Views from the Field /

Born-Digital Archives in the Undergraduate Classroom

Mackenzie Brooks, Washington and Lee University

Abstract

This case study describes a first-year seminar titled “Born Digital,” taught by a university library faculty member within a digital humanities curricular initiative at a small liberal arts college. This course explored the concept of “born-digital archives” and asked the following questions: How will future scholars understand the twenty-first century world of fragmented and fragile knowledge production and storage? What can creators do to ensure their content will continue to serve as record of their community? How do archivists adjust to a new paradigm where collecting decisions must be made in an instant?

The course embedded significant training in digital competencies and information literacy skills within a seminar on digital memory and archival theory. We examined issues related to the ethics of appraisal, privacy, digital obsolescence, underrepresented communities, media studies, and collective memory. A series of hands-on lab sessions gave students the technical skills to create their own web archives on the Archive-It platform. For undergraduates, a course on born-digital archives can provide a critical window into understanding modern archival practices and concerns, as well as our personal and collective responsibilities as media producers and consumers. This article addresses the lessons learned when adapting professional practices for an undergraduate audience.

Introduction

“The average lifespan of a webpage is 100 days.” This striking statistic has made its way into several popular magazine articles in the last few years. These articles, published in places like The Atlantic (LaFrance 2015) and The New Yorker (Lepore 2015) are alarmist in tone, but they do dispel the notion that the web is a place of permanence. The mourning period for Geocities may be over, but the recent shuttering of Storify, and Photobucket’s “breaking of the Internet” by blocking image links for thousands of users following a subscription restructuring (Notopoulos 2017) remind us that our content will not be available in perpetuity. Even the source of this statistic was hard to track down due to link rot.[1]

It was experiences similar to this one—the troublesome journey through dead links to verify a citation—that inspired the creation of a first-year undergraduate seminar on the topic of born-digital archives, as a way to engage students in the realities of accessing and constructing a historical record. One of the exciting outcomes of the popularity of digital humanities projects in the undergraduate classroom is the increased engagement with the material and staff of local archives and special collections. For college students born in the twenty-first century, these DH projects create a tangible connection with a past where letters, ledgers, and newspapers were the primary modes of mass communication and record keeping. But what about the artifacts of our time? We produce millions of records on a daily basis in the form of email, social media, and the detritus of a 24-hour news cycle. Will these records even survive 100 days? How will future scholars understand the twenty-first century world of fragmented, fragile, and ephemeral knowledge production and storage? What can creators do to ensure their content will survive as a record of their community? How do archivists adjust to a new paradigm where collecting decisions must be made in an instant? Digital archivists are starting to figure out how to handle the vast volumes of data at risk. Just as importantly, they are working to establish best practices for ethical collecting. Is anything on the web fair game for capture? Is it right to ignore robots.txt? For undergraduates, a course on born-digital archives can provide a critical window into understanding modern archival practices, as well as their own responsibilities as media producers and consumers.

This View from the Field will describe a first-year seminar titled “Born Digital,” taught by a university library faculty member within a digital humanities curricular initiative at Washington and Lee University.[2] Since this course was taught at the introductory level in a multi-disciplinary environment, its methods and assignments could be adapted to a variety of classes. The course embedded significant training in digital competencies and information literacy skills within a seminar on digital memory and archival theory. We began with reflective conversations on the experience of being a “digital native,” and then moved on to exploring the concepts and skills necessary to create a born-digital archive using the Archive-It platform.[3] This case study will share the lessons learned while adapting professional archival practices for an undergraduate audience.

Course Design and Framing

How do born-digital objects and records change the way we approach teaching? There is an abundance of literature on teaching with archival material and digital technologies. A search for model courses returns digital history courses similar to Shawn Graham’s “Crafting Digital History”[4] and graduate-level courses on digital preservation from library and information programs. Creating a seminar on born-digital archives required adapting these graduate-level models to an undergraduate audience unfamiliar with the professional and methodological practices of archivists and historians.

Because our course explored new territory, it was essential to find readings that exposed students to the rich scholarly conversation around archival principles without weighing them down with jargon. Several texts met these criteria and were instrumental in shaping the course. Abbey Smith Rumsey’s When We Are No More (2016) provides a high-level view of our relationship with information. From the ancient Greeks to the development of modern science, Rumsey contextualizes the modern information revolution for students who were born after the invention of Google and reminds us that “we have a lot of information from the past about how people have made these choices before” (Rumsey 2016, 7). For the nuts and bolts of digital preservation, we relied on Trevor Owens’s Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation (2017), available as a pre-print at the time of the course. Not only is Owens well respected in the digital preservation world, his writing is engaging and approachable for undergraduates. Owens’s purpose for the text, offering “a path for getting beyond the hyperbole and the anxiety of ‘the digital’ and establish[ing] a baseline of practice” (Owens 2017, 6) fit well with the goals of the course. Our final course text, The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and Present (Brügger and Schroeder 2017), was essential for modeling the way scholars make meaning from born-digital archives. Ian Milligan’s chapter, “Welcome to the web: The online community of Geocities during the early years of the World Wide Web,” contextualizes Geocities in its time and provides examples of computational approaches to web archives (Brügger and Schroeder 2017).

The learning objectives for the course, listed below, drew from overlapping frameworks.

Students will learn and be able to apply the principles of archival theory and practice.
Students will think critically about the use and creation of digital records in their own lives and communities.
Students will analyze “born digital” archives through the lens of their chosen discipline(s).
Students will practice methods for collecting and preserving born-digital archives by conducting their own digital preservation project.

These objectives gesture toward the established digital humanities learning outcomes from A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities[5] (Burdick et al. 2012), adopted by our curricular initiative. These outcomes emphasize the ability to assess information technologies and practice design thinking. The Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education served as this course’s backbone (Association of College and Research Libraries 2015).[6] Students were asked to think critically about information in every assignment. From writing an annotated bibliography to creating metadata for their web archive, students moved from savvy information consumers to thoughtful information producers. The lab exercises drew from Bryn Mawr’s Digital Competencies initiative and framework. Students developed “digital survival skills” like file structure navigation, troubleshooting, and digital writing and publishing skills like HTML and CSS (Bryn Mawr College n.d.).

Structure and Assignments

This course[7] took place during a twelve-week term in the winter of 2018. We met for ninety minutes twice a week and divided the week into discussion and lab days. Thematically, the course began with three weeks of introductions to the major concepts of the course: the idea of the “digital native,” collective memory, record keeping, and archives as institutions. The first assignment was a personal essay on these concepts and provided an initial indication of students’ comprehension and writing ability. Starting with this framing gave students an opportunity to share personal information and ultimately created a strong sense of community within the class.

In week four, we transitioned out of the personal sphere with a visit to the university library’s Special Collections and Archives department. After an introduction to the unit and its operations, students formed small groups and selected from a small pool of manuscript collections. For the second assignment, students unpacked each collection to learn about its creator, context, and provenance. The hands-on experience with archival sources readied them to consider individual archival principles like original order and respect des fonds (the idea that archival records should be grouped by creator). We even discussed the role and resources of the Special Collections and Archives department within our institutional context.

After week seven, we devoted each week to discussing one aspect of the records management lifecycle—appraisal, acquisition, arrangement and description, access, and outreach. Students worked toward their final project through a series of assignments: an annotated bibliography of existing born-digital collections and scholarly articles on a potential topic, a proposal for their born-digital collection, a process log, a short presentation, and a final reflection. Their final project was conducted through an educational partnership with Archive-It, a web archiving service. For a fee, we received 15GB of space in an Archive-It account and a live training session from an Archive-It staff member. Students selected ten websites on a topic of their choosing, from NFL protests to cryptocurrency.[8] They crawled each of their URLs to create a snapshot that would be preserved by the Internet Archive. The process log was the primary graded product to ensure that platform difficulties did not unevenly affect students.

Labs and Technical Skills

Throughout the course, we held a series of lab days to learn the technical skills necessary for the web archiving project. Lab days were relaxed and instructions were available on the course website so students could work at their own pace. Grouping students by operating system helped with peer-to-peer problem solving when technical errors occurred. On the first day, we built simple websites with HTML and CSS—essential languages for troubleshooting captured websites in Archive-It. Another lab session focused on the command line, using existing tutorials like “The Command Line Crash Course (Shaw n.d.).[9] This skill came in useful when a guest speaker led a workshop on Twarc, a command line tool for capturing social media data (specifically Twitter), created by Documenting the Now.[10] One of the most engaging lab days was spent making glitch art to complement our discussion of file fixity in digital objects. We modified images and audio by opening the files in a text editor and scrambling the content to demonstrate the fragility of digital files.

