Post-text scholarship? What do English Lit. Librarians think?

October 13th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

Last week over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Brian Matthews broached the subject of “post-text scholarship” and its relationship to the English major of the future. A presentation claiming that “Film & Media” are poised to become the “new” English major prompted his thoughts .

This may be true in a sense. It may be that “new media studies” are poised to overtake the study of literature in terms of popularity and pride of place in the academy. It is harder to believe that it will simply replace the English major or that English major will stop doing what it has been doing for the last century plus in exchange for a new curriculum. That is, of course, open for debate, but my sense is that new media studies is developing as its own discipline, sometimes overlapping significantly with English departments, sometimes growing into its own department. Also, new media aren’t that new. The cost of entry has dropped in the last decade from prohibitive to nearly nil, and distribution networks like YouTube have emerged where there once were none. As a result, proponents of multimedia literacy are well-positioned to argue for greater institutional attention to the subject. I think they are right to do so. This gets us back to an old question about the English major, however. Is it about Literature or about composition? Many (maybe most) people would say both, but the American academy is littered with all sorts of bureaucratic arrangements that suggest the question is unresolved. Some writing programs are securely housed within the English department. Some are fully independent. Some live in a space somewhere between departments. Then there are the writing centers. Some English departments are wholly separate from the “writing program” as such or partner with the writing center as a kind of service outpost. Some times these centers are basically departments in their own right, sometimes they are part of a bigger service enterprise (like the library).

My point is that thinking of New Media as the English major of the future might not be the best way. For many situations, it just isn’t accurate. Also, it feels like a scare tactic. English department chairs certainly can’t afford to ignore the popularity and power of New Media, and there will undoubtedly be a significant increase in English/New Media course offerings over the next decade, but YouTube videos and written argument is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Matthews’s post is interrogative for the most part, of course:

Imagine that the majority of students coming to your desk/office/studio are not writing a term paper but developing a video-based argument—using sound, data, images, and so forth. If this is how they are being evaluated, how do we help them? And likewise, if this is a major output for faculty and researchers, how do we enable them?

We tend to be a very text-based operation. And even as we migrate to digital content, it’s still text. What does this mean in a film-focused world? What’s the role of the library in a post-text world?

My feeling is that many silent assumptions are being made here. Certainly, we (the library, and we English Lit. subject specialists) need to be adapting to increasing “post-textual” needs, and based on local experience I can say that we are. But are we really heading for a “film-focused world” or a “post-text world”? Are we really meant to believe that A/V-based argumentation will be a replacement rather than a complement to “traditional” written argumentation? I’m skeptical, and it’s not because I’m old and set in my ways (although I may be both of those things).

I could go on, but I’d rather open things up for conversation. What do you think? Am I right to be skeptical? If you don’t share my skepticism, maybe you have thoughts on how we should be preparing for the future of video-based argument? Also, what about the other side of English department work (i.e., making new knowledge about literature, most of which is “historical” and “text”)? Whence Literature in an English major replaced by New Media studies?

Posted in Changes in the Profession, Scholarship | 4 Comments »

VIDEO – Literature Librarians and Faculty Partnering for Academic Success

October 11th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

 

A new video produced by Laura Braunstein and Mildred Jackson.

 

 

Literature Librarians and Faculty Partnering for Academic Success

 

Posted in Marketing and Outreach | No Comments »

The Critical Librarian / The Scholar Librarian / Other library literary critical approaches?

June 23rd, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

With this post, I want to do one thing, and I want to avoid doing another thing.

 

–I want to ask for feedback about the scholarly practices of librarians with subject expertise in English Literature.

 

–I do not want to get tied up in the PhD v. MLS debate sparked by Jeff Trzeciak’s April talk on the Future of Academic Librarianship. I know there are merits to talking about the differences between these degrees, but there is plenty of discussion taking place elsewhere on the subject.

 

So, with that out of the way…

 

*It has occurred to me lately that many English Literature specialists publish scholarly articles all the time, but I’m not sure how many publish scholarly articles that pertain to (or amount to) English Literary criticism. My first question, then, would be: what amount of our scholarly output as professionals might fall in this domain? I’d love to hear from people who are doing work they consider literary critical, and I’d love to hear about people you know of who are doing this kind of work. I’d also like to hear from those who don’t do it, of course, but (as I said above) I’m not particularly interested in rehearsing a debate about educational backgrounds; there’s no reason to assume that a subject-based critical practice would be arrogated to the PhD-holders.

 

*My second, related, question is: are there (could there be) meaningful differences in the way librarians do literary critical work? That is to say, might librarians be bringing something unique to the table here, and if they are, how would we describe that uniqueness?

