H817 Week 1 Exercise 4: An innovation - Decameron Web
Friday, 22 Jan 2016, 17:55
Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Saturday, 23 Jan 2016, 17:48
I chose Decameron Web as an innovative project
because my chief interest – the one that sustains – is literature. Also I
discovered the Yale course ‘The Ancient Hero in 24 Hours’ led by Gregory Nagy,
whilst I was studying a course on Ancient Greek Drama with the OU. This course
was clearly modelled on Decameron Web and is still running, last recruiting
January 6th of this year.
As Tom has said these courses aren’t all that interactive
between teachers and students, although Nagy’s course culminates in a Reader’s
Circle called Week 25.
What is productive is
a set of resources for reading texts in translation and in the original – the Nagy
course has now a full library of close translations (not much good as
literature but help people like me with very little Greek to counter the
massive original texts as well as read the best translations. There are a lot
of materials published under Creative Commons.
The ambition to build ‘a community of scholars’ has this as
its gateway: making the literature accessible and reducing the debilitating
context of closed scholarship and elitism that has always characterised great ‘national’
writers – even Shakespeare. The emphasis on play
is important but so is ‘close reading’ which is seen as a way of bringing the
texts out into relevant contexts and arguments about those contexts that span a
number of different academic traditions.
The course behind it talks about not only access to texts
but of an opportunity for learners ‘to re-play the game of storytelling’. We
learn by doing – by envisaging and playfully recreating the life of the text.
In a sense, this is already much more open than any other scholarship I’ve seen
on medieval literature, which (when I was forced through ‘Beowulf’ by Randolph
Quirk in the 1970s was a ‘chore’. I dropped it as soon
as I could.
The course isn’t trivial by being ‘play’ nor lightweight.
Texts are looked at as products of their history – even the historical context
in which they are read – so you can get hold of an exact facsimile of different
editions of the Decameron. Here is the Proem of the 1516 Florence edition from
the website. Other pages let you toggle between English and Italian text of the
narratives.
Like other projects all this increases access to ‘real data’
where even issues of font, illustration and spacing make us keep re-visioning
the text – indeed if we become a student we have to play / recreate (with)
parts of the text. That is how we are assessed not by the memorisation of facts
and opinions from others. We can use modern digital tools to search the text
for keywords or themes and have them reported. Once that is all that some
literary critics did.
Searching OU library found much what Tom found. Searches for
applications of the idea were stymied as you will see by the multiple meanings
of the word ‘literature’ in academic contexts – most to do with processes of
reviewing an academic topic.
However, what was of use to me was
two features of ‘webbing’ literary texts. First, creating new and innovative
kinds of scholar also went with an absolute commitment to the Web’s ability to
serve as a means of ‘curating’: preserving and making accessible text in forms
that were once available to very few and at great cost. The other was the
development of this idea for middle school use in order to build communal
shared and mutually accessible libraries of writing collected or written by the
learners themselves. This article indicated that such circles could bridge the
gap between the social needs served by reading groups and the dissemination of
a hunger for ‘close attention’ and, what we should call, ‘cognitive presence.
It was:
Whittington, J. (2013) ‘Literature Circles: A Perfect Match
for Online instruction’ in TechTrends
57 (4) pp. 53 – 58.
H817 Week 1 Exercise 4: An innovation - Decameron Web
As Tom has said these courses aren’t all that interactive between teachers and students, although Nagy’s course culminates in a Reader’s Circle called Week 25.
What is productive is a set of resources for reading texts in translation and in the original – the Nagy course has now a full library of close translations (not much good as literature but help people like me with very little Greek to counter the massive original texts as well as read the best translations. There are a lot of materials published under Creative Commons.
The ambition to build ‘a community of scholars’ has this as its gateway: making the literature accessible and reducing the debilitating context of closed scholarship and elitism that has always characterised great ‘national’ writers – even Shakespeare. The emphasis on play is important but so is ‘close reading’ which is seen as a way of bringing the texts out into relevant contexts and arguments about those contexts that span a number of different academic traditions.
The course behind it talks about not only access to texts but of an opportunity for learners ‘to re-play the game of storytelling’. We learn by doing – by envisaging and playfully recreating the life of the text. In a sense, this is already much more open than any other scholarship I’ve seen on medieval literature, which (when I was forced through ‘Beowulf’ by Randolph Quirk in the 1970s was a ‘chore’.
I dropped it as soon
as I could.
The course isn’t trivial by being ‘play’ nor lightweight. Texts are looked at as products of their history – even the historical context in which they are read – so you can get hold of an exact facsimile of different editions of the Decameron. Here is the Proem of the 1516 Florence edition from the website. Other pages let you toggle between English and Italian text of the narratives.
Like other projects all this increases access to ‘real data’ where even issues of font, illustration and spacing make us keep re-visioning the text – indeed if we become a student we have to play / recreate (with) parts of the text. That is how we are assessed not by the memorisation of facts and opinions from others. We can use modern digital tools to search the text for keywords or themes and have them reported. Once that is all that some literary critics did.
Searching OU library found much what Tom found. Searches for applications of the idea were stymied as you will see by the multiple meanings of the word ‘literature’ in academic contexts – most to do with processes of reviewing an academic topic.
Whittington, J. (2013) ‘Literature Circles: A Perfect Match for Online instruction’ in TechTrends 57 (4) pp. 53 – 58.