All posts by Ian F. MacInnes

Resources for faculty, Tips for Students and Faculty

Repatriation as Undergraduate Research: Lessons from Two Case Studies

We are fortunate to live at a time when museums and public collections are finally returning objects to the people and cultures from whom they were taken. Colleges and universities, large and small, often have their own collections and will continue to be a part of this process (in some cases the law requires it). As two cases at Albion College make clear, repatriation represents an opportunity for undergraduate research. Activities appropriate for mentored students include reviewing a collection, determining which objects are legitimate subjects of repatriation, and documenting them completely. The actual repatriation process itself requires communication and public relations. Its fruition serves as an important public confirmation and validation of basic research.

NAGPRA requires research

Happily, the law actually requires some research (how often does that happen!) through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) . All museums, federal agencies, colleges, and universities need to compile an inventory of Native American human remains, funerary objects, and summarize other cultural items. No university collections, no matter how small, are exempt, regardless of where the cultural items are physically located. Much of this inventory and summary work is within the capabilities of mentored undergraduates. At Albion College, for example, the inventory and summary research of student Chelsea Adams resulted in identifying a Zuni Ahayu’da, one of twin gods of war.

This Ahayu’da was subject of a successful repatriation effort.
This 19th century Ahayu’da had been in Albion College’s possession since 1973. It was returned to the Zuni people in a ceremony in 2018.

This was a clear case for repatriation since the Zuni consider any Ahayu’da removed from its shrine (where it retires to decay naturally) as stolen. After documenting the Ahayu’da carefully and following the NAGPRA protocol, it was repatriated in a ceremony on campus involving several Zuni elders.

Repatriation is highly collaborative

Opportunities also exist for repatriation outside of the United States. These are less formally defined than with NAGPRA repatriation, although the process can be more complicated and more collaborative. Archeologist Joel Palka (currently at Arizona State University) was using a collection at Albion College as part of his 2005 book on the Maya and identified an urn whose twin resides in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2016, he collaborated with Albion’s archivist, Justin Seidler, anthropologist Brad Chase, and Albion students to perform an instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) on the urn. Since then, Palka has helped Albion work toward repatriating the urn to Chiapas, along with Josuhé Lozada Toledo, an archaeologist and Professor of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico (INAH).

“Everyone has been extremely excited about the process,” says Meghan Webb, Albion College anthropology professor, “and it has been an encouraging process. All involved also see the repatriation as a process and opportunity to build ongoing relationships.” Webb has been working with student Dulce Aceves on a research project connected with the repatriation, which is expected to conclude in the spring of 2021.

Repatriation is scalable

These cases at Albion College make it clear that repatriation of even a single object is a major project, requiring intensive research and extensive communication. As a result, it’s possible that even small collections can potentially provide ongoing opportunities for undergraduate work. In addition, given the large number of small tasks, repatriation is a potential opportunity for a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), expanding the reach of the experience.

Repatriation is the right thing to do!

Finally, repatriation puts faculty and undergraduate students on the right side of history. The work of repatriation teaches students about the ethics of collections and about the history of Western colonialism and hegemony.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Tips for Students and Faculty

That Belongs in a Museum!: Rescuing Material for Exhibitions–And Undergraduate Research

Exhibitions offer excellent opportunities for undergraduate research especially at the introductory level. But finding appropriate materials to exhibit can be daunting, requiring collaboration with libraries or museums. In addition, established collections are often well studied, leaving a little room for authentic research by undergraduate students. One solution is to acquire items specifically for the purpose of an undergraduate exhibition. A treasure trove of inexpensive minor items, early printed pages, and more modern ephemera is available on auction sites like eBay. With patience and careful attention to ethical issues, it’s possible to assemble and mount an exhibition in your field for less than $500. And the items acquired can remain as part of a college or university’s teaching collection long after the exhibition is over, preserving public access to materials that might otherwise have languished in private collections. Here are some rules of thumb to guide your adventure.

Be flexible.