All of the labs contributed to improving computer and web literacies. Despite their reputation as digital natives, most of the first-year students did not know much about how the web worked. Working with HTML or the command line was an exciting look behind the curtain. Not only did the labs improve specific skills, they helped students become comfortable learning and troubleshooting digital tools.

Results

Students successfully achieved the goals of this course. The primary challenge from the instructor’s point of view was translating professional concepts to a first-year audience. The projects and lab activities were essential in bringing archival principles to life. The opportunity to work with manuscript collections was a highlight for many students and let them experience the realities of archival work. By using the Archive-It platform, students created something that would live beyond them and the bounds of the course. Working with their own topic was both exciting and challenging. It created a strong level of investment, but required explicit training in generating an appropriate research agenda.

Overall, most students easily met the first two learning objectives of learning archival principles and thinking critically about their own digital footprint. Student performance was uneven regarding the more analytical objectives, such as analyzing existing born-digital archives and creating their own collection. Project-based assignments were new to these first-year students, as was the emphasis on process over product. Student evaluations were positive, with most citing the value of learning about an underrepresented field and gaining a new perspective. However, from the instructor perspective, the best method of assessment would be to track the information literacy practices of the students throughout their college career. As the digital humanities curriculum initiative transitions into a digital culture and information minor, hopefully this type of assessment will be possible.

Conclusion

A course centered on archival research, whatever form it may take, is an ideal vehicle for teaching a range of scholarly practices and content areas. It is important for current students to be able to assess and understand the digital content they consume and produce every day. A course on born-digital archives opens the possibilities beyond specific manuscript collections or institutional records to anything on the web. Students held a range of opinions on the trustworthiness of the government and private institutions as preservers of the cultural record, but they all recognized the value in taking ownership of your data and preventing gaps and biases in collections. Their reflections consistently mentioned the importance of community-created and -controlled archives. Hopefully this case study inspires other instructors to make use of born-digital archives in their teaching.

Notes

[1] “The Signal,” the Library of Congress’s blog on digital stewardship, cites a Washington Post article (Ashenfelder 2011) as the source for this statistic, but their embedded link results in a 404 for an individual’s blog. Tracking down the Washington Post article in a subscription-based newspaper database indicates that the quote was attributed to Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, though no context or evidence is given.

[2] More information is available at https://digitalhumanities.wlu.edu/.

[3] Archive-It is a subscription-based web archiving service offered by the Internet Archive. The university library sponsored an “Educational Partnership” account for this course. Archive-It works with a variety of partners, including K-12 schools. They can be found at http://archive-it.org/.

[4] Available at http://site.craftingdigitalhistory.ca/.

[5] Available at http://jeffreyschnapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/D_H_ShortGuide.pdf.

[6] Available at http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.

[7] The course website is hosted on the GitBook platform and synced with the instructor’s GitHub account: https://mackenziekbrooks.gitbooks.io/dh-180-born-digital/content/.

[8] The final projects can be accessed here: https://archive-it.org/organizations/1374.

[9] Available at https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/appendixa.html.

[10] Documenting the Now is a collaborative effort to build community and tools around social media preservation. It can be accessed at https://www.docnow.io/.

Bibliography

Ashenfelder, Mike. 2011. “The Average Lifespan of a Webpage” The Signal. November 8, 2011. http://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/11/the-average-lifespan-of-a-webpage/.

Association of College and Research Libraries. 2015. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.

Brügger, Niels, and Ralph Schroeder, eds. 2017. The Web as History: Using Web Archives to Understand the Past and the Present. London: UCL Press. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1542998/1/The-Web-as-History.pdf.

Bryn Mawr College. n.d. “Digital Competencies” Accessed June 29, 2018. https://www.brynmawr.edu/digitalcompetencies.

Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, eds. 2012. Digital Humanities. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

LaFrance, Adrienne. 2015. “Raiders of the Lost Web.” The Atlantic, October 14, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/.

Lepore, Jill. 2015. “What the Web Said Yesterday.” The New Yorker, January 19, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb.

Notopoulos, Katie. 2017. “Photobucket Is Holding People’s Photos For ‘Ransom.’” BuzzFeed. July 7, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/photobucket-just-killed-a-chunk-of-internet-history.

Owens, Trevor. 2017. The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. https://osf.io/preprints/lissa/5cpjt.

Rumsey, Abby Smith. 2016. When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Shaw, Zed A. n.d. “Appendix A: Command Line Crash Course.” Learn Python the Hard Way. Accessed November 25, 2018. https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/appendixa.html.

About the Author

Mackenzie Brooks is Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian at Washington and Lee University. There, she teaches in the Digital Culture and Information minor and coordinates Digital Humanities initiatives. Her research focuses on digital pedagogy, scholarly text encoding, and metadata.

Issue Fourteen / Views from the Field

How a Digital Collaboration at Oberlin College Between Archivists, Faculty, Students, and Librarians Found Its Muse in Mary Church Terrell, Nineteenth-Century Feminist and Civil Rights Icon

Ken Grossi, Oberlin College

Alexia Hudson-Ward, Oberlin College

Carol Lasser, Oberlin College

Sarah Minion, Oberlin College

Natalia Shevin, Oberlin College

Abstract

This collaboratively authored article explains how a pedagogical partnership at Oberlin College between archivists, faculty, librarians, and students led to Digitizing American Feminisms (americanfeminisms.org), a project begun with pedagogically designed class assignments. The cooperative work between archivists, faculty and students models the synergy that can be developed in thoughtfully developed projects. The resulting website includes over thirty documentary student-created projects featuring introductory essays with transcriptions and annotations of primary materials highlighting feminist histories from the Oberlin College Archives. Demonstrations of student learning, these documentary editions also democratize access to previously unpublished and obscure materials that enhance knowledge of the diverse dimensions of First and Second Wave American feminisms. Key in this multi-year project was the rediscovery of 1884 College graduate, feminist and civil rights advocate Mary Church Terrell, whose reclamation coincided with a major gift of papers by her heirs to the Oberlin College Archives. Recovering the history of Terrell inspired students to connect past and present, stimulated a conference on activism for alums and students, and helped move the College to rename its main library in her honor as it looks ahead to a digital future that will connect and empower diverse learners, faculty, archivists, librarians, and all those interested in social change.

Sixty years after her death, social justice activist and 1884 Oberlin College graduate Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) stood at the center of a team of archivists, faculty, librarians, and students at her alma mater. Inspired by Terrell, we engaged in a series of collaborative projects that demonstrated the potential of digital history to rewrite dominant narratives and inspire activist interventions on our campus and beyond. Born to freed slaves in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell fashioned an illustrious career as founding president of the National Association of Colored Women, charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and relentless leader in campaigns for women’s suffrage and racial equality. Although Terrell herself never encountered “digital humanities,” she became central to our cooperative work on the student-created web-published document projects that comprise Digitizing American Feminisms: Projects from Oberlin College, and she inspired further interventions for social justice on our campus and beyond. This “View from the Field” describes the collaborative digital archival assignment crafted for an Oberlin College history class and its afterlife, including the naming of Oberlin’s Main Library for Mary Church Terrell.

Our project originated in Fall 2012, when archivist Ken Grossi and Professor Carol Lasser attended a workshop on “Teaching the Archives,” sponsored by the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges. Together, Ken and Carol designed an assignment for Carol’s history course on American feminisms in which students would transcribe items in the Oberlin College Archives and create “mini-editions”—small documentary projects presenting both digitized images and their transcriptions to make these materials widely available in digital form to public audiences. This assignment built on Carol’s earlier experiences helping students understand the relationship of past and present by creating “How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831-1861?” for the website Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. In this assignment, Ken saw the opportunity to publicize and make widely available materials from lesser-known and underutilized but significant collections.

