palimpsest

Letterpress Printing

Photos from a letterpress workshop that (I think) do a pretty good job of documenting the basic process of setting type, locking up the press, and the kind of equipment one sees in a print shop.

SCMS Teaching Resources

I've just learned that I'll be teaching a 2000 (sophomore) level course in film studies this summer, and I've been searching for resources online to supplement the course. In the class, I plan to use David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, a relatively popular film textbook.

So far, I'm still canvassing for ideas. In passing, I'll highlight the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Resources page, which offers a section where people can submit resources for teaching, research, and scholarship on film and media. The SCMS just launched their new webpage, so it may take some time for the resource page to build up a collection of useful material. It's something worth watching.

Right now, I'm trying to find ways of complementing the excellent treatment of film form in the Bordwell-Thompson book with a project that focuses on the material, social, and economic bases of film production. One possibility that I've considered is a collaborative project in which groups of 4-5 create a page focusing on (1) a specific decade of US/world cinema or (2) a specific technological or social development (the emergence of widescreen, the Hays Code, etc). I want to temper my ambitions somewhat because it is a summer class while still ensuring that students understand individual films in terms of their social, economic, and technological contexts. But any suggestions from people who have taught intoduction to film courses would be helpful. What assignments do you use to get students to think beyond film form? Will I be asking too much to encourage them to think in terms of modes of production?

Modified and cross-posted at the chutry experiment.

proposing a new course

I've learned from this announcement that the UMKC Center for Creative Studies is asking for applications by May 1 for curriculum development for interdisciplinary courses studying the creative process. You can read the application instructions for yourself. I'm thinking of proposing a course that would be taught by me and by a faculty member from the Art & Art History Department, but I'm not 100% sure what direction to take. A course that involved printmaking and/or bookmaking would be interesting, but I'm also tempted by the possibility of a course involving new media. There are faculty from A&AH engaged in both, so...

But what would a course "studying the creative process" and involving print or new media look like? This is just a blind post asking for suggestions for further reading and research. I have posted this to my own blog, as well.

Romantic Circles Pedagogies

News from the Romantic Circles blog:

Next month, Romantic Circles will launch a special section called Romantic Pedagogies, which will continue to expand well into the summer. Within this section, we plan to set up a "Romantic Commons" in which teaching issues can be discussed and teachers' materials shared with one another.

Hmmm. That sounds like a familiar idea.

Tracking down writers

Maud Newton links to a.k.a., a site listing "over 11,500 author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legal names, pen names, maiden names, and more." (cross-posted to my blog)

VirtualLit

Jill Walker writes: "VirtualLit looks like a set of excellent tutorials in close reading poems and fiction." [You can read more of what Jill has to say on her site.] The site is maintained by the publisher Bedford/St. Martin's: These multimedia tutorials draw students step-by-step through the close-reading of a literary work's elements and the in-depth study of its critical and cultural contexts.

imagining free textbooks

A user reviews five free calculus textbooks on Slashdot, which got me thinking (preliminarily, I'll admit) about how it might be possible to teach certain courses without requiring students to purchase any textbooks. For example, when I taught freshman writing at the University of Maryland, we used a workbook created by faculty and grad students in the department, and it would be easy to make such a document available onlinle in PDF format. Granted, the student would need to print out much of this workbook, but if colleges and universities provided enough of a print quota, this might not be too much of an obstacle. As for literature, the primary texts I regularly teach are well out of copyright, and so the challenge of an all-digital course would be to find good, scholarly editions. The well-known Project Gutenberg is a goldmine of texts, but I'm not so sure how faithful they are to the originals. The challenge is to find works in a digital format that not only represent reliably the original edition(s) of a work, but that perhaps also are annotated in a way that would be useful to students. [As an aside, I'll say that the Blake Archive provides better access to the poet's work than just about all the print editions I could ever imagine assigning.]

So, yes, this post is mostly just thinking out loud about the possibilities of free editions of literary texts designed for teaching.