Research

This lesson plan prompts students to use Juxta (collation software) to compare different witnesses or instances of a text.  Students compare multiple versions of a literary work, locating revisions in order to discuss word choice and textual instabilities.  Most useful for literary works with full-text editions available online. 

In this assignment students use the Oxford English Dictionary to make individual mindmaps of the multiple definitions of related words, then the class together creates a constellation of meanings surrounding a seemingly simple topic that becomes more and more complex. 

This lesson introduces students to a collaborative annotation tool to facilitate class discussions and to encourage active reading and research practices.

In two short blog posts, I asked students to choose an interesting or perplexing word to look up in the books we'd just finished reading. After conducting their research, students blogged about their findings and made a quick effort at applying their research to a passage. 

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past.  This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

In this lesson, students created Dipity timelines that allow them to integrate multi-media content into a temporal-sequential order.  Taking the sources from their first essay, students reflect on the benefits of the multimedia/chronological presentation.

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class.

For this assignment students use Photoshop to create a visual depiction or information graphic (infographic) of an essay. This infographic will focus on the interrelation and visual communication of ideas rather than statistics (as in traditional/popular infographics). 

This assignment asks students to engage in an uncommon form of literary analysis, where the goal is to determine the significance of location and travel in the novel. The entire class collaborates in creating a Google map of all of the places that Humbert Humbert travels to in Lolita.

Through this assignment, students learn to close-read (critique) monuments on campus and consider the rhetorical nature of memory.

This is a short assignment using the free text visualization software, Wordle, to help students find keywords for researching their chosen topics.

The infosphere assignment calls on students to identify online sources of information they regularly take in and to create a representative structure for this information. Students must build their own unique infospheres and organize them as they see fit.

My class used Twitter for a few general purposes and then for two specific assignments. For our general goals, we used Twitter to share resources among one another and to familiarize ourselves with various conversations that are important to people in the digital humanities.

As a conclusion to an online research workshop, students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides.

RHE 306 group work: Students write short manuals outlining how to use databases (LexisNexis, Infotrac Newsstand, Academic One File, Opposing Viewpoints, Google/Wikipedia).

Using the free digital timeline website, Dipity, students can organize and annotate their sources chronologically.  This enables students to visualize the sequence of events and better address how particular texts interact with or talk past each other.

Students worked together to create a collaborative annotated bibliography on PBWorks that covered a range of literary scholarship relating to the novels and poems on the course syllabus.