Academic Commons

The Humanities, Done Digitally

lisagatesphd@gmail.com — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:11:51 +0000

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, professor of media studies at Pomona College, explores the definition of digital humanities in the Chronicle's ProfHacker blog.

April 2011

lisagatesphd@gmail.com — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:50:55 +0000

Digital technology has changed how scholars work, increasing access to material and allowing new methods of inquiry to emerge. Preservation, publication, and dissemination have likewise been transformed. Digital scholarship in the humanities requires deeply collaborative processes between scholars, information technologists, librarians and others. At small liberal arts colleges, where scholarship is fundamentally connected to the undergraduate curriculum, sustainable strategies that fit the pedagogical mission and needs of smaller institutions are also critical.

What do these changes and requirements mean for humanities inquiry and pedagogy at liberal arts colleges? In this issue of Academic Commons, NITLE presents case studies of two projects that begin to answer this question. One project tackles the issue from a curricular and pedagogical front, creating a structure for students entering the English major "both to practice criticism and to examine criticism as a practice." Using a collaborative digital platform, the authors of "English Majors Practicing Criticism" pursue a three-pronged goal: to help students understand intellectual inquiry as rooted in communities of practice, to engage students directly in intellectual practice via the techniques of active collaboration and shared meta-analysis, and to demonstrate the dialectic process that builds a field's intellectual diversity. Another project uses the construction of a bibliographic database of early English novels (1660 - 1830) to position undergraduate students as researchers responsible for creating records representing those novels. To develop "what we might call the 'research imagination'," the authors of "The Early Novels Database" write, students "work with librarians, programmers, other students, and professors in a collaborative environment... [and] begin to think like researchers as they work to puzzle out what kinds of information researchers will want to know."

Each of these projects deploys collaborative approaches to engage students directly in the scholarly process, using practice to support learning and to connect undergraduates to their broader fields of inquiry. NITLE congratulates these winners of the October 2010 Community Contribution Award and thanks them for sharing these case studies. As always, we invite you to read, share with colleagues, and offer your comments.

English Majors Practicing Criticism: A Digital Approach

SUNYGeneseo@academiccommons.org — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:45:17 +0000

Project Overview

At SUNY Geneseo, Practicing Criticism uses digital technology to help build a sense of community, common purpose, and shared identity among undergraduate English majors enrolled in separate sections of a required, introductory course, English 170: The Practice of Criticism. A long-established course at Geneseo, English 170 introduces students not only to the essential disciplinary skills of interpretation and critical writing, but also to some of the basic theoretical questions that help constitute English as a discipline: What types of works should we read? Why should we read these particular works? And, most important, how should we read them? By prompting students to engage with these fundamental questions, English 170 aims to create self-reflective majors who are skilled at critical analysis and have a deep understanding of the disciplinary issues and debates underpinning the various modes of critical analysis. In other words, students in this course learn both to practice criticism and to examine criticism as a practice.

This essay reports on our effort to launch Practicing Criticism in the fall 2010 semester. It explains our purpose in creating the project, describes the tools we chose and the assignments we designed with them, and explores some of the lessons we learned.

Purpose

Although English 170 is the gateway to the English major at SUNY Geneseo, instructors are free to choose their own texts and develop their own assignments. Ideally, the primary learning outcomes are enough to give students a sense of how these different sections are connected, but in reality, because the contents of the course and the intellectual commitments of the instructors vary, students often come away with only a minimal sense of these connections. In this respect, the course is tailor-made to confirm students' suspicion that success in English is a matter of discerning anew in each course "what the professor wants"--as though there were no identity to the discipline that a student might recognize across the inevitable individual differences in critical perspectives and teaching styles among the faculty.

The problem is to some degree a microcosm of the problem that Gerald Graff has identified within literary studies as a whole, in which a structure of “patterned isolation” or “uncoordinated individualism” among faculty and courses, resulting in part from the live-and-let-live solution to an earlier era of theory wars, fails to acquaint students with the constitutive role played in literary studies by the conflicts--over “assumptions, premises, and legitimating principles and concepts”--that have driven different faculty to adopt different methods and approaches in the first place.¹

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested that discussion and debate over core principles structure traditions of practice generally, so that “when an institution--a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital--is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict."² Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave’s influential notion of “communities of practice” identifies the same constitutive role for ongoing conversation in less formal settings (and with less emphasis on conflict), including tighter or looser networks of individuals who “share a concern or a passion for something they do” and who may or may not meet face to face.³

The internet, of course, offers new ways for these communities of practice to engage in shared enterprises while sustaining the conversation that constitutes them. Wikipedia, with its communally authored “article” pages and their attendant “discussion” pages, is perhaps the quintessential example, but online discussion boards for shared-interest groups large and small serve a similar purpose. Yochai Benkler argues that these and other tools for networked communication and peer production are helping to foster a more general “culture of conversation about culture” in which the habits of linking and commenting produce a structure of “response and counterresponse,” increasing “the transparency of culture to its inhabitants.”⁴

The Practicing Criticism project at Geneseo might be described as an attempt to leverage this culture of conversation so that students experience their own involvement in English 170, and in the major, as the experience of a community of practice, a community that mirrors but also strives to understand the larger practice that is “literary study.” If successful, the project should increase for students the transparency of both their own local practice and the larger practice that they are studying and that some of them may aspire to join. It should do this by putting them in conversation with each other and allowing them to hear, in their professors, the style of conversation that characterizes the practice of criticism. It should do this not only in spite of but because of the fact that the different instructors approach texts in different ways.

Tools

In its first semester, the collaborative tool at the heart of this project was wiki. SUNY Geneseo uses Atlassian’s Confluence software to provide a wiki platform for the entire campus. We created a “space” in Confluence titled “Practicing Criticism,” and inside the space we set up three different sites for collaboration: two for collaboration among the students, one for collaboration among ourselves. A discussion site allowed students to engage in conversation about questions touching on their shared identity as English majors. An annotation site invited them to collaborate in annotating over a dozen poems that were assigned in all three sections of the course. An approaches site attached four audio clips of interpretive commentary, recorded by the four professors, to the text of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Easter, 1916.”

We decided that the simplest and most direct way to involve students in the kind of conversation about “assumptions, premises, and legitimating principles and concepts” that constitute our discipline, and to simultaneously constitute them as a community of practice, would be to build some discussion forums around a few fundamental questions cast in terms of their identity as English majors. Prior to the 1970s, most English programs operated on the assumption that students, in order to master the discipline, needed to study a series of “great” authors, with critical debates tending to center on which of these authors are truly essential (say, Milton or Shakespeare) and which are merely important (say, Pope or Keats). Since then, with the advent of feminist, Marxist, New Historical and other critical paradigms, debates about “the canon” have changed considerably. Many professors now teach previously marginalized authors, many reject the idea of abstract aesthetic hierarchies, and some have called into question the very notion of the literary work as a distinct textual entity. Our discussion forums personalized and localized this constitutive debate about the “canon” by asking the students across our four sections of English 170 to discuss such questions as, "How should a professor decide what works to include on a syllabus?" and "What factors or issues should be considered in deciding whether all English majors should take a course in Shakespeare?" The forums also asked students to reflect on the differing principles that inform the practices of reading and conversation within and outside the discipline of English by posing such questions as “What are the advantages and disadvantages of close reading?” and “What’s the difference between a book club and an English class?”

Annotation

Whereas the discussion site fostered conversation about the practice of criticism, our annotation site required students to practice criticism in conversation; that is, to construct a “reading” of a poem, or take the first steps towards a reading, by collaboratively elucidating and interpreting particular words and phrases within it, and by articulating a shared thesis statement about it.⁵

Confluence wiki software allows for a hierarchical page structure of “parent” and “child” pages. We put each of the poems to be annotated on its own page, then asked students to annotate by selecting words and phrases within the poem that seemed to require interpretation or explanation and linking these words or phrases to individual child pages with commentary. Thus a student could select the phrase “shallow rivers” from Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and link it to a page holding commentary about the phrase. Another student could improve the annotation by elaborating on it or polishing the wording. We asked the students to adopt a Wikipedia-style “neutral point of view” in writing these annotations, so that they could collaborate in producing commentary that spoke in a single voice. We also asked them to use Confluence’s “comment” feature in the same way that Wikipedians use “discussion”--to suggest an individual viewpoint for consideration by the group, or to hash out a disagreement. Making this distinction had the potential to create, in effect, two layers of conversation: the conversation formed by the individual annotations in relation to the poem, and the conversation among the creators of each annotation as to what the annotation should say.

Approaches

There is no shortage of pedagogical tools for illustrating the kind of conversation that characterizes the practice of criticism. The most popular of these is probably the “casebook,” which juxtaposes a primary text with critical essays representing a variety of viewpoints on the text. In collections where these essays are meant to exemplify the different kinds of reading generated by different “schools” of critical practice (Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, etc.), the impression left on the student can be precisely the one we were attempting to counter: that these specific practices are not instances of any general practice--that the schools, in effect, have nothing to say to each other.

Our approaches site in the wiki attempted to model critical variety by using the same localizing logic as our discussion forums about the English major. We ourselves became the exemplars of critical variety, and we did so in a manner that was “conversational” in tone as well as form. We put the text of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Easter, 1916” on each of four wiki pages. We each recorded a brief audio commentary on the poem and attached one clip to each page. On a parent page for the four commentary pages, we reproduced the text once more, together with an explanation of what we wanted our students to see: namely, that “four practicing critics can look at the same poem and find different things in it,” that the differences spring not from mere personal idiosyncrasy but from adopting “different intellectual angles,” and that “despite our differences, all four of us are doing certain things in common.” Two of us took the lesson this site was designed to teach a step further by bringing their sections (scheduled at the same time) together for a joint lecture in which each offered a viewpoint on a novel assigned in both sections. The lecture was followed by group discussion.

Results

We surveyed students at the end of the semester in order to get a sense of how the course had or had not changed their knowledge and attitudes. Only 4% percent of the 88 students surveyed said that they began the semester with a “very clear conception of the skills an English major should have”; 52% said they had a very clear conception of these skills at the end. Thirty percent began the semester “wondering” what skills an English major should have but lacking an answer; at the end, no student agreed with the statement, “I still don't have an answer that's even moderately clear.” Fully 19% “hadn’t really asked [themselves] what skills an English major should have” before taking the course; by the end, only 1% agreed with the statement, “I'm unclear about the skills an English major should have, and I haven't given the question much thought.” Exactly the same percentage--47%--began and ended the semester with a “moderately clear conception of the skills an English major should have.” Most of the students who fell into this category at the end had likely moved there from the “I wondered but didn’t have an answer” and the “I hadn’t really asked myself” categories.

Similarly, we asked the students how clear their thinking was before and after the course about “the works an English major should read” and “the debates an English major should understand.” Eleven percent began the semester with a clear conception of the works a major should read; 39% ended the semester that way. Nine percent had wondered about this question at the beginning but lacked an answer; at the end, no one was without at least a moderately clear idea. Twenty-five percent had not asked themselves this question at the beginning; at the end, 9% said they still had not given the question much thought. Again, the percentage who possessed moderate clarity remained about the same, declining slightly from 55% to 52% as, presumably, some moved up from moderate clarity to great clarity and others moved up to moderate clarity from not having asked themselves this question.

