Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:06
welcome to liquid margins this is sharing the page building community with annotation today's guest haley stefan visiting assistant professor of
00:00:20
multi-ethnic and latinx literature from the college of the holy cross arun jacob phd student in the faculty of information
00:00:31
at the university of toronto andy boyles peterson digital scholarship librarian at michigan state university and today's moderator is nate angel he's the director of
00:00:44
marketing at hypothesis and i'm your host randy french and i want to thank you all for being here and i'm going to shut up now and i'm going to turn it over to nate and thank you so much
00:00:57
thanks randy and uh i'm really uh so excited to have y'all here um this is a topic area that i'm really personally um kind of committed to and interested in some interested in and so i'm looking forward
00:01:11
to the conversation today and um as we get started here i think one of the things that might help our audience best and also um as we're recording this for posterity is if one of you guys could kind of
00:01:23
describe to us the community that you participate in and kind of what its interests and goals are so we can get an idea of sort of like where you're coming from
00:01:34
uh in your use of social annotation i don't know who's the best person to take that question i guess i can give kind of a super brief overview of of what dh reads is what we do um
00:01:47
so we've had dh reads going for the past couple years uh and we're planning on keeping that going in the future and basically every month over the summer from may through august we look at a digital humanities piece
00:02:00
that has been published over the past year and that's published not necessarily calendar year but basically summer to summer then using hypothesis we end up annotating and then kind of chatting about
00:02:12
discussing that text at the end of each month we then kind of pair that annotation with a two-hour twitter conversation using the hashtag dhreads where we really kind of delve in a
00:02:24
little bit more and explore the annotations that we had over the past month uh this year pairing with that during the first year we just had looking at a dhps that had been
00:02:37
published this year we added a digital project component where we kind of paired a related digital project to each month's readings uh and then
00:02:50
kind of annotated that with hypothesis as well aruna haley do you have any other comments on on what we do or i think that covered everything it was a
00:03:05
fantastic way of getting together especially during the pandemic and you know let me uh do a follow-up then and maybe arun or haley could take this one um you know for the uninitiated
00:03:17
when you hear this term digital humanities right i mean i have an idea sort of of what it means and what it encompasses but how do how do you guys think about digital humanities how would you describe it as someone who's unfamiliar with the term
00:03:30
the the definition i'd like i work off of is uh catelyn fitzpatrick has this definition and which i have like botched and turned into you can do digital things
00:03:41
to analog you can do digital stuff to analog things or analog thing stuff to digital things so what a traditional humanist would do we do that the object of analysis
00:03:56
could be a digital text could be a digital i mean whatever or it could be the other way where the object could be an analog object it could be an old book or something and we do analytics which is of the digital nature
00:04:09
so either or i don't so it's sort of like um exploring both sides of the terms there the the digital and the humanities side got it so haley i saw you unmute um it would
00:04:22
also be great if could you give us a couple examples of some digital humanities projects that you love absolutely there are a lot as arun was kind of pointing out it's a large umbrella
00:04:33
that it covers here i think about some of the really exciting projects that we're seeing right now as kind of a rune was pointing towards here are digitizing some really great older text making things open access
00:04:46
really widening the way that we understand teaching and learning but there's also some exciting projects happening in things like text mining figuring out across large corpuses or groups of texts
00:04:58
how language is being used how it evolves as well as thinking about more things like material objects so there are projects like the asylum suitcase project the name of which i've just watched but
00:05:10
i'll throw the link in the chat here where they open up these left behind luggages left behind materials um from folks who are in or were rather institutionalized to kind of
00:05:22
showcase what does this look like kind of make these histories more legible to a wider range of people and try to think about what we can do with material objects in digital space too
00:05:36
and that's i'm really starting to get a picture of it now um and it's kind of hooks back into some memories of i used to be a an academic back in the day myself and uh fiddled on the edges of these margins when they were first maybe being
00:05:48
explored um so and uh what so you have this this community dh reads that focuses on uh you know kind of it sounds like exploring these digital humanities
00:06:01
projects um like together as a community who who makes up that community how big is it how often do you get together if you will which is probably different than actually meeting face-to-face i imagine
00:06:14
so i i think i i can chime in on this arun you've been here for a couple years so if you have comments uh on it i'd love to hear your thoughts or haley as well um over the past couple years
00:06:27
our dh reads community has shifted a little bit the first year when when we kind of first started this up uh so often our faculty and students and everyone
00:06:39
else it hits the summer and we lose so many people and you have those relationships where you're still maybe emailing with folks or you're working on kind of big projects but at least for us librarians we're oftentimes still in the