 

*My third, and final, question depends on the first two. If there isn’t interest in those, then the answer to this one is obviously just, “no.” Might it make sense to start a peer-reviewed academic journal (probably open-access / online) that focuses specifically on the critical scholarship of subject specialist librarians? I’m probably imagining a “humanities” scope rather than the narrower “literature” scope, but you see where I’m going with this…

Posted in Professional Development, Publishing, Scholarship | 10 Comments »

Small Press Publications

May 16th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

It’s fairly redundant to say we are often faced with tough choices in our collections duties, but small press publications present special challenges. New production methods (especially print-on-demand technologies), combined with trade presses’ shrinking interest in literary publications (and their low profitability margins), has led to a small press boom in recent years.

It can be hard for librarians to keep up and hard, too, to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I’ve just come across a nice website that might be of use (at least as part of our selection toolbox). It’s called Hey Small Press!, and it’s designed by Public Library employees for the purpose of getting good small press publication into the stacks. The Public Library focus seems more circumstantial than essential to me, and I plan to use it to help inform my small press buying.

Do you have other recommendations for this kind of selection tool?

 

Posted in Collection Development, Publishing | 3 Comments »

LES Meeting Times at ALA Annual – New Orleans

May 2nd, 2011

About Liorah Golomb

Key:
MAR = New Orleans Marriott
DOUB = Doubletree
MCC = Morial Convention Center

Friday June 24

~ 9:00-11:00 a.m. Literary Walking Tour with Inez Douglas. (exact time and meeting place TBD). $15/person. Space is limited! Contact Liorah Golomb at lgolomb@ou.edu to reserve a spot.

Saturday June 25

8:00-10:00 a.m. LES Executive Committee Meeting I — MAR-Regent
1:30-3:30 p.m. General Membership Forum — MAR-Mardi Gras H
4:00-5:30 p.m. New Members Discussion Group– MAR-Mardi Gras H
5:30-7:00 p.m. LES Social Hour — TBA

Sunday June 26

8:00 a.m.-noon Conference Program, co-sponsored with ANSS:  The Aftermath of Katrina and Rita: The Effects on Libraries, People, and Neighborhoods — MCC 356-357
10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Reference and Collection Development Discussion Groups — DOUB-Crescent B
1:30-3:30 p.m. MLA Int’l Bibliography Discussion Group*  – MAR-La Galerie 2

Monday June 27

8:00-10:00 a.m. All Committees Meeting — MAR-La Galerie 4
10:30 a.m.-noon LES Executive Committee Meeting II — MAR-Regent

All LES meetings are open to all. The All Committees meeting is when all LES committees meet simultaneously. If you are interested in serving on an LES committee, consider attending to get a sense of what we do.

*Not hosted by LES, but of interest to many members.

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Facebook for Academic Purposes?

March 28th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

In some recent work reviewing an updated edition of a writing handbook, I questioned whether it might not be time to start thinking seriously about how we should be encouraging students to work with social networking sites as online research sources. Certainly, plenty of people have been thinking for some time about how to use Facebook for pedagogical interactions (leading, among other things, to the so-called “Creepy Tree House Effect”). Not much thought has been put into “citing the site,” however, or into how students might be exploiting/learning from/re-purposing material that circulates in the social network space. It’s easy to be skeptical about students using Facebook and other social media for research, but Creepy Tree Houses notwithstanding, developments like the one mentioned in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education suggest that this kind of skepticism might be as misplaced as was our general indifference to social media a few years back.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Electronic Resources, Instruction | 3 Comments »

“Using Sources as Tools for Analysis”

February 21st, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

In recent months, my colleagues and I here at the University of Michigan Library have been reviewing our approach to information literacy instruction. Doing so is, no doubt, the kind of thing an organization should engage in almost constantly.

 

Among other things, this review has revealed that a dramatically high percentage of our library instruction is currently being directed at entry-level English classes. While it may not be an earth-shattering revelation, knowing this seems to oblige some new thinking about how best to approach such a high concentration of new library users (serving the patrons well and sparing the instruction librarians any undue redundancies). Also, insofar as the curriculum for these entry-level English classes is homogenous (although much of it isn’t), we’d like to adapt our instruction to its particular learning goals.

 

In service of these aims, I’ve been consulting with faculty in the English Department Writing Program about ideas for “Do-it-Yourself” information literacy instruction modules. The point of such modules is to offer faculty and graduate student instructors a way to begin directly integrating information literacy into their classes. These modules aren’t meant to replace the traditional 50-minute one-shot instruction session but rather to supplement it by delivering the most basic information in advance and by smoothing the transition between “course content” on the one hand and “library instruction” on the other.

 

*

 

The preceding three paragraphs are all a long preamble to what I’d really like to talk about in this post. In my attempts to develop the aforementioned instruction modules, I’ve been quizzing members of the writing faculty about the kind of content they’d find most useful in this format. Today, I got an interesting response. The assistant director of the program asked me to think about providing a module on the following topic: “Beyond the Research paper—using sources as tools for analysis.” He went on to emphasize how important it is to first- and second-year students to understand that gathering secondary source material is not an arbitrary task and that the sources themselves are meant to do something in a paper.