All exhibitions have a theme or focus, and your expertise will no doubt suggest many ideal items to you. But you will have most success if you bring a flexible and open-minded approach to your search. Items produced in large numbers, or in metal, and pages from large and popular texts are easiest to find and present the fewest ethical issues. (See “Pay Attention to Ethics!” below). Small metal finds from the European Middle Ages include lead pilgrim badges, cloth seals, and seal matrices; from the early modern period, you’ll find Delft tiles; bronze book clasps, and pages from popular works of natural philosophy. A page from Speed’s Atlas in a student exhibition Happily, pages that offer the most opportunity for student research, with text as well as images, are usually less expensive than ones with images alone. Modern ephemera include local newspapers, family photo collections and scrapbooks, posters, campaign materials, etc.

Trust your expertise?

Museums care deeply about provenance and authenticity. In part, that is because they are collecting items of great value, where forgery becomes an issue. At the cost point for undergraduate exhibitions, your ordinary scholarly expertise is enough to point you in the right direction. For example, while it is possible for someone to forge a page from Gerard’s Herball (1597), the cost and trouble to do so at the level that would deceive any early modern scholar would not be worth the $6 that such pages often garner. If you’ve spent hours in the archives, you are unlikely to mistake a facsimile for the real thing. Overall, you don’t need to be an art expert in order to demonstrate the level of expertise required for a low-cost undergraduate exhibition. A good rule of thumb is that if you doubt the authenticity, then others will too.

Pay attention to ethical issues!

As anyone involved with museum acquisitions knows, purchasing an artifact always involves a delicate ethical balance. If you use items you acquire in teaching and make them available to the public, you have some strong positive outcomes. But you should take care to minimize the harm caused by participating in the marketplace. The issue is particularly tricky with anything that counts as an antiquity. The Society for American Archaeology’s code of ethics generally forbids participation in the market for antiquities because it creates incentives for looting. If you’re a purist, you may extend this even to existing private collections and to objects that have always been extant. Raising the ethical issues can also be a legitimate part of the pedagogy of your undergraduate research experience.

  • Consider both the cost of the item and its origin. A low cost may seem unlikely to encourage irresponsible behavior. But for items from developing countries, prices that may seem low to you can still be incentives to loot. Some countries, however, strictly monitor (and permit) the collection of minor objects. In the UK, for example, metal detector finds are documented in a public database, and the Treasure Act and national monument laws protect cultural heritage.
  • Avoid beauty. Prefer damaged, broken, and incomplete minor items. Objects and texts that are perfect or aesthetically pleasing are important cultural heritage, if authentic. Broken pottery fragments might be OK (but no guarantees). The frieze of the Parthenon is not.
  • For pages from texts, consider the cost of the page against the value of a complete text. You can usually check this using records from sites like abebooks or auction sites. Don’t buy individual pages for a price that might encourage collectors to destroy undamaged books.
  • Do not acquire items from indigenous cultures or their ancestors.

Save some of your budget to mount your exhibition.

Creating secure and attractive exhibitions requires some thought to presentation, and that comes with its own costs. Individual pages can be mounted using swing-out plexiglas with nothing more than some brass hardware, a hand drill, and a screwdriver. (NB: Consider UV resistant plexiglas for long-term or sunlit installations). Three dimensional items might require collaborating with someone who has basic carpentry skills. The low cost nature of your items should make you less anxious about theft or vandalism and thus open up more potential semi-protected exhibition spaces.

Consider future teaching uses.

Exhibitions offer great course-based undergraduate research experiences, but consider collections that can be used in teaching long after the exhibition is taken down. Simple classroom assignments can motivate students when they have the chance to handle historical material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Resources for faculty

Virtual Interviews Expand Reach of Undergraduate Art History Project

If there is any silver lining for undergraduate research during the Coronavirus pandemic, it lies in way virtual meetings have expanded possibilities for connecting artists and scholars across the globe. Kylee Turner, an Art History student at University State University, was able to take advantage of this trend to radically extend the interviews she planned as part of a project on contemporary printmaking. CURAH recently caught up to Kylee, virtually of course.

CURAH: What was the nature of your project?

KT: My URCO research is a combination of my two passions, film and printmaking. I’m recording interviews with printmakers from all around the world to capture the rich history and energy around the art form. I will use the footage and information I gather to make an energetic and informational documentary about printmaking.

image of Kylee Turner
Kylee Turner, Utah State University

CURAH: What were the easiest and hardest things about the work you did?