00:06:52
library and we're working away and i wanted to kind of maintain those contacts with other folks at michigan state who had kind of kind of scattered out
00:07:05
and gone to the wind to go work on their uh their own separate separate projects and such and so dh reads was a way for at least once a month us to kind of get together
00:07:17
and talk and look at something relevant and really kind of delve in and that first year we had mainly michigan staters who were there in the d dhreetz community along with arun joined us
00:07:31
and a few folks that we're friends with on twitter and such uh who kind of pulled in uh this second year ended up advertising it a little bit more broadly using uh largely the
00:07:46
digital humanities summer institute listserv as well as a couple other dhlisters and that i was very very excited we ended up bringing in a lot more individuals from kind of all areas of
00:07:59
the country and uh in canada as well so so haley did i take from sorry i ruined you you want me to go ahead yeah the way i would say it is like after the post-conference rush that we'd have in
00:08:14
the summer then there's this radio silence and dh reads was like the ideal kind of activity to like make up for that radio silence and it was like the
00:08:26
the energy that you came back with to work on at your home institutions and all of a sudden is like oops and that like you know talking things through thinking things through and being able to do that that was what
00:08:38
dh reads as a community i mean provided most for you know solo flying researchers at their own home institution it was a sense of getting to yeah bounce ideas off of each
00:08:50
other and yeah that sense of community was developed in that sort of way that sounds really good and haley i'm just i'm surmising from all this that maybe of the three of you you're you're possibly the newest
00:09:02
member of dhreed so how did how did you get interested in it and how did it connect to your your like digital humanities scholarship absolutely yeah i'm definitely the newest um i think
00:09:15
i came at this from a couple different angles one being the digital humanities summer institute listserv that i get via email i know i had already followed arun on twitter as i was going to be
00:09:27
attending his workshop this coming summer that'll be happening a little bit of a different format now but i'm also the outreach coordinator for the digital americanist group through the american literature
00:09:38
association and part of my job for that is to research what's happening in digital humanities and highlight it on that twitter account so i was doing a little bit of that work came across this reading group shared
00:09:51
the link and thought this is something that i want to be a part of and and did it does it how does it connect to your own scholarship and work do you do you have digital humanities things of your
00:10:03
own going on that resonate with it yeah absolutely a lot of my work is in disability and race um and thinking about how that works in both to use kind of rooms where they're like the analog and digital spaces
00:10:17
and so i've been learning a lot from this group i wasn't formally trained in my graduate career in the digital humanities so i think like many of us i'm kind of coming at this from variety
00:10:30
of different angles and trying to learn on my way there the digital humanities summer institute that andy just shared on the link or on the chat here is one way that i've participated in that and a lot of it is learning from other
00:10:42
scholars like arun and andy and all the folks in dh reads well that i mean i feel like i got a better background now of of what it means to be a part of dh reads um
00:10:54
maybe uh and i don't know if this is a good question for arun or andy but um could you just uh sketch out for us how social annotation is involved in the practices of dhr's and kind of how
00:11:07
you're using social annotation as part of your community work i think the way i i take it is like going off of what uh jeremiah caller is writing about like you know annotation is first draft
00:11:22
thinking and and that is is kind of what i've i found the most interesting it's it's like marginalia is usually stuff that's going on in my head and it's a conversation you have with yourself
00:11:34
and the text whereas here you get to bounce those you know am i reading this right questions that you have to yourself with other people who's along with it so there's this collective effervescence
00:11:47
that comes from you know using it that i find is the most enriching part about uh reading it that way i really love that term collective effervescence
00:11:58
um andy was maybe gonna pick up on that too i was going to say basically what haley said in the chat that's a wonderful way to put it arun uh i've really loved with hypothesis that we've been able to have
00:12:12
kind of some of those preliminary conversations uh really flesh things out and discuss things and then i've been a part of groups before where we've just had twitter chats and those can be great
00:12:24
but oftentimes you're only really getting at that first level and using hypothesis we're really able to get to that first level and then kind of take it to the next level in our twitter chat
00:12:36
and then sometimes we'll even bring it back and folks will go back after the twitter chat and make more annotations put links in do different things and so we really get a lot of depth that i i'm not sure that we would get
00:12:49
otherwise that's really interesting so it goes all the way from that first draft thinking uh that aren was mentioning um or maybe it was haley now i've already lost track um and uh all the way into like a a
00:13:03
second or third pass at the material where you're adding kind of layers of extra information onto the work at that point it then becomes like a critical fandom
00:13:14
where it's like you know like you know how fans would discuss in in a in a fan website it'll be like oh yeah this person said this and then you tack it onto it so there it's scholarly but it has another
00:13:27