Four percent began the semester with a very clear idea of the debates a major should understand; 31% ended with a very clear idea. On this question, we saw the largest percentage--36%--who had wondered about the question without finding an answer; only 7% said they lacked even a moderately clear answer at the end. Twenty-five percent began the semester without having asked themselves the question previously; 7% ended the semester without having given it much thought. On this question, the percentage that began and ended with moderate clarity--35% and 55%, respectively--showed the greatest change.

Asked generally whether “this class changed your thinking about the skills of an English major,” 72% said “yes,” while 28% said “no.” Asked the same question about “what works an English major should read,” 63% replied “yes,” 37% “no”. Asked this question about “the debates an English major should understand,” 64% said “yes,” 36% “no.”

These results suggest that we were modestly successful in giving our students a better sense of what makes English a discipline. We asked some additional questions about their experience of the online assignments; judging from their answers, our success on this part of the collaboration was more limited. Asked to rate, on a scale of 1-5, the usefulness of our online annotation assignment for clarifying or stimulating thought about close reading, their ratings broke down as follows: 5 (very useful), 14%; 4, 19%; 3, 33%; 2, 23%; 1 (not useful), 11%. Asked to rate the usefulness of online discussion forums in clarifying or stimulating thought about the skills, content, and issues an English major should master, the ratings were 5 (very useful), 5%; 4, 24%; 3, 35%; 2, 23%; 1 (not useful), 14%. Our most effective online assignment was the one in which we ourselves were the collaborators. Asked to rate the usefulness of our audio commentary on Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” in providing a sense of how professional scholars/critics approach a literary work, students responded as follows: 5 (very useful), 28%; 4, 32%; 3, 22%; 2, 7%, 1 (not useful), 11%.

Lessons Learned

Practicing Criticism has been dormant during the spring 2011 semester but will continue in fall 2011. As the project goes forward, it will benefit from some of the lessons we have already learned.

The challenges faced by the project in its inaugural semester were technological, organizational, and motivational.

The technological challenges themselves were threefold, involving, respectively, faculty, students, and tools. One member of our faculty group had had a great deal of experience teaching with technology and was already a “power user” of the Confluence wiki software. Another was less familiar with the software but highly invested, from the beginning, in adopting digital methods to expand conversation beyond the classroom. Two members of the group saw technology more as an aid to pedagogical collaboration and coordination of purpose than as a central feature of the project. These differences in technological comfort and investment were not a drawback--on the contrary, they created a healthy balance of perspectives on the value and limitations of our digital tools. But they led to occasional frustration with the tools and less than perfect agreement on what we hoped to accomplish with them. Going forward, the project will benefit from some formal efforts to increase everyone’s familiarity with the tools and ongoing conversation within our own community of practice as to how they can best be used.

It was not only the professors, however, who found the wiki a challenge. Our students are thoroughly used to inhabiting online spaces, but these spaces do not all work the same, feel the same, or serve the same ends. A social network such as Facebook is not the same as a networked community of practice. Writing collaboratively from a “neutral point of view” is not a skill that digital natives automatically possess. (A good number of students had difficulty adopting this style in their poetry annotations, and fewer students produced collaborative annotations than we had hoped for.) Finally, even geeks need help with an unfamiliar interface. The project will go better in the future if we set aside some time to train the students in using the tools.

But what will the tools be? Wiki works well for collaborative authorship, and a flexible platform such as Confluence can extend the capability of wiki into other areas, such as group discussion. But a dedicated tool for building conversation around a central text, such as VoiceThread, might be a better alternative for the “approaches” component of Practicing Criticism.

The main organizational challenge we faced was that of giving students a sense of community while each syllabus went its own way with readings and other assignments. Although this combination of collaboration and autonomy was in some sense the point of the project, we ran into difficulty when, for example, collaborative online assignments across the sections took place out of sync with the readings on one or another professor’s syllabus. As already indicated above, two of us did coordinate readings and assignments more closely than the rest; in conjunction with synchronized scheduling, this planning made possible the joint lecture and group discussion offering a live reprise of the online “approaches” to “Easter, 1916” in the wiki. Better coordination might have also enabled students working across sections online to combine their virtual meetings with live ones. There are times when, as one student told us, you would just “rather meet in person” to accomplish collaborative work. In future semesters, at least a few planned meetings of the four sections--for technology instruction, open discussion, give-and-take among the professors, or even just pizza--would also help create a greater sense of community.

From a theoretical perspective, perhaps the most interesting challenge we faced was that of generating excitement about the work. Communities of practice form, by definition, because of shared passion or concern. By contrast, students choose courses and majors from a wide variety of motives and come to them with widely varying levels of interest and commitment. In the conventional classroom situation, the familiar remedy for this discrepancy is to incentivize "participation" using grades. But the familiar remedy seems inappropriate, at a deep level, to the culture of the Internet, whose very ethos is self-motivated participation and whose most powerful social lesson has been the capacity of self-motivated participants to produce lively, engaged discussion and (in the case of Wikipedia, for example) highly organized content without central direction or extrinsic reward. We went into the semester before having resolved this quandary, and, to judge from the survey results, without providing our students sufficiently clear guidelines for how active they should be online or how their work would be credited. We are still uncertain where the balance lies between meeting students' expectations for guidance and protecting the culture of self-motivation that makes the Internet an exciting place to collaborate and share. We will surely need to make adjustments on both ends--not only by formulating clearer expectations but also by structuring opportunities for discussion in ways that keep the conversation lively and fresh. Offering a wider range of discussion questions, introducing new questions at strategic points in the semester, and allowing students to pose their own questions would all help produce more participation for participation's sake.

Conclusion

As we write, the community that is SUNY Geneseo's English department is in the midst of revisiting its own practice. In face-to-face as well as asynchronous virtual conversation (within a dedicated space of Geneseo's Confluence wiki), department members have been discussing a substantial revision of the major that would shift the major’s emphasis from coverage of content to the self-reflective practice of analytical reading and writing skills. Not surprisingly, the department’s conversation has returned again and again to the very questions we posed to our students in Practicing Criticism: What should we read in English? Why should we read it? How should we read it?

For the four of us, the department’s conversation has reinforced the conviction that students need to see through their course syllabi, their assignments, and the requirements of the English major to the issues and principles that lie behind them--in other words, that students should experience English courses and the English major as transparent.

The department is considering making multi-section collaboration and cross-section conversation using digital tools a permanent feature of English 170 in a revised major, perhaps transforming Practicing Criticism into the official locus of the course. Needless to say, the four of us believe that such a decision would go far toward promoting the transparency of English at Geneseo. But whatever the department decides, we are certain that our project has improved the quality of our own conversation, while making our own practice more transparent to ourselves.

Notes
1. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 20th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 252-62. [return to text]
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. [return to text]
3. Etienne Wenger, “Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction,” last modified June, 2006, accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm. See also Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). [return to text]
4. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 293-94. [return to text]
5. For a discussion of the same kind of assignment in the context of civic engagement, see Paul Schacht, “Rowing Alone: Technology and Democracy in the Humanities Classroom,” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society 4 (2008), 61-68. [return to text]

The Early Novels Database: a Case Study

buurmalevineli@academiccommons.org — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:44:37 +0000

Project description¹

The Early Novels Database (END) is a bibliographic database based on the University of Pennsylvania's Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s extensive collection of fiction in English published between 1660 and 1830. Produced by the collaborative effort of Penn librarians, information technology specialists, faculty from Swarthmore College and Penn, and Swarthmore College undergraduate researchers, the completed database will include richly descriptive records of more than 3,000 novels and fictional narratives, from the very canonical to the almost unknown, from fictions that clearly announce themselves to be novels to the works of fiction (fable, travel narrative, romance) that formed part of that genre’s notoriously murky origins. Users will be able to perform both keyword and faceted searches across bibliographic records containing both edition-specific and copy-specific information about each novel. END seeks to unite twenty-first-century search technologies and twentieth-century descriptive bibliography with the sensibility of eighteenth-century indexing practices in ways that enable researchers to write new histories of the novel.

We have designed END to complement the extensive existing full-text facsimile archives that contain early novels (such as ECCO, GoogleBook, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust, to name a few). One of the major problems with recent large-scale book digitization projects has been the loss of edition-specific and copy-specific structured metadata--of information about and describing the book--of the kind often available in library card catalogs. The absence of this data can make it difficult for scholars and other researchers to find particular novels or sets of novels they are interested in, because even as our archive of digital texts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries has expanded exponentially, our ability to access them in precise, controlled, and complex ways has diminished. While recent projects have begun to take on this challenge--Brian Geiger’s (University of California, Riverside ) and Ben Pauley’s (Eastern Connecticut State University) Google-sponsored effort to automatically match ESTC (English Short Title Catalog) records to GoogleBook items is a notable recent example--our project seeks to use human eyes and brains and hands to create and control bibliographic descriptions in ways that computers cannot. For example, we tag each noun, adjective, person name, place name, and object mentioned in the title of each novel; the resulting information can be keyword searched but also appears as a set of “facets” that display how often a given word in each category appears. Therefore, researchers can not only perform traditional keyword searches of the title field to turn up relevant items, but can also see the entire array of nouns appearing on all title pages sorted alphabetically or by frequency. We also include in-depth information on other aspects of the novel’s paratexts, describing the prefaces, introductions, dedications, indexes, tables of contents, copyright statements in both controlled and more discursive vocabularies. As a relatively slow-moving project--because of the inherently slow and careful nature of the catalog work, the need to train students thoroughly before they can begin creating records, and limited amount of time our student researchers have to spend each year on the project--we continue to think through how we can create value that is complementary to and not soon to be substituted by faster and more automated modes of computer indexing and searching. So for us, the very subjective nature of many of our detailed bibliographic descriptions--often perceived as a problem by traditional cataloging and bibliography--has become a strength, particularly because these descriptions can be used alongside more objective and standardized modes of description from both within and outside our database.

Figure 1. Early Novels Database (END) search interface

An example of how END might be used by an individual researcher will make things clearer. A scholar interested in when the types of works we now think of as novels first began calling themselves “novels,” to take a hypothetical example, can not only instantly call up all 189 records of works of fiction with the noun “novel” or “a novel” in the title; she also, at the click of a button, can see that of the records of novels with “novel” in the title, 27 of them also include the adjective “young”; that 56 of them have prefaces; that the majority of them are written in the third rather than the first person; and that eight of them profess to be written “by a lady” but were in fact penned by men. She can sort and unsort them by year and decade of publication, and notice that most of them are published in London, but that after 1775 many of them also are published in Dublin; she can pull up records of all novels that contain prefaces, and click on each record to see the individual idiosyncratic titles of each one; she will also find detailed cataloger notes quoting interesting passages from the prefaces, passages which may either tell her something she needs to know or indicate to her that she needs to take a closer look at a particular novel herself. She can find also out instantly that 134 of her set of novels have epigraphs on the title pages, and by looking at the authors of those epigraphs she can determine at a glance how many are by “ancient” and how many by “modern” authors. And she can do all of this work in seconds, rather than in the weeks or even months it would take for her to generate this information herself. So while as a bibliographic tool END does not itself make a claim about literary history, or even represent to its users the “insides,” or texts, of the novels it includes, it helps enable the writing of new, alternative histories of the novel.² Using the well-worn digital technology of the electronic card catalog--a technology that is the result of a few centuries of changes in tools we create to locate books--END seeks to offer students and researchers a set of new and more flexible ways to locate and learn about early novels.

