in this book I attempted to keep these considerations in the foreground, wondering about human flight as something counter-intuitively natural for our species. Love it or hate it—or just tolerate it—air travel is something our species has evolved to do. What would it mean to inhabit these spaces and times—airports, airliners, the durations of flight—with this in mind?

With all the harrowing headlines and stories in the news—skirmishes between passengers, airline agent aggression, the iron fist airport security, travel bans, shrinking seats, laptop bans, and so on—the topic of flight is in the air, more than ever. I hope Airportness can help put some perspective on this fraught form of mobility.

Am I done with airports, now? My friends and colleagues want to know. When I delivered this manuscript I really thought yes, I am done. BUT. I keep writing. And things keep happening at airports and in planes, things that are clearly (and sometimes not so clearly) related to this tense moment. There’s much more to explore around this topic, for better or worse. So, I’m working on something entirely new. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I hope readers will enjoy Airportness: The Nature of Flight. You can take it with you on your next flight! It’s conference season, after all—a time when so many academics fly around, lose bags, make connections, and share their ideas. This book brings together my latest theories and questions concerning the nature of flight.

 

Christopher Schaberg is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2013), The End of Airports (2015) and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and co-editor of Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons.

Q&A with Matthew Griffiths

Matthew Griffiths answered some questions for us about The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World, now out in the Environmental Cultures series. 

How would you describe your book in one sentence?

Poets need more sophisticated ways of writing to engage with climate change, and Modernism provides valuable resources for them to do so.

What drew to you writing about this subject?

I’d done a master’s in creative writing, focusing on poetry, and then went into publishing, where I worked as a sub-editor on a number of environmental science magazines. Climate change was an increasingly prominent issue in the material I was editing, and I wondered how I could reconcile that with what I was writing (and reading) as a poet. Most poems “about” climate change, whether mine or those of others, seemed simply to rehash familiar ideas from the press and TV. I could see nothing distinctive about them as poems, and I thought the potential that poetry offers was not being used.

How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?

I started my PhD at Durham in 2009, so about eight years ago, but had done a fair bit of critical reading before that. Although I had been introduced to a number of stimulating approaches to texts while I was an undergraduate at Birmingham – such as feminist, postcolonial and Marxist critiques – there was nothing specifically about the environment. It was only after I had been out of academia for some years that I came across the concept of “ecocriticism”; once I did, I realised that was for me.

What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?

Climate change and Modernism had received next to no attention in ecocriticism when I started my research, and I think they had both been overlooked because they didn’t fit with the discipline’s initial, Romantic vision of nature. That was starting to change by the time I was finalising the book, but my particular interest is in how climate change retrospectively alters our conception of Modernism (and, indeed, literature), which I don’t think anyone else has attempted. I’ve also put together a brief survey of contemporary climate change poems in the final chapter, and again, to my knowledge, this has not been done elsewhere.

What initially drew you to Literary Studies?

I’ve always enjoyed reading – and writing! – and getting a greater understanding of the way texts and language work fascinates me. My mum did her English degree as a mature student while I was at school, and I could see how thoroughly it engaged her, so that was another inspiration. And despite – or perhaps because of – all my hard years at words, I’ve never lost my interest.

Which Bloomsbury Lit Studies books have you read? Which are your favorites, and why?

Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge was out just in time for me to cite in my book – it’s an incisive critique of some problematic assumptions that still persist in the field, and I was excited to read it. For the sake of disclosure, I should say he was my PhD supervisor … though this was one book he didn’t have to force me to read!

 

Matthew Griffiths is a poet and literary critic. His book The New Poetics of Climate Change is now available from Bloomsbury.

 

H.G. Wells, Tom Cruise, Life on Mars and Doctor Who

Peter Beck reflects on points raised by his recently published book The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond:

In The War of the Worlds: from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and beyond (Bloomsbury: 2016), you state that H.G. Wells’s book, though published in 1898, still sells well today.