Archival research is the heart of Carol’s history pedagogy. She places the exploration of primary materials at the center of a “history compass,” which she asks students to use to develop their historical thinking. Specifically, the compass has three intersecting axes:

Axis “A” runs between seeming opposite reasons for why we study history: to recover the pastness of the past and to recognize the presentness of the past. Axis “B” connects the contrasting poles of historical causation: contingency, with its emphasis on free will and individual agency, and determinism, with its emphasis on the role played by forces beyond individuals’ control. Finally, axis “C” stretches between divergent methodological positions: the need for research in primary sources to locate evidence and establish historical facts and the need to construct historical interpretations in dialogue with other scholars. (Kornblith and Lasser 2009, 2–3).

Figure 1. Image of a “History Compass” with “Axes of Historical Analysis” at center and six spokes with arrows extending outward: “Contingency,” “Constructed Interpretations,” “Presentness of Past,” “Determinism,” “Factual Evidence,” and “Pastness of Past.”

As an archivist, Ken carefully preselected collections with diverse, accessible, and engaging materials, and flagged points of interest. For example, in the Frances Walker-Slocum Papers, he showed students the program for her pathbreaking 1976 piano recital of African American music at Oberlin. Ken also shared the courtship letter Ruth Alexander wrote to her future first husband describing her efforts to capture a porcupine on film, which enticed students to pursue a project on this multi-dimensional woman of extraordinary drive. Another team took great interest in an 1860 letter from Jamaica written by single missionary Lucy Woodcock to her brother. This focused engagement with specific documents was crucial given the time limits of the busy semester, during which students were also exploring the many interwoven narratives of American feminisms.

The archival assignment was broken into several parts to scaffold the learning goals that develop students’ historical thinking. Each student was assigned to a research team to produce their “mini-edition” based on a particular collection in the Oberlin College Archives. Composed of three students, each team skimmed collections in a special archival session at the beginning of the term and identified their preferred collection. Each individual was responsible for transcribing 500–2,000 words from a particular document or series of documents, which entailed slow, careful reading. In addition, each student produced a heading for their document(s) with identifying information (creator, date, place, type of document), and a 150–300 word introductory note underscoring the importance of context. Every document required appropriate annotations to identify elements that might be new to readers. Each team also cooperatively produced an introduction to their mini-edition, about 500–1,500 words in length, explaining the project’s overall significance and demonstrating their ability to interpret the past. Finally, each group had to produce a bibliography, which highlighted how present interpretations are built on past constructions. Grappling with unfamiliar people, phrases, and ideas, students learned to analyze the distance between past and present.

After Ken conducted an introductory session on archival research methods, students returned regularly to the archives to receive further one-on-one assistance in navigating their collection and related resources. They learned to use finding guides, identify sources and citations for footnotes, and manage digital versions of scanned archival documents. Many students made particular use of the special Monday evening hours at the archives, scheduled to accommodate their hectic days.

Ken and Carol noted appreciatively that students improved their efforts when their assignments could be read by a general audience far beyond their classroom. Yet, while excellent, the completed student projects did not always meet the standards for digital publications on a scholarly website. To improve the quality of these mini-editions, Ken and Carol used local Mellon grants targeted at digital projects plus important supplements from Oberlin College to hire trios of student assistants, primarily recruited from the class, in the summers of 2015 and 2016. As the student assistants improved the quality of these digital mini-editions by incorporating new documents, additional visuals, and even sound recordings, they refined their historical thinking skills and developed editorial expertise. One student focused on the digital layout of our project, eventually guiding us toward the use of WordPress, preferred for its appearance and functionality, especially the ease with which Word documents could be migrated to its platform.

Figure 2. Homepage for Digitizing American Feminisms.

Through their work on Digitizing American Feminisms, the student assistants refined their historical analysis skills. For example, one team of student assistants curated and analyzed the correspondence between antebellum Oberlin African American alumna Lucy Stanton Day and the American Missionary Association. In the correspondence, Day and the association members debated her suitability to serve them at the end of the Civil War. The team of students teased meaning out of cryptic exchanges and came to appreciate the vocabulary of the past on its own terms (Hoak et al. 2015). Another group of students analyzed the courtship letters between early Oberlin students James H Fairchild and Mary Kellogg. The students were horrified by sentences revealing abolitionists’ unreflective participation in racialized culture. Through their analysis of these letters, the students grappled with language and context, eventually coming to terms with the distance between—and proximity of— past and present (Kummer-Landau et al. 2015). The students focusing on Frances Walker Slocum, Oberlin’s first tenured female faculty member of color, pointed out the heartbreaking contradiction that she was shunned by other women teaching in the conservatory, even as the Women’s Movement came into its own (Kummer-Landau et al. 2016).

In February 2015, Oberlin students Sarah Minion, Natalia Shevin, and Michaela Fouad connected past and present through their work on Mary Church Terrell, applying her quest for social justice to current struggles. As Natalia and Sarah later reflected,

Four months before we began our research, in November 2014, prosecutors in Ferguson, Missouri, had chosen not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown, which reignited national Black Lives Matter protests. On our campus, Black students made myriad demands on the College (Stocker 2014). As we joined protests in Oberlin and Cleveland, we were also making our way through Terrell’s then-modest materials in the Oberlin College Archives. Almost immediately, we saw how experiences of racism like those we now witnessed at school and in national headlines had, in earlier times, motivated Terrell’s life-long pursuit of a more just world, especially for African American women. Discovering, selecting, transcribing, and digitizing Terrell’s papers at the Oberlin College Archives brought her with us into the present at a critical moment. Terrell became for us at once a testament to the ambitious spirit of Oberlin and a guide for who we must strive to be as students, administrators, faculty, staff, and alumni.

When we pored over Terrell’s files, we noticed, stuck between her letters and manuscripts, the business card of Russell Thomas Edwards, a lobbyist in Washington D. C. While Edwards and his relationship to Terrell remain unclear, the phrase he composed in jaunty, deliberate script across the front of his card became our inspiration for understanding Terrell’s tenacity: “You can’t keep her out.” It served both as a warning to all who attempted to silence Terrell in her relentless challenges to institutional barriers that obstructed the advancement of African Americans and women, and as an acknowledgement of her accomplishments in doing exactly that. It spoke to the many ways in which Terrell seized access to the very institutions that tried to keep her—and her commitment to racial and gender justice—out.

Figure 3. Introduction to March Church Terrell project on Digitizing American Feminisms website.

In an effort to replicate for our readers our own experiences in the physical archive we used Edwards’ words to title our mini-edition (Fouad et al. 2015). We drew documents from different boxes and different collections to tell our story of Terrell’s confrontation with Oberlin College administrations, as well as with local and federal policy-making agencies. We explored the flexibility of the digital space to construct a coherent narrative from disparate documents, allowing us to highlight Terrell’s simultaneously compassionate and critical relationship to her alma mater. Terrell honored the place that Oberlin College occupied in her own life story and in abolitionist history, but, at the same time, held administrators accountable for its subsequent “back-sliding” on racial justice (Terrell 1914). To allow readers to see this for themselves, we transcribed each document in our project in full. Yet we acknowledge our influence on the narrative through our selection, interpretation, and authoring of introductions to the documents.

We hope her life and words, presented in our digital exhibit, will continue to inform bold progress at Oberlin College and to inspire us as we strive to be active alumni and citizens.

Sarah and Natalia continue to honor Terrell’s legacy—to be unyielding and courageous in the necessary work for social justice.

Their digital work had yet further repercussions on our campus. In a remarkable twist of fate, just after the completion of this class project, Alison Parker, professor of history at the College at Brockport, SUNY, at work on her scholarly biography of Mary Church Terrell, reached out to connect Oberlin students and faculty with Terrell’s heirs Raymond and Jean Langston. In her conversations with the Langstons, Parker emphasized the importance of Terrell’s archives to students, faculty, and staff at Oberlin, and the Langstons chose to donate a number of Terrell’s papers, which remained in their possession. This gift then inspired collaboration between Oberlin’s Africana Studies Program, chaired by Professor Pam Brooks, and the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Program, which Carol then chaired, resulting in a Spring 2016 conference entitled “Complicated Relationships: Mary Church Terrell’s Legacy for 21st Century Activists.”[1] Joined by the Departments of History and Comparative American Studies, the Library, the Alumni Association, the Oberlin Alumni Association Of African Ancestry, and others, this celebration of the “homecoming” of Terrell’s papers brought together scholars, students, and alumni to explore our histories and our futures. Thinking with Mary Church Terrell, the conference pondered how she could help us understand engagement, respectability, and activism in the digital age. We asked what Terrell’s synthesis of pragmatic and strategic approaches to advancing civil rights and suffrage could teach us about approaching social justice work today.