KT: The easiest part of my project has been staying motivated, no matter the changes that have come due to the state of the world. I want to learn what my interviewees have to teach me and I’m excited to share that information with others. Printmaking is a largely community-based art. There is a really passionate group of people that are excited about the work they are doing and want to bring others in to share the magic that lies within the process. I am thrilled at the idea of capturing that and hopefully letting new people experience the intense passion that comes with making. My desire to do this, and do this well, brings in the biggest stressor and most difficult part of this project. There is no book on “How to Make a Documentary on Zoom” and I don’t know how my final product is going to look compared to what I had originally planned.

CURAH: What kinds of things did you learn? (about your topic, about scholarship, or about yourself)

KT: Undertaking such a massive project has pushed the bounds of the small world that I thought I lived in. I had planned on visiting artists in Utah, Idaho, and the surrounding states based on availability of artists. My grant money included a travel fund that I was going to use to get to Florida to speak to artist that had a different background and setting. This, to me, was a fairly broad stroke I was going to use to try and paint a very complicated picture. Now, Zoom has allowed me to complete interviews with artists from all over America as well as Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Hong Kong. The reality of being able to paint a global picture of printmaking has been huge for my research and really solidified the idea of scholarship to me. Reaching out to big names—people in the MOMA, artists making waves, printmakers inventing processes—it all seemed out of reach before this. Now, it’s reality.

CURAH: Did you make any discoveries along the way?

KT: Researching in my field of study has been eye opening on many fronts. Hearing from so many passionate and active artist has help keep my personal practice of printmaking alive. I’ve learned simple ideas to share printmaking with more people and complex technical skills that I hadn’t heard of before. While this might not directly show in the documentary, learning new things proves how expansive this field is. There’s so much to be excited about and dive into. I’m reminded with each interview I conduct that this is a worthwhile topic and that there is something here to share with the world.

CURAH: How has the project helped you in your career goals?

KT: In video, one of the greatest strengths you need while applying for jobs is a strong reel of work. While I’ve been working on video projects throughout my university career, this is different than anything I’ve had the chance to make. It will help me prove my film skills to future employers but, more importantly, my ability to adapt and overcome roadblocks in the creative process. This project is a proof of my ability to plan, shoot, produce, and problem solve effectively. While it hasn’t landed me my dream job yet, I’ve still got a lot of work to do before I’m finished here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Tips for Students and Faculty

Building Community in Online Classes through Undergraduate Research

As so many teachers have realized over the past months, building community in online classes is a central challenge, a fact that veteran remote educators have alway known. Unfortunately, many proposed solutions are of the “getting to know each other” variety. But authentic community is created not when students simply know each other but when they share values and goals. And one way to create such shared values and goals is through the course-based undergraduate research experience or “CURE.”

Anyone who has created even a small competitive game in class knows that shared goals can be created entirely artificially. There are wonderful and robust arts and humanities methods that use this strategy such as the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) simulations from Barnard. But because undergraduate research, as defined by CUR, involves “original intellectual or creative contributions to the discipline,” it relies on meaningful goals that go beyond the classroom. Getting students to share those goals means helping them value the arts and humanities themselves, an important learning outcome. Here are some ways to shape your course-based undergraduate research experience for maximum community building.

Make dissemination visible

Look for projects in which dissemination is timely and visible. Many valuable projects in the humanities ask for material from participants that may not see the light of day for years. Contributions to the arts and humanities infrastructure, such databases and curation may not appeal to students who are already experiencing the distancing of remote education. If you do want to use projects like these, seek out opportunities to create immediate feedback, like inviting the director of a project or organization to thank the students and to help them imagine the value of their contributions. Consider whether the project can make any immediate acknowledgment of students while their work is being processed, such as listing them on contributor pages.

Involve a known audience

It is tempting to incorporate creative and scholarly experiences that speak to a national or global audience since that is what faculty themselves consider to be the ultimate audience for any contribution to the field. But valuable work in the arts and humanities can also be directed at more local audiences, especially when the “public humanities” and non-expert audiences are considered. It’s easier for students to feel the reality and immediacy of their work when its audience includes peers, mentors, and family members. Virtual presentation opportunities have actually expanded the possibilities. For example, if students’ work will be part of an online conference, consider requiring them to invite a number of family and friends to listen in.

