Free Lance Star, 11/3/09
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Tuesday, November 03rd, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
I am indebted to Other Sam for drawing my attention to this very moving detail. One of the best things I saw at the Library of Congress was Whitman’s letter of December 29, 1862 (that is, exactly 106 years before the day I was born), to his mother about finding George in Fredericksburg. We were able to read aloud his words about the suffering of the soldiers putting other suffering into perspective. We have read this letter in a collected of selected letters: “Dear, dear Mother, . . . I succeeded in reaching the 51st New York, and found George alive and well–in order to make sure that you would get the good news, I sent back by messenger to Washington (I dare say you did not get it for some time), a telegraphic dispatch . . .” What is not visible in that version of the letter is the revision Whitman made, no doubt anticipating the anxiety with which his mother would scan the letter if she had not received the “telegraphic dispatch” or was desperate for information about her wounded son. Lovely:
revision ("alive and well"), photo by MNS 10/24/09, LOC
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Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Immediacy is something the Reverend talks about as a benefit of the blog, social networking technologies, and the great digital experiment that is Looking for Whitman. Presence. Accessibility. These are words we use a lot. So this week a question has been dogging me while I process Digital Whitman’s Saturday field trip to Washington City. This pair of images sets it up:
WW notebook #94, Library of Congress American Memory site
WW notebook, photo by MNS, Library of Congress
The one on top is from a link to the Library of Congress I gave the class a few weeks ago, urging them to use these digitized images to study what OMW recorded about the soldiers. The bottom was taken on our field trip, and is surprisingly focused given that I, Brady Earnhart, and our students were nearly all literally in tears in that weird institutional room with lockers, blackened windows, and government-issue tables. Unless we were crying with simple gratitude for the incredible time that Barbara Bair had given us (or because we were soaked to the bloody skin and had been standing for 10 hours with two or three to go), why were we? Nothing was much easier to read in person, as those of us who stumbled reading aloud can attest (writing still spidery, bleeding through paper, plastic protection on many items reflected flourescent glare, etc.). We couldn’t touch anything (though, good lord, we certainly breathed all over it), couldn’t feel the paper, the wood, the leather, the hair (the hair!).
Whitman's hair, deathbed edition, photo by MNS 10/24/09
I couldn’t even smell the leather of that haversack or of its decay, and I have one good super-sniffer.
cue to tears: the haversack, photo by MNS 10/24/09
Obviously, what I am suggesting is this: the artifacts of the Library of Congress archive were in some ways no more accessible or immediate (indeed, let’s be honest, a lot LESS accessible or even immediate if we mean time instead of proximity) than the digitized images of those artifacts online. I saw that the inside of the haversack is brown canvas. Brendon found a fingerprint and will NOT entertain suggestions that it belongs to anyone but Walt Whitman. But tears?
Presence. Through the blog we are present to each other online even when we are physically apart during the week (or have never seen each other: hallooo out there, Brooklyn, Camden, and Novi Sad!). Agreed. But finally Saturday we were (good) old-fashioned groupies, we were Whitman lovers, and we were bodies (finer than prayer, but, geez, we were a bit rank by Hour Ten of the marathon). We desired the physical–the textured, the pasted, the water-stained. We may have cried because the broken skins of brittle pages and fragile covers, the light-sensitive [associative digression: Whitman’s Camden eyeglasses: so small, and with one lens protectively glazed over after strokes] and subsequently entombed haversack, and the tickets to a lecture on Lincoln long since delivered were as close to Whitman (brittle, entombed…) as we are going to get, as present as we can be. Unlike the wounded soldiers, we won’t get the healing presence of his 200-pound, hirsute, maroon-coated, deep-pocketed self. But it turns out that the digitized can’t hold a gas lamp to the physically present, and even if it’s paper and not flesh, I’ll take it. Whitmaniacs, pass the tissues.
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
I’ve mentioned this podcast from Nate DiMeo at the memory palace before. I find it pretty poignant. It’s about the Booth brothers, especially John Wilkes’ older brother Edwin. Listen for a shout-out to Our Man Whitman [OMW]:
Here Edwin is looking pensive (or moping about his footwear):
Edwin Booth, thespian
And here is a famous photo we saw at Ford’s, with John Wilkes lurking around at Lincoln’s second inaugural (Lincoln center, JWB top row). Read more at this blog post on The Blind Flaneur.