Mary Church Terrell lingers on the Oberlin campus. In July 2016, newly appointed Director of Libraries Alexia Hudson-Ward could not understand why, as she arranged her books in her spacious office, one volume, Mary Church Terrell’s autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World, kept tumbling off her shelves. As Oberlin’s first African American and second woman library director, Alexia was deeply impacted by Terrell’s 1896 admonition to pursue “the acquisition of knowledge and…the cultivation of those virtues which make for good” (Terrell 1898, 8). Soon Alexia learned of a movement on campus to honor Terrell’s legacy by renaming the Main Library after her. To her great joy—and with support of the president, key administrators, students, and faculty—the board of trustees voted to approve the Mary Church Terrell Main Library.

In preparation, Oberlin’s librarians rolled out a further digital initiative, Mary Church Terrell: An Original Oberlin Activist. Raymond and Jean Langston gifted additional Terrell papers to the archives during the naming ceremony. Considered together, these collaborative efforts to recover the voices and visions of former Oberlin activists underscore how digital technologies can help shape historical memory.

Notes

[1] The full list of speakers and sponsors can be found at
https://calendar.oberlin.edu/event/complicated_relationships_mary_church_terrells_legacy_for_21st_century_activists#.W7kJeRNKim3.

Bibliography

Fouad, Mickaela, Sarah Minion and Natalia Shevin, eds. 2015. “You Can’t Keep Her Out”: Mary Church Terrell’s Fight for Equality in America. Accessed December 12, 2018. http://americanfeminisms.org/uncategorized/you-cant-keep-her-out-mary-church-terrells-fight-for-equality-in-america-1911-1949/

Hoak, Lisa, Dan Quigley, and Essie Weiss-Tisman, eds. 2015. “I Shall Have Your Sympathy, If Your Judgment Refuses Me Your Support”: Lucy Stanton Day, the American Missionary Association, and the Politics of Respectability (1864). Accessed December 12, 2018. http://americanfeminisms.org/uncategorized/i-shall-have-your-sympathy-if-your-judgment-refuses-me-your-support-lucy-stanton-day-the-american-missionary-association-and-the-politics-of-respectability/

Kornblith, Gary J. and Carol Lasser. 2009. “Introduction: Reflections on Textbooks and Teaching.” In Teaching American History: Essays Adapted from the Journal of American History, 2001–2007, edited by Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.

Kummer-Landau, Eve, Kasey Ulery, and Joanna Wiley, eds. 2015. “You Will See With What Freedom I have written”: The Courtship Correspondence of James H. Fairchild and Mary F. Kellogg. Accessed December 12, 2018. http://americanfeminisms.org/you-will-see-with-what-freedom-i-have-written-the-courtship-correspondence-of-james-h-fairchild-and-mary-f-kellogg/

Kummer-Landau, Eve, Jenny Sledge, and Kasey Ulery, eds. 2016. “Frances Walker-Slocum’s Brilliance and Advocacy: Bringing Black Classical Composers to the Forefront of Oberlin Conservatory.” Accessed December 12, 2018. http://americanfeminisms.org/frances-walker-slocums-brilliance-and-advocacy-bringing-black-classical-composers-to-the-forefront-of-oberlin-conservatory/

Terrell, Mary Church to Henry Churchill King, January 26, 1914, Papers of Henry Churchill King, Oberlin College Archives, Recor Group 2/6, Box 72. Accessed December 12, 2018. http://americanfeminisms.org/ayou-cant-keep-her-out-mary-church-terrells-fight-for-equality-in-america/document-2-segregation-in-oberlin-college-dormitories/

Stocker, Madeline. 2014. “Students Fight for Academic Leniency.” The Oberlin Review, December 12, 2014.

Stocker, Madeline. 2014. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Students Protest Systemic Racism, Police Violence.” The Oberlin Review, December 5, 2014.

Terrell, Mary Church. 1898. The Progress of Colored Women: An Address Delivered before the National American Women’s Suffrage Association at the Columbia Theater, Washington, D. C., February 18, 1898, on the Occasion of its Fiftieth Anniversary. Washington, DC: Smith Brothers.

About the Authors

Ken Grossi is Oberlin College Archivist and a member of the Advisory Board of Project STAND: Student Activism Now Documented. He provides instructional sessions, presentations, and research assistance in support of the use of primary source materials for teaching, research, and scholarship.

Alexia Hudson-Ward is the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries for Oberlin College and Conservatory. Ms. Hudson-Ward holds an M.L.I.S. from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. degree in English Literature and African American Studies from Temple University, and she is currently a Ph.D. student in the Managerial Leadership in the Information Professions program at Simmons College.

Carol Lasser, Emerita Professor of History at Oberlin College taught and published on nineteenth-century American history and women’s history before retiring in 2017. She is, most recently, joint author, with Gary Kornblith of Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio (Louisiana State University Press, 2018).

Sarah Minion graduated from Oberlin College in 2017 with majors in Politics and Comparative American Studies. Interested in the nexus between grassroots community organizing and meaningful policy change, she currently works at the Vera Institute of Justice.

Natalia Shevin is an early childhood educator in New York City. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2017 and recently published a document collection about Mary Church Terrell in the online journal, Women and Social Movements in the United States.

Student writing prompt that reads: "Our past, undoubtedly, influences our future. Looking back at your past, was there any experience (physically, emotionally, mentally) that greatly impacted the kind of student you are today? What was the nature of this experience; was it bad, good, embarrassing, etc.? Try your best to reconstruct that experience. If proven to be difficult, use your imagination and develop an idea similar to that experience - draw from that idea, and construct an essay around that thought. Paint a map for your readers, who will also be witnessing this journey with you."

Issue Fourteen / Views from the Field

“Diving Into the Wreck”: (Re)Creating the Archive in the First Year Writing Classroom

Daisy Atterbury, The Graduate Center CUNY

Maxine Krenzel, The Graduate Center CUNY

Abstract

“I came to explore the wreck,” Adrienne Rich begins in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” and tumbles to the depths of her questions about efficacy—of speaking, of writing, and of teaching—during a time when students activists shut down campuses across the country, striking for anti-racist education policies from curriculum design to admissions. With a desire to connect our students at Brooklyn and Queens College with the history of student activism at CUNY, we developed a semester long peer-peer writing exchange to take place between our composition classes where our students developed and exchanged writing prompts inspired by Rich’s archival teaching material. By having our students document and record the unfolding of their written exchange, we argue that this type of collaborative project offers a new way of conceiving how participants in a classroom can build, envision, and record new ways of learning. As every classroom leaves behind an archive of writing, notes, and lesson plans, we ask, what do we do with the written materials we and our students leave behind, the materials that signal the embodied work of building a space of learning? How can the work that students leave behind inspire and enact its own unique pedagogy? This paper will present the unfolding of our students’ writing exchange, ultimately demonstrating that the archive of materials left behind by Rich and our own project can further inspire students and instructors to question what is possible while living and working in the ever-shifting space of the writing classroom.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

-Adrienne Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck”(2013, 22)

Figure 1. The image above shows a writing prompt created by a first year writing student at CUNY for the intra-classroom writing exchange between Brooklyn and Queens College.

“I came to explore the wreck,” Adrienne Rich begins her poem, and tumbles to the depths of her questions about efficacy—of speaking, writing, and teaching—during a time when student activists shut down campuses across the country, striking for antiracist education policies from curriculum design to admissions. When, as instructors of writing at Queens College and Brooklyn College, CUNY, we realized that we’d independently assigned our first-year writing classrooms selections from Rich’s recently published archive of teaching materials, we knew that beyond reading and analyzing her writing exercises, syllabi, or notes, our students would need to produce an archive of teaching materials of their own. We wondered, what could the process of recording and collecting their own work teach our students about the archive itself?