more i mean we've had this conversation together and you're building on it in a fan-like way so that's that's another way i like that and i suppose there's a lot of great digital humanities work going
00:13:40
on in in fandom as well hayley you unmuted i was just going to kind of extend what everyone was saying here it really is like a critical fandom i mean our twitter chats are filled with memes and gifts and a variety of kind of
00:13:53
chatting back and forth and the fun part about hypothesis is we can do that there too so things are linked across these two sites we're kind of speaking both within them and across them we come back to them as andy said
00:14:06
we've then kind of compiled a list of all these sources that we've read to kind of keep building off them keep learning from each other and i think that's been what's really neat about this is that these conversations are happening in multiple
00:14:19
spaces and can be asynchronous which has been really useful yeah one of the ways that i often end up thinking about um social annotation is that it really takes the what has
00:14:31
heretofore been a more lonely process like everyone was describing of of reading and having a conversation by yourself with the text and then expanding that out to a social a social dimension
00:14:43
where it kind of turns your reading into a social event do you would you that sounds like what you guys are describing and i'm wondering do you think it fundamentally changes the nature of reading itself to have it
00:14:57
have that social dimension i don't know who wants to take that one no one maybe i could take that or unless a room do you want to go ahead i i would say yes absolutely i mean i
00:15:09
think coming at it from a teaching perspective and andy i'd love to hear this perspective from you after too kind of thinking about it from the library side um so much i think sorry to put you on the spot
00:15:20
so much i think of reading is that moment like a room set of happening kind of in your head figuring out whether you're digesting something i don't want to say correctly but maybe in the way that the author attend intended you to get it and teaching i
00:15:34
think is is really kind of doing that move of holding a mirror up to the class to borrow a phrase from a critic whose name i'm forgetting awfully and help them understand what they're thinking help them kind of work through
00:15:47
all those miscellaneous threads and put them together and i think hypothesis kind of allows you to do that allows you to kind of bring those voices together work through them so i do think there is something vital
00:15:59
that happens when you're having these conversations in lifetime in a sense while you're reading i think that changes it entirely and as a reading group it was like a
00:16:13
close-knit community it was intimate enough and it was a place where we could be engaged in like vulnerable reading and like vulnerable annotations in the sense it's like you know they're it's uh putting in your ideas which
00:16:27
you're not sure out there in in the thing and like sharing it with these people so that creates a safe i mean space for thinking through your thoughts and ideas and
00:16:39
i mean this was what i was thinking of uh as i was thinking of how to implement this in a classroom setting it's like how to bring you know this as a teachable moment it's it's like if we're going to
00:16:52
be living in a world where people are going to chat with each other and common threads are a part of social discourse as a teaching practice like this allows people how to be how to engage in civic discourse
00:17:05
in chat threads and and those are the kind of thoughts and ideas i was thinking through about how you know as a teachable practice how to conceive of of what we do here
00:17:19
yeah that really that really makes sense and so i mean this is obviously a kind of um professional development kind of experience the dh reads in general although obviously you've got people from all different
00:17:30
kind of um ranges of the academic life all the way from librarians to grad students and and then and teachers and so forth and you're all teaching too i'm sure and i i really wanted to pick up on that idea that you were putting on a roon about
00:17:43
um uh the experience that you have professionally using um something like social annotation
00:17:55
uh and kind of exploring it yourself not as a teacher necessarily but almost as a student right or as a as a reader as a scholar let's say and then using that as a hinge to think about how
00:18:08
one might incorporate it into your teaching as an experience for for your students and i'm wondering i feel like uh when educational technology is brought into our our teaching and learning experiences a lot of times
00:18:21
that step isn't taken where the teachers themselves kind of deeply experience the affordances of either the tool or the pedagogy or whatever it is before they then experiment on their students with it um is that it
00:18:35
seems like you were kind of getting at that room yeah and and i think that that kind of speaks to uh institutionally if you think about the professoriate or such uh the professor lives in a space like
00:18:48
that has come from the priesthood and now that's not the case they have to be more so with the programmer so they're the priestly connections are leaving and now we have to be more programmerly
00:18:59
in our interactions and it's a way of thinking about how edtech has to be coming into the classroom with the pedagog in the driver's seat so how is this learning technology
00:19:12
uh what is the critical pedagogical value that it places rather than a cto or someone who's driving the decision making of why is it that we're using this learning management
00:19:24
system and that is what this as a learning technology allows for us to do it's like okay we can the affordances that that we have to take into consideration
00:19:35
i guess that's what it allows to kind of build off that too i think it it kind of breaks down that power structure just a little bit not fully between the instructor and the student when you're doing things like taking