The Undergraduate Researcher: Classroom, Library, Database

END relies on undergraduate researchers--so far students from Swarthmore College and Bryn Mawr College--as the primary creators of the records that populate our database.³ Recruited mainly from history of the novel college classes, the students usually have at least a little background in the history of the novel in English and descriptive bibliography before joining the project team. Nevertheless, if the detailed, painstaking investigation of each novel and transfer of information into the proper record fields necessary to create database records is to be a meaningful and interesting task, and for the student to be capable of making observations about noteworthy aspects of the novel, each student needs a certain amount of general background on eighteenth-century literature and culture and the material form of the novel. We therefore run an informal week-long training on the eighteenth-century novel, descriptive bibliography, and the design of the database each summer before work begins. Further, if the work is to become meaningful in the context of the student’s own ongoing education, it is important that she develop a personal project related to the database work; in informal blog posts and more formal papers, students have developed their ongoing interest in topics ranging from narrative form to the representation of dialect to the quantitative study of the link between the novel’s representation of time and the novel’s length in page numbers.

To us, one of the most valuable aspects of our database project is the fact that it offers undergraduates an opportunity to work with librarians, programmers, other students, and professors in a collaborative environment.⁴ Also valuable is the way that the project teaches students to begin to think like researchers as they work to puzzle out what kinds of information researchers will want to know. This skill is important not because of the specific content involved--few students who work on this project will go on to research in English literature professionally (and in fact our team’s first “graduate” is heading off to an excellent law school in the fall of 2011). Rather, the critical thinking skills that the ongoing attempt to think like a researcher develop--the development what we might call the “research imagination”--is what is important in the context of the student researchers’ liberal arts educations. Also important is the way working on the database helps students develop a very concrete understanding of the difference between the canon--that small subset of books that have been carefully preserved, regularly edited, and (most importantly) routinely taught in the classroom--and the library or the archive in which a much wider array of texts are preserved. For example, when I (if Rachel may interject in the first-person for a moment) teach my mid-level survey class The Rise of the Novel, students read canonical works like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Frances Burney’s Evelina; the syllabus does not contain, for example, John Battersby’s Tell-tale Sophas: an Eclectic Fable in Three Volumes, Mary Walker’s Munster Village, the anonymous The Example; or, the History of Lucy Cleveland, or any one of the several thousand eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels that have survived but not become canonical. To see these texts, to turn their pages and skim their chapters, is necessarily to grasp an entirely different history of the novel; or, perhaps I should say, to realize that the history of the novel we teach depends upon the few texts we choose to assign. This isn’t to say that the canon isn’t valuable or that databases like END should replace the Penguin Classics, but merely that there are kinds of learning that undergraduates can do in the library and not in the classroom, and vice-versa. And at the same time that working on END enables students to live and grasp this difference--a difficult one to teach as an abstract concept--it also enables students to live and grasp the ongoing tension between the particularity of the book’s material form and the database’s attempt to categorize and capture a certain set of fixed and more-or-less objective characteristics. Again, the ultimate goal is not that students learn a lot of things about eighteenth-century novels--though they certainly do--but that the sustained examination of books, creation of database records, collaborative working environment, and library context make it possible for students to learn the kinds of things that they can’t learn in the traditional classroom, that they engage in a kind of learning that isn’t possible in the context of the course and the delimited class meeting.

Potential Futures of END

While this project is potentially endless--we’ve completed only about 200 records of the 3,000 Penn novels we plan to include and are currently piloting the inclusion of French novels in a partnership with Bryn Mawr’s Canaday library as we continue to seek new partner libraries and institutions--we are currently performing user testing and preparing to seek peer review from the 18thConnect group⁵ before embarking on the task of streamlining our cataloging protocol, training more undergraduate cataloger-researchers, and adding more records. We’ve written an article about the project, forthcoming in a collection titled Past is Portal: Teaching Undergraduates Using Special Collections and Archives.⁶ And we hope that some part of the value of END lies in its potential inspire other forms of collaborative humanities research that cross institutional lines in order to engage undergraduates in the process of producing new knowledge in the humanities.

Notes

1. END would not have been possible without the unwavering support and concerted efforts of the following individuals: Lynne Farrington Curator of Printed Books, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania; Michael Gamer Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania; Heather Glaser, Curator and Assistant Fine Arts Librarian, Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania; Marianne Hansen, Special Collections Librarian, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College; David McKnight Director, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania; Dennis Mullen, Web Developer and Designer, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Jon Shaw Head, Research, Training and Quality Management, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Laurie Sutherland, Metadata Specialist, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; Eric Pumroy, Director of Library Collections, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College; Leslie Vallhonrat, Web Managing Editor, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. View the database at http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/88396 . [return to text]
2. While END is in many ways a database of information designed to give researchers a “middle distance” view of the novel (as opposed to enabling the kind of “distant reading” of visualized large-scale sets of information about the novel which Franco Moretti and others are interested it), some of the types of macroscopic information included may eventually lend itself naturally to graphical representation. (See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London; New York: Verso), 2005.) Eventually, for example, END may be able to map the frequency of epigraphs against a timeline, or even more specifically, the frequency of quotations from Shakespeare used as epigraphs against a timeline. Even more important than building our own data visualization tools, however, will be making our database and data compatible with digital tools that others create; for one example, we are working to make sure that END is as compatible as possible with the Zotero citation manager. [return to text]
3. The database construction itself--a complicated endeavor--has been expertly overseen by staff involved with the University of Pennsylvania’s Digital Library Architecture, with whom we meet regularly to discuss questions that cross database structure and record creation matters. See http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/staff/ancillary.html?id=dla/poweredbythedla for more detail. [return to text]
4. For a look at our project’s internal blog that gives a bit of a sense of what day to day learning and work is like see http://transatlanticfictionproject.blogspot.com . [return to text]
5. 18Connect is a group dedicated to the aggregation and peer review of digital resources relating to the long eighteenth century; see http://www.18thconnect.org. [return to text]
6. Co-edited by Eleanor Mitchell, Peggy Seiden, and Suzy Taraba, to be published by the American Council of Research Libraries. [return to text]

From Project to Program: The DePauw University GIS Center Engaging the Campus with GIS

WilkersonSmith@academiccommons.org — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:08:07 +0000

In September, Academic Commons published case studies of three campus projects focused on helping students develop the visual and quantitative literacies that they need to work with, understand, and critique representations of complex data. The projects—recipients of the NITLE Community Contribution Award—were recognized for promoting student engagement and learning and for teaching students how to make sense of data, communicate with maps, and define and solve problems within real-world constraints.

This month, we are happy to present a follow-up case study focused on the use of geospatial technologies within liberal education. While September’s case studies focused on specific projects, this case study looks at engaging students with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from a programmatic point of view, telling the story of how a GIS initiative at DePauw University resulted in the creation in January 2005 of The DePauw GIS Center.

This case study also heralds the establishment of the NITLE Sustainable Program Award, with The DePauw GIS Center as its first recipient. The NITLE Sustainable Program Award recognizes institutional programs that successfully and sustainably integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and technology and help their institutions achieve mission-related goals. By creating an opportunity to share insights and lessons learned (via published case studies), the award helps identify the questions institutions should ask when moving from project to program. It also helps the liberal arts community learn from its own successes.

NITLE congratulates the DePauw GIS Center and thanks M. Beth Wilkerson and Carol L. Smith of DePauw for sharing the story of its development with their colleagues in liberal education. As always, we invite you to read and share this study with your colleagues and to offer the authors your comments and questions.

An online map of Mediterranean archaeological sites... gratis copies of the book GIS for Everyone... a faculty interest group... the proverbial “free lunch”...

Taken together, this modest list outlines the initial components that ultimately led to the creation of a thriving and sustainable Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program at DePauw University.

Introduction

The concept of GIS was first introduced to DePauw in 2002 via the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA - http://cgma.depauw.edu), an inter-institutional venture directed by Dr. Pedar Foss, Edwin L. Minar Professor of Classical Studies and Associate Professor of Classical Studies, and Dr. Rebecca Schindler, Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the Classical Studies Department. In 2004, with their help and with funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Venture grants and support from the Lilly Endowment for DePauw’s 361 Degrees technology programs, DePauw University officially began an initiative to promote the use of GIS and spatial technologies throughout the university.

Figure 1. A product of CGMA, MAGIS (Mediterranean Archaeology GIS) is an on-line GIS of regional archaeological survey projects in the greater Mediterranean which catalogs survey metadata.

Over the past six years, that foundation has grown from a simple effort to support a few faculty members’ personal research into a vibrant, rich program that enables instructors to engage students in the classroom utilizing spatial tools, allows administrative departments opportunities to leverage locational elements in their work, and continues to support individual faculty research projects. Through the work of GIS program staff and the tools and resources available in the GIS Center, DePauw students, faculty members, and staff members receive one-on-one consulting, engage in spatial software workshops, participate in annual GIS events, and obtain focused support for their projects. As a result, during the 2009-2010 academic year, the GIS Center supported nearly forty GIS projects, spanning fifteen academic or administrative departments and including seventeen faculty members, ten staff and eighteen students.

The Story

Like the old folk story "Stone Soup," the evolution of DePauw’s GIS program represents the contributions and cooperation of many, with the sum being much greater than the separate parts. While there is no recipe for developing a successful GIS program that works in every case for every institution, some of the key “ingredients” that we used at DePauw and which we share here might, when combined with locally available resources and personnel, help promote the use of GIS in your organization.

The broth (water): A clear guiding vision

As with any institutional initiative, whether academic, administrative, or other, there needs to be an underlying vision that is at the heart of the endeavor and that continually permeates and focuses related efforts and actions. At DePauw, as is true of most liberal arts institutions, the primary focus is students. DePauw University’s vision states, “DePauw intellectually challenges students and inspires them to lead and to serve in an increasingly diverse and rapidly changing world.” Embracing this vision, the GIS program at DePauw is passionate about providing students with tools and experiences that provide them with a technological advantage to compete in the real world. As a result, the program concentrates on enhancing students’ learning through rich engagement in research and scholarship, enabling students to conduct research and course projects with tangible benefits that impact the community, and engaging students in communicating their research results to increase GIS awareness across campus.

Close collaborations between faculty members and GIS program staff result in symbiotic relationships between technology and academic departments that enable faculty members to devote their time to the content-specific aspects of a course or project while a GIS specialist focuses on the geographical and technological elements. In addition, these partnerships enhance our students’ spatial analytical skills and increase their awareness of the range of tools available to them, providing them with a greater appreciation of how powerful GIS can be in answering a wide array of research questions. Through these collaborative efforts, students participating in the courses and student research projects are given the opportunity to gather and analyze data using cutting-edge tools that may not have been available otherwise. Moreover, by applying GIS concepts, students are offered the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the content that they are studying, thus enhancing their learning potential.

Figure 2. Students gained a new perspective on public policy by applying GIS techniques to visualize the advantages and potential disadvantages of proposed laws. In addition, using similar spatial concepts they offered possible modifications to the proposed laws that would still obtain the goals of the laws while minimizing the drawbacks (see http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=18798).