Designed as a collaboration between our students, ourselves, and Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials from Basic Writing at City College, we created an intra-classroom writing exchange in Spring 2018 which drew on the recent publication, ‘What We Are Part Of’: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974, (Parts I & II), published by Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative in 2013. The project involved a total of forty-nine students, twenty-five at Queens and twenty-four at Brooklyn; half of the twenty-four Brooklyn College students were in CUNY’s SEEK (Search For Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) Program. Working simultaneously with other primary documents circulating during Adrienne Rich’s time at CUNY, our classes used digital file-sharing technology to eventually create an archive of their own writings. While discussing that no archive is ever complete–that any written record is a reconstruction of a lived context–we approached the archive as an evolving and contingent pedagogical map. Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck” was an important locus for this conversation because of the ways we were able to evoke the poem in the classroom as a living archive in a critically contingent digital space such as PennSound. Both classes listened to audio recordings hosted on UPenn’s poetry archive, giving students the chance to hear a recording of Adrienne Rich reading “Diving into the Wreck” at Stanford in the 1970s. The resonance of the poem’s themes in our own classrooms emphasized how the archive is kept alive and determined by the spaces in which it is contained. Ultimately, this allowed students to envision themselves as doing the work of both institutional critique and self archiving.

Tracing the Archive through CUNY’s History of Teacher & Student Activism

Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, published by the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, publishes “extra-poetic” material such as correspondence, journals, notes, transcriptions of letters and syllabi and pedagogical residue related to New American Poetry. Lost & Found “finds” the archive in sites which concretely include personal and institutional collections, raw materials gathered by editors, in interviews with living writers and selections from their material records, documents which circulate among poets, scholars, educators and fans, and in recirculated volumes which find their homes in collections, in libraries and in the classroom. More abstractly, the project locates the archive in person-to-person contact, verbal and non-quantifiable exchange, affective registers and especially in friendship.

The extent to which the classroom and the archive are considered together in the Lost & Found project cannot be understated. The publication collects pedagogical materials from a generation of poet educators teaching at CUNY in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Center for Humanities curates suggested groupings on their website for contemporary educators engaged in the building of syllabi for courses across CUNY and beyond with themed collections such as “Feminist Practice and Writing”; “Teaching Pedagogies/Methodologies”; “Resistance”; “Friendship and Politics”; “Radical Poetics”; “Queer Poetics,” and more.

Series IV’s “What We Are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974, Adrienne Rich (Parts I & II), collects the material traces of poet Adrienne Rich’s teachings at City College, and the series’ pedagogical focus continues with Series VII’s publication of investigations into other CUNY poets and educators: June Jordan: ‘Life Studies,’ 1966-1976, Audre Lorde: I teach myself in outline, Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha, and Toni Cade Bambara: “Realizing the Dream of a Black University” & Other Writings (Parts I & II).

In the volume we introduced to our CUNY classrooms, we discussed how the notes, syllabi, and writing assignments created by Adrienne Rich exist not only as a record of poetic inquiry and pedagogical theory that Rich engaged with while teaching at City College, but also as a testament to the relationships formed through Rich’s commitment to deploying the “classroom” as a performative space in which writing, protest, and embodied action intersected. In designing an assignment sequence of our own, we noted the contingency inherent to the notion of the “classroom” for Rich: with classes closed frequently during the period due to student strikes and institutional flux, letters exchanged in the mail and individual meetings off-campus became the learning environments for Rich’s composition students.

(Dis)Locating the Classroom

The ontological designation that comes with naming helps us understand that Rich often called the classroom into being through an act of naming alone: to declare an exchange a “classroom” makes it so, whether in a basement cafeteria or by way of the U.S. Postal Service. In fact, where Rich locates the classroom is as important as how and where she dislocates it, for to her the classroom is also “cell–unit–enclosed & enclosing space in which teacher & students are alone together / Can be a prison cell / commune / trap / junction–place of coming-together / torture chamber”(Rich 2013, vol. 1, 15). In our own writing exchange, the use of file-sharing technology facilitated the exchange of student writing outside and between our two classrooms. Each classroom was able to create a folder of student work in Dropbox that functioned as an online dossier. So while our classrooms were separated across two different physical campuses, our students’ works were collected in this temporary digital classroom.

Printout: Notes, Statements, & Memos on SEEK 1969–1972. Introductory: What we are a part of. Classroom as cell—unit—enclosed & enclosing space in which teacher & students are alone together. Can be prison cell, commune, trap, junction—place of coming-together, torture chamber. But also part of much bigger nationwide cultural revolution: "Compensatory" education increasingly important aspect of "higher" education. a) movement for social change—break down false barriers of class & color to make all education truly open to all people who want it. b) movement for educational reform—such programs are surely going to effect changes in nature of teaching at all levels. c) At present, we are involved in THE key area of university teaching new territory—few if any proven "methods". Many inherited prejudices & rigidities stand in our way. a) in the educational hierarchy which has a vested interest in old methods. b) in students who have been taught that the classroom is something apart from "life" except that it will eventually either help you or prevent you from getting paycheck—are unaccustomed to relating classroom experience to larger whole.

Figure 2. Image from Adrienne Rich, “What We are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974 ed. Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, erica kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev and Wendy Tronrud, (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Series IV, 2013), 15.

In a memo on SEEK from 1969 or 1970 (exact date unknown), Rich goes on to suggest that the classroom is “also part of much bigger nationwide cultural revolution,” elaborated as such

a. movement for social change–break down false barriers of class & color to
make all education truly open to all people who want it b. movement for educational reform–such programs are surely going to effect changes in nature of teaching at all levels […]. (Rich 2013, vol. 1, 15).

To locate the classroom in the exchange between teacher and student and simultaneously in the nationwide cultural revolution is to bring politics to the classroom and the classroom to the world. Rich knew that to teach in the classroom was to engage the world from close proximity, a paradox because such engagement allowed her to tap into much more far-reaching social and political engagements than she’d found through poetry alone.

CUNY Students and the Archive

Focusing on Rich’s Writing Exercises, the first written component of the assignment sequence asked students to respond to a “Dream Course” exercise in which Rich prompted her students with the following:

Writing exercises drawn from various classes 1969–1974: "Write a description of a course you would like to take some day—on any subject, or covering any kind of material. Talk about how you feel this material could best be taught, and what you would hope to be doing in the course. (It might be film-making, writing, history, some technical skill, contemporary issues, art, etc.) Talk about how you'd like this course to be run, under what conditions you would most enjoy and profit from it—how much classroom time how much reading and writing, how much individual work with a teacher, field trips, etc. If you know books you would like to be reading in such a course, name them, telling why you chose them. Also tell why this particular course would seem valuable to you, what you hope to gain from it for your life."

Figure 3. Image from Adrienne Rich, “What We are Part Of”: Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974 ed. Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, erica kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, and Wendy Tronrud, (Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative Series IV, 2013), 7–8.

This first part of the assignment sequence asks students to put themselves in Rich’s classroom and imagine how the stakes of writing changed when the campus was transformed by protests. Our students were asked to read the “5 Demands” distributed in 1969 by a group of Black and Puerto Rican students at City College asking for equal representation and anti-racist admissions processes, as well as flyers, pamphlets, and notes that circulated across CUNY. Some of these materials can be found in the CUNY Digital History Archive, an online archive that collects digitized materials from CUNY’s history beginning in 1847 with the creation of the Free Academy in New York City and continuing to the present moment. To help students conceptualize their relationship to wider CUNY history, the CDHA offers a rich entry into the history of CUNY’s infrastructure, policies, and impact as a public institution, a history that implicates each student and determines their experience of education in the present. For instance, in order to access the “5 Demands,” students had to locate a link titled the “Creation of CUNY–Open Admissions Struggle” from a longer timeline, which ushered them to a page presenting wider archival materials from the late 1960s (oral histories, articles from student newspapers, and faculty memos). The CDHA’s Project History, which we also explored in the classroom setting, emphasizes that the CHDA emerged out of “gaps in the knowledge of CUNY faculty, students, staff, and alumni about that history,” a mission that resonated with our class’ focus on the archive as a means of generating engagement in the present with activism in the past.

Typewritten list of demands and justifications, continued. Demand 5: That All Education Majors be Required to take Black and Puerto Rican History and the Spanish Language. Followed by a summary of the events of the April 1969 City College occupation.

Figure 4. Unknown, “Five Demands,” CUNY Digital History Archive, accessed September 26, 2018, http://cdha.cuny.edu/items/show/6952.