Give prizes

Creative and scholarly experiences are serious and meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t improved them with a bit of community-building fun, and nothing builds community as fast as friendly competition. Look for opportunities to award non-serious prizes separate from any course related benefits. For example, local groups participating in the annual transcribathon for EMROC may be encouraged by silly prizes awarded for the first person to spot a given word in a manuscript.

Reduce the stakes for collaboration

Collaboration is a powerful tool for building community in any setting because it focuses small groups on shared goals. But when collaboration is also a course expectation it risks working against community through the dreaded “group project” syndrome. High-performing students either worry on the one hand that their performance will be held hostage to that of their peers or on the other hand that they will end up doing all the work. These problems are exacerbated in online classes because students may feel that they have reduced opportunities to encourage each other.

One solution is to make collaboration involve both independent and group responsibility. For example, ask students collaborating on a single scholarly or creative outcome to create their own independent contribution and then to work with others to merge the best aspects of their independent work. Assign course credit based on individual merit for the first part and on participation and engagement for the second part. This reduces the responsibility for effective teamwork while still producing successful outcomes since the best student work will end up in the final product whether or not a group is successful as a team.

Collaborate with undergraduates at other institutions

School spirit doesn’t disappear after high school, and it’s a well-tested way to create a sense of community that can be adapted for undergraduate research experiences. Look for opportunities to pair projects with colleagues at other institutions. Students can make presenting to their peers at other institutions a part of the research experience. Not only is emulation a powerful motivator, but students at each institution will grow closer together as they seek to put their best foot forward.

Have you used CUREs for building community in online classes? Let the CURAH editors know at @curartsandhumanities.org.

Tips for Students and Faculty

Using Exhibitions for Undergraduate Scholarship

By Ian F. MacInnes, Alexa Sand, and Lisandra Estevez

Curating exhibitions is genuine research work that allows students to work collaboratively, engage the community, and practice public humanities scholarship. Exhibitions can teach students the fundamentals of research in a discipline while focusing on small and achievable outcomes, like bibliographic descriptions and short interpretive explanations. Exhibitions can help students understand and articulate the value of the public humanities. They allow students to practice making a persuasive visual and textual argument for a general audience. And finally, working on an exhibition is inherently collaborative, a model of humanities scholarship that is becoming more prevalent. Planning and mounting exhibitions can be resource and time intensive, but students tend to embrace the challenge. The public venue inspires them to do their best work.

An exhibition itself may be real or virtual, though whenever possible your students should have access to the actual objects they will be curating. Here are some things to be aware of if you are considering adding an exhibition project to your class.

Be open to different sources of material

The material for your exhibition is an opportunity to think creatively about the collaborative work you envision. Libraries and museums are obvious sources (and venues), but so are local historical societies. Smaller museums and libraries often have interesting collections of uncurated material, giving students an even more meaningful experience. Libraries also often have unadvertised collections of objects that can supplement documents. If local archives don’t have what you need, it is sometimes surprisingly easy to collect items yourself. Major auction sites, like eBay, are inexpensive sources of fragmentary material. Roman glass, Greek pottery sherds, pages from early print sources, and modern ephemera are all probably within reach of your budget. Finally, don’t forget that students can create facsimiles and replicas to build out an exhibition, either working on their own or with the help of experts on campus.

Prepare the ground with your collaborators

Whether working with a departmental or college gallery space, a campus museum, your library, or another on- or off-campus venue, start discussions long in advance of the first class meeting. Think about scheduling: when will the exhibition be installed or beta-tested? When will it open and will there be an associated event? When will it close and who will be responsible for taking it down and cleaning up? Are there special considerations to be taken into account in handling materials or working in the space, or the digital environment? Who will be responsible for what aspects of student support? For example, if display “furniture” such as supports or hanging hardware need to be constructed or installed, will the students do this, or will it be delegated to a preparator, and if so, is the service gratis, or fee based?

It’s a good idea to have all of this worked out ahead of time. That way, you can give student curators a comprehensive “map” of what their responsibilities will be, and what support they can expect from staff or curators employed by the exhibition venue.