Like the water surrounding the ingredients in the soup, we feel a successful GIS program must ensure that the institution’s core mission is the focus of GIS endeavors. In other words, spatial technology should not be used for technology’s sake, but rather the introduction/incorporation of GIS should be guided by pedagogical priorities such as enhanced student learning and critical thinking.

The main ingredient: A GIS support person

One of the most important first steps in laying the groundwork for the successful GIS program at DePauw was to hire a GIS Specialist, a dedicated resource person who not only had technical knowledge in GIS and/or other related STEM areas (e.g., computer programming, math), but who also had the ability to work with faculty members, students, and staff in various teaching, research, and administrative settings. This person was tasked with three basic goals: 1. to promote GIS awareness and activities across campus; 2. to encourage and expand faculty expertise and curricular uses of GIS; and 3. to serve as a resource for faculty, staff, and students interested in working with GIS. As members of the DePauw community became aware of the powerful capabilities of GIS, many quickly recognized its utility and benefit to their particular area of interest. The issue for them, then, became one of overcoming the obstacles of time and inertia to learn and incorporate new technology routinely in classroom, research, and administrative endeavors. We addressed this issue by adapting our GIS support to the needs of these GIS “clients” in two ways:

First, for faculty and staff members interested in learning the technology, the GIS Specialist consulted with them one-on-one to help them learn GIS tools that would enable them to visualize and/or analyze their particular datasets. As these individuals became more comfortable and knowledgeable with the software, they could undertake more self-exploration, become more self-sufficient, and ultimately only need to ask “how-to” questions as they worked with their data. In addition, because faculty and staff time comes at quite a premium, the GIS Specialist developed “quick-hit” workshops. These were quite successful because each lesson focused on a single technique of broad applicability (e.g., how to download and analyze digital elevation data), provided step-by-step instructions that could be used as a later reference, and lasted no more than one hour (including practice time). Over time, this collection of lessons has grown into a resource from which faculty members can request “quick-hit” workshops for their classes.
Second, for those individuals who did not have the time, need, or inclination to learn GIS technology (a group substantially larger than those described in the previous paragraph), the GIS specialist and her student staff members worked directly on technical projects for them. These projects ranged from creating a single map for a publication or class lecture, to performing detailed analyses of large and complex research datasets, to developing and teaching lab exercises for a course. For each project, the GIS specialist and her team followed three guiding principles that shaped their approach: express a willingness and desire to help, listen to the needs of the client, and evaluate his/her data carefully to develop a plan that utilizes appropriate tools and techniques to visualize and/or analyze the data in a spatially meaningful way.

Figure 3. An early color version of the Freetown Central Ward illustration created by DePauw GIS Program staff for inclusion in the publication, New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio.

For all types of projects, and particularly for administrative projects, it is helpful if the GIS specialist begins by demonstrating to the interested individual how GIS technology can be used in their discipline or department. Often, the best way to lay the groundwork for such an initial meeting is to create a proof-of-concept product that uses data relevant to that person’s area of study or responsibility. For example, our specialist created maps showing current student home locations overlaid with various types of census data (median household income, population of high school-aged children) prior to meeting with the vice president of admissions to discuss possible collaborative opportunities.

Providing GIS support on campus using this type of generalist approach does present challenges to the specialist. In general, it would be easiest to only assist faculty members with their research projects, since researchers can easily identify pieces of their projects that can benefit from GIS, and the resulting GIS programming support needed is typically very clearly defined. In contrast, classroom-related project support needs can vary broadly from instructor to instructor, which requires the GIS specialist to be much more flexible in her level and type of involvement. For example, in some projects she may simply provide assistance in creating a map or other course-related study materials or present a brief orientation to students about a particular technique or piece of software, whereas in others she might help develop project assignments or co-teach some class sessions with the faculty member. One might initially think that tackling technical projects from this wide range of type and disciplines would be a daunting task for the GIS specialist, but in our opinion, the truth is far from that. Rather, we have found that the variety of disciplines, topics, and tasks serves to keep the work fresh, challenging, and exciting.

Figure 4. Asian Studies students with little or no background in Chinese history and geography gain insights into Chinese culture with the aid of media-rich content in Google Earth.

We believe the most essential ingredient to a GIS program “soup,” then, is a GIS specialist. In addition to being technologically savvy, this person needs to be flexible, willing to work with individuals to the degree that they need/want, and able to act as a catalyst (and occasional evangelist) to advocate the use of GIS technology as an effective tool.

Hey, we’re making soup here!: Getting the message out

One of the early challenges for developing a thriving GIS program at DePauw was to establish a critical mass of awareness about GIS, how it might be beneficial, and where one might go to learn more. In keeping with our stone soup analogy, the “soup” becomes better as news of what is happening spreads.

Undoubtedly, word-of-mouth from faculty members, staff, and students who have worked with the GIS Center initially provided a powerful means of extolling the virtues and pedagogical possibilities of using GIS technology and spreading the word about the people in the GIS Center who could help them. At DePauw, conversations of this nature are supplemented by formal faculty forums, where faculty members give presentations on their research activities. These gatherings bring together faculty members from all disciplines to discuss the research and the tools they used in conducting that research. Similarly, faculty members have many opportunities within their departments and across campus to discuss pedagogical development in association with their courses, creating more possibilities for the GIS Center to work with other instructors. Finally, students readily share class projects involving spatial technologies via capstone course presentations. These presentations often are attended by faculty members from within and outside the course’s discipline, providing opportunities to promote awareness and use of GIS and spatial technologies throughout the University.

Figure 5. Two students in DePauw’s Spring 2010 Aquatic Ecology class presented the research, methods, and results from their semester-long bathymetric survey project at the course’s project showcase. In addition, this project was highlighted at this year’s GIS Day poster session.

One particularly effective means of communicating about GIS activities around campus is DePauw’s annual GIS Day celebration. GIS Day is a worldwide event held each year on the Wednesday during the National Geographic Society’s Geography Awareness Week. Since 2004, the DePauw GIS Center has joined hundreds of organizations around the world in sponsoring a GIS Day event. Each year there are many interesting displays and activities at DePauw’s celebration, but a perennial favorite is the poster session where students, faculty members, and staff from various disciplines and departments across campus share how they apply GIS in their respective fields. This session is augmented with GIS-focused posters displaying spatial data related to current events (e.g., renewable resources) and interactive displays supplied by the GIS Program staff and by displays from outside vendors and companies that use GIS. Refreshments are served (feed them and they will come!) and a fun “GIS Quest” allows participants to enter for a drawing to win geographically-themed prizes, including a handheld GPS. This casual and relaxed setting provides an environment for attendees to learn about the impact of GIS both on and off DePauw’s campus. Peers can informally share GIS ideas and successes, brainstorm potential uses of spatial technologies in their own projects or courses, and explore ideas with the GIS Program staff. This critical mass of people combined with the numerous applied visual examples creates a “buzz” about GIS around campus that often serves as a catalyst to spawn new project and course ideas.

Figure 6. Time lapse video of approximately 30 minutes of DePauw’s 2009 GIS Day poster session (in the video 1 second = 1 minute).

In our experience, these and other activities (e.g., email newsletters, serving on committees) helped to establish and grow the GIS program at DePauw. The collaborations across campus helped GIS to take root and to organically spread to other areas. As such, some faculty members have become “repeat customers” who regularly use GIS in their courses, research, or scholarly work every semester, while others work with the GIS specialist and her staff only occasionally when the need arises.

The soup pot: A GIS Center

Figure 7. The GIS Center is a dedicated space where DePauw faculty members, staff, and students can find information, help, and technology related to GIS.

About a year after the GIS Program began, a renovation of DePauw’s Percy L. Julian Science and Mathematics Center, an academic building that hosts many science-related academic departments as well as the science library, provided physical space for the creation of a GIS Center. The GIS Center provides a core set of GIS-related resources for faculty members, staff, and students in a single location, centrally located near computer classroom labs, the campus technology data center, and various science departments. The GIS Center houses office space for the GIS specialist and student staff and state-of-the-art equipment for working on GIS projects, including powerful workstations with GIS software such as Google Earth Pro and ArcGIS, a large-format scanner, and a large-format plotter. The Center also provides ample table space to examine printed maps, a data projector for instructional workshops and group study, wall space to showcase poster examples of completed GIS projects, and it stores several handheld GPS units and a research-grade GPS that can be borrowed by faculty members for their classes or research.

The establishment of the GIS Center was critical to the development of the GIS program at DePauw. The centralized location of equipment, physical space, and experienced personnel make the GIS Center a convenient, one-stop shop for information, help, and technology related to GIS.

Contributors to the soup: Faculty, staff, students, and administrators

Finally, as with many successful initiatives under the umbrella of 361 Degrees, the GIS program at DePauw originated out of a need suggested by members of the faculty. Initial luncheons and meetings of interested faculty members led to internal grant proposals, which resulted in the hiring of the GIS specialist and the launching of the initiative to promote awareness and use of GIS and spatial technologies throughout the university. This initiative was supported by a GIS advisory committee comprised of faculty members who helped promote GIS awareness and activities and who provided advice and support to both the GIS specialist and the administration, playing an essential role in the early development of the GIS program. The committee was composed of individuals who were interested in working with GIS in their research and classrooms. Those faculty members’ projects were then used as early case studies showcasing the potential of GIS, and, as such, helped advocate use of the technology to their colleagues and to the administration.

Soon, rapidly expanding interest and use of spatial technologies led to the formal integration of the GIS Program into the larger context of DePauw’s already strong technological support programs. In particular, the GIS program became part of DePauw’s Instructional and Learning Services department, which provides instructional technology support for faculty members and students who make use of technology in their teaching and learning. Within this framework, the GIS program benefited from established and proven support programs and borrowed from their existing connections with faculty members, staff and students. Moreover, the administrators within these programs encouraged experimentation and provided the freedom for the organic growth of GIS as an emerging technology.

Figure 8. An early incorporation of GIS in the classroom by a member of the GIS Advisory Committee helped geoscience students visualize the 3D landforms that are represented by the contours on 2D topographic maps.

Additional support for the GIS program has come from the students in two key ways. First, the GIS Center benefits greatly from the involvement of numerous Information Technology Associates Program (ITAP) student interns and Fifth-Year interns. These interns became proficient with GIS technology and worked with the GIS Specialist on faculty, staff, and student GIS projects. Second, student GIS projects associated with courses has helped promote GIS awareness via the GIS Day poster session. For example, students from the GEOS 205: Introduction to GIS course routinely work on major GIS projects that are highlighted at DePauw’s GIS Day event.

The soup: GIS @ DePauw

While this story and the examples we have described apply specifically to DePauw, we feel that there is a strong take-home message here consistent with the "Stone Soup" story--everyone contributes to the success of the final product--and we believe that this message is transferable to other instructional technology programs as well. Any beginning program must be scaffolded by a clear, consistent philosophy about how instructional technology fits into the institutional mission and have a minimal critical mass of faculty members who will use, support, and promote that technology or method. Such faculty advocates can provide successful examples for their colleagues that highlight the potential benefits of the techniques supported by the program. In addition, having administrative support (financially and within a user support environment) and freedom to grow organically is invaluable. Furthermore, one should not underestimate the value of students in developing the program.