The next component of the assignment sequence had students compose their own writing prompts to be exchanged through the same Dropbox folder with a student at a different campus. Giving students the option to use the Dream Course they designed as inspiration for their exercise, we randomly assigned partners to students at Queens and Brooklyn Colleges. Two weeks later, after our students received their completed assignments, each class discussed their initial reactions to their partners’ responses and to the assignment sequence more broadly. Finally, our students reflected on their experience on their own and turned in a portfolio of the whole exchange, including a final reflection essay.

Documenting the Present

The exchange took place in a dialogic space in which students used their own assignment to deepen their understanding of Adrienne Rich’s pedagogy as emerging out of a moment when students were calling their education into question. After discussing the “5 Demands,” current Brooklyn and Queens students prompted their partners to speak about contemporary debates including discussions around tuition-free higher education. One student wrote to his partner:

Writing Prompt: "The topic of tuition, free tuition, how high or low tuition should be, is constantly being discussed by students, professors, institutions, as well as law makers, and politicians. For this assignment you are asked to give your take on this debate. What do you believe you should be paying for a degree? Should students who cannot afford College be forced into taking out loans that will take them years to pay off? Be sure to not only discuss your opinion but why this will be most beneficial for everyone."

Figure 5. The above image shows a student prompt created for the writing exchange.

In asking each other to use writing as means of interrogating the wider education system in their current moment, these students performed—and, in turn, affirmed—continuities between the historical conditions of Rich’s archive and the present moment. Linking student activism in the late 1960s to debates around Free Tuition at CUNY in early 2018, another student used the assignment to prompt questions about education and access:

Writing Prompt: "Write a 1-2 page response, size 12 Times New Roman, double spaced. Describe what would your life be like if you did not have a college education and in what ways would it affect your life as it is now. Explain and give examples on how your attitude towards education would be and how would you view people who do not have the privilege to have an education."

Figure 6. The above image shows a student prompt created for the writing exchange.

Adrienne Rich’s Writing Exercises are opportunities for “reflection and action,” each assignment prompting students to tease out a “relationship to his [her/their] world, to his identity, to his sense of time and space, his trust in and suspicion of others, his ways of identifying others” (Rich 2013, vol. 1, 30) By designing their own writing prompts and then documenting the unfolding of an epistolary exchange, students came to a new way of conceiving of how participants in a classroom can build, envision, and also leave a record of the work that can move beyond the space and time of a single classroom.

Remarking on the experience of working with partners they have never met in person, a student at Brooklyn College observed that the structure of the assignment performs the process of community building and activism: “[The exchange] could be seen as a performance from Adrienne Rich’s notes on teaching…it could resemble the strike from the 70s and us having to always engage even with students we have not interacted with.” During the university-wide strike, solidarity meant connecting students from different CUNY institutions through a circulation of flyers, memos, and other written material; community was created through shared embodied demonstrations and exchanges across CUNY’s disparate campuses. As this student points out, this project forged connections between students from Queens and Brooklyn, which helped students feel embedded in CUNY, a public university comprised of twenty-five campuses across New York City’s five boroughs. Now as the complexity of our students’ exchange is embodied in—and reduced to—a folder of written documents, our students experienced how the archive is always incomplete in so far as it is only a fragment of a dynamic and living context; furthermore, the archive is always changing as it is part of an ongoing dialogue between the moment of its creation and the work it inspires today.

Next Steps

When we envision future iterations of this assignment, we realize we as instructors need to account for how the habits and codes we used to relate to students influenced the structure of the exchange. As one student suggests, allowing students to contact each other on their own terms—rather than through the instructors—would emphasize the importance of writing for one another rather than depending on the instructors’ authority. Beyond putting students in direct contact with one another in both public and private platforms for exchange, we conceptualize a means of engaging a wider public by collaborating more directly with existing digital platforms such as Lost & Found, CDHA, and PennSound. Since these public archives served as key pedagogical material and framing devices for students, we envision the next steps of this project as not just engaging with but contributing to their form and content. Projects that allow students to engage with the historical record through a practice of self-archiving challenge us to restructure existing hierarchies and rethink where and how learning takes place. By envisioning a type of study rooted in investigating and enacting the process of building an archive, this project produces an immaterial space within the university where students shift the power and become the interlocutors for each other.

It is in this not-yet-mediated space of connectivity and exchange that we were able to honor and continue the work of CUNY’s student-activists; it is here that we can build new archives of learning in and beyond the classroom, to “reexamine all that we’ve been doing, try untested things, put ourselves on the line, be willing to take risks” (Rich 2013, vol. 1, 16).

Bibliography

Rich, Adrienne. 1973. Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. 1st ed. New York: Norton.

Rich, Adrienne. 2013. “What We Are Part Of.” In Teaching at CUNY: 1968-1974, vol. 1–2, ed. Iemanja Brown et al. New York: Lost and Found.

Lost & Found. n.d. “About Lost & Found.” Accessed June 15, 2018. https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found/about-lost-and-found.

About the Authors

Marguerite Daisy Atterbury is a writer and doctoral student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research centers on 20/21st C. poetry with an interest in gender, race and coloniality. She is the co-director of NM Poetics, an annual summer program founded in 2010 to support conversation around aesthetics and politics in northern New Mexico. Her work engages audiences through various media including film, installation and performance as well as more traditional outlets of production and publication. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Maxine Krenzel is a doctoral student in English at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her research interests are in composition-rhetoric theory, focusing on the history and pedagogy of first year writing programs, as well as feminist theory and autobiography. She teaches writing, literature, and ESL courses at Brooklyn College.

Issue Fourteen / Views from the Field

Teaching Colonial Translations Through Archives: From Ink and Quill to XML (Or Not)

Allison Margaret Bigelow, University of Virginia

Abstract

There is a rich body of work on colonial archives, but little consensus about how to use them in the classroom. What is the right level of complexity to introduce? What is a manageable assignment structure in an undergraduate course? In this essay, I present four experiments in teaching an upper-division seminar in which students translate colonial-era materials from Special Collections for publication on the Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA). I have taught the class in different institutional contexts, twice at small liberal arts college (listed in three departments) and twice at large research university (listed in one department). In one semester, we translated a text together. In other semesters, students selected portions of rare books or manuscripts that they thought would enhance the scholarly mission of EADA. This essay explains the course structure and assignment structure of the seminar as I have changed it over time. I conclude by assessing where the class has succeeded, where it has failed, and what I can do differently as I teach students to think critically about the nature of information, present and past.

Background

Many of the new insights and much of the energy animating colonial studies comes from our archival research. Students are often eager to work with rare materials and to share unique aspects of their university’s collections with wider audiences, although even advanced undergraduates may not have the skills in early modern language, paleography, and archival protocols required for original research. In this essay, I explain the design and implementation of a seminar in which third- and fourth-year students in Spanish worked in teams to translate a handful of texts from Special Collections for the Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), a free, open-access repository of texts published in or about the Americas from 1492 to 1898. In this way, students learn about colonial archives by approaching them as public-facing, meaning-making sites of translation, interpretation, and textual editing, and by remediating print materials from the archives into annotated translations.

Assignment Sequence

Beginning

We begin the semester by asking students to analyze passages related to translators, interpreters, and message-shaping go-betweens in texts from the early Americas. By plotting the movements of Admiral Cristóbal Colón ([1492–1503] 2011, 63-93) on Google Maps, students visualized the ways indigenous informants shaped the movements of Spanish imperial agents (Figure 1). In this way, I take a familiar practice (close reading of literary passages) and use it to destabilize concepts that students thought they knew: empire, power, language.

Figure 1. Map of Colón’s movements from 15 October–12 November 1492.