00:19:52
part in these live some social annotation moments you know i think we kind of as instructors imagine that when we're commenting on drafts and writing comments on the in the margins that somebody's going to respond back to that or that they're
00:20:05
going to get a kick out of you know the mini joke that i leave there i i'm sure they do but when you're doing it on hypothesis or you know kind of engaging in these things like twitter where they can
00:20:16
respond and you're reading alongside them i think it you know you're more human to them you're picking up on the jokes you're confused at the same time as them you're looking up things linking in new ideas so i think that
00:20:28
kind of destabilizing the power dynamic also makes learning a little bit less scary maybe more accessible and and to build off of what haley's saying is like my annotations uh happen to be gifts
00:20:42
they happen to be song lyrics they happen to be screenshots it's not just static text that is showing up as an annotation and since hypothesis allows for it i go full throttle and put everything
00:20:54
that i find works in there and that makes for a lively conversation and andy i we haven't let you talk for a while and i was also wondering you may have something to say on those lines but i also thought you know given your role as a librarian
00:21:08
are you do you feel like this kind of social annotation revolution let's call it um is changing people's relationships to books at all in any interesting ways
00:21:23
wow that's a that's a doozy of a question my goodness um i think uh i think that really kind of ties in with uh with what we've been talking about
00:21:34
uh where like yes i i do think this changes the way that folks interact with uh with a text or interact with a with a book or interact with their classes with a textbook
00:21:47
as i particularly in the classroom but elsewhere in a reading group etc everyone every student
00:21:59
is an absolute expert on their own lived experiences and they're bringing that into their reading of a text and having the opportunity to read that
00:22:12
alongside them and hear their different perspectives their different takeaways what is uh objectively important to them what points they're like having challenges with
00:22:25
i think that's huge and it brings so much depth and range to uh the reading of a text and the understanding of a text
00:22:36
uh and just kind of using a text in both in the classroom and in in life so i'm not sure if that's necessarily with uh with all library texts but uh i i do think that
00:22:48
uh is yeah i think that's changing the way that we read and go ahead and uh and on the other hand i mean there's also another aspect to it which is accountability in the sense that
00:23:01
if you've been assigned a reading you have to come with the receipts it's like everybody else can see what you have done in terms of reading and as a and like you know what your
00:23:13
thoughts are you can't like you know weasel your way out of it and and and which is something that in classroom settings makes it you know makes it interesting i don't want it to use it as a cop
00:23:26
technology but it it allows you to see it's like okay who got stuff who didn't get stuff that that kind of there's so many ways that you know teachers have long tried to
00:23:40
figure out if people are doing the reading right not because they want to be cops like you say but because they feel like the learning is going to happen if people are focused on the text right um and so you know like the reading quizzes
00:23:52
and the you know the papers where you just regurgitate cliff notes and all those things that really don't seem like they contribute as authentically to the learning experience as this kind of social
00:24:04
annotation does but i think what you're saying arun is that it also leaves a trail of kind of let's not say accountability but a record of your passage through the text as a reader
00:24:17
that's really interesting you know the other thing that's come to mind here going back to the digital uh humanities side of all your work and and everyone if you want to say something i'll give you that mic in just a sec but maybe you could think about this too
00:24:28
um there's a way in which the annotations themselves then kind of become a secondary or cursory text uh that um i mean each one has its own
00:24:40
distinct url it kind of exists as a scholarly object on its own as an annotation and so it's um not to it's kind of turtles all the way down here but there's like text on text on text and i'm wondering if you guys have
00:24:52
thought about that or explored that um kind of the palimpsest of annotation if you will that's a tough one i don't know it's it's an interesting question in the sense if like
00:25:07
the way we having um that andy has curated our reading lists over the summer it's been we've been going through like different uh domains of research demands of expertise and stuff like that
00:25:19
if we were like thinking through like reading in like an ebook or something of that sort where it was from snout to tail that's what we would be doing over the summer then that would
00:25:32
make for an interesting uh book review project or something that could be derivative out of that work in that yes there seems to be a lot of potential
00:25:45
it's probably early days still right for that um but as annotation we got i think we're we're almost we're coming really close to 20 million annotations uh now recorded in hypothesis so there's
00:25:57
there is kind of a rich corpus of work there and of course annotations that are in the public layer if you will um are open to kind of scholarly exploration from like a digital humanities perspective
00:26:10
um and so i think there's some there's some future of really interesting work that can be done there and of course we're we do it uh in conjunction with uh you know teachers who are using uh annotation in
00:26:22
a more private class context as well but of course that needs to be remain private and isn't open to that kind of analysis as well i did want to make a small plug here though for on the new research program that hypothesis is launched
