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12 1 Cultivating Digital Media Work in English Studies: Negotiating Disciplinary Questions The web is a fabulous—& dangerous—resource. —Anonymous survey respondent Imagine an assistant professor in a literary field who works in an English department; we’ll call her Polly. She is creating a scholarly hypertext edition of one of the texts of a somewhat unknown female author and wants to bring this type of work into her introductory literature class, having students create annotated online editions of literary texts. The biggest challenge she sees in teaching students literature is that they struggle with critical/analytical reading. She read a white paper published online by David Barndollar arguing that in learning to read literature, students are learning to “make different distinctions in texts from those they are accustomed to making; and making distinctions in texts is the very definition of reading” (n. pag.). He further asserts that by “marking the text” (using hypertext markup language—html—to make the text look a particular way on the screen and to annotate the text), those distinctions are made visible for students in concrete ways. In other words, creating hypertexts helps students attend to textuality and attend to reading and interpretation in a more active and self-conscious way by forcing them to make decisions about the presentation of a text based upon their interpretations of its meaning. Hypertext annotation requires students to interrogate a text in order to understand both the meaning of the text and how the text creates that meaning, then to communicate that knowledge to others in the form of hypertext markup language. Additionally, CULTIVATING DIGITAL MEDIA WORK 13 because students have familiarity with hypertext from the standpoint of reading/interacting with websites, Polly feels that they may perceive a greater connection between the course content and their own lives and will thereby attend to the work with more enthusiasm and focus. When Polly asks the university’s scheduler to schedule her class into a particular computer classroom (one that has web composing software installed on the computers), the scheduler responds that it is not possible. Polly was prepared for this response. Space is at a premium at the university, and most special requests for particular spaces cannot be accommodated. Although the composition program has made special arrangements for first-year writing classes to meet regularly in computer labs, literature classes are much more difficult to schedule in the computer classrooms. Polly talks to a colleague in creative writing who had similar difficulties in a previous semester scheduling a creative nonfiction course focusing on digital storytelling in a computer lab but eventually prevailed. He says he merely went to talk to the department chair and explained what he was doing in the class and why he needed the space, and the chair cut through the bureaucracy to get the course scheduled in a computer classroom. Polly emails her syllabus to the chair and makes an appointment to talk about scheduling. In the meeting, she explains in more detail what she wants to do in her class and why this plan necessitates that the class meet for at least several weeks in a computer classroom; Polly would prefer to be there the entire semester but recognizes the reality that there are fewer computer classrooms than faculty who wish to use them. Polly expects her chair to ask a few questions about her assignment before committing to help her get her class into a computer lab. However, she is caught off guard when her chair says something to the effect of “You teach literature, not creative writing. You don’t need a computer classroom.” Polly responds that her hypertext project requires computers; the students can’t be expected to create hypertexts completely outside of class without any hands-on instruction. To this, her chair replies, “You’re paid to teach literature, not technology. This project sounds like it’s going to take a lot of time, and this is a survey course. How are you going to achieve historical coverage when you’re wasting so much time teaching students to make websites?” Polly tries to explain that making websites will help students find meaning in the literature and make connections between the course texts and their own lives, which are increasingly digitally mediated. But the chair is not convinced and responds that students already know about websites but need to learn how to read literature and write about [3.144.84.155] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 02:37 GMT...

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