JWB stalking MLL
This nauseating bit about JWB is something I learned this summer at Harper’s Ferry. Here, from Wikipedia:
Strongly opposed to the abolitionists who sought to end slavery in the U.S., Booth attended the hanging on December 2, 1859, of abolitionist leader John Brown, who was executed for leading a raid on the Federal armory at Harpers Ferry (in present-day West Virginia).[60] Booth had been rehearsing at the Richmond Theatre when he abruptly decided to join the Richmond Grays, a volunteer militia of 1,500 men travelling to Charles Town for Brown’s hanging, to guard against any attempt by abolitionists to rescue Brown from the gallows by force.[60][61] When Brown was hanged without incident, Booth stood in uniform near the scaffold and afterwards expressed great satisfaction with Brown’s fate, although he admired the condemned man’s bravery in facing death stoically.[40][62]
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Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
I was reading in yesterday’s Washington Post in a piece called “Beyond ‘Great,’ to Exemplary” that Whitman’s “O Captain!” is one of about five works identified by the National Standards Initiative as it tries to give guidance to high school teachers about what students should know– with Austen, Morrison, and a few others, it was given as an exemplar of something requiring complex interpretive skills, and the article implied that the choice was probably not controversial. This got me thinking about a conversation I had with Professor Nina Mikhalevsky, whose Banned and Dangerous Art course I linked to some weeks ago. She was remarking to me that she can’t believe that Whitman, whom she characterized as a radical thinker, had become such a national icon. At the time, I was focused on Whitman’s desire to be recognized as a poet for/of his nation, which makes iconic status more sensible, but lately I’ve been musing more about. . .
Whitman, American Rebel Idol.
A few examples:
Walt Whitman High, Bethesda, MD
Walt Whitman High School, Huntington Station, NY
The Walt Whitman Bridge (PA-NJ)
The Walt Whitman Mall (Huntington Station, NY)
Walt Wit Beer (Philly)
LOC image, Whitman cigar box from 1898
Whitman-Walker AIDS clinic, Washington DC
Walt Whitman Hotel, Camden , NJ
Walt Whitman T from LOLA (one of many)
Walt Whitman Fence Company (NY)
Mad Magazine, 1967
Campers at Camp Walt Whitman, Piermont, NH
Jesse Merandy (CUNY) with WW impersonator (Camden)
Walt Whitman Service Area
What?
Historical marker (NY)
Walt Whitman Golf (Bethesda)
WW Park (Brooklyn)
Obvious College Football connection
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Random notes from training:
Tech support is new group where faculty and students can post tech questions for help from members and Jim.
Matt and Jim will add tabs for fora and will fix course blogs so they draw in essential feeds. We should each think about what feeds we want for course blogs and individually arrange them with techies. (Grab URL for RSS feed of specific tag on a site like delicious, then go to widgets in dashboard of own blog to add RSS feed and paste in address.)
Note re: Delicious. Use bookmarking tools to add buttons to browsers and then you can just click the button from website you want to save and it will automatically save to account and will let you add tags, description, etc.
Tab for Resources on frontpage which we will build together– links to MLA citation, WW Archive, etc. Also a Press tab for articles etc.
Two central sites for aggregation: course blogs and LFW home site.
Jim and Matt will set up various editions for annotation for each class.
Mechanics/Ideas for shared annotation assignment:
- we will all start with 1855 Song and use it for image gloss assignment so classes complement each other. Specific words from text will be linked to blog post glosses.
- March planning notes divide eras of WW writing for different classes– after the initial image gloss annotations of Song, class annotations will focus on additions to Leaves for particular era–e.g., Camden may do very late poem additions, or Fred may do Drum Taps, Lincoln poems, etc. Annotations can be linked to visual, will be researched as appropriate, could be secondary criticism, primary or historical research, local geographical supplements, etc. Jesse Merandy’s article on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” in Mickle Street Review is an example of deep annotation of single poem.
- faculty should communicate schedule for annotations and exact poems as those are decided in course planning over summer
Some final product ideas: video, mp3 reading, online museum entry, essay, deep annotation or scholarly edition, wikipedia entry, cinepoems or mashups like documentary on WW and Camden——> projects that are designed to educate wider public
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Thursday, June 18th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Groups and BuddyPress: Fora. Can be public or private. Could be used e.g. by students working on shared projects for discussion. Group wire is like Facebook wall; can also notify by email that something has been posted on the wall. Archiving group information. Groups could be formed across class/campus lines–e.g., for students interested in Whitman and sexuality. Member profiles can be way that students find each other by clicking on terms that will identify shared interests.
Change profile by going to My Account.
Planning blog now has summer assignments for faculty.
Collaborative work: supplementary, collective knowledge building AND dialogic exchange
- Material culture entries across campuses: ask students to compare, to consider two together, to take two from other campuses and discuss re: WW text, etc.
- required comments and reading
- shared projects like annotations
- field trip documentation
- feeds: Matt and Jim will work out best way that each person in/teaching a class will be able to view in one place all the posts happening across the site. Will include group wires– can and should it include forum posts?