00:26:35
starting last fall with our scholar in residence remy collier who's not here today although he often is and that that that program is really going to start to generate out some really interesting
00:26:48
formal research about the usage of annotation in different contexts the first big project is um with indiana university focused on english and composition uh
00:27:00
use cases uh mostly on in these kind of like you know 101 classes there are introductory classes for composition and and literature um franny's sharing some links there in the chat about that so that would be really cool
00:27:12
um and i'll just also uh point out to our attendees that um if you all have questions or observations happy to hear put them in the chat um or we can even like give you the mic and
00:27:24
let you take take up some space on the stage as well um i've been asking you some crazy questions and so forth was there was there something and maybe start with andy was there something that you really wanted to make sure that we talked about
00:27:36
today that we haven't touched on yet oh that's a good question uh arun haley is there anything that that you particularly would like to talk about um i i think it'd be interesting to kind of talk about
00:27:52
uh like carrying this through uh through covid and through kind of uh the large transition to online teaching and
00:28:06
whether whether either of you have have noticed any changes with that or have any any thoughts but i i'm loving this conversation thus far
00:28:18
uh after doing the d.h reads group um i was like very enthused about it and took it to my home department and where um i'm in the middle of getting my qualifying exam readings together and
00:28:32
like pitched it to my peers it's like we can do our qualifying exam readings on on uh on hypothesis where we each of us could you know see what each other's readings because it's
00:28:43
a solitary reading practice it didn't go as well as i thought it would in the sense that there is apprehension in how it is that you know to disclose
00:28:56
my uh you know journal thoughts is that something that you want people to do so like that's something i've been trying to think through it's like how do you like the technology is easily
00:29:09
it's like hey have you used genius it's exactly like genius they blame i had the pitch already but it didn't happen and that was was like why did it not happen and
00:29:20
and trying to think through what makes this so like i mentioned like vulnerable and like placing yourself out there what is it about that that makes that you know have to get past
00:29:37
yeah i had a similar kind of move of like taking this forward i ended up you know i didn't teach in the spring i was on a research fellowship and so the summer was kind of my opportunity to get back in the game if you will and i ended
00:29:50
up bringing hypothesis into the classroom over the fall and it worked really well i think with students especially because our classes are fully remote and they're fully synchronous but they're doing
00:30:01
asynchronous work at the same time so getting to read together walk through text together was a lot easier using hypothesis which is definitely something i was worried about i saw a lot of those tutorials but
00:30:14
how can you set up your phone to be a document camera it wasn't going to happen for me so using something like this was really helpful and it's something i'll continue into the spring and i felt like because
00:30:25
i had used it through dh reads i not only had done sort of the generic like troubleshooting that you do as an instructor when you're bringing something into the classroom but also as a user i'd figured out you know what are the
00:30:37
things that i like to do how do i like to work through this and the signup process was really easy to use so having kind of had all of this experience with it over the summer thanks to andy and the group it it was
00:30:50
really easy i think to migrate into the classroom i would echo that and i i'm thrilled that you used it in your class and such um i i did the same with my class this past fall
00:31:06
i've been very excited to bring hypothesis into the class but with us being entirely online and having the option to be asynchronous or synchronous or mixed i ended up doing
00:31:18
a mix but so often so often in our synchronous conversations it was hard to get uh really get students engaged get them to turn their cameras on get them to to speak anything along that line and i
00:31:31
found particularly uh in the asynchronous annotations of hypothesis particularly on the weeks where i put in the labor and i put annotations
00:31:44
in and i really showed i cared and was following up uh folks had a lot of engagement folks had a lot of connections to the text a lot of connections to uh some of the
00:31:56
other things that we'd done throughout the semester and that was that was terrific and i think additionally in setting up the course um using hypothesis and knowing that i was
00:32:08
going to be using hypothesis was a good encouragement for me uh to make sure that things were open and i try to uh i try to make sure that i'm
00:32:20
i'm providing readings doing things like that that are open uh to begin with but using hypothesis was was further more of an encouragement for that of hey i need to make sure that any of my
00:32:32
students can access this they're they're able to uh not pay for this etc right so there was like a an extra affordance built into it to move toward
00:32:45
at least openly available texts as well you know this kind of brings up i want to hinge off something that karen uh said in the chat about um you know just changing the nature of rereading itself going back a little bit to this idea of
00:32:57
our relationships to books changing um and this idea of um scaffolding uh both teacher and student experiences into social annotation like how did how to do that i know that um
00:33:09
uh if you guys are familiar with amanda la castro who's another um practitioner uh in the social annotation space who just recently moved from stevenson to upenn um and she's actually in the library there andy so she's joined your