Scaffold the needed skills into the class material

Exhibitions are daunting assignments from a student’s perspective, so it’s extra important to build student skills slowly from a base. Scaffolding, along with clear benchmarks, gives students a better sense of direction of where to start with this project. It is especially important in working with students who might have little experience with research in our disciplines.

Some early steps include

More complex later steps include

  • Interpretive descriptions;
  • Transcription and translation;
  • Introductory explanation for the entire exhibition;
  • An exhibition catalog;
  • Posters advertising exhibition; and
  • Oral script of presentations for exhibition opening.

While scaffolding undergraduate research assignments might seem time-consuming, it actually allows for better time management for both students and instructors. By providing clear goals from the start, students get ongoing feedback regarding the progress of their project. Scaffolding also helps to model the research process for students step-by-step. They begin with a question, transform it into a statement or thesis, and carry out research for a bibliography. They then produce a substantial, thoughtful project that can be shared with the academic community.

Remember you are part of the team

As instructor, you are responsible for evaluating and assessing student work associated with the exhibition, but don’t forget that your name will also be publicly associated with the results. This means that you should consider yourself part of the team as well as an outside judge. While you normally avoid editing students’ work for excellent pedagogical reasons, you should not be shy about revising material that will be made public. Doing so not only helps create a better outcome but lets your students know that you are willing to work alongside them on a successful event.

Know your tools

Mounting an exhibition, whether actual or virtual, requires technical skills. As for most pedagogy, don’t evaluate your students on skills you don’t have yourself, including digital skills. And try to stick with exhibitions you feel confident about mounting yourself if you had to. Having a committed collaborator is often helpful, but don’t expect your IT department or your archivist to fill in for skills you lack.

Leave time for installation

It is tempting to think that final installation will go quickly since it’s just a physical event. But installations, whether physical or digital, take time, care, and can run into obstacles that may require time to fix. If you expect students to include replicas, make sure you plan for the time, space, materials, and expertise to help them achieve these goals. When possible, set aside some class time for installation. It’s practically the only time you can actually require all students to be present.

Plan your publicity

The more public your exhibition, the more your students will be inspired to do their best. Make publicity part of the project. Consider setting aside time and money for a “grand opening” event that includes campus stakeholders and influencers. As Chip and Dan Heath reveal in The Power of Moments, celebratory milestones can give students a sense of achievement and closure. And dissemination is a key element of undergraduate research: students should have the opportunity to interact with public visitors to their exhibition.

Further reading

Several models for curatorial work are discussed in this CUR Quarterly essay by Alexa Sand, Becky Thoms, Darcy Pumphrey, Erin Davis, and Joyce Kinkead of Utah State University, where the university’s library and art museum have often been the venues for student curatorial projects, and where the expertise of the library and museum staff are a critical factor.

Furthermore, a couple of great resources for composing museum labels and texts and creating inclusive exhibitions can be found here.

A comprehensive source for labels:

Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Didactics:

Writing Text and Labels (Australian Museum)

The V&A Ten Point Guide to Gallery Text

Quick Guide to Adult Audience Interpretive Materials (The J. Paul Getty Museum)

The Inclusive Museum

Cognitive underpinnings:

Heath, Chip and Dan, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact . Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Check out our other best-practice guides for faculty:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
News

Apply for an NEH Humanities Connections Grant – Sept. 19 deadline

September 19 is the 2019 deadline for applications to the only NEH grant that specifically requires undergraduate research: the Humanities Connections Grant (there are two versions: planning and implementation). Inaugurated in 2016, the NEH Humanities Connections grants support collaborative curricular projects and programs involving different departments at the same institution. They also must “incorporate meaningful student engagement activities such as undergraduate research projects.” Now is the perfect time to begin planning an application for next year. And if you’re in the final stages of a proposal for this year, you might appreciate these insights from CURAH councilor Amy Woodbury Tease (Norwich University) about her current NEH grant: Developing an Interdisciplinary Curriculum to Foster Citizen Scholars.

Resources for faculty

Gallery founder reflects on her undergraduate research experiences

Undergraduate research experiences can prepare students for the future in ways they might not expect. Hannah Litvan graduated with art and creative writing majors from Albion College in 2015; within two years she had founded the Ice House art gallery in Evanston, Illinois. Starting a business required skills not typically included in studio art or creative writing, but Litvan found that her undergraduate research experiences in particular had made her more articulate, more adaptable, and with a larger perspective on the core value of art.

