making things, helping people make things better
via THATCamp CHNM 2009 » Blog Archive. For the past year or so, I’ve been interested in putting together a small team of like-minded folks to help bring to fruition a data visualization project that could benefit less-prepared college students, teachers in the humanities, and researchers alike. Often, underprepared or at-risk educational populations struggle to …
Continue reading "Visualization, Literary Study, and the Survey Class"
One of my favorite readings of the term, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina. We had three presentations, and the essays the students presented did give us a good context for discussion; however, one student used a non-scholarly source, and I'm pretty sure another didn't actually read Haywood (at least, he didn't have the copy with him...)! I'm …
In class on Wednesday, we returned to Tartuffe and spent quite a bit of time meditating on the motif of blindness, the nature of sight, and ultimate conclusions about the play; we also considered the impact of a historical awareness of its staging, especially insofar as spectators would have been seated on the stage, and …
In world literature, we went over the Reply to Sor Filotea, which I was incredibly surprised to note that so many students had actually enjoyed! I thought it would be a "meh" reading, but it seemed to strike a note. In future classes, I'd like to be able to spend more time on it, and …
Last week was busy, busy, busy. After returning from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century studies conference in Richmond, itself a whirlwind event, I found returning to classes a bit overwhelming. Peter Karapetkov, Dr. K, and Stephanie Szkutak graciously agreed to sit in for me in my classes, and I think everything worked out alright from …
This week I'm at the ASECS conference, giving a paper on Mary Toft and the strange fact of the pantomime/harlequinade that emerged from her fraud. I went to several fascinating panels, and one not-so-fascinating panel, met quite a few interesting people, re-connected with graduate school cronies, and generally made academic hay. Richmond has a very …
Continue reading "American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies"
ASECS 2009 Richmond, VA "Harlequin Toft; or, Imposture, Pantomime, and the Instabilities of Satire in the Early Eighteenth Century" From October to December of 1726, Mary Toft hacked dead rabbits into small and not-so-small pieces; forced them, piece-by-piece into her vagina; then expelled these “made…monster[s]”i under the gazes of eminent and not-so-eminent medical men, scholars, …
Oh, what a wonderful thing theater is! I thoroughly enjoyed the Shakespeare Theatre's new production of Euripides' Ion, billed as a "Greek tragedy with a happy ending." Though the "happy" part of the "happy ending" is always subject to nuance and debate, as the viewer must necessarily question the tidiness with which that "happy ending" …
We're just beginning Tartuffe in EN203, and I think that students will be very interested in the play over the next meetings. In class, I went over some of the essential introductory context information, specifically the cultural and historical contexts of the "Enlightenment," and then considered the resonance between that context and first reactions to …
Thursday, I took my composition students to the library for a refresher on using Aladin for research, and I was left with some confusions about their comprehension, level of comfort, and intuitive/creative/logical ability to use the catalog to browse effectively. At the end of the class, instead of looking at the books we'd pulled and …
Tonya Howe 