In weeks two to six, we practice translation with hands-on exercises from the primary texts. In a Tuesday/Thursday class, I ask students to translate a passage from Tuesday’s reading, such as Colón’s finding “beautifully deformed trees” ([1492–1503] 2011, 69) or Cabeza de Vaca’s report of same-sex marriage ([1542–1555] 2011, 173). We review their translations in class on Thursday, debating the advantages and disadvantages of “deformed,” “different,” and “diverse” as translations of “están tan disformes de los nuestros” and analyzing the connotations of “idolatry,” “devilishness,” and “sin” for “vi una diablura.” To trace lexical emergences and common usages, we consult databases like the Real Academia Española’s Corpus diacrónico del Español (CORDE, http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html) and Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográfico de la Lengua Español (NTLLE, http://ntlle.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle). As students compare translations in their groups, they appreciate how team members approach the task of translation in different ways and how small lexical variations impact the tone and meaning. This is one of the most challenging aspects of collaborative translation: each translator writes in her or his own voice, yet the group must find a shared tone that respects the historical tenor of the source text. To complement these in-class workshops, I sometimes assign theories and methods of translation (Benjamin [1923] 1968, Spivak 1992).[1]

Along the way, in week three, we transition to a “metadata analysis” of those sources, meaning that students begin to analyze them within the context of digital publics and archives. First, students review a curated list of archival texts that they might consider translating, sorted by theme (language contact, science, religion), region (Central America, the Caribbean, South America), and author (Gonzalo Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega). Then, they meet with archivists in Special Collections to learn about rare materials: how the library acquires its collection, determines which materials to purchase, and classifies colonial works that defy genres, such as multilingual broadsides and maps with artwork. Students also learn protocols required to handle rare materials. After seeing how tightly the university controls access to colonial records, most students are excited to make these materials accessible to readers. We define “access” in two ways. These documents must be freely available and contextualized for general audiences so that non-specialists can understand them.

Independently, students work through a handout to evaluate the text’s content, interest to EADA users, and availability of other editions (Figure 2, distributed before visiting Special Collections). For example, Abby Kamensky, Mae Flato, Molly Hepner, Kayla Pomeranz, and Karla Núñez found a recent, scholarly translation of an important treatise on indigenous people of Mexico on Google Books (Palafox y Mendoza [1650] 2009). Because most of the text is not available in preview mode, they used an edition from Special Collections to transcribe and translate passages on law, foodways, and artisan practices (Palafox y Mendoza [1650] 1893). These themes complement other digital works, such as Sigüenza y Góngora ([1693] 1932) and Las Casas (1552), prepared by guest editor Rafael E. Tarrago from an edition held at the James Bell Ford Library of the University of Minnesota. The students thus understood their work as part of a larger process of archival formation with EADA collaborators at other libraries and universities, and electronic resources like Google Books.

The second part of the handout asks students to identify what they want to learn from the project. Some students seek practical experience in translation, while others want to make the work intelligible to non-specialists with well-researched footnotes. Students also specify which passages or chapters they will translate, explaining how they will balance this project and its challenges with their other coursework and commitments.

Figure 2. Handout to evaluate texts to translate for EADA.

Middle

Students use the handout, which we work on in class, to write a formal proposal of one or two pages, which takes the place of a midterm exam (weeks six and seven). Each proposal explains how the selected text will enhance EADA readers’ understandings of early American history, literature, or culture, and how the student will design a manageable project within the constraints of the semester. For context, we review sample proposals of translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. I removed all of the names and identifying information from the proposals and secured NEA approval before sharing materials in class. By evaluating recent, real-world proposals, students see how professional translators conceive of a project, justify its merit, and plan to bring projects to completion.

These proposals reveal how students understand archives and public-facing digital research. Some see digital archives as mode of preservation, as when Claire Gillespie chose to work with a manuscript that bears signs of water stains, deteriorating paper, and ink runs (Vendrell y Puig 1794). Others considered that the archive should fill gaps in public knowledge. When Hannah Berk discovered that no full-text digital edition existed of the order of King Carlos III (1767) to expel the Jesuits from Mexico, she resolved to make a bilingual edition that was freely available to readers. Emma Merrill identified a gap in the historiography, noting that a Dominican treatise about the excesses of women, fashion, and tobacco (Ramón 1635) was cited in important scholarly works from Latin America (Ortiz 1940), but not available in English.[2]

After commenting on and grading the proposals, in week seven, students are grouped based on overlapping interests like European empires in the Caribbean or Orientalisms in the Global South. These were the points around which two groups formed. Sutton White, Matt Trope, Anthony Correia, and Brent Nagel translated a Spanish diary of a British attack on Florida (Gálvez 1781(?)), and Taneen Maghsoudi, Kimia Nikseresht, and Tara Shafiei translated a Francophone account of Persia that connects orientalisms in the Middle East and Latin America. The latter group of students used their knowledge of Farsi to reveal these points of connection, recently studied by Camayd-Freixas (2013), and to correct Tavernier’s interpretations of medical practices, policies, and customs. So far, I have only grouped students by shared interests, although I can imagine pairing them based on complementary goals. For example, if one student wanted to build experience in translation, one wanted to research and edit, and a third wanted to manage the project, they could make an effective team.

Once students are in their teams, they transcribe the text to create a searchable record. This assignment serves two purposes: I have something tangible to grade before the final project, and students begin to develop collaborative methods. The interactive format of Google Docs makes it easier for teams to search and replace terms that they decide to re-translate, such as rendering “natural del pueblo” as “from the town of” rather than “native of” in Danielle Tassara’s translation of a Chinese labor contract in Cuba, or Ashleigh K. Ramos, Andreea Cleopatra Washburn, and Vanessa Macias’s decision to encode John Smith’s addresses to Queen Anne and Pocahontas in different registers to mark the gendered nature of both relationships in Álvarez(?) (1788).

End

In the final month of the semester, we edit drafts during in-class workshops. I also meet with students in office hours and in Google Hangouts, often joining their drafts to edit and ask questions (Figure 3). One week before the due date, students submit complete drafts. I review them and add comments, either with pen and paper or on a Google Doc, depending on the group’s preference. By using low-tech collaborative platforms like Google Docs, students see that a task that sounds obscure—translating rare materials for a digital archive as a group—is actually within their reach.

Figure 3. Trading comments with students by Google Doc.

On the day of the final exam, student groups sign up for a thirty minute appointment to review their work and submit it. One semester, I made the mistake of asking students to mark up their translations using XML, after learning it in a library workshop. None of the students were able to complete the markups. They ultimately submitted their work to the EADA site as plain text files, which editors at the archive finalized for publication. I realized that students were working hard to select, transcribe, translate, and annotate colonial-era texts, so I never repeated the XML assignment. Now, we send our work as plain text files to the managing editor, who reviews submissions for quality and consistency. This external review makes it easy to grade final projects: an undergraduate who writes for publication is doing excellent work. I grade the projects based on four parts: transcription, translation, footnotes, and letters of reflection in which students evaluate the contributions of all group members—including their own.

Student Response

Students generally enjoy the course, reporting favorably on meeting with professors, archivists, and librarians, and learning a variety of skills, including collaboration, textual analysis, and how “to help others in translating and teaching translative methods.” They also highlight the value of “meaningful work” in a “very fulfilling course,” writing, “I am amazed how much we accomplished in this course,” “The work was extremely practical…. Coming out of it with something substantial to put on my resume is great,” “the course gave me a sense of accomplishment that no other course had,” and “I could see myself translating texts in the future because of it.”

Teacher Evaluation

I have taught the class four times with twelve student projects, eleven of which are published on the EADA site. Because I work closely with students in each step of the process—selection, transcription (especially with manuscripts), translation, and research—teaching this course requires more time and energy than a course with a traditional research paper. It is also far more rewarding.

After teaching “Colonial Translations,” I began to incorporate projects with interactive technological components into my other courses, such as “Literatura indígena,” in which students wrote Spanish-language Wikipedia pages based on understudied aspects of indigenous history, literature, and culture (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:Alisoneditorial). I also offer translation projects as options for students who want to combine academic and creative work, such as an edition of Sor Juana’s “Hombres necios” (Foolish men) in which Kate Eagen and Lisa Trinh, enrolled in a seminar on the Mexican nun, conserve the rhyme scheme and meter (http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/509/) in ways that the EADA edition of Sor Juana ([1689] 1920) had not.

By adapting a project-centered understanding of the archive, one grounded in projects that students develop, students understood in practical terms some of the theoretical questions—what is an archive, whose voices shape it, and how do we hear them?—that can be hard to teach. In the future, I will incorporate more theoretical and methodological readings on translation and digital publics to complement the practical orientation of the course.

Student Projects

Project: …. Francisco Álvarez (?). 2012. Noticias del establecimiento y población de las colonias inglesas en la América Septentrional: religión, orden de gobierno, leyes y costumbres de sus naturales y habitantes; calidades de su clima, terreno, frutos, plantas y animales; y estado de su industria, artes, comercio y navegación. Translated by Ashleigh K. Ramos, Andreea Cleopatra Washburn, and Vanessa Macias. Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA). http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/noticia-del-establecimiento-y-poblacion-de-las-colonias-inglesas-en-la-america-septentrional-religion-orden-de-gobierno-leyes-y-costumbres-de-sus-naturales-y-habitantes-calidades-de-su-clima-terr/.