The book remains in print, and is widely available online and in translation.  We can expect more editions next year with the expiration of copyright. For most readers, the story about a Martian invasion of Britain proves an excellent read, an exciting sci-fi page-turner raising such fantasy counterfactuals as ‘Is there life on Mars?’ and if so ‘What if the Martians invaded earth?’. It sells also as a tie-in book to such adaptations as the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film and Jeff Wayne’s music stage show.

Does The War of the Worlds possess any contemporary resonance?

The story’s enduring appeal derives in part from its timeless focus upon such questions about life on Mars and national security. For Jeff Wayne, Wells’s storyline ‘resonates today’, and still talks to the present-day world. Stephen Baxter, the bestselling sci-fi writer, and Niall Ferguson, the historian, are among those giving Wells high praise for his prescience.

What does The War of the Worlds tell us about Wells as a writer?

The War of the Worlds highlights Wells’s skills as a writer of what he called scientific romances, a magician who encouraged readers to suspend their disbelief by mixing doses of fantasy with substantial portions of real life.  The War of the Worlds shows how Wells’s writing drew upon his personal experience, strong sense of time and place, scientific knowledge, creative imaginative skills, and informed vision of the time to come.

How did the book’s success impact upon Wells’s reputation?

The War of the Worlds was instrumental in enabling Wells, who began writing the story when he was only 29 years old, to make his mark in the challenging literary world. In turn today he is represented as one of the founders of science fiction, indeed - to quote Brian Aldiss – ‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’. Just as Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) inspired television’s Doctor Who, so The War of the Worlds pioneered alien invasion stories.

How far have adaptations become people’s initial point of contact with The War of the Worlds?

The story has proved highly adaptable. Frequently reimagined and retold over time, The War of the Worlds has been taken repeatedly to new and diverse audiences through a wide range of multimedia formats setting the story in different locations and time periods. Thus, for many people today The War of the Worlds has come to mean, say, a film, a music show or a radio drama.

How would you describe your new book?

Apart from telling readers a lot about Wells as a writer, especially his rapid emergence as a new young writer and present-day cultural significance, my book is best represented as a biography of The War of the Worlds. In brief, it analyses critically Wells’s book – its inspiration, research, writing, reception and impact – as well as the story’s active and successful multimedia afterlife, with special emphasis placed upon adaptations by Orson Welles, Steven Spielberg and Jeff Wayne. There is also a substantial focus upon the Wellsian literary heritage.

Finally, your book can be seen also as marking two important Wellsian anniversaries.

Yes – My book’s publication date was targeted towards these anniversaries. 2016 marks the 150^th anniversary of Wells’s birth (21 September) and the 70^th anniversary of his death (13 August).

 

Peter J. Beck is Emeritus Professor of History at Kingston University.  His previous books include Presenting History: Past and Present (2012) and Using History, making British Policy: the Treasury and the Foreign Office 1950-76 (2006).

 

Password

Guest post by Martin Paul Eve

What does it mean to write a cultural history of passwords? Aren't passwords, after all, digital phenomena, part of computers and the internet? Surely passwords aren't really old enough to have a history?

Well, Ali Baba's “Open Sesame” suggests otherwise. As does Aeneas Tacitus's account of Roman siege defence where he implies that a casual whistle might work well as a password. As do the cryptographic devices of the Ancient Greek empire. As do the exploits of Alan Turing and all in Bletchley Park in World War II. Even in the limited sense of “words that grant access”, passwords pre-date our computational technologies by a substantial margin.

But what if we thought differently about passwords? What if, instead of taking them at face value, we drilled to the core of what they do? What if we had a broader concept of passwords that spanned pass-spaces, pass-actions, and pass-words?

For passwords are actually about identity. They are the mechanisms that we use to substitute for an actual person when we cannot compare every feature of a person to a pre-stored version. Instead of storing a copy of a person (which we can't do), we say: if this person knows this word, then I suspect this is the person I seek. On the basis of such decisions, made through proxies for identity, we grant access.

In such thinking, a labyrinth that is impenetrable to all but one quester is like a password. Theseus, who entered the labyrinth of the Minotaur and found his way back using a piece of string, might be called the first hacker. So too might the magic spells in the Harry Potter series be called passwords; a sequence of words of knowledge that grant access to magical feats. Does the bible give us a clue to the power of Godly pass-words when, “in the beginning was the word”?

