Digital books in literary education: a semiotic approach to analysis

http://www.ester.ee/record=b4715970*es

Kirjandushariduse digitaliseerumine kultuurilise autokommunikatsiooni kontekstis

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneVaatamata levinud arvamusele on noorte inimeste kirjanduselu aktiivsem kui kunagi varem. Kirjandusega suheldakse lihtsalt viisidel, mis ei pruugi alati laiemat tunnustamist leida. Digiajastul hõlmab kirjandusharidus erinevates meediumites loodud metatekstide mitmekesises võrgustikus navigeerimist ja nende pinnalt terviku integreerimist. Algtekstide esialgsel kujul lugemise asemel hangitakse selle kohta teadmisi nt ekraniseeringute, meemide, videomängude või isegi YouTube’i kommentaaride vahendusel. Verbaalsele, lineaarsele ja üksikautorluses trükiraamatule vastukaaluks on digitaalsed tekstid multimodaalsed, mittelineaarsed ja koosloomelised. Tekstide kvantitatiivsete ja kvalitatiivsete omaduste muutuste kõrval on digitaliseerumine kaasa toonud nihked ka kirjandusharidust puudutavates sotsiaalsetes suhetes - loojad ja vastuvõtjad segunevad, kõike teadvatest õpetajatest saavad juhendajad iseseisvas teadmiste omandamise protsessis. Sellist olukorda võib vaadelda kultuurilise plahvatushetkena, kuid käesolev töö keskendub vastasküljele -- pidevale muutusele. Väitekiri käsitleb kirjandushariduse muutumist erinevate nurkade alt. Esiteks vaadeldakse eelnimetatud metatekstide rakendatavust kirjanduse õpetamisel. Teiseks sünteesitakse Tartu-Moskva semiootikakoolkonna ning multimodaalsuse uuringuid analüüsimaks kirjandusharidust nii kultuurilise autokommunikatsiooni kontekstis kui läbi sotsiaalsete suhete prisma. Viimaseks pakutakse välja pedagoogilisi ja tehnoloogilisi lahendusi, et ületada formaalse kirjandushariduse ja igapäevaste digitaalsete praktikate vahelist lõhet. Väitekirjas lähenetakse uurimisküsimustele eksperimentaalselt ning töö aluseks olev empiiriline materjal pärineb autori osalusel valminud digitaalselt õppeplatvormilt Haridus Ekraanil ja selle kasutamiskogemustest.Despite the common concern, young people today are engaging with literature more than ever, albeit in the ways that are not always recognized. Literary education in the digital age implies navigating a heterogeneous world of metatexts in different media and integrating them into a coherent whole. Rather than reading the original versions of literary texts, people often gain information from elsewhere, i.e. by watching film adaptations, scrolling through memes, playing video games, or reading comments on Youtube. In contrast to printed books that are mostly verbal, linear and created by a single author, digital texts are becoming increasingly multimodal, non-linear and collaborative. Apart from a qualitative and quantitative change in the nature of texts, digitalization entails a shift in social relations: producers and consumers merge into prosumers, while teachers turn into knowledge facilitators rather than all-knowing others. While the current situation can be certainly considered as a moment of explosion, this work mostly focuses on its opposite – the stage of gradual development. The thesis explores the transformation of literary education from different angles. At first, it discusses the applicability of different forms of texts and practices to teaching literature, such as digital and film adaptations, games, and project development workshops. Secondly, it synthesizes the ideas of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School and the multimodal approach, in order to analyze literary education in the context of cultural autocommunication as well as through the prism of social relations. Finally, it suggests pedagogical and technological solutions for bridging the gap between formal literary education and vernacular digital practices. The thesis aims to answer research questions by means of experimentation rather than by a theoretical argument: the findings are based on the empirical material gathered while working on the Education on Screen project.https://www.ester.ee/record=b538322

