Tag: pedagogy

2023 Website Update and Forthcoming Publications

Posted on by jmotis

To every thing there is a season… and while I still do love the theme I picked out when I originally moved my website to WordPress, even I have to admit that it’s showing its age a little bit. And I don’t just mean in terms of aesthetics. While the theme amazingly has stayed functional through dozens of major WordPress updates, it hasn’t been updated in <cough, cough> years and there were no guarantees it was still secure.

So, without further ado, I present to you my new, updated website appearance.

While I’m doing an announcement blog post, I figure this is also a good time/place to mention that numerous publications that have been clogged up in the pandemic publishing pipeline have finally started to appear in print:

And last, but never least, By the Numbers, my long-awaited monograph on numeracy and quantitative transformations in early modern England is coming out from Oxford University Press at the end of the year. ETA: It officially comes out January 4, 2024 with pre-orders shipping mid-December 2023, so I hope to be showing off physical copies at AHA 2024 in San Francisco.

So it’s time to say, so long 2010s, old website, and the pre-COVID world. Here’s to the Roaring (20)20s and may things continue to look up from here.

screenshot of original website design showing white text boxes on a yellow background and a header photo of people waiting in line to enter the British Library

Coding Queen Elizabeth’s Court

Posted on by jmotis

This is an edited version of a lightning talk I gave at the Shakespeare Association of America Folger Digital Tools (Pre-Conference) Workshop. image of a poster created to advertise an encode-a-thon

In March of 2019, Meaghan Brown of the Folger Shakespeare Library came to George Mason University’s campus to run an encode-a-thon with the upper-level undergraduates who were students in my Early Modern England course.

For this event, we were working on the Elizabethan Court Day By Day dataset, compiled by Marion E. Colthorpe. While the origin of this project was an attempt to track Queen Elizabeth’s royal progresses through the countryside over the course of her reign, it morphed into a dataset tracking the events of her court for ever day of her 44-year reign. It includes not just a list of events but also select quotations from a wide variety of primary sources.

Folgerpedia page explaining the Elizabethan Court Day By Day datasetThis dataset was donated to the Folger Shakespeare Library as a massive PDF. At over 2000 pages long, it’s a treasure trove of information about the peregrinations and events of Elizabeth’s reign. The Digital Media and Publications team at the Folger have extracted the information from the dataset into plain text and have been working to encode it, to facilitate future analyses of the data.

This encoding is done in a modified version of the Folger’s Dromio TEI transcription/collation tool, developed by Mike Poston, for Early Modern Manuscripts Online transcribathons. Students begin by entering their name or the alias by which they would like to receive credit – I hear rumors William Shakespeare is quite active on the platform! Then they choose a month of Elizabeth’s reign to begin encoding and land in the interface pictured below.

image of HTML encoding of datasetThe first line of each day is metadata (colored red in the image to the right) where participants record the day, the type of event that has been captured, and the location of the event (where known). This particular month is February, 1601, chosen as the dates for the Earl of Essex’s rebellion – there are two events on the 7th and one on the 8th. While I wasn’t certain where Essex was when he refused to obey the Privy Council’s summons (politics), his followers were definitely at the Globe Theatre later that day, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Richard II (performance), presumably to get them in the right headspace for their attempted rebellion! The events of the 8th were somewhere in London, per the text, but at multiple locations within the city, hence the location is recorded at a larger scale than the single building of the Globe.

After adding (or editing some of the automatically generated) metadata about each day, students then marked up each day’s text by highlighting important words/phrases and clicking the buttons at the top of the interface to designate them as people (individual people, groups of people, or countries acting as people such as “Spain invaded”), places, dates, quotes, books, or general sources. While straightforward enough for a novice human encoder, this isn’t a task that can be done automatically for a lot reasons. For example, Essex is a person, a county, and also (in conjunction with the word “House”) a building in London.

image of XML encoding of datasetMost of my students worked solely in the interface, but a significant minority also flipped over into the XML markup view and dealt with manual tags, especially when they were dealing with days that needed to be split into multiple events or other complicated encodings. As someone who is personally familiar with XML, this view was in a lot of ways easier for me to work with as I could see very clearly when I’d accidentally gotten a tag in the wrong space or included a space in a place tag, or other “messiness” that I know will have to be processed out in the final analysis of the dataset.

While my students weren’t entirely certain, going into the event, how exactly this “encode-a-thon” thing was going to relate to their other classroom experiences, when I briefed my students after the event, they identified a number of positive outcomes they’d had from the activity:

  • up-close and personal look at daily life among Elizabethan elite and their servants
  • humanized historical actors
  • looking at “raw data” of facts/events that forms historical narratives
  • variety of sources used to reconstruct narrative of events
  • coverage of major events that didn’t make it into the classroom narrative due to in-class time limits
  • work behind building historical datasets
  • critically think about categorization of events/activities
  • introduction to XML (advanced students only)

And, perhaps most importantly, in between them regaling me with the stories they’d uncovered – and linking those stories back to important points I’d made in class lectures and their assignments – they reported having fun.