What is also interesting about passwords, though, is that for as long as they have existed in their many forms, there have been those who would seek to defeat them. What, though, might this mean when we say that your eyeball or your fingerprint is your password (a system of measuring the body that is called “biometrics”)?

The first thing that evildoers attempt in such an environment is to hold up a picture of your eye to a scanner in order to fool it. This, in all seriousness, even worked with the first eye scanners! Yet several films—such as Angels and Demons and Demolition Man—have envisaged a gruesome scenario that is know as the “borrowed biometric bypass” that goes a step further. For our bodies are, sadly, not fixed and stealing someone's finger is easier than we might imagine for a determined villain.

These are some of the histories, contexts, and cultural aspects that I explore in Password. Speak friend and enter...

 

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (2014) and Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014). His most recent book, Password, has just been released in Object Lessons.

Macbeth, Macbeth: Day 5

To end the week of blog posts celebrating the launch of Macbeth, Macbeth, John Schad, Professor of English at Lancaster University, and one of the editors of Beyond Criticism introduces the series—its inspiration, and what we might expect from it. For future Beyond Criticism news keep an eye on the series website at http://thebee.buzz or follow the series on Twitter @BeeInquiries.

A man in a desert, the desert that is the university, a man called Matthew Arnold, once lectured sadly to himself.  ‘Creative activity,’ he said, ‘is the promised land to which criticism can only beckon.’  The critic, you see, like Moses of old, is to die in the wilderness, the well-policed academy with its dry-as-dust dreams of cool argumentation, rational analysis, and objective investigation.  

Many, though, have since protested, crying out in the wilderness, peddling rumours of a criticism-to-come, Arnold’s utopia.  Chief among these crazy promised-landers is another man, also in trouble, a man called Oscar Wilde, he who said he could see or foresee what he called ‘the critic as artist.’

And now, right now, within the academy, there are many who, with the help of those without, are would-be desert deserters, quietly seeking to tunnel their way out, out toward the promised land.  These are those for whom the act of reading is not to be confined to the laws of the desert, the so-called norms of scholarship.  Instead, these tunnellers pursue a reading of books that does itself draw on the ways and means of books.  They seek, that is, to read from within, if you will, rather than without.  This, they say, will be a literary criticism that really is literary – criticism at the very limit of criticism, criticism beyond criticism.

Cue a new Bloomsbury series called precisely that, ‘Beyond Criticism’ - a wave of books written and yet-to-be-written that will see the act of reading take on a host of lawless forms: novel, poem, play, memoir, meditation, provocation, manifesto, jest, sigh, whisper, cry, prayer, etc. etc..

And as if all this were not enough, which it isn’t, there is, I see, a site, a website, to mirror the series, to ensure that it goes electric – like Dylan, I dream, in 1966.  Cry Judas!  This way lies forms of reading rich not only in word but other such hazards as sound and image, moving and still.  And its name, this website, it is ‘the bee.’   Do not ask why. 

Macbeth, Macbeth: Day 4

“One of the things we hope is that the book is a sort of testimony or its own small monument to the extra life in the play, the  uncontainable… it would be nice to think that the reader takes what we’ve done as permission, as authorisation, as a kind of blessing on their own fugitive responses.”

Ewan Fernie

In today’s instalment of our celebrations of the publication of Macbeth, Macbeth, we’re delighted to present an interview with the book’s authors: Ewan Fernie, Professor and Chair of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham), Stratford-upon-Avon, and Simon Palfrey, Professor of English Literature at Brasenose College, University of Oxford.

Speaking to David Avital, Publisher for Literary Studies at Bloomsbury, the authors discuss such topics as:

• Rediscovering Macbeth through the act of writing
• The parallels between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
• Criticism, art and moral judgement
• Women in Macbeth’s masculine world
• How Shakespeare critics have reacted to Macbeth, Macbeth

Macbeth Macbeth - Interview 1 - Introduction

And keep an eye on the Beyond Criticism series website at http://thebee.buzz for further audio interviews with the authors.