Source document: Álvarez, Francisco (?). 1778. Noticias del establecimiento y población de las colonias inglesas en la América Septentrional. College of William & Mary (W&M) Swem Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Rare Books #E188 .A47.

Project: “The Audiencia of Sta. Fee to the king, on the taking of Sto. Thome by the English in 1618.” 2014. Translated by Allison Bigelow, Mawusi Bridges, Shaun Casey, Julia Colopy, Eleanor Daugherty, Taylor Dorr, Mary Catherine Gibbs, Carly Gordon, Rebecca Graham, Alison Haulsee, Brynna Heflin, Kimberly Hursh, Lindsey Jones, Katherine Lara, Nathaniel Menninger, Sierra Prochna, Kyle Reitz, Blake Selph, Alexandra Soroka, Julia Sroba, Nora Zahn, Mary-Rolfe Zeller, and Emily Zhang. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/the-audiencia-of-sta-fee-to-the-king-on-the-taking-of-sto-thome-by-the-english-in-1618/.

Source document: “The Audiencia of Sta. Fee to the king, on the taking of Sto. Thome by the English in 1618,” In Venezuela Papers, Vol. VIII, British Library Western Manuscripts Collection, Add MS 36321, 67-91.

Project: Benites y Gálvez, Bartolomé. 2014. Diario que hicieron los comisionados Alonso Hill Interprete de Indios, y Don Bartolome de Castro y Ferrer…. Translated by Patrick Johnson. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/author-entries/benites-y-galvez-bartolome/.

Source document: Benites y Gálvez, Bartolomé. 1790. Diario que hicieron los comisionados Alonso Hill Interprete de Indios, y Don Bartolome de Castro y Ferrer…. East Florida Papers Bundle 353. N. 17 170, April 6 (San Agustín).

Project: Gálvez, Don Bernardo de. 2015. Diario de las operaciones de la expedicion contra la plaza de Panzacola…. Havana (?). Translated by Sutton White, Matt Troppe, Anthony Correia, and Brent Nagel. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/diario-de-las-operaciones-de-la-expedicion-contra-la-plaza-de-panzacola-concluida-por-las-armas-de-s-m-catolica-baxo-las-ordenes-del-mariscal-de-campo-don-bernardo-de-galvez_-havana-1781/.

Source document: Gálvez, Don Bernardo de. 1781 (?). Diario de las operaciones de la expedicion contra la plaza de Panzacola…. Havana (?) University of Virginia (UVA) Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (SC) #A1781.G358.

Project: King of Spain (Carlos III). 2014. “Se extranen de todos sus Dominios de España….” Translated by Hannah Berk. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/se-extranen-de-todos-sus-dominios-de-espana-e-indias-islas-philipinas-y-demas-adyacentes-a-los-religiosos-de-la-compania-assi-sacerdotes-como-coadjutores-o-legos-que-hayan-hecho-la-primero-pr/.

Source document: King of Spain (Carlos III). 1767. “Se extranen de todos sus Dominios de España….” México: s.n. W&M SCRC Rare Books Double Folio #F1231.M4.

Project: Lafitau, Joseph François. 2012. Histoire des découvertes et conquestes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde. Translated by Sarah Schuster. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/histoire-des-decouvertes-et-conquestes-des-portugais-dans-le-nouveau-monde/.

Source document: Lafitau, Joseph François. 1733. Histoire des découvertes et conquestes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde. Vol. I, Book ii, pp. 123-125 and Vol. II, p. 485. Paris: Saugrain. W&M SCRC Rare Books #DP583.L16.

Project: Palafox y Mendoza, Juan. (1650) 2015. Virtudes del Indio, chapters V, VII, IX, XII, XIV, and XVI. Translated by Abby Kamensky, Mae Flato, Molly Hepner, Kayla Pomeranz, and Karla Núñez. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/author-entries/palafox-y-mendoza-juan/.

Source document: Palafox y Mendoza, Juan. (1650) 1893. Virtudes del Indio. Madrid: Tomás Minuesa de los Ríos, chapters V, VII, IX, XII, XIV, and XVI. UVA SC #A1891.C65 v.10.

Project: Queen of Spain (Isabela II). 2014. “Chinese Coolie Contract Regarding Work in Cuba.” Translated by Danielle Tassara. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/chinese-coolie-contract-regarding-work-in-cuba-1858/.

Source document: Queen of Spain (Isabela II). 1858. “Chinese Coolie Contract Regarding Work in Cuba.” Collection of Spanish Language Manuscripts. W&M SCRC, Mss 1.16, Box 1, item 2012.146.

Project: Ramón, Tomás. 2012. Nueva prematica de reformacion contra los abusos de los afeytes, calçado, guedejas, guarda-infantes, lenguaje critico, moños. trajes: y excesso en el uso del tabaco… Translated by Emma Merrill. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/nueva-prematica-de-reformacionnew-pragmatic-language-of-reformation/.

Source document: Ramón, Tomás. 1635. Nueva prematica de reformacion contra los abusos de los afeytes, calçado, guedejas, guarda-infantes, lenguaje critico, moños. trajes: y excesso en el uso del tabaco… Zaragoza: W&M SCRC Rare Books #GT509.R3 1635.

Project: Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. 2015. “The Travels of Mr. Johannes Baptista Tavernier,” 335, 340-341, 343. Translated by Taneen Maghsoudi, Kimia Nikseresht, and Tara Shafiei. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/voyages-through-persia-and-india-spanish-trans/.

Source document: Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. (1686) 1705. “The Travels of Mr. Johannes Baptista Tavernier.” In Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, edited by John Harris. London: Thomas Bennet, John Nicholson, and Daniel Midwinter, 301-348. UVA SC #G160.H27 1705, v. 2.

Project: Vendrell y Puig, don Miguel. 2014. “Mathematical Dissertation.” Translated by Claire Gillepsie. EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/mathematical-institutions/#colophon.

Source document: Vendrell y Puig, don Miguel. 1794. “Mathematical Dissertation.” Collection of Spanish Language Manuscripts. W&M SCRC, Mss. 1.16.

Notes

[1] When I taught the class in an English department, largely to heritage speakers of Spanish, I included these texts. When I taught the class in a Spanish department, I did not, because most of the students had taken a translation course for their major or minor.
[2] When I taught the class in a seminar with five to six students, I allowed students to work independently. In a class with eighteen to twenty-two students, they work in groups.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. (1923)1968. “The Task of the Translator.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 69–82. New York: Random House.

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. (1542-1555) 2011. Naufragios. Edited by Juan Francisco Maura. Madrid: Cátedra.

Camayd-Freixas, Erik. 2013. Orientalism and Identity in Latin America: Fashioning Self and Other from the (Post)Colonial Margin. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.

Colón, Cristóbal. (1492-1503) 2011. Los cuatro viajes: Testamento. Edited by Consuelo Varela. 3rd ed. Madrid: Alianza.

de la Cruz, sor Juana Inés. (1689) 1920. “Arraignment of Men.” Translated by Peter H. Goldsmith. In Hispanic Anthology: Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, edited by Thomas Walsh. New York: Putnam. From Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA). http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/arraignment-of-men/.

—. (1689) 2017. “Philosophical satire, or Sátira filosófica.” Translated by Kate Eagen and Lisa Trinh. From EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/509/

Ortiz, Fernando. 1940. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación). Havana: Jesús Montero.

Palafox y Mendoza, Juan. (1650) 2009. Virtues of the Indian. Translated by Nancy Fee. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos. (1693) 1932. The Mercurio Volante of Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Translated by Irving Leonard. Los Angeles: Quivara Society. From EADA. http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/mercurio-volante/

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1992. “The Politics of Translation.” In Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, edited by Michèle Barret and Anne Phillips, 177–200. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

About the Author

Allison Margaret Bigelow is an assistant professor of colonial Latin America in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on colonial science, Indigenous literatures, and Latin American digital humanities. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Anuario de estudios bolivianos, Early American Literature,Early American Studies, Ethnohistory, Journal of Extractive Industries and Societies, and PMLA. Her book, Cultural Touchstones: Mining, Refining, and the Languages of Empire in the Early Americas, is forthcoming from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/UNC Press (Spring 2020).