Author: jannellelegg

This blog is back up and running for this spring semester – hopefully it will chronicle the development of some really great technical skills. Worst case scenario: it serves as a harrowing reminder of a tech-newbie gone wrong.

The website I created for the final project is completed. Please click here to view it.

Thanks for a great semester, everyone!

This is definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY rough.. I’ve been completely outside of my comfort zone with this: but picked up some handy new tricks.

There is dummy text in place, and many photos are up from the archival sources – but full citations are missing. My mapping tool is still in the early stages as well.

Deaf-Missions Baltimore

(Note: due to problems with my dataset and a lack of access to location data I’ve changed my final project. My initial plan was to geolocate members of the Christ United Methodist Church for the Deaf in Baltimore during the desegregation of the church and get a sense of the population distribution in the city. I was also interested in how and why the church moved during the the first half of the twentieth century – but I was unable to find data the appropriately investigate these questions.)

The collaborative emphasis of this week’s readings (and our discussion of digital history/humanities this semester) has been one of the most attractive features of work in this field. It serves two of the major concerns I frequently face as a scholar – one, it broadens the field of study – making use of more hands and minds to cast a wider field of study – and two, it centralizes critique and conversation in a way that encourages participation of multiple voices.

Working on a small subject field, with resources scattered in various repositories that are frequently overlooked for categorization or consideration- digital tools and curated digital archives have unlocked a great deal of the hidden histories of people with disabilities. Placing these conversations in public, accessible spaces increases the participation of minority voices. Beyond that, it locates me in a conversation with scholars that challenge my thinking and encourage me to consider my role in the process.

Unfortunately, as I read this week, I was struck by the lack of collaborative digital deaf studies resources. Deaf studies as a field makes use of digital tools – they encourage collaboration, as a rule, but other than a wiki project proposal a few years ago, I haven’t seen any major efforts to cultivate scholarly discussions outside of walled institutions.

We have a digital journal, I’ve mentioned before: the DSDJ, but looking at the resources this week, I thought about the process of peer review that could occur. If videos were uploaded in smaller pieces, commentary were available on the page- enabling participation and dialogue with community members using technology like vialogues – this could make the peer review process more engaging and result in stronger works. I’m thinking of more efforts that could be made to enhance the use of the DSDJ as a tool and a resource – it might be worthwhile to send them an email and see if they could do something similar for at least one article per issue.

This week’s readings were cause for reflection for me. I thought a lot about the ways in which I constructed my courses (and my use of powerpoint). For the most part, I taught the way I learned – with a coursepack of readings and sources, with five page papers and tests that asked you to recall “facts”. But I started to think also about how I had deviated from that – asked my students to take opposing positions and debate their interpretations, required them to make “mashups” of newspaper articles that tackled particular content/concepts, and encouraged them to use digital/analog media to represent change over time. I measured whether or not this was effective by the depth of our discussions as much as their scores on essay questions.

But more than instilling a degree of teaching anxiety, the readings got me to consider more broadly what it means to teach/learn/do history.

Rather than a process of ensuring that students can fill in enough Scantron bubbles to demonstrate that they “learned” something, I liked how Kelly described the act of engaging students as a “tension” , as something that “destabilized their assumptions” (in chapter 1). (Similarly, Wineburg, writes, that historical teaching teaches us “to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our own brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in history into which we’ve been born.” 498) Learning can be remarkably uncomfortable and it can also be challenging and fun. The AHA article reached this point as well- that its less about teaching students what to think, and more about teaching them how to think.

Reformulating teaching practices from these positions forces us to reconfigure how we use the classroom and what sources we use. Rather than approaching “the web” as a barrier teachers have to reach across to impart knowledge to students, “We can think of the web as the untextbook” (AHA “Abundance”), something that destabilizes a rigid teaching approach and encourages us as scholars to consider useful and effective means to develop historical skills/thought in our students. Perhaps the internet presents an obvious, if not superior, means of doing just that- as McClymer states in the introduction, “On the web there is no scholarly filter.” And as the examples presented by Kelly demonstrate, students should develop the ability to assess and use the abundance of information available.

If nothing else, I agree with Kelly here: “The best way to use digital media to teach them to see history as we see it is to create learning opportunities that make it possible for our students to do history—to practice it as we practice it—to help them make history, using their own creative impulses, rather than simply giving us what they hope is the correct answer to a question we have posed.”

I’ve been playing with the Google ngram viewer. I wanted to test it’s features and the best way to test it was to use terms from my area of research.

I got some typical responses:

In this chart, there are no real surprises. The comparison of terms demonstrates the changes in how sign language was described – in the nineteenth century, “language of signs” was the accepted phrasing, the sharp growth of “sign language” corresponds with what we know about the rise of oralism, and American Sign Language is a relatively new term that differentiates ASL from other sign languages.  The introduction of signed systems in the twentieth century – is clear  here as well with the appearance of “Signed English”.

My next chart is a bit more interesting. I wanted to look at changing social perceptions using the Deaf Pride/Deaf President Now movements as key features. DPN was a dramatic, public protest in March 1988. The spike on the graph at this time is clear -but the secondary spike is interesting – clearly, after the event occurred – it became the subject of considerable discussion, though interest has waned. The concept of “Deaf rights” makes an appearance at this time, but does not appear as frequently. “Gallaudet” is difficult to parse out -the spikes don’t align with major events/moments with the university  – I wonder if there is confusion between the place / family name.

The final chart was a look at the growth of phrases of self-identification in the literature:

“Deaf community” is the phrase with the longest history. The growth of it’s usage in the 1960s lines up with the burst of sociological/linguistic study of deaf people as a group. The 1980-90s development of “Deaf culture” makes sense with the Deaf Pride movement and the DPN event – as well as a flurry of texts that adopted cultural/minority perspectives. “Signing people” is a new phrase (as evidenced by the graph).

So, again – no major surprises.

It’s a cool tool – but limiting. I found myself frustrated and wanting to search within a specific corpus of texts (ie books relevant to these subjects). Using specific search terms like “deaf” were ineffective because the word is used largely within literature without describing/pertaining to deaf PEOPLE. It would be cool to be able to look across deaf studies texts/articles/pedagogical materials and identify changing terms in conjunction with larger social changes.