This week, the Silkworms have been working with Tierney to add the Google MyMap to the homepage and to proofread and perfect the rest of the site. I am enjoying this phase because I finally feel as if I am digging my hands into the actual project and contributing to its creation. It has been interesting for me to sit back and supervise throughout this process, and while I have enjoyed that dynamic and have felt that I have made a difference in that way, I am happy to be creating something concrete. I am enjoying focusing on the aesthetics of the website as well. Last week, I got to see Team Tongue’s project come together as a polished product. This week, I am getting to put the finishing touches on elements that connect the four projects into one cohesive, online academic tool. The Silkworms are the ones pulling this project together and I have appreciated being able to be a part of that element of our progress as a class.
At this point, it all feels sort of surreal. This project was ambitious; none of us have ever attempted something like this and it is a foreign concept to Guilford College. Although I came into the process later than many (I was asked to be a Silkworm late this past summer), I feel a deep attachment to this project and its success. It is very fulfilling to watch it coming together so beautifully. I am constantly thinking back to the stages of the project when the students asked us what was going on and we asked the professors and the professors stared back, just as confused as the rest of us. This project has been all about teamwork, from the teaching team to our project teams to our entire class as a team working towards this final project. Every person has had a distinct role in this project’s success and I believe that each of us feels like we own it.
via GIPHY
All posts by kellyan
All's Well that Ends Well
Over the past two and a half months, I have had the pleasure of directly supervising the Tongue Team project as a silkworm. Frankly, I feel like I got the best part of the deal—I got to be a part of two different teams: the teaching team and the student team. From the very beginning, before the students were even involved, the teaching team (made up of 2 professors, 3 library/tech specialists, and 4 TAs/silkworms) knew that we wanted the center of this course to be a research project on a student-generated topic completed as a group and presented online. We were not sure how to get to this end goal, but we knew that that was where we were aiming. I served as the middle-man between my group and our professors, an overseer of group dynamics and timely progress, a strict editor, and a morale-booster (hence my alias). At times, the only help I could provide was asking if they were being overly ambitious given, our time constraints. At others, my contribution was sitting at a round table in the library proof-reading for six hours straight. There were bumps along the way, as to be expected, but, standing here at the end, I am amazed at how magnificently this project came to embody our dream for the course. We hoped that students would find a topic they could really be excited about; we hoped they could create something that they could share with the world. I genuinely hope that they are as proud of themselves as I am of them. I anticipate that digital humanities will continue to gain momentum and evolve throughout my lifetime. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Chugging Along
At this point, I am so proud of how my group is working. This week, members of my group actually stopped to ask our professor whether they could continue to add to the project after the due date just for fun because they are so interested in the topic. They are every TA’s dream. I feel really good about where they are in their individual research, their planning of the digital synthesizing of their ideas, and the personal dynamics between team members. I think that they have done a great job creating deadlines and sticking to them. I’ve also been very impressed at how well they’ve coordinated this one single topic to showcase each individual person’s strengths. I am honestly shocked at smoothly this process is going. If I worry about anything with my team, it is that I worry they are biting off more than they can chew (Tongue group…ha…ha…) with building the Tandoor oven, but they are planning to get the first round of cooking done this weekend after building it this weekend so I do think they can stay on track. I admire that they have been trying to go so above and beyond and have really embraced how much they care about this project. I have tried to push them to remember to start drawing the lines on what is going to be too much to cover and just focus on completing the tasks that they have already started.
The TAs started working with Tierney this week about creating our project in the Google MyMap section. I am a little nervous to see how my group’s project comes together to create my part, since my group has chosen to mostly abandon the StoryMap program and are focusing considerably more on tracing things through time, rather than a linear geographical narrative. I think it will definitely be doable to translate it into points that will work on our Google MyMap, but I think it will take a bit more digging and decoding for me to find the points—making sure that I pick out the locations within their narrative. I also think that I may have a lot more use of individual points with icons and without connections than other groups.
Below, I am attaching a view that explores the idea of digital humanities. We will be presenting the findings of our class at a faculty development program in the near future, so I have been thinking more and more about the concept of digital humanities and how that can be integrated into the future of education.