00:33:22
your world um although she was an english teacher before so that's an interesting move you don't often see that um but she talked a lot about having bringing students um first through a
00:33:34
private annotation experience with just a group so that they could kind of get their feet wet with the idea of how to like have that vulnerability like everyone was talking about and so forth um and practice that and then build them
00:33:47
toward uh an activity where they would maybe annotate more fully in public once they felt more confident and the the reason i wanted to hook it to what karen was saying is she's thinking about this idea
00:33:59
of like does this mean that we need to read more slowly um and that makes me think too of the pandemic where we're all trying to juggle like what is the right amount of reading to assign probably like and i think i've heard
00:34:12
from some students that it seems like some teachers have gone too far and they're assigning even more when maybe the circumstances of the pandemic should be asking all of us to maybe assign less and so maybe there's a little kernel in
00:34:24
here that i'm trying to reach for where reading less more slowly might be an interesting way to approach that knot i don't know i don't know who to toss that one to i see nodding heads
00:34:40
i i mean the way i might think that through is it's it's not just reading the text it's like how our social cultural reading practices look like right now
00:34:52
we don't just watch a tv show you gotta you know have the build up to the tv show and then you gotta go find out what was spoken about it and so in that way we don't just consume text
00:35:05
in isolation anymore it's the recognition as educators that these texts come with paratexts that the reader is consuming so so annotations are a way social
00:35:17
annotations are a way to recognize that and to fold that in to teaching praxis which was happening in other spaces anyway and if that is incorporated into it
00:35:30
that could change you know the way that teachers are thinking about reading it's like if every bit of of literature that you assign comes with other i mean fan texts that are associated with it
00:35:42
then let's let's fold that in and and in annotations it's like oh these students are going to generate x number of words along with this as well and account for that and then count that as
00:35:55
reading material as well i love that idea of thinking about like bringing all of that into the classroom and they steal that the whole the whole world has become one
00:36:11
giant book club in a sense right what what about this idea of um do you find that um the the reading process when you're when you're using social annotation does become slower in a sense
00:36:26
does it slow you down as a reader maybe in a good way so i think it slows down a bit but it also whereas like let's say the kind of more conventional model
00:36:42
of you read something and then you write up a reflection on it or a discussion post on your on blackboard or moodle or a canvas or whatever uh instead of do this
00:36:54
and then that it's almost do both at the same time and so reading through oh i've got a thought on this i'm going to highlight it i'm going to provide uh provide a comment and i don't know if that
00:37:07
at least for me necessarily takes more time it's just doing both at the same time and really kind of incorporating the two and i think for me anyways that gives a
00:37:20
richer understanding and more ability to uh kind of reflect on on small small nuances within a piece as opposed to kind of okay these are the
00:37:32
big three things that i want to talk about so i'm going to write them in here if i were to answer that it's the difference ends is like if you're consuming
00:37:45
this is a really bad example but but uh the hamilton musical you you and if you had to annotate that or if you're reading that it's like oh not only are you learning the history of it then you get a little history of rap
00:37:58
lesson there as well and then you get to find out all the other like details there's so much of different streams of information from different domains of information that are coming together
00:38:10
and being braided in here for you to understand so rather than being a learner of a subject in isolation here that interdisciplinary nature and multidisciplinary nature of work that can be done
00:38:23
is more explicit and in out in the open so it lets all of us be think about how to pivot to thinking in multi and cross-disciplinary fashion i guess
00:38:41
definitely and it highlights how situated learning is too right that we're all coming to these texts with different expect perspectives with different experiences and thinking about them in different ways you know
00:38:53
approaching a text now together is very different than it was when you were you know perhaps in your college dorm room however many years ago right when you're kind of by yourself or maybe sitting in the common room right the common room is digital in a lot of
00:39:07
ways now and so thinking about how that looks especially during a pandemic especially when many of our students themselves are kind of multitasking at home caring for family
00:39:18
caring for ourselves it makes the reading process really different and i love this idea of kind of highlighting that and inviting that into the conversation it would be interesting to start out
00:39:30
your course letting students know that you're going to read in a completely different way this term than you ever have before and then really invite that that difference in with the memes and and
00:39:42
multi-textuality and all that um i guess i've always felt like one of the most powerful things about social annotation too is that it takes what could be that same conversation that arun is saying is usually happening somewhere else anyway
00:39:55
on twitter or in the discussion forum like andy was saying but it anchors it like literally on top of discrete passages of the text itself and i feel like that's one of the most powerful things about it is that the