Flickr account for each class. Make album, make slideshow, and take embed url to make it a blog post. Flickr feed on LFW homepage sidebar. Tag all images that go to Flickr Whitman20 to feed it in.
whitman20 is now tag for all outside sites (flickr, delicious, etc.) to draw in to project
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Various course ideas:
- one blog post per week that will be more structured on focused short writing task/question (post two days before class) + 3 comments by class, at least one on post from another course (self-report in class?)
- frontispiece as start to blog– of self in clothes and pose that they consider apt intro of self to world and LFW community. Discuss week one and due week two. Accompany by 6-10 lines of Song they identify with most (this would replace March idea of using image from internet to illustrate the passage) . Possibly chart on google map. Personal, familiar contact with WW.
- UMW final project of “My Walt Whitman” (research paper or digital equivalent)
- group annotations of assigned sections. Randomly reviewed by peers/teachers each week to chart progress.
- Note to Brady and Mara: redistribute readings but make sure to get to Civil War stuff before field trips. Schedule Chatham and battlefield visits.
- historical context readings possibly handled in teams that will blog/summarize and do oral report. Where do we put these? Up front for those things that fertilize the ground for WW.
- Image gloss. One related to Song–students choose any image and do annotation or context or gloss (e.g., The Alamo) that includes image, audio, or video. (Artifact more closely related to Camden and with deeper research later–see below.) **** See this as starter project for shared annotation project. Focus on unfamiliar, historical vs. earlier personal assignment. Quicker gloss than more polished and rich discussion of material objects.*** What is its significance or what does it add to our knowledge base?
Tyler’s sample schedule:
- First week: intro and tech training
- Second: preface and start to Song, frontispiece due and favorite lines chosen and explained
- Third: Song + image gloss explained above
- Fourth: Song + rest of 1855 LoG
Common assignments still in play:
- frontispiece/signature image (use as avatar?) to introduce themselves and i.d. passage that speaks to them
- cultural contexts/artifacts assignment from March planning post by Matt– choose appropriately for your geographic space. May include historical sense of places WW references. Include image. Use tag digitalmuseum to aggregate into space that will draw across campuses. List generated by instructors. Probably individual student projects. Stagger digital museum artifacts assignment to point that makes sense to individual courses.
- annotations of LoG. Can be linked to image glosses and digital museum for references.
- video: “This is where I found Walt Whitman” –read-aloud in specific place by end of semester
- documentation of/reflection on field trips
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Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
General info and planning:
- International Whitman Symposium in Italy focus on 1860 edition, esp. for graduate students– Karen will post link when website is ready
- Library of America + WW archive for other editions, facsimiles, etc.
- Begin with 1855 as shared base text
- WW archive has summary descriptions of various editions
From Jim:
Looking for Whitman as immediate, collaborative space. Disorientation because your blog is portal or home page but actually we have linked spaces controlled by individuals that feed into readable central site. Individual–>course—> uberblog of all five courses (Looking for Whitman). Clicking on individual posts links you back to place it was first written (Ty’s, student’s, course, etc.).
- Support tab on LFW site has FAQs and instructions for using WordPress, in text and video.
If our students make videos (e.g. reading at sites for “where I found Whitman” assignment or cinepoems), they can put it on youtube (10 minute time limit) or blip.tv (unlimited time, can set up own site or course site) and then upload it through Anarchy onto blog: simply uploading from computer may not work because of size of videos. Audio files such as podcasts can be uploaded with Upload/Insert Audio button right from computer (own files or downloaded from internet) or with URL into Anarchy.
LibriVox as resource for audio files (mp3 advised over ogg or mediaplayer files). Archive.org as another source.
- Possible or optional collaborative project for our classes: good recordings of WW texts for Librivox.
- Consider making a Help group on our site for collaborative support on tech issues.
- TAGS: Frontpage as tab that will send any post to the main LFW site; this is functional use of tagging to send posts to specific spaces. Tags as key terms and issues also may be used by students to help follow shared interests. We can have a tagcloud that will include tags from all campuses. Encourage students to use tags generously as key words for their thinking. Adding tags is one way to get students to think critically about what they are writing/reading. Choice of keywords/tags can be topic for discussion in classes since it indicates students’ critical processing of work.
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Sunday, March 08th, 2009 | Author: mscanlon
Sunday morning discussion:
— each student will produce a (low-tech) film: reading Whitman work aloud in a particular place: THIS is where I found Whitman; THIS is what it means to read Whitman in a particular city (vs. in a classroom alone). This becomes part of our representation of place, as will be our record of field trips and local resources. May be mapped onto Google maps of the cities/regions.
–production of cinepoems as option for multimedia assignment; could also, e.g., compare interpretive readings from Mickle Street collection. YouTube examples of Whitman cinepoems available through Mickle Street also.
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