Ninth Grade History Gone Academic Adventure
In ninth grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Herrington for a history class called “Eastern Civilizations.” At this point in my life, I was the furthest thing from a history buff or even a history fan, and I struggled to see studying history as interesting. In Ms. Herrington’s class, we studied the Silk Road and the Mongol Empire and that was the first thing in my high school history career that truly piqued my interest—why, I can’t really be sure. I still remember a packet that we had that told stories of Genghis Khan stuffed villagers into carpet bags and running them over with horses (once again, why this fascinated me so much, I’m really not sure). I am definitely looking forward to sending Ms. Herrington a letter at the end of the course when the website is posted and telling her about how I went on to college to serve as the teaching assistant for a large digital humanities project on the Silk Road, an interest that she originally cultivated in my education. Not only that, but I will be traveling 3500 miles along the Silk Road over 3 weeks in January. It’s crazy for me to think that one chapter that I particularly liked in my high school history book is now something that I get to go see and do. I never imagined that my academic career would bring me here, but I am so excited at the opportunity.
In class this week, while discussing the Mongol Empire, we talked about how Chinghis Khan holds the reputation of being incredibly violent, which, while true, conflicts with the reality that many towns peacefully surrendered to Chinghis Khan because they had heard about the Mongols by word of mouth. It stuns me that Chinghis Khan may not have actually intended to be a conqueror, but instead kept conquering for fear of retaliation from places he had already defeated. I find it fascinating perhaps the most successful conqueror in history may have done it by chance or convenience, rather than by intense engineering. While this video is aimed at a younger audience than our class, I think it gives a good basic representation of this struggle around Chinghis Khan’s reputation.
StoryMap Tech Lab
We had another Tech Lab this morning in order to go through an introduction to the StoryMap tool. I think that this tool is going to be a great way to illustrate our research projects in a fun, interactive, innovative way. I was really surprised how easy and fun it is to create StoryMaps. The tool was very intuitive—I do not expect a great degree of difficulty from our team members in picking up the basics of this tool. I think my team is relieved to now be able to actually play with the StoryMap tool, which will help to plan the project in a more effective and more detailed way.
What I am most worried about is making sure the citations are accurately attributed to content within the StoryMap. I do, however, think that a larger bibliography page on our class website will be effective.
At this point, I’m getting more and more excited about what these projects will look like in the end. I feel like this process is pioneering a new method of academic research at Guilford and will make our school stand out.
I think the next step is to work on research until we have a basic idea of what each person is saying. From that point, we can figure out how many slides are needed for each person, complete the writing for each slide, find the media for each slide, and organize the citations. I see the last piece of the project being the actual StoryMap data entry. It seems that it will be much easier to organize and edit outside of that tool and that once we begin to enter it, we will probably want to be entering a near-final draft.
Fall Break: So Close Yet So Far
I am definitely feeling the stress this week. The 3-hour time expectation for the Map Test was a very conservative estimate. I’m struggling to keep up with three very reading intensive classes this semester (two Religious Studies and one Philosophy) at the same time and am finding it near impossible to keep up. I’ve been sick on and off for the past couple weeks, which has put a significant strain on my work time, and am facing a very big week in my internship with the Bryan Series, along with a visit from my mother for family weekend and homecoming this weekend. I normally feel that I hit a rut at some point in the semester, but am feeling like it should be much later than this point.
We did a ten-minute meditation in class today to a recording of poem performances, which was very appreciated. I was enrolled in Eric’s class on Buddhist Emptiness last semester, which had a weekly (if not more frequently) meditation component that I am not sure I realized how much I enjoyed until the class ended, the summer passed, and this new semester has started. I would like to get back into the habit of going to the Buddhist Meditation Fellowship meetings to get that meditation in, which I hope will aid in relieving some stress. I would also like to go chat with both Eric and Jill (my other Religious Studies professor) sometime within the next week to work out some strategies for coping with the high level of reading that is currently on my plate.
My experience in Guilford’s Religious Studies department has been very different than my experience in the Business department. In the Business department, if I did not excel at assignments, it was often because I found the assignments to be mostly busywork and had difficulty motivating myself to complete them to the best of my ability. In the Religious Studies department, I feel a lot of pressure to perform well in my classes because not just because the material is interesting and in depth, but also because I truly look up to and respect these professors and consider them good friends. I feel like I’m not only letting myself down, but them down as well when I don’t complete work to the best of my ability. I’m finding myself spread so thin that I’m not satisfied with my work in any class and then I just end up spiraling into a zone of stress where I can’t finish all of the work and I’m not happy with the quality of the work I am doing so then I end up more stressed and left unable to complete a bigger chunk of what is assigned.
This semester, I am a TA for two different classes, following my summer position as an Orientation Team Leader and my simultaneous work as an intern and student representative for the Guilford Bryan Series. I feel that all of these roles have left me in a place where I feel like I need to be someone that others can look up to and count on and when I start to fall behind, I feel that I am no longer doing that duty. I start to feel like a phony being the TA of a class that I am not thoroughly completing every reading for because I am supposed to be setting an example.
