Using Sentiment Analysis to Ease Students toward or around Macroanalysis

"Using Sentiment Analysis to Ease Students toward or around Macroanalysis" introduces teachers to the mathematical analytical method currently being promoted by Matthew Jockers which he calls macroanalysis. This method uses an algorithm called "R," originally designed by researchers in sociology. In many ways, macroanalysis presents an approach to literary analysis that might seem to many traditionalists  to run counter to our training as close readers or advocates of specific literary theories. Instead of  focusing on specific elements in a limited number of texts, macroanalysis uses a computer to consume a huge number of literary works--more than a single human being could read in a lifetime--and collect a statistically significant amount of data, a search which has been programmed into the algorithm by the researcher. This use of a computer to do the reading for the researcher results in a new methodology which Jockers calls "distant reading" (a term he borrows from Franco Moretti). After providing an introductory discussion of macroanalysis, I turn my focus onto making a case for the advantages of using graphs to aid in classroom discussions of reading assignments. In the introductory discussion, I point out that one serious advantage that arises from Jocker's macroanalysis is how the "R" algorithm produces a variety of graphs that provide visual reinforcement for the statistical data it generates. Consequently, in the second section of the essay, I provide a justification for why it would be advantageous in a college or even high school discussion of a reading assignment to privilege visual presentations of student responses to the assignment. Once I've established the nature of macroanalysis, and how challenging it is for the average English major, I offer an alternative approach to creating graphs to clarify student responses. This alternative approach is a blend of "sentiment analysis" and reader-response theory. Essentially this approach can be used to ease students toward the more serious graphing features of macroanalysis, or it can function as a self-contained form of analysis without shifting to the difficult mathematics characteristic of macroanalysis. To prepare the readers for the rather lengthy discussion of a graph produced by a group of Virginia Governor's School students, I first provide a simple graph that shows my responses to the opening scene of Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Having clarified how sentiment analyis, with the mechanical help of Microsoft Excel, can produce an engaging graph of emotional and intellectual responses that can be easily shared with the class, I then move to the last half of my essay--a detailed discussion of an actual student graph derived from a reading of Helen Klein Ross's What Was Mine which was much more sophisticated than the graph I created for the O'Connor story. Even though the students' graph was overly ambitious, the discussion of its visual dynamics demonstrate how even a faulty graph can teach students how to become close readers and appreciate the importance of analysis that is based on specific elements of the literature being analyzed

New Encounters with an Old Course: Rethinking my Composition Course Approaches for a Highly Diverse Class

In this narrative, the author reflects on her experience of teaching a writing course to an extraordinarily diverse group of undergraduate writers. She highlights that the teaching experience allowed the class to negotiate writing practices and culturally-bound assumptions. The teaching of a highly diverse composition class reemphasized how important contextual consideration is, and how past experiences can hinder one’s ability to plan with an open mind

New Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare with Live Theatre: Table of Contents

This document contains the table of contents for the roundtable titled New Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare with Live Theatre

Teaching Shakespeare at the Live Cinema Broadcast

Since the 2009 broadcast of the National Theatre’s production of Phèdre to cinemas worldwide, the availability of high-quality live theatre via digital relay has increased exponentially. Shakespeare has been a particular beneficiary of the explosion of live-streamed theatre, with productions initially broadcast direct to cinema screens, but increasingly available in schoolrooms, commercial DVD, and home computers, offering an invaluable pedagogic resource. While much has been written about the aesthetic and technical properties of the live theatre broadcast as an art form, this article considers the affordances of the cinema broadcast as an event. Class excursions to a cinema offer a degree of similitude to trips to live in-person performance, replicating the qualities of collective viewing, ephemerality, and “eventness” which this article argues offer distinctive pedagogical opportunities. However, the unique conventions and grammars of the theatre broadcast require different analytical methods to in-person performance. This article, drawing on experience teaching cinema broadcasts on undergraduate and postgraduate modules, offers practical strategies for training students in reading theatre broadcasts in ways that preserve the eventness of the experience and help develop group literacy in the medium

Performance Cruxes and Consequences: Teaching Shakespeare with Text and Performance

This article outlines a pedagogy that conceptually links the study of textual "cruxes" in Shakespearean editorial practice to moments of indeterminancy in theatrical performance in order to structure students' experience of attending, interpreting, and writing about a live production of a Shakespeare play

“Shakespeare is for Everyone”: Teaching Regional Productions through the Digital Performance Archive

Over the past decade, local live productions of Shakespeare have become increasingly visible to scholars and audiences alike, both through critical work on the subject as well as through public projects such as Shakespeare on the Road. This visibility highlights the cultural and artistic work of regional theatre. On the one hand, local live productions celebrate regional culture through visual or aural appropriation: original music written by local artists, or an iconic building recreated in the set. On the other hand, these shows also expand and sometimes challenge our sense of Shakespeare’s work through these local appropriations. And yet, despite recent interest in local live productions, there is a curious lack of scholarship on how we might encourage students to understand and appreciate regional productions of Shakespeare.   This article explores one way to engage students in regional Shakespeare through discussing the Nashville Shakespeare Performance Archive, a student-curated online archive of local productions that has been a feature of Shakespeare classes at Belmont University in Nashville since 2016. Funded by a micro-grant from the Folger Institute, this project enables our students to collect artefacts from the Nashville Shakespeare Festival’s annual performances and curate them into a suite of webpages each year that includes video footage, interviews, photos, musical scores, set models, costume sketches, and other elements of the production. This article overviews the early years of the project and explores a recent redesign that more directly challenged student assumptions about what constitutes a performance of “Shakespeare.”   Ultimately, this article makes the argument that a student-curated archive has the potential to slow students down in their encounters with local live theatre, helping them to identify a show’s contributions to local artistic identity and challenge their notion of Shakespearean "authenticity.

Live on Film! Recent Trends in Research and Teaching with Mediated Theatre

The purpose of this article is to provide an introductory survey of the field that might be called "mediated theatre studies"--that is, the study of recordings of theatrical performances. The survey has three parts. First, I chart broad trends in the research. Next, I review types and capabilities of some of the longer-running digital platforms. Finally, I plot the range of approaches to mediated theatre in existing pedagogical articles. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to help instructors to refine established, or develop new approaches to teaching with mediated theatre. In particular, where it seems relevant and helpful for students, I hope that this survey can help instructors to design courses that are not only informed by the now established discourse of performance criticism but also by specific questions and topics in mediated theatre studies

Editor's Note

This is the Editor's Note for this issue of The CEA Forum

In Defense of Clichés: A Half-Hearted Polemic

This column considers a) how clichés are conventionally approached in the writing classroom and b) why such approaches are often misguided.  At the core of this column is the idea that clichés are important tokens of community that bind speaker and audience, writer and reader.  This essay does not endorse absolutely the use of clichés in student writing, but neither does it condemn it.  Rather, this essay suggests that writing instructors and students alike should approach the use of clichés with more nuance and awareness of their cultural and linguistic functions

Vision and Revision: The Whys and Hows of Employing Creative Writing Pedagogy in the College Classroom

Current research suggests that students who struggle with grammar, spelling, mechanics and other “problems of ability,” as well as students who suffer from “problems of engagement,” as well as those students who see reading and writing as a chore, can benefit from creative writing assignments and learn to enjoy reading and writing on the college level through this genre of writing. This paper explores several benefits from teaching creative writing in composition courses, and proposes that creative writing assignments be assigned to composition students as a precursor to teaching academic writing. Several Anglophone countries worldwide have been deploying creative writing pedagogies in their English classrooms as replacements for, or supplements to, other forms of college writing with great success