Rethinking literary education in the digital age

This paper discusses the perspectives of literary education in the context of the transforming of the notions of literature, reading, and learning. While everyday semiotic practices are becoming increasingly digital and multimodal, school education in most countries is still largely focused on mediating original literary texts in print and their established interpretations. Less conventional sources of literary information – brief retellings, comic strips, memes, social media posts – tend to make up a large part of the students’ semiotic environment; yet these are usually dismissed by school education as inaccurate and irrelevant. Cultural semiotics, however, allows regarding pulverized versions of texts as a part of a natural educational system – the culture itself. A holistic approach allows not only integrating everyday semiotic practices into a school curriculum, but also revealing the inherent multimodality, transmediality, and creativity of the literary experience. The paper explores possible implications of semiotics in three aspects of literary education: multimodality and heterogeneity of literary experience; influence of digital media on the perception habits; reading as a creative building of a whole from different fragments. The overarching goal is to enrich school education through a deeper understanding of literary experience and a widening of the spectrum of acknowledged tools, formats and media. The theoretical survey is supported by real-life examples from school practice and recreational reading

Culture as education: From transmediality to transdisciplinary pedagogy

For the past three years, the Transmedia Research Group at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, has been developing open access online materials for supporting the teaching of humanities-related subjects in Estonian- and Russianlanguage secondary schools. This paper maps the theoretical and conceptual starting points of these materials. The overarching goal of the educational platforms is to support cultural coherence and autocommunication by cultivating literacies necessary for holding meaningful dialogues with cultural heritage. To achieve the goal, the authors have been seeking ways of purposeful harnessing of transmedial, crossmedial and other tools offered by the contemporary digital communication space. We have started with an understanding of culture as education – a model which is grounded in cultural semiotics and highlights the role of cultural experience and cultural self-description in learning literacies. From these premises we proceed to explicating the value of a transdisciplinary pedagogy for methodical translation of the theoretical concepts into practical solutions in teaching and learning culture

Multisensory learning environments. Research project Education on Screen

The unity of heterogeneous sensory channels plays an essential role in our learning and development. The multisensory approaches to learning imply a simultaneous use of visual, auditory, kinesthetic-tactile and other possible modalities. The paper analyses the affordances of multisensory learning via the framework of semiotics of culture and contemporary research in education, as well as explores the relations between multisensory perception of environment and multimodality of representation in learning. The multimodal nature of human communication became explicit in the age of the Internet and audiovisual media. The development of digital technology also made it possible to consider the multiplicity of representational modes in learning. Whereas multisensory learning practices usually emerge in vernacular contexts, the recent developments in education and semiotics of culture offer unprecedented means for supporting such practices both in formal and non-formal education. Also, the multisensory learning practices are inherent to the development of the new literacies necessary for meaning-making in the contemporary media environment. The theoretical discussion is followed by the analysis of a practical example – digital educational platform Education on Screen. The platform aims to facilitate a meaningful dialogue with the cultural heritage by means of multimodal and multisensory learning

Broken time, continued evolution : anachronies in contemporary films

In 1983, Brian Henderson published an article that examined various types of narrative structure in film, including flashbacks and flashforwards. After analyzing a whole spectrum of techniques capable of effecting a transition between past and present – blurs, fades, dissolves, and so on – he concluded: "Our discussions indicate that cinema has not (yet) developed the complexity of tense structures found in literary works". His "yet" (in parentheses) was an instance of laudable caution, as very soon – in some ten–fifteen years – the situation would change drastically, and temporal twists would become a trademark of a new genre that has not (yet) acquired a standardized name: "modular narratives", "puzzle films", and "complex films" are among the labels used

La letteratura in laboratorio

La letteratura in laboratorio raccoglie 12 Pamphlet pubblicati dal Literary Lab dell’Università di Stanford sotto la direzione del suo fondatore, Franco Moretti, dal 2011 al 2017. Con i suoi lavori, già tradotti in diverse lingue, il Literary Lab di Moretti ha aperto un nuovo capitolo nel rapporto tra gli studi letterari e le risorse digitali dando vita a un nuovo approccio critico i testi. Moretti e il suo gruppo di co-autori hanno messo al centro dei loro esperimenti la letteratura nella materia da cui è costituita, il linguaggio, e hanno condotto approfondite indagini su banche dati esistenti e su corpus creati in modo autonomo. Franco Moretti ha arricchito gli studi letterari dando vita sia a un metodo teorico sia a una precisa procedura tecnica applicata alla letteratura. I saggi che compongono questa raccolta spaziano dalla dimensione microlinguistica a quella delle forme e dei generi attraverso una serie di analisi quantitative che permettono di accrescere, migliorare e rendere più precisa la comprensione della storia e della teoria della letteratur