Although this was more personal than I initially intended this blog post to be, I am feeling better just having had the opportunity to talk about it, so I suppose I owe you a “thank you,” kind Internet reader. I hope that your week is a little more positive than mine and I look forward to bringing you a more positive outlook soon.
Monday Meeting Debrief: How to Create a Linear Narrative with Many Different Elements
Last night, I met with my group in the library to set up a basic plan of attack for the next few weeks. We talked about how setting up specific data finding/creation deadlines to make our group progress schedule a bit more specific. As per Eric’s advice, I recommended adding deadlines for having all of the images, all videos, all text completed, etc. as we anticipated that data entry will take longer to finish than groups might think at this point.
In our administrator meeting yesterday morning, we discussed that each team will only be allowed to use one single StoryMap to present the work of their entire team, rather than creating multiple maps for different sections of the project. I think this will be particularly daunting for my team since we don’t necessarily have one singular storyline, but one meal that traces out in multiple lines in different directions since they are tracing different ingredients and elements of the meal backwards through time. We made a lot of progress in imagining how our StoryMap will actually end up by drawing out different formations while brainstorming. The best idea that we came up with was to create a center point with the image of the entire meal and take each element, in order of their consumption throughout a typical meal period (starting with drink, first course, second course, etc) and then zooming out to the beginning of the history of that element and tracing it back to the table and overall meal. By tracing inward rather than outward, each element will end at the center and refocus on the larger picture of the entire meal. We will then proceed to trace the next element from the outer-most point inwards and so on. This will make the phases of the project seem almost like flashbacks that lead the reader to the final meal.
We talked about how we will maintain a narrative within this format. We had originally envisioned telling the story from the first person perspective, allowing one person to witness where the ingredient came from and they got it to the table. We also brainstormed telling the narrative in the first person as the ingredient itself. We came upon a final solution of telling the story in the second person perspective, allowing the audience to be the center of the narrative and having them be the person bring the ingredients to the table. This will create a narrative that seems almost like a “choose your own adventure” novel, but structured to be a directed story rather than a number of audience choices.
I was worried that the limited format of StoryMap would limit our narrative abilities, but I think that we have come to a very good agreement and new arrangement for our information. At this point, my team is feeling anxious to learn about the StoryMap tool and is eagerly counting down to our next Tech Lab.
Anna's Monday Meeting
This morning I met with the other Silk Worms, Eric, Zhihong, and Tierney to chat about administrative functions of our website and how our role in creating the technology-based aspects of the larger project will evolve. After this meeting, I have a much better understanding of what my role is within the larger project.
I feel that a lot of the actual administrative work on the current website that involves organizing pages, categorizing blog posts, etc. is pretty straightforward. I don’t think there will be any struggle on my part keeping up with those functions since I’ve done similar jobs on more simplistic websites before. I think that a good bit of the website design (on a very basic level) comes easily to people who have worked with computers in the past—even casually to browse the internet—so I don’t worry about our students being able to do things like create pages and blog posts. I think my biggest worry about the website management basics for both myself and other members of the class will be making sure that citations are done correctly. Our students are proficient in creating citations in a research capacity, but I expect complications from the new necessity to cite photos, videos, and other multimedia elements.
Other conversation that occurred during this meeting explained about how our larger map will incorporate elements of all of the team projects, in a color-coded diagram on top of a larger map. We will be creating this homepage map with Google MyMap, which Tierney showed us. From the basic introduction, I think this seems like a really useful tool and I could see myself using it to create tools for other programs, possibly for Guilford’s incoming student orientation or even surprise scavenger hunts for friends. Google MyMap is one of the tools we are learning that I think will become extremely helpful as a practical skill. I like that we are using this alternate tool rather than StoryMap to create the larger homepage map. I think this tool adds the flexibility that we need to create a non-chronological, non-linear display of four different projects simultaneously.
I think I understand the importance of our role much better now. This meeting clarified that we are not just doing busy work and data entry—transferring what our students create into map points in a different program—but synthesizing what our groups do into a summary and transferring that information into a cohesive, four-project map.