Ready For Anything

Litvan says she founded the Ice House gallery because she saw a need: “I noticed my hometown community was lacking a representation of fairly priced, quality local art for sale, though it had plenty of artists looking for a place to show and sell their work.” But starting a gallery would be challenging. “As much as I learned about art and myself as an artist [in my college coursework], I learned nothing about art as a business or about being a business owner,” Litvan says. She quickly found herself having loan meetings, pitching ideas, and meeting with large and varied groups of people.

Presenting her undergraduate research project, a study of comics and art, helped her communicate with her new audience. “It was good to hear feedback and questions from a larger audience,” she says, an audience “who thinks differently than me, who would ask questions I may not have thought of, and think about my idea in their own way thus giving me a different perspective. That happened both in my undergraduate research experience and early groundwork for the gallery. Even now I work with the city and large groups of people in each of my shows. I have to make sure I cover a lot of ground as far as what I show in order to appeal to more people.”

Hannah Litvan, Founder Ice House Gallery, former undergraduate scholar

Working on a complex and evolving project also turned out to be something Litvan had experience with by way of her undergraduate project. “My research idea started off a lot more simplistically than what it turned into,” she says, “and that was true of my gallery too. I thought a nice little local art gallery would be nice, then a whopper of a space fell in my lap and I needed to be much more than a gallery. There are artist studios, classes, workshops, concerts, performance art, constantly changing shows and collaborative events with other businesses and the city. It still has the base value of what I wanted to present, but now on a much larger scale.”

Balancing Art and Business

Being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean abandoning your core values, even if the day-to-day work sometimes can seem far from the reason you began. As Litvan says, “I’ve always placed a large value on art, and have always pushed for art appreciation, sales, features and for serious treatment of that profession. I wanted to convey that in my undergraduate research as well as with my gallery.”

Litvan considers herself primarily as an artist rather than an entrepreneur, although her future goals certainly draw on the business skills she’s learned. “Opening and operating my own gallery has its ups and downs. I love coordinating group shows, setting up and installing shows, talking about art as well as selling it. These are all skills that I learned both in my education and on the job. Now I have all the experience and knowhow all those other jobs wanted me to have straight out of school, and I can be my own boss.”

“But it is not a ‘dream come true,'” she adds. “Owning a business leaves little time for personal time, especially when it comes to creative time. I am slowly reclaiming that as my business stabilizes. I don’t know where I will be in 5 years or what type of career I will have, but I know I always want to be involved in and with art.”

Hannah Litvan participated in Albion College’s Foundation for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (FURSCA).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Resources for faculty

Kit Marlowe Project is built by undergraduates

Sometimes the perfect opportunity for original undergraduate scholarship in the humanities ends up as a multi-semester digital project with a life of its own. This is the story of the Kit Marlowe Project, the brainchild of early modern scholar Kristen Abbott Bennett when she taught at Stonehill College. In essence, Kristen’s students researched and created an entire digital humanities project, from the basic TEI coding to its WordPress implementation. Each part of this process offers lessons and inspirations for undergraduate research. I tracked Kristen down at her new home in Framingham State University and asked about her experiences.

IMcI: What inspired you to create this project for your students?

KAB: My students inspired the project. I’d assigned a Scavenger Hunt so that they could do research on Christopher Marlowe and they struggled to find sites that had reliable and comprehensive information. We also discovered that there is no site that offers a curated digital collection of both Marlowe’s drama and poetry. My students and I decided to fill that gap in the context of coursework we were doing and they jumped right in.

IMcI: What kinds of research and scholarship did they need to do?

KAB: Students had to conduct rigorous research to design their web exhibits, their works projects, and to contribute to the “-ography” database we started that complements the encoded works we’ve published to date. The web exhibits required conventional library research, but at the same time, they studied web offerings to think critically about how to select information to include, present it, and write for new media. The works assignments required them to learn about editorial practices in the context of figuring out what kinds of editions they were working with and sharing that information with an audience of readers who are, like themselves, learning about Marlowe’s life and times.