Teaching With Wikipedia

Posted on by jmotis

I have been privileged to work with several awesome graduate students this semester, including Cordelia “Cory” Brazile and Lauren Churilla. A few weeks ago, we had a thought-provoking conversation about using Wikipedia in the classroom that inspired this blog post.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who despairs when my students cut-paste out of Wikipedia in their classroom papers. But the ship of “don’t use Wikipedia” sailed at least a decade ago, if not more, and honestly it’s not completely different from the age-old problem of “don’t copy from encyclopedias.” Tertiary sources have always (for definitions of always involving everyone alive today) been a part of our academic landscape and have clear uses for both research and pedagogy so banning the use of encyclopedias (crowdsourced or not) makes no sense. We need to use them responsibly and teach our students to do the same.

Enter Wiki Edu, a set of online resources dedicated to supporting teachers who want to incorporate Wikipedia assignments into their syllabi. If you have the desire and inclination to structure a major classroom assignment (equivalent to a whole-semester or half-semester research paper) into your syllabus, I highly recommend checking the site out. It includes a host of video resources that teach students how to edit Wikipedia – including videos on copyright and attribution – and teachers who register their classes on the site can get technological and staff support during the assignment.

That said, not everyone has the time or inclination to engage that intensely with Wikipedia. Our syllabi are jam-packed with everything else we need to convey to students and many teachers don’t want to reinforce an encyclopedia-like “history is facts” mentality over the argumentative, thesis-driven model of historical writing. So what are some alternatives? This is the list Lauren, Cory, and I brainstormed.

  • Explore an article edit history to see how the “facts” emerge over time. 

Using the example of the World history article, students can use the “view history” link to see the original version of this article in which a user snarkily defined world history as:

First the earth cooled.

Then the dinosaurs got too big and fat so they all died.

Referneces:

Johnny, “Airplane – the Movie”

(Among other things, this provides students with a window into why some teachers view the site with serious skepticism…) In the following years, the page was redirected to “History” more generally, then redirected again to “History of the World,” before finally becoming a brief definition of the field of World History and expanding from there. Guiding students through a journey likes this helps them understand the evolution of the “facts” that they often take for granted when reading a Wikipedia article.

  • Explore an article’s talk page to see how the “facts” of controversial subjects are negotiated among interested parties.

The Wiki Edu resources deliberately steer students away from editing controversial articles (which is smart given their assumptions that students are editing/writing articles) but exploring these controversies can give students a peek behind the curtain of Wikipedia’s vaunted “neutrality.” Each article has a talk page, where editors can discuss changes before making them (or debate changes if someone else has reverted their changes). Exploring an article’s talk page in addition to the edit history gives an added dimension to the goal of exposing students to how historical consensus emerges in the case of controversial subjects. As a bonus, the talk pages themselves have a edit history! Reading the edit history of, say, the Black Lives Matter Wikipedia talk page is a fascinating exercise in the construction of Wikipedia article, in addition to educating students about the emergence of the movement. Wikipedia maintains a page with a list of controversial articles, which range from politics to sports, as well as a page on Wikipedia controversies.

  • Examine the bibliographies of articles and assess the chosen sources for bias.

Despite Wikipedia’s attempts to create “neutral” articles, which don’t favor any particular point of view over another, it doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes the bias is overt and comes under review or is tagged as biased. In other cases, however, the bias emerges only by carefully reviewing the sources chose for citation. My favorite biased article (yes, I have a favorite) is the Long Parliament article, which is almost entirely derived from the work of two nineteenth century publications and is very Whiggish. I’ve been using it as an object lesson to my students for over four years now and eventually someone will fix it but it hasn’t happened yet! Exploring the bias in this particular article also leads to a greater discussion of the nature of copyright, what sources people seeking to edit Wikipedia have – or don’t have – access to, and how lack of access to cutting-edge academic research might create barriers to public understanding. Insert discussion of the Open Access movement here…

  • Find articles that have been flagged for lack of citation and see if students can find reliable citations for them.

Wikipedia flags articles that need additional verification as well as maintains a page with a list of all these articles. (It even includes a button “I can help! Give me a random citation to find!” to get people started.) Asking students to work on a particularly under-verified article requires them to discover research sources outside of Wikipedia. Students then can practice providing sources for assertions of fact or determine that alleged facts lack citation because there is no evidence for them and modify the articles accordingly.

  • For multilingual students, examine the difference between the English language version of a article and the version in a different language.

We know that Wikipedia exist across multiple languages, but not everyone realizes that articles can differ radically between languages. The English Wikipedia article for King Sancho IV of Castile, for example, is a mere 5 sections long, most of which are genealogical, while the Spanish version is over twice as long with 11 sections. Comparing the two helps introduce students to the idea that “facts” and “common knowledge” can actually be culturally – in this case linguistically – determined.

  • Last, but not least, conduct targeted article edits.

Just because you don’t want to spend a huge chunk of your semester doing a Wikipedia assignment doesn’t mean that it can’t be productive to do some group live-editing of an article during class, or as a single homework assignment. Showing students how to make simple tweaks to the site gives them a better understanding of the crowdsourced nature of the site and how it’s constantly being updated – and may reinforce both a sense of publicly contributing to knowledge instead of writing solely for an audience of the teacher, as well as the idea that perhaps they should question the veracity of things they read online, instead of taking it all for granted.

So those were our ideas! If you have any other great things you’ve tried out with Wikipedia in the classroom, I’d be interested to hear it.