Digital storytelling: Reinventing literature circles

New literacies in reading research demand the study of comprehension skills using multiple modalities through a more complex, multi-platform view of reading. Taking into account the robust roll of technology in our daily lives, this article presents an update to the traditional literature circle lesson to include digital storytelling and multimedia. Digital Storytelling Circles (DSCs) support the idea of creating a “community of learners” who participate in purpose-driven engagement with text to create meaning. Digital storytelling as an activity is not new to English language arts classes, but this article discusses the versatility of digital storytelling and how DSCs provide a framework for social interaction where students create video adaptations of the texts they have read to showcase their comprehension, ultimately producing book trailers, documentaries, or personal narratives, depending on the demands of the text

Bible as Interface

The book is undergoing a major technological transition as print wanes in its dominance and the internet and mobile devices transform our reading and writing technologies. With the entangled histories of bible and book, our emerging technological age and its transformation of the materiality of bible forces us to engage bible as something irreducible to a book. The connections between the major technological transition from roll to codex in antiquity and the contemporary move toward the internet and mobile technologies as reading platforms encourage us to consider bible as an interface that affords high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy. Building on a growing attention to materiality in the study of religion and iconic books like the bible, I suggest bible as interface here to signal that bible is more than a container of content. Rather, bible as interface is a relationship between a material platform and a user that cannot be reduced to simple consumption of content. Rooted in the material religion approaches of Brent Plate and James Watts and animated by the interface theory of Johanna Drucker extended through a Levinasian optics of proximity, I will explore the many contact points of high surface area, the interruptive processes of collaboration, and the irreducibility to a single original text or single proper use in anarchy through a close look at the materiality of bible from ancient roll to digital API

Situated and distributed cognition in artifact negotiation and trade-specific skills: A cognitive ethnography of Kashmiri carpet weaving practice

This article describes various ways actors in Kashmiri carpet weaving practice deploy a range of artifacts, from symbolic, to material, to hybrid, in order to achieve diverse cognitive accomplishments in their particular task domains: information representation, inter and intra-domain communication, distribution of cognitive labor across people and time, coordination of team activities, and carrying of cultural heritage. In this repertoire, some artifacts position themselves as naïve tools in the actors’ environment to the point of being ignored; however, their usage-in-context unfolds their cognitive involvement in the tasks. These usages-in-context are shown through artifact analysis of their routine, improvised, and opportunistic uses, where cognitive artifacts like talim—the central artifact of this practice—are shown to play not only multifunctional roles beyond representation, but are also complemented by trade-specific skills bearing strong cognitive implications in a task

Building a Christian Worldview through Response to Literature

Research has shown that what one reads can be an important factor in developing one’s worldview. This paper will report my thoughts about experiences I had while reading aloud-challenging texts in two Christian school classrooms. My goal for the read alouds was to have students think about issues related to justice, love, and commitment as they apply to both the family and the larger community. Various types of response methodologies (written, art, drama, discussion) were used to encourage students to build connections between what they learned, to what is the appropriate response and action

Agendas for Digital Palaeography in an Archaeological Context: Egypt 1800 BC

Handwriting raises issues alive in archaeological debates, philosophical and historical. In turn, by their extreme fragmentariness, the earliest archaeological manuscripts could generate usefully different questions for the field of palaeography. Here, digitisation offers new common ground for the separate disciplines in the study of the past. For current archaeological discussions of structure and agency, manuscripts pose the act of writing, between social and individual. For debates over literacy and power in part- literate societies, an archaeological hoard of manuscript fragments offers opportunities to assess our chances of knowing, for one time and place, how many writings and writers. The largest earliest group of writing on papyrus-paper comprises several thousand small fragments from Lahun in Egypt (about 1850–1750 BC). Traditional methods of recording similarity and difference across the collection can now be accelerated to a point of qualitative change, by applying image-matching software. This paper considers the potential of computer-aided palaeography for generating new research agendas

Race, Hegemony, and the Birth of Rock & Roll

The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock & Roll On his Grammy winning album, Hard Again, McKinley Morganfield (a.k.a. “Muddy Waters”) sings his song The Blues Had a Baby and They Named it Rock & Roll.1 What are the racial and social implications of this rebirth? In this study, I will argue that the cultural context during the birth of Rock & Roll was such that Blues music had to be “reborn” in order to enter into the predominantly white mainstream. From the perspective of a Blues musician, Morganfield’s use of the idea of rebirth is a subtle apology for the Blues, preserving the filiation and downplaying the issue of racial division. However, a more critical analysis of the situation questions the aptitude of rebirth as a metaphor for the process of change that was required of (Rhythm &) Blues music before it could be embraced as a mainstream art form. Contemporary scholarship suggests a range of terms as more accurate descriptors of this transformative process, including appropriation, assimilation, blanching, and subsumption.2 We can add terms like “translation” and “renaming” to this list, each bringing a slightly different perspective to the issue.3 By attempting to recognize a convergence of unseen or “behind the scenes” forces that cause this transformation to take place, the current study seeks to demonstrate their consequences not simply with respect to the development of popular music, but with respect to the larger relationship between popular culture and race in the latter half of the twentieth century

Teaching Manuscripts in the Digital Age

This chapter reflects on the author’s practical experience teaching palaeography in several different contexts at the start of the so-called “digital age”. Material for manuscript-studies is becoming available at an enormous rate: perhaps most obvious are the results of the large-scale digitisation programmes which are making high-quality colour facsimiles of manuscripts available online to wide audiences. At the same time, Virtual Learning Environments provide new possibilities for teaching and learning, and many tools for research on manuscripts can also be used for teaching. Perhaps more fundamentally, however, it has often been noted that scholarship is changing as a result of digital tools, resources, and methods. What, then, of teaching? Should the teaching of manuscript studies also change along with the scholarly discipline, bringing the Digital Humanities into our classes on palaeography and codicology? To begin answering this question, and to suggest some pedagogical possibilities brought about by technology, the author’s own experiences are discussed. Some limitations of technology for teaching are then considered, and some general remarks are then provided on the relationship between palaeography and Digital Humanities, two fields which are both fighting for recognition as full academic disciplines and not “mere” Hilfswissenschaften