The DePauw 361 Degrees vision is grounded in the belief that the connections that technology enables, not necessarily the technology itself, are most important to students, faculty members, and staff. With this in mind and through experience with various instructional technology projects and activities over the past few years, DePauw has adopted a number of guiding principles about how to effectively leverage change in the use of technology in teaching and research on our campus: focus on collaborative partnerships, engage a broad set of stakeholders (faculty, students, key departments, etc.), and put technologies and tools in the hands of students. As a core component of 361 Degrees, the GIS program inherited these core values that serve as the foundation of providing support that reinforces student engagement and student-centered research and promotes GIS prevalence across the university through the application of spatial analytical techniques.

When the DePauw GIS initiative began in 2004, GIS was essentially an unknown technology utilized by a select few in a couple of disciplines. Today the DePauw GIS program is a sustainable program providing spatial support for numerous projects involving a variety of students, faculty members, and administrative departments from all areas of the institution.

For a graphical timeline outlining the growth experienced by DePauw’s GIS Center, visit http://www.depauw.edu/univ/gis/GISTimeline.

September 2010

lisagatesphd@gmail.com — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:51:00 +0000

As geospatial technologies become easier to use, more accessible, and increasingly interactive, maps and other data visualizations are becoming ever more popular forms of communication. Likewise, our ability to collect geolocated data is also expanding. As a result, cartographic representations have permeated popular discourse, offering interpretations on a wide range of issues: domestic and international politics, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, habitat preservation for endangered species, military strategy and tactics, and many others. To borrow and build on a turn of phrase from Jeff Howarth, a contributor to this issue of Academic Commons, visualizing quantitative data is a powerful, creative act, one that both influences how we interpret data and sets the parameters within which we understand it.

As spatial data become more ubiquitous, we are challenged to chart new terrain for academic inquiry and pedagogy. Liberal education is increasingly called on to help students develop the visual and quantitative literacies they need to work effectively with data, to discern patterns within and extract significance from them, and to understand and critique the myriad ways in which they are represented towards a variety of ends. In this issue of Academic Commons, NITLE presents case studies of three projects that have begun to chart this new knowledge terrain. Each project connects the creation and communication of knowledge via maps to student engagement and learning; together, they show how data visualization can be used to foster students' creativity, teach them to define and solve problems within real-world constraints, and make the leap from simply observing bits of data to making sense of them.

NITLE again congratulates these winners of the May 2010 Community Contribution Award and thanks them for advancing geospatial studies within liberal education. As always, we invite you to read these studies and share them with your colleagues, and to offer comments and ask questions.

Putting Study Abroad on the Map

jhowarth@middlebury.edu — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:47:56 +0000

“Each year about 60% of the junior class at Middlebury studies abroad in more than 40 countries at more than 90 different programs and universities.”

When I read this sentence on the Middlebury College Web site, I thought to myself: that’s a dataset that my students ought to map. I knew that there had to be a dataset behind that sentence, something that the author could summarize by counting the number of different countries, programs and students. But I imagined this dataset could show us much more if we represented it spatially and visually rather than just verbally. I didn’t know exactly what it might show, but I knew that my cartography students could figure that out as long as I taught them the technical skills for handing the data and the general concepts for visualizing multivariate data. What they decided to make with this knowledge was up to them.

Increasingly, teaching cartography involves training students on specific software platforms while communicating more general principles of the craft. This presents the need to design instructional materials that connect technical skills with thematic concepts while allowing students to creatively achieve the broader educational objectives of a liberal education. As an instructor of cartography at Middlebury College, I have largely followed a project-based learning approach focused on the process of cartographic design. My learning objectives seek to link techniques and concepts in an extended creative procedure that involves data management, problem setting, problem solving and reflection. At different steps along the way, the students must make their own design decisions, applying the available means to their chosen ends. Here, I describe the case of mapping the study abroad program in order to illustrate the general approach of integrating technical and conceptual teaching through design problems.

The Project

I gave the students a very simple prompt: Design a layout for the Web that explores how the Study Abroad Program connects Middlebury students to the rest of the world. The students also received a spreadsheet, supplied by Stacey Thebodo of the Study Abroad Program, listing all students who had studied abroad between 2006 and 2010. In addition, the students received some geographic data, including country boundaries, in a common GIS format. Like all the projects in the course, this assignment provided students with an opportunity to apply topical and theoretical concepts that had been introduced in lecture and readings. For that week, the topic concerned spatial representations of multivariate data based largely on the Jacques Bertin’s theory of graphics.¹ The three learning objectives of this assignment each connected theory to technique at different steps of the creative procedure: 1. demonstrate data management skills for cartography, specifically how to transform a list of nominal data into a statistical map; 2. identify the components of information to visualize in order to satisfy a purpose for an intended audience; 3. solve the problem given real-world constraints (available data, software, time and knowledge).

Data Management

The dataset came packaged as a spreadsheet with columns for semester, year, student name, major, minor, gender, program name, city, and country. The first problem was to reformat this dataset into something that could be mapped, which could be completed with two technical operations--linking the country or city names to geographic coordinates that could be plotted on a map and transforming nominal data into quantitative data.

The students were familiar with both the purpose and procedure of the first operation as it had been introduced in a previous assignment. They knew that descriptions of locations in an attribute table, like country names, could be joined to a separate file with corresponding geographic coordinates of each location in order to plot them on a map. But that alone would not get them much closer to visualizing the dataset, as they would wind up with a lot of overlapping geographic features, one for every row in the database. It would be far more preferable to format the dataset so that each row represented a different geographic feature (e.g. country) and each feature had attributes like the total number of students or the total number of programs. Then the students could make a map that showed spatial variation in these quantities.

To do this, the students needed to transform nominal data into quantitative data, which was a new problem. It introduced a new technical procedure with a theoretical concept that had been introduced in lecture that week. Technically, it involved using spreadsheet functions to ‘pivot’ data, summarizing instances of one category by instances of another category (e.g. counting the number of students per country). Conceptually, however, it involved defining the core theme that the students wanted to map, or what Bertin called the ‘invariant’ of information: the base concept that does not vary across spatial, temporal or thematic dimensions and by its invariability allows us to recognize the components of information that do vary. And this conceptual side of the problem made the task a bit more difficult than simply repeating the technical steps that I had demonstrated for ‘pivoting’ data.

The intuitive unit of the study abroad dataset was ‘student who studies abroad,’ but the dataset did not necessarily come structured in a way that let us map this. It was essentially organized by semester: for every semester between 2006 and 2010, it recorded each student studying abroad. This meant that if a student studied abroad for an entire year (two semesters) then they would be listed in the dataset twice and simply counting the number of students during the pivot operation would generate error. There were a number of possible fixes for this but they all required the student to think about balancing what they could do given the dataset and what they should do to achieve their purpose and help the reader interpret their map.

Setting the Problem

Once the students had seen the dataset and were shown how they could manipulate it so that it could be mapped, their next problem was to decide what they wanted to show on their map. In general, the students had to consider how to apply the means available to them (the dataset and their technical skills) to one or more ends, but these ends--the goals they sought to achieve by making their map--were decisions that they had to make on their own.

Throughout the course, I asked the students to consider their audience, media and theme when deciding what kind of map they would make. What kinds of questions would the people using this map with this kind of media want to answer about this theme? In this case, what would visitors to the study abroad Web site want to know about the program that a map could help them understand?

This tested students’ understanding of how relationships between variables help a reader make inferences from a graphic. This, of course, is the underlying principle of simple graphics, like scatterplots and charts, but in this case the students had more than just two variables that they could let the reader visually compare. The dataset included attributes for region, country, program, year, semester, gender and major. In addition, the students could generate new attributes from these, such as changes in number of students over time. What combination of variables would allow the reader to answer questions they might have? Or better yet, what might provide answers to questions that the reader might not even have thought of?

Problem Solving

As students begin the process of making a map layout, the workflow becomes less linear as the student must coordinate high levels of interacting elements. During this phase, students will not be able to work through the problem one step at a time, but rather must shift into a mode of reflective action, as they evaluate how each decision interacts with other decisions that they have made or will make, constantly adapting these pieces of the design to improve the quality of the whole.² Their work during this phase thus reflects conceptual understanding at two levels: the individual components of the map and their interaction as a whole.

In this case, students demonstrated their comprehension of lower-level concepts in two ways. First, the students needed to choose one or more visual variables (e.g. shape, size, hue, value, texture) to represent each component of the dataset, evidencing both their conceptual understanding of Bertin’s theory of visual variables and their technical ability to implement these concepts with graphic design software. Second, the students needed to provide geographic context for the symbolized data by making a base layer. This evidenced their conceptual understanding of cartographic principles, such as projection and generalization, and their technical ability to implement these concepts.

As students implement these lower-level concepts and begin to produce a design, they confront conceptual problems of design that result from the interaction of their lower-level decisions. These include concepts like figure-ground, contrast, balance, as well as knowing when to use an inset or when to use small multiples because a single graphic is simply trying to say too much. These concepts are difficult to master by following simple rules but rather mature through thoughtful reflection during the process of design.

Reflection

In addition to the map layout itself, I also required students to submit a written discussion of their design process. My objective was to provide another means to distinguish between a student’s comprehension of a concept and their ability to implement the concept with technical operations. I asked students to describe the decisions that they made during the design process and to relate these decisions to concepts that were introduced in lecture and readings. The short reflective write-up provided students with an opportunity to communicate their understanding of theoretical content even if the could not apply this understanding in their layout due to technical shortcomings.

Evaluation

Throughout the course, my joy of receiving thirty uniquely creative expressions of student work at the end of each week was countered by the dilemma of pegging each to a standard evaluation scale. My main objective when grading was to recognize both the student’s conceptual and technical understanding during each phase of the project--data management, problem setting and problem solving--using both their map layout and written discussion. For this assignment, I focused on the following:

Is the thematic unit clearly defined and intuitive for the intended audience?
How many components are visualized and what kinds of inferences can the reader make by relating these components?
Do the visual variables help the audience interpret the components?
Does the base map demonstrate comprehension of cartographic principles?
Does the map composition demonstrate comprehension of higher-level graphic design principles?

Each of these questions relates an aspect of the work to one or more concepts from the course.

Examples

This map designed by Marty Schnure '11 map shows a simple message well.

Figure 1. Map by Marty Schnure '11

Marty has simplified the information content of her layout by removing the time component and aggregating by region. She uses intuitive visual variables (width of lines to represent magnitudes, hues of polygons to represent regions). She also uses a projection that is appropriate for this spatial extent. Her map is especially pleasing because she also demonstrates higher-level concepts of graphic design: her color scheme draws from the palette of the Middlebury Web site, her layout expresses symmetrical balance and she’s using contrast to effectively distinguish figure from ground.

Like Marty, Jue Yang ’12 also used flow-lines to represent numbers of students traveling abroad, but she added another component to this information and shows this data at two levels of spatial aggregation. Her flow lines originate from Middlebury aggregated by region and then branch midway to quantify the proportion of students studying in each country.
Figure 2. Map by Jue Yang ’12.