00:40:06
conversation and the text are just really right on top of each other um which makes it you know more connected less disassociated right from that like andy gestured you know you go off
00:40:18
to write a reflection piece and a lot of times you're going to do some sort of maybe dry summary because you're not embedded in the sort of you know close reading of the text itself
00:40:30
is that does that seem like it kind of comes out of your experiences as well i'd say very much and to add on what you were saying before with kind of multiple layers i really have loved it when
00:40:45
we've had pieces that have either had public annotations or they've been annotated in a class as well as the reading group where there's multiple more layers there's the text then
00:40:57
there's our reading group then there's maybe public annotations then a different uh and it's great to see everyone's different take on that text on those passages etc in a way we're mimicking an older
00:41:12
technology the transparency like what a transparency sheet would do on top of a thing is essentially we're recreating over here with with the social annotation
00:41:24
yeah and then adding a little bit of um we can do it across time and space in a way that the transparency didn't really afford right up frannie has popped on i think she she wants to say something here
00:41:36
hi uh yeah we are nearing the end of the show but um if people want to go over um if our panelists um want to hang around and keep this really rich conversation going that would be great
00:41:48
um and but i want to be cognizant of people's time so if they need to if you need to leave you know feel free to our guests and
00:42:00
attendees oh yeah we always have places to go right yeah if you want to stay on the panel just raise your hand
00:42:13
all right wow and repeat after me we're swearing you in as panelists on liquid margins but only on like a book a novel okay great well let's keep it going then
00:42:28
um for anybody who does have to leave um from our attendees uh thank you so much for coming and please um come to the next liquid margins you'll
00:42:40
get some notifications about that we're also always on twitter promoting the show yeah thanks and you know that reminded me of um something i i did want to um ask you guys about that i didn't yet and that's some so
00:42:54
it's kind of like a classic question but like what's next for dhr's what what's yeah i take it that this summer i mean we're now in the you know just kicking off another what's going to be
00:43:05
probably somewhat difficult term right i mean we got another term pandemic to look at here are you thinking about uh another summer activity that's particularly focused on something or
00:43:16
what's up next for dhreads so i'm very curious to hear other folks's input as if other folks want to take this in different directions i'm very excited uh excited to do that
00:43:34
i think for our third year of dh reads my plan thus far is to keep it to another summer activity that's been fairly intentional there had been some discussion
00:43:46
and some questions about potentially particularly during covid carrying that into the fall term but we already have so many uh so many plates in the air
00:43:58
and i i didn't really want to kind of put that additional labor on folks um with with where the pandemic is currently i think for this next year
00:44:11
we'll probably do something relatively similar to what we did this past year and uh try to bring more folks into the fold try to have more conversations but not necessarily
00:44:23
grow what we're doing because again even though it's during the summer all sorts of folks will have child care they'll have other responsibilities etc and this is supposed to be fun it's not supposed to be something that's too much
00:44:37
labor so yeah you don't want to you don't want to uh make people's experience in this really exciting opportunity look like work right like more work i was uh i attended a uh
00:44:53
i have a high schooler and i attended uh you know getting ready to apply for college session with them last night and um the school structured it so it was like probably i would say a not very well
00:45:06
designed zoom class session where we had to go to breakout rooms and there was an assignment and i was just like i could see all the students who were there their eyes were just glazing over there like we just did this all day and now we have to do it again
00:45:19
maybe i don't want to go to college right so i i love how uh the energy and creativity that you guys are bringing to this um makes kind of rekindles my faith that
00:45:30
you know teaching and learning can be a really exciting interesting innovative process that can kind of rekindle your love for books and scholarship in ways that normal schooling might kind of you know
00:45:43
empty it out do you guys feel you know more energized about about your work and your reading there there are good days and they're not so in the sense like uh i had
00:46:00
i mean with the experiences that i had with dhreads i wanted to see if it's oh is this possible to incorporate it into the learning management system that's at uh my school but then i realized it's like
00:46:12
there it's the tech department that you know that deals with that sort of thing and it's it's a very sicipian task to in get it to be able to do it
00:46:23
in that context so uh in small spaces uh yes it's it's uh there's innovative things that can be done but to build a coalition building takes time and uh like to get everybody else on
00:46:39
board uh to make it work yeah there's effort and time that goes into that i think one of the big things for for me with it is it it gives me an opportunity to
00:46:55
really read a lot of the great work in in our discipline uh that's stuff that i've been wanting to read but haven't necessarily had the chance to there's always so many other things on
00:47:08
the docket and uh having having the opportunity specifically carved out to delve into four texts and then for me some time beforehand to really kind of look at some other
00:47:19