Anna's Introductory Blog Post
Hello, hello to the wonderful, wild world of the Internet. My name is Anna and I am currently serving as one of the “Silk Worms” for our Digital Silk Road project this semester. I am supervising the “Tongue” group, composed of Billie, Christopher, Zachary, and Delaney. For their project, the Tongue group will be tracing the elements of a contemporary meal from Kashgar back as far as they can in hopes to discover where the parts of this meal originated and what significance those parts hold. Each team member will be taking a certain collection of items or topics within the meal (bread, meat, tea, cooking utensils, folklore surrounding food, etc) and together, create an interactive narrative in the form of a Story Map.
I am extremely happy with how this topic has formed so far and am excited to see how it develops in the future. I think all of the groups had a bit of trouble nailing down their topic before the proposal and we were no exception. Our original interests, while related, were not an approachable topic on their own; interests ranged from language diffusion to Middle Eastern culture, from the rise and fall of empires to the spread of food with culture. Most had something to do with culture and something to do with movement, but that was where the concrete similarities ended. This being said, the first two days of brainstorming were stressful for me. As a group advisor, I did not want to influence their decisions more than I had to. Since I am supervising research rather than actually conducting it, I wanted to make sure that they all got what they wanted out of the topic, but could easily see that the agreements that we were coming to were too broad. There was a miscommunication about an interest in spices, which was never really a consideration for our group. I definitely felt a bit frazzled leaving for that weekend because I knew what the problem was, but I was not sure of my role in fixing it. I knew that it needed to be more focused, but I knew that they were the ones that needed to drive that revision. I was glad to see that by Tuesday, it seemed that the problem had been resolved, a topic was agreed upon, and all was smooth sailing from there.
My biggest anxiety at the current moment is how my role in this process will play out. I do know that I will have a heightened responsibility as we get closer to going live with our website, but at the moment, I do not feel very needed by my group. Perhaps that is simply a good sign. I’m thrilled to be working with a team wherein each team member seems equally engaged, enthusiastic, and committed to both the process and the final project. All four are very competent students. I wonder how I can actually be of help to them, though I am trying to not show my anxieties so I can maintain my place as a role model for this group. It is hard to gauge my performance since I think that I haven’t been of much service thus far. I think that my group has done a great job and that my role will come into play more as we move forward in the process.
One of my biggest struggles in both my personal and my academic/work lives has been the ability to go with the flow. I like to have plans and execute things according to their plan. Throughout my college career, I have taken larger and larger steps in learning to revise, rethink, and learn as I go and I think that this project is by far the biggest. As an Orientation Team Leader, I had a lot of moments when I was revising plans while leading a team of students and I learned to thrive in that environment, despite some discomfort. This project relies so heavily on a “learn-as-you-go” mentality, which is part of what makes this project so cool, but also what makes it challenging for me. It is difficult for me to not have an exact model or rubric to be trying to match. The goal right now is very vague, which makes this an incredible research opportunity, but in some ways a nerve-wracking time to be leading others. The way that I am coping with that is through the wonderful team I have supporting me in this process as well. I think my favorite thing about this entire process is how team-oriented it is. Yes, I am supervising a team of four researchers, but I am also part of a team of four “Silk Worms” (teaching assistants). Beyond that, we work with a team of two professors and even beyond that we work with a team of technology specialists and professionals from other areas of Guilford College. I revel in the opportunity to be a member of such an amazing, intricate team and I think that as we go, we will all learn together and find a way to pull this off.
Beyond the anxieties I have about supervising a team, I know that there are areas where I can be of great help if they need it. My writing skills are well established and I am a thoughtful proofreader. I am comfortable working in a research environment. I am good at managing many sources and citations. I can help with time management skills and planning. As a supervisor of this project, my goal is to let my team members thrive in whatever areas are most compelling to them. I want them to find their passions and execute them to the best of their abilities. Where I believe I want to step in is where they struggle so that this project remains centered on them. They’re the stars and the center of this project and I want their interest and abilities to be the main focus. I see myself as a facilitator for this project and want to help them create the best project they can.
I am really excited to be contributing to this academic revolution that is coming to be Digital Humanities. I have sympathized with Eric’s explanation of the need for a “non-disciplinary” academic system, rather than a categorized list of subjects. I also have seen the damaging effects of the divide between subject, teacher, and student. Digital humanities provides a new way for all these areas to interact—the subject is now the teacher, the student is now the teacher, and the product creates a space where anyone online can now become the student. It is an incredible way of changing education and of breaking down walls. I am proud to be a part of this process and maybe in 50 years, I’ll be looking at a totally different system and I’ll be saying, “I remember back in my day when a History class wasn’t the same as a Religious Studies class and all we did was read one textbook and listen to one person teach and we never looked beyond that. We were so silly to think that way.”