By designing her origin as a pie chart, which she repeats at a larger scale in the upper corner, she quietly urges her readers to compare the regional pattern while also providing a very subtle legend to her color scheme. She’s also made several decisions that evidence good cartographic principles. For one thing, she’s removed Antarctica, which makes sense for a lot of reasons: no students study there, the projection distorts the poles and would have made the continent funny-looking, and it frees up space for her flow lines to Oceanic countries. She’s also hidden an artifact that can be seen on most of the other student maps. The country boundary data has more detail than necessary for mapping at this scale. This makes some coastlines, like the west coast of Canada, accumulate line weights and appear as distracting blobs rather than crisp boundaries. Jue’s creative solution to this problem was to use white boundaries for countries and white fill for her oceans. This visually simplified coastlines without any laborious data transformations.

Several students increased the information content of their graphics by representing temporal components. Thom Corrado ’11 visualized the number of students studying in each country for each year of the dataset.
Figure 3. Map by Thom Corrado ’11.

Thom developed an original scheme that used size to represent the number of students and color to represent the year. This allows the reader to infer changes in the study over time with any single country and also to compare the numbers of students studying in different countries for any single year. His insertion of an inset map evidences his awareness of a higher-level design problem resulting from the popularity of Europe, where circles representing number of students each year would overlap and obscure the underlying country boundaries.

The layout developed by Katie Panhorst ’10 layout was one of the most ambitious efforts due to the number of components that she included. She shows two temporal components (year and semester), two spatial components (country and region), and one thematic component (program sponsor). Her design uses small multiples arranged in a grid to reveal temporal components. Her thematic component allows the reader to interpret the quantitative data in a new way by correlating the number of students to the presence of Middlebury-sponsored programs.

Figure 4. Map by Katie Panhorst ’10.

Some students chose to represent change rather than time. This involved calculating the difference between the number of students studying in different countries or regions over two consecutive years and then representing the change symbolically. Jordan Valen ’10 offered one creative solution that used proportionally-sized arrows to represent change. This allows the reader to recognize patterns of change: Latin America, Europe and Asia seem to be largely consistent over time, Africa and Oceania fluctuate from one year to the next, while the popularity of the Middle East appears to be on the rise.

Figure 5. Map by Jordan Valen ’10.

Lessons Learned

There are four key lessons that I’ve gained from this project-based approach to teaching cartographic design:

Show students how to solve problems, but allow students to set the problems to be solved. While some liberal arts students may appreciate that a course allows them to list commercial software names under the skills section of their resume, simply training students how to use software falls outside the traditional scope of a liberal education. Providing students with the technical skills to solve problems while allowing them to set the problem to solve will foster student creativity and a learning environment characterized by exploration and discovery.
Integrate your teaching of technique and theory, but separate your evaluation of technical skills and conceptual knowledge. The disparity of technical skills in a classroom can challenge both the evaluation of student work and the motivation of students to work. Some students will feel disadvantaged if their peers have had prior experience with a particular software, while those that enter the classroom with experience won’t be challenged if they are simply being shown how to push buttons that they have already learned to push. Additionally, a student will feel frustrated if their mastery of a complicated tool constrains their opportunity to demonstrate their comprehension of concepts. The reflective write-up describing design process is one strategy to tease apart these two kinds of knowledge, but I found that some students, even those with much to gain from a verbal description of their thinking, seemed to treat this part of the assignment with less effort than the map product itself. This may have been due a failure on my part to clearly communicate the importance of this part of the assignment or it may reflect a more intrinsic bias on the part of some students to focus on the product of design rather than the process.
Design is reflective action and reflection takes time. This assignment required the students to commit a significant amount of time. In part, this stems directly from my expectation that students set their own problems. Problem-setting requires students to take the time to explore the dataset in order to discover its possibilities. Also, because the students decide what to make, they also have to decide when they’re done. Any student who has learned how to efficiently meet a professor’s expectations will find it difficult, if not frustrating, to decide when to stop working on their own. But independently of having students set problems, the complex nature of cartographic design, where elements interact with each other, and one decision influences both past and future decisions, translates into time needed to reflect and adapt. In particular, high-level design concepts, such as contrast and balance, are not dependent on a correspondingly high-level of technical knowledge that is difficult to master. Rather, they rely on students taking the time to consider and resolve them. As such, these gestalt concepts underlie the most common design flaws in student projects.
Provide project topics that engage students.
This last point is by no means novel in a liberal education but it should not be ignored when developing topics for student projects. The study abroad project provides an example of a dataset that students were drawn to explore. Many had studied abroad, so many started by looking themselves up in the dataset. This provided an opportunity to discuss key cartographic concepts, like data integrity and abstraction, as the row of fields attached to the dot on the monitor didn't quite map to the richness of their memory. They became curious about how popular their program was and what places were less traveled. And they became interested in sharing this with other students and promoting the college program. It's a useful case in the larger pedagogy of teaching techniques at a liberal arts college: give students problems that connect to their experience and involve both problem setting and solving. Many will recognize that visualizing quantitative data is a creative act.

References
1. Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). [return to text]
2. Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983). [return to text]

Simple Animations Bring Geographic Processes to Life

cfastie@middlebury.edu — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:46:44 +0000

Introduction

It seems we spend a lot of time teaching about things that we can’t easily observe, maybe because students are already familiar with processes they see operating around them, or because previous teachers have already harvested those low-hanging fruit. Processes that are obscure because they are small, large, slow, fast, or distant in time or space require more careful explanation. Some of these processes can now be revealed using digital technologies. I used Google Earth to model a very large process that took place 13,500 years ago. I used a global positioning system (GPS) receiver to map a series of glacial features in west central Vermont and transferred the results to Google Earth. I then added graphical models of the retreating Laurentide glacier and associated pro-glacial lakes and rivers which shaped the mapped features. Animated flyovers of the augmented Google Earth surface at different stages of the reconstructed glacial retreat were saved as video files and incorporated into an explanatory video. I have presented this video both before and after student field trips to the study area with good results. Subsequent upgrades to Google Earth allow animated flyovers to be recorded and played back in the free version of the program. This offers a streamlined creation process and the potential for a more interactive and collaborative experience.

Click on the video link below to view.

Old, Flat, and Unconsolidated: Salisbury’s Gravelly Past from Chris Fastie on Vimeo.

Science instruction benefits greatly from graphical demonstrations of physical structures and processes. Current textbooks are elaborately illustrated and associated Web sites sometimes include animations of important general processes, but ready-made animations of more specific processes or locally relevant examples are rarely available. Software for producing custom animations is becoming more user-friendly, but the cost and training commitment still prevent wide adoption. Google Earth is a free program that is based on animation of the earth’s surface and that includes tools sufficient for creating simple animations of many social, geographic, geologic, and ecological processes. The professional version (Google Earth Pro), which is not free, adds the capability to save these animations as video files that can be viewed separate from the program.

Geomorphology and Google Earth

Most geomorphic processes, by definition, include movement of material at the earth’s surface, and are therefore well suited for animated representations in Google Earth. Extant geomorphic features can be difficult to observe in the field because they are large, subtle, or obscured by vegetation. Google Earth is an effective way to highlight such features before they are visited in the field, or afterwards when observations can be summarized and interpreted. By animating the time course of development of such features, geomorphic processes and concepts can be effectively revealed.

Glaciers shape the landscape as they flow, but evidence of glacier advance is often obscured by more recent features produced during glacier retreat. The last part of the Laurentide ice sheet to retreat from Vermont was a lobe of ice in the Champlain Valley. As the length and thickness of this lobe diminished, great sediment-laden rivers pouring from the glacier and from the surrounding barren landscape flowed through and alongside the ice. The Champlain Valley drains to the north, and the glacier impounded a temporary body of water called Lake Vermont which rose to a level several hundred feet higher than the current Lake Champlain. Some of the water flowing south into this lake flowed alongside the glacier and built gravelly floodplains between the newly exposed valley walls and the ice. As the glacier continued its retreat, these flat surfaces were abandoned when the river found a lower course next to the ice. Remnants of these surfaces, called kame terraces, are conspicuous features of the Champlain Valley. When the glacial rivers reached the level of Lake Vermont, they built sandy deltas into the lake. These fine-grained deposits were left high and dry when Lake Vermont eventually drained as the impounding ice retreated far enough north.

Modeling Landscape Features

In 1998, I moved into a house at the eastern edge of the Champlain Valley and began to explore the neighborhood. The landscape was dominated by the steep lower slopes of the Green Mountains, but these bedrock slopes were interrupted by dozens of flat, level terraces that appeared to be built of unconsolidated material (sand, gravel, boulders, etc.), instead of solid bedrock. I am a plant ecologist by training, not a geologist, but I began to sketch the extent and location of these flat places to see if the larger pattern held clues to their origin. The sketch maps on paper were a key element of the discovery process because the pattern of the flat areas, which are spread along miles of valley edge, was difficult to see without them. Dense forest covers most of the area and the resolution of the existing topographic maps was insufficient to reveal the subtle terraces. It is possible to identify some of the larger terraces from the air or from stereo aerial photographs, but most terrace margins and their relative heights cannot be discerned well. I assumed that no one had ever mapped these terraces before, so my map would be the first opportunity to study their landscape-level pattern in detail.

The evolving paper map allowed me to begin to reconstruct the progressive positions of the glacier margin and the associated routes of the ice-marginal river that must have created the kame terraces. It required considerable imagination to visualize the massive glacier redirecting a swollen, turbulent river along a hillside that today is three hundred feet above the valley floor. The map was good data, but to explain the complex course of events that played out over many decades and affected many square miles of hillside, it was just a start.

In 2007, I acquired a consumer GPS receiver which had two crucial features. It could produce tracklogs of walking tours by recording location coordinates at ten second intervals and the Garmin Mapsource software it came with had a menu item called “View in Google Earth.” So I could walk the margins of a kame terrace with the GPS recording, upload the tracklog to a PC using Mapsource, and then see the tracklog in Google Earth. Google Earth allowed the terrace margins to be displayed on a recent color aerial photo stretched over the three dimensional topographic surface of the study area. This digital landscape could be viewed from any angle and any height above the surface, and one could “fly” over the scene at will. This encouraged me to make digital tracklogs of all the terraces I had found. Without the tracklogs displayed, the terraces could not be discerned in the crude Google Earth topography, which is just a digital version of the mid-twentieth century USGS topographic maps. As the terraces accumulated in Google Earth, I realized that the animated movie of ice, rivers, deposition, and erosion that had been playing in my mind for several years might be successfully shared with others.

Google Earth incorporates simple drawing tools that allow lines and shapes to be placed on or above the digital landscape surface. Three-dimensional objects can be represented by extending lines from objects down to the ground surface. Far more elaborate 3-D objects can be created using the free program Google SketchUp, but all of the objects created for this project were done with the tools included in Google Earth. I used these tools to trace all the terrace margins imported from Mapsource, creating horizontal polygons in the shape of each terrace. I used the option to extend lines down to the ground surface to give each terrace a solid appearance. The resulting shapes are crude representations of the actual terraces (which do not have vertical sides, and are not all perfectly level) but provide a bold display of the overall pattern formed by the terraces.

I also used Google Earth’s drawing tools to make simple models of the glacier, Lake Vermont, other pro-glacial lakes, and meltwater rivers as I envisioned them at three different times during the formation of the terraces. This allowed the geomorphic features along a four mile stretch of hillside to be put into the context of the retreating ice margin and the associated lateral displacement of an ice-marginal river. I could now display three stages of the landscape process that had shaped my backyard 13,500 years ago.