IMcI: This sounds difficult for anyone, let alone undergraduates! What were the biggest challenges they faced?

KAB: You’re probably expecting I’ll say that the encoding portion of the class was the most challenging. But when we have enough hands on deck, especially people like Scott Hamlin (Stonehill IT) who helped me for the past three semesters, plus enthusiastic and smart TAs, the encoding part of the course can be wonderfully exciting and satisfying. Actually, the biggest challenge is teaching students that one must be more rigorous about writing and citing well on the Internet than in a conventional writing class. That may sound like common sense to instructors, but students’ online writing models – not just Instagram and Twitter, but even their blog posts – tend to feature sentence fragments and confused syntax. One of my critical projects in this course is to persuade students that they must be model writers for others.

IMcI: But you did also teach them to code! People say TEI coding is the hardest and least exciting skill in the DH repertoire, but clearly your project proves otherwise. What did they get out of TEI?

KAB: TEI is a brilliant way to teach close reading skills in any classroom! The act of transcription alone forces students to slow down and pay attention to textual features, to the language itself. TEI encoding practices are, to oversimplify, basically a way of annotating text critically and consistently. Although we teach students annotation skills in most classrooms, they are usually not required to make decisions about what the “authoritative title” is, what printer errors one corrects, what to do about omitted signatures, or curiously spelled place names that do not exist on Google Maps (but do in Pelagios!). Moreover, these editorial decisions need to be made as a class. Students must work toward consistent encoding practices collaboratively. They understand that they are accountable for not only their own work, but that of their entire team. I hold them to the same standards in the works projects and the web exhibits, but the encoding project brings this point home.

IMcI: The fun thing about a public-facing website is watching people use it and respond. What kind of comments have you gotten?

KAB: Unfortunately, we didn’t have the comment feature working after our launch at the 2018 Shakespeare Association Conference (SAA), but I’ve received a number of compliments about the resource! The librarians at Framingham State University have added it as a featured database on the library website. I’ve been told by many colleagues that they are directing their students – both graduate and undergraduate – to the site to learn about Marlowe and his works! Overall, the feedback has been great. Moving forward, I will be open to contributions from classes at different institutions and will be happy to work with faculty to design suitable activities.

IMcI: And the project now has a life of its own, right? What happens next?

KAB: This semester my former Stonehill TA, Rowan Pereira (’19) will work on the project as an intern. She’ll be editing the two Faustus editions our Spring class published and cleaning up other parts of the site. Additionally, my sophomore-level Shakespeare class at Framingham State University will contribute web exhibits focused on Marlowe and Shakespeare’s collaborative works.

Abbott-Bennett’s students are enthusiastic about the value of the project. The following comments are reproduced with the permission of the students.

I am incredibly proud, impressed, and surprised by the work I created and published in this course. When all of the transcribing, encoding and time-consuming work was complete, and the final piece was uploaded onto TAPAS it was such a gratifying experience. It was so cool to see how the different codes interacted with the text to actually make things happen in the final product. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to see the final text with all of the various textual features as if nothing went into making them happen, but then thinking about all of the work that went into bringing the text to life.
— Justin Boure, Stonehill ’19

The experiences that I had during the process of proofing, editing, and proofing again had an impact on my reading practices. I took care to read more carefully in an effort to avoid missing details that I could have gone over before. When I noticed a seemingly obvious detail on a second look through the text, it would be a gentle reminder to avoid skimming… I also became more focused on the spelling of words, the phrasing, and rhymes. When attempting to encode the text, I could not simply read the words and get the gist of what was said, but I had to analyze every letter, and could not but help notice rhyming couplets wherever they appeared. Ultimately, the proofing, editing, and further proofing served to make my reading much more methodical, detail oriented, and analytical.
— Robert, Coleman. Stonehill ’19

The issue of open access is quite possibly my biggest takeaway of this course. My whole life I have had access to whatever information I wanted. My schools provided databases and resources so I could read anything I was interested in. … Making knowledge accessible to all is so important and interesting from an ethical perspective. I would like to research it more.
— Abigail Ballou, Stonehill ’19

Do you have any experience teaching with TEI or curating a digital site with undergraduates? Let us know.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.