texts and kind of vet them to uh to have in this uh is is absolutely invaluable sort of giving you an excuse to do something that you wanted
00:47:32
to do anyway right sorry haley go ahead i was just gonna say i think because we're often siloed in our individual disciplines too or our individual jobs doing something like dh reads lets us
00:47:43
kind of put feelers out into the field more broadly this large field of of digital humanities of digital learning of social annotation and thinking about you know what else is happening out there how does my work connect to it how might i
00:47:56
get involved in these conversations yeah it strikes me that digital humanities obviously is interdisciplinary sort of at its root across the humanities of course right but there's also a way in which it reaches across
00:48:10
the sort of um like a rune was gesturing toward across the sort of uh you know at least computer science and uh humanities realms right and makes connections there that maybe weren't as common
00:48:23
in the past um is that do you guys have you found yourselves all i don't know the degree to which you think of yourselves as technologists too but have you found yourselves chipping toward technology or data related things that
00:48:37
you might not have before having been an english teacher or something like that i mean i'll say yes and it's a very slow chipping it's like very very slow um but doing things like
00:48:49
exactly exactly that gesture nate it's you know doing things like dh reads attending things like dhsi the digital humidity summer institute being on social media seeing these conversations that folks are having in
00:49:03
ed tech or digital pedagogy has been i think a huge part of my growth as a scholar and learner and also you know getting to be a part of the world and thinking about these conversations
00:49:16
and seeing you know what else can i learn how can i incorporate that into my teaching and learning and just general interests very slow chipping like if if the teaching profession had a
00:49:29
certain amount of care work that you had to do with it when it moved to like online teaching there the care work look turned into tech support
00:49:41
and where all of a sudden in order to be able to do your teaching you had to do tech support but not in a very consumerist way but if it's like okay you have to teach these people
00:49:55
how to use this tech in order to move them along and there it's it's tech support as care work that becomes a different kind of thing which you don't find in other domains
00:50:07
that's a skill set that that we had to acquire like in in the last yeah year and a bit i suppose yeah so it wasn't data science necessarily it
00:50:19
was how to use zoom or something yeah understood yeah i was just uh thinking i interviewed a bunch of community college students about their experience in the pandemic and and sort of like what haley was saying one thing that they all said
00:50:33
that regardless of what else had happened with their their you know their learning across the spring term this was last spring the one thing that they had all gained was like deeper skills and facility with technology just because they had to sort
00:50:46
of and they actually felt like in many ways that was the most valuable thing that happened to them because it also helped prepare them for um the working world where obviously we have to use this stuff too well i see we're getting really close to
00:50:59
the top of the hour here and this has just been a great conversation i could talk to you guys all day and i would love to do that but we probably have other things we need to do so i'll just um one more time is if there's anything anybody else wants to say um i'll just
00:51:11
call you one at a time say it and say goodbye as we go through it so haley uh what's your last thought and sign off just thank you to nate and franny and everyone at liquid margins for
00:51:26
putting this together inviting us and thank you to andy and arun and the the dh reads community for being so welcoming and for doing this work join us thanks for coming haley arun what's what's your
00:51:38
sign off uh thank you to the liquid margins crew and the hypothesis crew for the amazing tool that you have provided us and uh thank you for the h reads community that andy and and the
00:51:50
team has put together it's it's been lovely to see how if we can use tech in a way that that makes us feel not isolated in a in a time where that
00:52:02
seems to be you know in the word so that takes a lot of effort and thanks for that you are much appreciated okay andy the final word is yours well try not to sound like a an oscar speech
00:52:17
here with too many thank yous uh but um first off uh thank you again to the liquid margins crew for having us on thank you for hypothesis it's an absolutely fantastic tool
00:52:28
and i d h reads would not be the same without it uh and it's been great in the classroom uh thank you to arun and haley for being here today as well as michael albany is one of our attendees
00:52:42
uh michael was a regular dh reads individual for this past year and we're so glad to have you with us today as well uh and then i guess my final thing is uh
00:52:57
we hope to have folks join us so this next year it'll be hashtag dhreads21 and uh feel free to to message any of us uh sorry to speak for
00:53:09
for both of you but feel free to speak or feel free to message me at least um if you're interested in joining or participating uh we hope to have you thank you well definitely thanks thanks for all your
00:53:22
kind words all of you and we'll definitely be sharing the recording from this session out with um some dh reads uh twitter handles and hashtags attached really appreciate you're coming out and
00:53:33
i'm i guess we'll be excited to see what happens uh going forward don't ever hesitate to reach out to anybody on the hypothesis team if you run into issues or troubles or questions um we're we're there to help we got a
00:53:45
whole other bunch of people behind us too that are even wiser than us about things um so don't hesitate to reach out really appreciate your coming
00:53:57
you
End of transcript