To bring the process to life, I used the Movie Maker tool in Google Earth Pro to record flyovers of the augmented landscape at different stages in the reconstructed landform-building process. Due to the large scale of the study area there is great explanatory power when the view zooms from the regional to the local and then to a detail, for example, of a river’s route along the glacier. Google Earth allows any view of the digital landscape to be saved by “snapshotting” the view of a saved “placemark.” The program will automatically and smoothly “fly” from one placemark view to another and these single flights formed the content of most of the video clips I produced. A few dozen of these clips were edited together using Adobe Premiere Pro. By inserting cross-fades between identical landscape views depicting different stages in the process, simple animations of the landscape development could be produced.

Presenting the Results

I first presented a draft of the video after students in my class at Middlebury College spent a January day exploring the snow-covered landforms. We made multiple stops to see several key parts of the study area and were still thawing out when we piled into my office to watch the video consisting only of the silent flyovers from Google Earth. I think the students were able to more meaningfully synthesize their field observations after seeing the animated landscape. The reward was probably greatest for those students who had been working hard during the trip to make sense of the individually mundane features. I assume that the video allowed everyone to attach some additional geomorphological significance to the flat surfaces we had visited. During this field trip, we collected some new video of ourselves which was later incorporated into the final version of the video along with other footage and a narration.

For a subsequent class field trip to this area, I asked a new group of students to watch the video beforehand. By this time, a completed twelve-minute version of the video was available online. Viewing the video gave them a context for understanding what they later saw in the field and established a shared baseline of knowledge. I asked students a year later whether viewing the video before or after the field trip would have been more productive and the consensus was that before was better. The primary reason given was that the subject was sufficiently novel and obscure that every explanatory aid was welcome. Viewing the video first also allows a class to quickly address more complex issues such as the relationship between geomorphic origin and vegetation. However, some students recognized that the process of struggling to make sense of confusing field observations has pedagogical value. The video presents a compelling explanatory model, so it eliminates the need for students to assemble and test their own. Waiting until after the field trip to view the video has great potential for classes with the background and motivation to benefit from a puzzle-solving exercise.

In May 2009, Google Earth 5 was released with a new feature that allows flyover tours to be saved and played back within the program. The tour is not saved as video, but as a set of instructions that the program interprets in real time. While creating the tours, drawn objects (e.g., rivers or kame terraces) can be toggled on or off, creating simple animations. Photographs or videos can be displayed sequentially at designated places in the landscape. Narrations or music can be created and saved with a tour. This new feature offers an alternative method of sharing explanatory flyovers and animations.

Learning to save and distribute tours is easier than learning to save video clips and produce online videos and can be done with the free version of Google Earth. Without programming, tours can be embedded on Web pages where they play automatically in a window. The window is a working instance of Google Earth, so if the tour is stopped the user can interact with the digital landscape without having Google Earth installed (a free Google Earth browser plug-in is required). Tour files can also be distributed directly to users who can interact with them using Google Earth. The keyhole markup language (KML) files which encode the tours are usually small and easy to distribute to others. In addition to watching the recorded tour, users with Google Earth installed can experiment by toggling features on and off or creating their own new features. This creates the opportunity for interactive and collaborative projects. An advantage of KML tours over tours saved as video files is that it provides a view of the full resolution Google Earth landscape, not a compressed video version, and displays the most current aerial photos. Soon after I completed the video about glacier features, Google Earth updated the photo coverage of Vermont with higher quality, more recent images, instantly changing the video’s status to outdated. A primary disadvantage of distributing KML files to others is that there is less control over the viewing experience, which depends on the user’s operational knowledge of Google Earth, and settings in Google Earth (and of course, Google Earth must be installed). For examples of the tours I created, see www.fastie.net. You can also download the .kmz file for viewing in Google Earth.

Learning to view the landscape in Google Earth is fun and easy. Learning to produce and save video clips or KML tours is more of a challenge. Google’s online help and tutorials are a start, but you should plan for some trial and error if you want to produce something other than the simplest result. If there is someone on your campus who can help you get started, you might be able to climb the steepest part of learning curve in an hour. Otherwise, plan for some additional learning time. Although the required commitment is not trivial, the models and tours you create can be used year after year to give students valuable insight into geographic patterns and processes that no one has witnessed firsthand.

SmartChoices: A Geospatial Tool for Community Outreach and Educational Research

jack.dougherty@trincoll.edu — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:20:16 +0000

SmartChoices, a Web-based map and data sorting application, empowers parents to navigate and compare their growing number of public school options in metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut. A team of students, faculty, and academic computing staff at Trinity College developed this digital tool in collaboration with two non-profit urban school reform organizations: the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN) and Achieve Hartford (the city's public education foundation). While English and Spanish-speaking parents learned how to use SmartChoices through a series of hands-on workshops, my students and I simultaneously collected data to better understand the "digital divide" and factors influencing parental decision-making on school choice. Overall, our project supports two liberal arts learning goals: to deepen student interactions with members of our urban community, and to nurture student participation in creating original research for real audiences.

The idea for SmartChoices began during a conference call with community partners a few weeks before the fall 2008 semester. Marc Porter Magee from ConnCAN and I were brainstorming about a possible collaboration between his education reform group and my Cities, Suburbs, and Schools undergraduate seminar at Trinity. Building on Trinity's long-standing Community Learning Initiative, I designed this interdisciplinary seminar as a team research workshop, where we read historical and social science studies on schooling and housing and then design local research projects to test the application of research findings to metropolitan Hartford. Our region is a land of extremes: Hartford is one of the nation's poorest cities, located inside a belt that includes some of the wealthiest suburbs. A year earlier, while learning basic GIS skills, my students created thematic maps to explore city and suburban differences in educational resources and outcomes, using data provided by ConnCAN. We all sensed the power of maps, and sought to build on our relationship by going a step further.

Marc and I agreed that the expansion of public school choice would soon become the most pressing issue for Hartford parents, because each family's number of options was dramatically increasing, for two reasons. First, the Sheff v O'Neill school desegregation case created more interdistrict choices. Based on a 1996 ruling, the court mandated Connecticut to create more magnet schools (designed to attract both city and suburban students), encourage suburban districts to accept more city student transfers, and begin counting public charter and technical school students when calculating racial integration goals. Second, the Hartford Public School launched its district-wide school choice program. The district replaced neighborhood school assignment with a citywide lottery, required for all students who completed their current school's last grade level, and optional for any students who desired to change schools. Suddenly, Hartford parents who were accustomed to sending their children to the neighborhood school were surrounded with more choices, and now when their child finished elementary or middle school, they were required to submit a choice application to advance to the next grade level. All together, a typical Hartford parent of a child entering the 6th grade now faced over thirty different school options. Moreover, competition between interdistrict and district providers meant that there were two different major application processes--and a host of minor ones--each with their own application form and procedures. While public school choice was intended to improve educational opportunity, it quickly became overwhelming.

"Do you think you and your students could design a brochure to show Hartford parents their school choices?" Marc asked.

I explained that there was no way to create one printed document that showed parents their exact set of eligible choices. We needed a dynamic system to deliver the right school data--and only that data--for each family, based on their residence and child's age. First, parents wanted to see only those schools that offered their child's grade level, and these varied widely across the two hundred public schools in the metropolitan region (ranging from K-2, K-5, K-6, 3-5, 5-8, 6-8, 7-12, 9-12, and so forth). Second, the Hartford Public Schools divided the city into four zones, guaranteeing bus transportation only for students attending schools within their residential zone, provided they did not live so close that they could walk. Third, across the region, many schools were limited to enrolling students from designated attendance zones or school districts. Yet public school choice happened so fast that most Hartford parents, particularly new arrivals with limited literacy skills, had little sense of where their interdistrict and district school options were located.

"The only way we can do this is to create a Web site," I replied, "and it needs to show parents their eligible schools on a map, in relation to where they live." We agreed to cooperate on attempting to build a pilot version during the fall semester, with Trinity designing the technology and ConnCAN providing school data and community support. The fact that my graduate training had focused on history and sociology (not computer science), and that I had acquired only "advanced beginner" GIS and HTML skills during the past decade at Trinity, should have made me think twice before leaping. But I was fascinated by the idea of blending a much-needed community outreach project with a research tool to better understand how parents from different neighborhoods made school choices.

Prior to this conversation, I had read innovative research studies on parents, information, and school choice. In Washington, DC, Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider created a Web site where users could compare different public schools (traditional and charter), while researchers monitored mouse clicks and search patterns.¹ The authors found that parents using the site displayed racial preferences: when comparing two schools with comparable achievement levels, parents were more likely to drop the school with a higher percentage of black students. Later, I became aware of a related study by Justine Hastings and Jeffrey Weinstein in Charlotte-Mecklenberg, North Carolina, where researchers experimented with providing school data to parents in different paper formats.² They discovered that low-income parents who received a list of schools ranked by test scores were more likely to choose higher-performing ones than a control group which received an alphabetical list, without test data. Furthermore, Trinity economics professor Diane Zannoni, our undergraduate co-authors and I published an article that analyzed how much money suburban homebuyers were willing to pay for a comparable home on the more "desirable" side of an elementary school attendance line, and connected this trend to the growing availability of school-level data on the Internet.³

Fortunately, my Trinity colleagues and students shared in the enthusiasm and hard work to create the SmartChoices Web site. When parents type in a child's home address and grade level, the site displays all of their eligible district and interdistrict public schools on an interactive Google Map, as well as a table for sorting and comparing distance from home, racial balance, and student achievement levels. Additional links point users directly to individual school Web sites, application forms, and transportation information. David Tatem, academic computing instructional technologist, helped me to conceptualize the interactive map and school database, and provided GIS support. Undergraduate research assistants Jesse Wanzer and Nick Bacon digitized school attendance boundaries. My seminar students compiled address and demographic data for over two hundred schools in the city and nearby suburbs. Devlin Hughes concentrated on refining the user interface as a case study for her senior thesis on data visualization, with assistance from Trinity's social science data coordinator, Rachael Barlow. Another student, Christina Seda, provided the Spanish translations. Jean-Pierre Haeberly, the college's director of academic computing and an exceptionally talented programmer, developed the Web application. Based on Web 2.0 design principles, SmartChoices exists on a three-tier server architecture, which integrates the Web server (for the search page and interactive map) with the application and database servers. Asynchronous requests permit the user to initiate searches and view results without having to reload the page, as in a traditional form-based Web site. To encourage other regions to create similar Web sites, we are distributing SmartChoices code as free, open-source software upon request by email <SmartChoices@trincoll.edu>.

Figure 1. Smart Choices Web interface

Prior to our public launch, ConnCAN community organizer Lourdes Fonseca helped organize a series of focus groups to receive feedback from Hartford parents and administrators of different school choice programs. My seminar students designed interview guides and guided participants through the pilot site, while recording how users interacted with and interpreted school data on their screens. We made several revisions to make the site as user-friendly as possible for Hartford parents, including many who have little or no experience with computers. We also faced difficult choices when deciding which school-level data categories to feature, since we committed to developing a site that would fit on display screens no larger than 1024 pixels wide. School choice administrators sometimes requested revisions that would serve their particular program's needs over others, or feature promotional material. Some education officials expressed concern about direct school-to-school comparisons of test scores or student racial composition. As a result, we took the position that SmartChoices would stand as an independent project, not affiliated with any school, district, or choice program. Furthermore, we committed to reporting data obtained from public sources of information, such as the state department of education or school Web sites. By providing the most comprehensive source of public school choice information, SmartChoices has filled the role of a "consumer reports" service for public education in the Hartford metropolitan region.