Macbeth, Macbeth: Day 1

Bloomsbury are thrilled to announce the launch of an exciting new series—Beyond Criticism—exploring (and breaking) the boundaries between criticism and creativity in the 21^st century. To celebrate the series, we’ll be dedicating the whole week on the blog to the publication of the first title: Macbeth, Macbeth.

Written by two leading Shakespearean scholars—Ewan Fernie of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon and Simon Palfrey, Brasenose College, University of Oxford—Macbeth, Macbeth is at once a sequel to, a repetition of and a profound commentary on Shakespeare’s most familiar tragedy.

The tragedy is done, the tyrant Macbeth dead. The time is free. But for how long? As Macduff pursues dreams of national revival, smaller lives are seeding. In the ruins of Dunsinane, the Porter tries to keep his three young boys safe from the nightmare of history. In a nunnery deep in Birnam Wood, a girl attempts to forget what she lost in war. Flitting between them, a tortured clairvoyant shakes with the knowledge of what’s to come.

And here is a trailer for the book to give you a preview of what you will find within its pages, performed by the actress Stephanie Greer, directed by Mark Jones with illustrations from the book by Tom de Freston:

 

Come back to the blog tomorrow for a reading from the book by Stephanie Greer.

On Wednesday, we’ll hear first responses from readers of the book, including Slavoj Žižek, RSC Director Lucy Bailey and poet Don Paterson.

Thursday, we’ll have a podcast interview with the authors who tell us about the inspiration for the book and the process of adapting Shakespeare’s play.

Finally on Friday, Beyond Criticism series editor John Schad introduces the series website, an exciting new platform for creative-critical work (see it here if you can’t wait until Friday): http://thebee.buzz/

New Releases: May 2016

May is shaping up to be an exciting month for Bloomsbury Lit—we have an incredible range of new titles coming out on subjects including Kerouac’s poetics, the future of literary theory, and reagency in the contemporary American novel. Take a look at some of our new titles below:

 

In Subject of the Event: Reagency in the American Novel after 2000, Sebastian Huber examines the conception of events and subjects in five contemporary American novels: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jess Walter’s The Zero, Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, Paul Beatty’s Slumberland and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

 

 

Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels explores Jewish comics creators’ tackling of themes such as Jewish identity, the Holocaust and the Israel/Palestine conflict, with chapters by leading and emerging scholars in contemporary comic book studies.

 

 

Hassan Melehy’s Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a reassessment of Jack Kerouac’s poetic theory and practice from the perspective of their central yet most overlooked component: the fact that he thought and worked in two languages, his native French and his adopted English. If you’re in New York, stop by the Kerouac book launch on May 20^th at KGB bar—details here.

 

Macbeth, Macbeth is an unprecedented collaboration between two leading Shakespeareans – with commentary throughout on the narrative's sources and the process of adaptation, this critical reimagining of Shakespeare's Macbeth opens up vivid new insights into one of the most familiar plays in the literary canon.

 

 

In Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory, leading scholars explore the afterlives of Theory following the deaths of its first generations of thinkers and its legacies for contemporary criticism.

 

 

 

British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade charts how the dramatic socio-political changes that marked the decade impacted on the development of fiction during the 1960s.

Environmental Cultures: Day 5

We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about our Environmental Cultures series this week and have had a chance to browse the texts of the first two books on our open access platform. Look out for these books coming later this year:

The next book arrives in August, when we publish Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture by Rod Giblett, exploring the cultural histories of swampland cities, from New Orleans to London, Paris and Venice.

In October, we’ll be publishing Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture, in which Anthony Lioi explores geek culture’s engagement with environmental issues, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Men to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Also in October, comes Astrida Neimanis’s book Bodies of Water, an innovative theoretical work that seeks to build a posthuman feminist phenomenology from our liquid bodies.

And to finish the week, here’s series editor Richard Kerridge on the future of the series, and the sorts of proposals we’re looking for, plus an unexpected guest who offers proof that nature will not be denied…