After our public launch in early 2009, the Achieve Hartford local education foundation joined the project to fund research and community outreach. Our primary research questions were: Who uses SmartChoices, and how does digital information influence parental decision-making? My Trinity students and I organized a series of parent training workshops to collect both qualitative and quantitative data, and ConnCAN contracted with community organizers from another Hartford organization, the Voices of Women of Color, to assist parents at public libraries and to bring laptop computers into people's homes through school choice "house parties." Print, radio, and television media also broadcast features about the Web Site.

Who used SmartChoices, and where did they search? In our full report, we analyzed Web site statistics and found that during the five-month choice application period in 2009-10, over 3,385 distinct searches were conducted on SmartChoices. Over three-quarters of these searches were conducted for addresses in the city of Hartford, while the remainder included addresses in suburban towns and outside our coverage area. The dot distribution map illustrates the geographical spread of SmartChoices usage across urban and suburban areas. The grade levels most commonly searched were Kindergarten (16 percent) and 9th grade (14 percent), which matches the most common grade-level entry points in the system.

Figure 2. Distribution of SmartChoices searches

How did people use SmartChoices, according to Web statistics? We created a sorting feature that allowed users to organize their search results in five different categories: school name, distance from home, racial balance, test scores, and test gain over the previous year. The Web site randomized how each user's initial results were sorted, to determine which categories were most frequently selected. Among users who sorted results, the most popular categories were Distance (25 percent) and Test Goal (24 percent), with Test Gain and Racial Balance trailing behind. However, we observed that most users never sorted their results (70 percent of the 3,385 distinct searches), perhaps because they did not see the sort button, nor understood how it worked.

Rather than simply waiting for users to find and visit our site, Trinity students and I organized ten hands-on workshops (in both English and Spanish) in Hartford to train parents how to use the site, while interviewing them in depth about their decision-making process. Our sample of 93 workshop interview participants was limited to parents of children entering elementary school (grades PreK-8) in the next academic year. Each workshop participant interacted one-on-one with a trained Web site guide, in front of a computer, for about fifteen to forty minutes, and gave informed consent to be interviewed. Each guide followed a script that asked parents to list their top-choice schools (before and after using SmartChoices), and walked users through the Web site while explaining what data labels meant. About half of these interviews took place in workshops at local neighborhood schools, while the other half occurred during larger regional school choice fairs. At the neighborhood events, our most successful workshops were organized with the assistance of Hartford Public School Family Resource Aides (FRAs), who helped us arrange access to school computer labs and attract interested parents with bilingual flyers. Note that these workshops were not located at representative locations across the city (due to research design and logistical issues). Furthermore, all workshop participants were self selected, meaning they voluntarily responded to a neighborhood workshop flyer or walked up to our regional school choice fair tables. By definition, self-selected participants are not necessarily representative of the Hartford-area population at large, limiting the interpretation of our results.

SmartChoices parent workshops. Photos by Nick Lacy.

How did the SmartChoices workshop influence participants' decision-making? Before introducing the Web site, our interviewers asked a pre-workshop question: for one child in your family, what are your top choices for schools next fall? After hands-on Web searching and sorting, we asked it again as a post-workshop question. When we compared participants’ pre- and post-workshop responses for their top-choice schools, we found that the total sample divided into roughly equal thirds. About one-third changed their top choice, meaning the workshop experience led them to switch from one school to another. About one-third clarified their top choice, meaning they began with no response or one that was too vague for an application form ("the school near Walmart") but eventually selected a specific school. Finally, about one-third did not change their top choice.

For the thirty-two workshop participants who changed their top choices, we compared their initial selection to their final selection, to measure the relative influence of the four key data categories in the SmartChoices search results. To compare pre/post-workshop responses across different categories, we expressed all in common units, based on one-third of a standard deviation of the mean difference. On this scale, Test Goal (69 percent) and Test Gain (64 percent) were the most influential categories in this sample, followed by Racial Balance (47 percent). Interestingly, Distance was the least influential category in this phase of the analysis, because roughly equal portions selected new schools that were farther, closer, or a similar distance to their homes.

Does this mean that school distance from home does not matter to parents? Absolutely not. When we compared how workshop participants sorted results, we found that Test Goal and Distance were virtually tied (at 23 and 22 percent, respectively), followed by the other categories. Given that parents often make trade-offs between distance and school quality factors they value, we infer that SmartChoices helped workshop participants to identify desirable schools that were located closer to, or a similar distance from, their initial top-ranked school. In other words, we suspect that the SmartChoices map and distance calculator helped workshop participants find "good schools" (however they defined them) that they were not previously aware of.

Does increased public school choice improve education for all? SmartChoices cannot answer this policy question, because this project only considers families who seek to make a choice and self-selected to try our website. For our next research project, Diane Zannoni and I wish to conduct a spatial analysis of who does (and does not) participate in school choice, either by submitting an application or by exiting the district. We are also deeply interested in spatial research that uncovers racial and social stratification as a result of choice.

Nevertheless, the movement for public school choice has attracted multiple supporters in our politically divided nation, particularly in metropolitan Hartford. Advocates of the Sheff ruling support voluntary interdistrict magnet schools and city-suburban transfers as the most viable means to racially integrate schools. At the same time, market-oriented advocates embrace public school competition as a means to empower urban parents to exit low-performing schools and enter those more likely to reduce the achievement gap. “Choice” has become such a politically popular label in metropolitan Hartford that it appears in the name of at least three distinct entities: the Open Choice city-suburban transfer program, the Regional School Choice Office, and the Hartford Public School’s “All-Choice” initiative.

We cannot ignore the influence that the Internet has had on consumerist activity in “shopping” for public schools. Google, the ubiquitous search engine, recently reported that the category of “school comparisons” was the leading type of public data search conducted on its Web site in November 2009.⁴ In their report, Google defined "school comparisons" as any search on education from PreK to higher education, such as: "Douglas County schools" or "top law schools." Indeed, other categories might have ranked higher if Google had not broken out certain subgroups of searches, such as separating “cancer” from “health” searches in general. But the report confirms that citizen-consumers are eagerly looking to the Internet to help them make judgments about comparing the relative qualities of different educational options.

Whether or not one supports public school choice, it exists and continues to grow in our nation's urbanized areas. To participate in these application processes, families need access to reliable information to make informed decisions about public schools. To be sure, some information flows through parents’ social networks: the opinions of trusted relatives and neighbors, conversations with principals and teachers, and personal visits to schools. But other sources of information--such as student achievement, racial balance, distance from home, and program offerings--are more readily available on the Internet.

Yet access to information, and knowledge about how to search and interpret Web sites, is not uniformly distributed. The “digital divide” was more commonly discussed a decade ago, but it has not disappeared, and remains as one of the most challenging barriers in the twenty-first century knowledge-driven economy. While working on the SmartChoices project, we were struck by the difficulty of obtaining reliable, current data on the scope and size of the digital divide in the Hartford region. In 2007, the US Census Current Population Survey posed this question to a national sample: “Do you (or anyone in this household) connect to the Internet from home?” The proportion responding “Yes” who resided in the city of Hartford ranged from 34 to 55 percent, while those living in the three-county Hartford metropolitan statistical area ranged between 75 to 92 percent. The range in estimates is due to the large number of people whose responses were omitted because they answered “No” or did not respond to the initial question, “Do you access the internet from any location?” Therefore, if we include these omitted responses, the results point to the low end of the estimated range. In addition, we still lack comprehensive data on the true scope of adult literacy--particularly computer literacy--among residents of the city of Hartford, compared to the metropolitan region or state. Based on our first-hand experience with the SmartChoices parent workshops, we witnessed a wide range of computer ability between adults who self-identified as new versus regular users.

As the “SmartChoices” name clearly implies, familiarity with the World Wide Web has become a necessary ingredient to be an informed consumer of public education in Greater Hartford. The rapidly expanding (and constantly changing) set of public school options, as well as differences between competing choice providers and their eligibility guidelines, made it nearly impossible for us to communicate with parents through a paper booklet or catalog. We created SmartChoices as a dynamic Web site--with an interactive map of school locations, distance-to-home calculator, and transportation links--because we could not conceive of a way to adequately present the key information that each parent needed on paper. Furthermore, beginning in January 2010, the Hartford Public School Choice Office shifted from paper-only to Web-only applications. For families in our urban setting, learning how to navigate the Internet is not an option, but a requirement.

To be sure, digital tools like SmartChoices are only valuable to people who have access and knowledge of how to use them. In our parent workshops, my Trinity students observed significant differences between participants who had greater familiarity with computers and higher levels of education. If school choice is expected to improve public education for all, then community outreach needs to focus on novice computer users, with information literacy to help users understand and interpret key data categories (in English and other languages), as well as hands-on guidance on Web skills such as sorting data and following through with online applications. Liberal arts college students, staff, and faculty already enjoy most of these skills, and we can learn a great deal about our broader communities if we find meaningful ways to engage with them on these important issues.

Notes
1. Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider, Charter Schools: Hope or Hype? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). [return to text]
2. Justine S. Hastings and Jeffrey M. Weinstein, "Information, School Choice, and Academic Achievement: Evidence from Two Experiments," Quarterly Journal of Economics 123, no. 4 (November 2008):1373-1414, posted online 15 October 2008. [return to text]
3. Jack Dougherty, Jeffrey Harrelson, Laura Maloney, Drew Murphy, Russell Smith, Michael Snow, and Diane Zannoni, "School Choice in Suburbia: Test Scores, Race, and Housing Markets," American Journal of Education 115 (August 2009): 523-548, published online 4 June 2009. [return to text]
4."Statistics for a Changing World: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs," Official Google Blog (8 March 2010), http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html. [return to text]

NERCOMP Workshop "Integrating Critical Literacies into the Curriculum"

lisagatesphd@gmail.com — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:54:55 +0000

Registration is now open for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop: "Integrating Critical Literacies into the Curriculum"

DATE: September 16, 2010
TIME: 9:00 - 3:00 (Coffee and Registration start at 8:00)
PRICE: NERCOMP Members: $130, Non-Members: $260
Your fee includes unlimited am and pm break service and lunch.
LOCATION: Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center
Norwood, MA

DESCRIPTION: Information Literacy, Digital Literacy, Visual Literacy, Media Literacy, Spatial Literacy…

How are we defining “critical literacies” on our campuses?
What “literacy” skills do our students need to succeed as undergraduate students and graduates?
What is the “right” time to introduce/reinforce them? Is there an ideal format?
How are we assessing levels of understanding in our students and/or our programming?
Who are our campus partners in addressing literacies across the curriculum?
Where do our efforts fit within a student’s K-16 experience?

We will tackle these questions together in this mixed-format SIG including examples of existing literacy programs and group discussion. Participants should bring goals, program examples, questions and challenges from their own institutions.

For a full schedule and registration information, please go to:
http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=6282