 

If writing instructors find it challenging to instill this lesson in students minds, there’s every reason to believe we librarians might have some difficulty, too, but I like a good challenge…

 

So. In order to begin thinking about how to approach this topic as a librarian, I’ve begun with thinking about the way we tend to teach students about plagiarism and how to avoid it. After all, plagiarism is the ultimate failure in the proper use of sources. In order to avoid such a failure, we teach students to identify what they are interested in before they start diving into their sources and to take fastidious notes based on those interests as they are reading their sources. We teach them to summarize, to paraphrase, to quote properly, and to give credit where it’s due. But the task at hand isn’t about what we don’t want students to be doing, it’s about what we do want students to be doing.

 

In order to turn things around, then, so that the emphasis is on making sources interact “as tools for analysis,” I think we have to probe how we expect students to understand the terms “analysis” and “sources.”

 

What is analysis? What is a source? There are plenty of ways to answer these questions, of course, but as far as the “discourse conventions” of English Literature study go, the range is not really that wide. I put it to my fellow LES librarians to help me answer this question.

 

I do have some ideas. I wonder what you think.

 

Isn’t Analysis something like an operation requiring one to take a critical position on something unclear, debatable, or otherwise interesting in a text (probably, but not necessarily, a literary text)?

 

Isn’t a Source another text that has already taken a critical position on the thing one is attempting to analyze? Isn’t it therefore an example of analysis, the successfulness of which is open to debate?

 

In order to teach how students of English Literature incorporate secondary source material into the production of new analytical perspectives, I wonder if we don’t have to teach a specific feature of critical thinking. Don’t we have to teach students to think of sources almost etymologically poetically, as streams of ideas (some stronger, some weaker) to draw from selectively as they develop their own thoughts?

 

Clearly this is a work in progress, but I’d love to know what others think about this set of questions and where it might lead.

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Posted in Instruction | No Comments »

Digital Questions, pt. 1

January 6th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

Although I’m a little hesitant to post my first blog entry while a significant portion of the LES group is immersed in the ALA Midwinter Convention, I’m sure many others like me will be staying put this week and looking on virtually.

 

It is significant for us all, certainly, that the MLA convention is also taking place just up the road in Los Angeles, and today’s panel session there (3:30-4:45) sponsored by the new Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures discussion group gives me an excuse to broach a subject many of us are thinking about. The panel is called “Literary Research in/and Digital Humanities” and features six presentations on the potential and problems of collaboration in digital environments between Literature Librarians and Literary Scholars. A nice group of presentation abstracts is available in a LibGuide set up by panel organizer Jim Kelly at: http://guides.library.umass.edu/MLA2011.

 

I wish I could make it to this panel, as I find myself thinking about digital scholarship more every day. In lieu of that though, I’d love to get comments from those who are able to attend. I’m sure other readers would be interested, as well. I’d also like to hear non-presenters (those who were or weren’t able to make it to the MLA panel) about how this panel corresponds to ongoing or anticipated activities at their home institutions.

 

My questions are several. But most basically I’d like to hear what kinds of digital Library/English department collaborations are happening around the country right now. The panelists at the MLA event give us a glimpse at some, and I’m aware of many others via my work with the EEBO-Text Creation Partnership. Still, it seems to me that a more categorical list of what is happening would be helpful to all English Literature Librarians as they work to develop their sense of the digital services the discipline is starting to demand.

 

There have been plenty of efforts to pin down a sense of what the elusive “Digital Humanities” are (or can be). As a useful first step, there seem to be many discussions floating around about what Humanists (and by inference Literary specialists) do with the objects of their study. Digital Humanists presumably do those same things but with the help of digital prosthetics. Two brief and rather elegant accounts of what Humanist do may be found, in fact, in a piece by Mary Claire Vandenburg in the most recent issue of our own BiblioNotes.

 

Mary cites John Unsworth’s short-list of common humanities activities: “discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating and representing” (7). She then goes on to suggest that the Humanities is really “a set of skills or ‘ways of doing’ which allows us to make sense of our world” (8). Here again, one infers that the digital addition to this set of practices would be in keeping with our increasing immersion in a world that is digitally mediated – or, that the Digital Humanities is a set of ‘ways of digital doing’ that allows us to make sense of our digital world).

 

Given all this, I’m very curious to hear more about what these digital “ways of doing” look like or entail in specific cases and how they make use of the skills/resources we have to offer as Literature Librarians.

 

My sense is that, currently, most digital literary scholarship fits roughly under the rubric of curatorial and/or editorial work. Do others share this sense? I notice, for example, that Unsworth’s list does not include words like “analyze,” “interpret,” or “explain.” Perhaps he covers this territory with his “illustrating or representing,” however.

 

Of the abstracts for the MLA panel, Manuel M. Martin-Rodriquez’s project strikes me as the most explicitly inquiry-driven use of digital tools insofar as it seeks to capture and manipulate literary information in a way that would be hard to accomplish without computers. It seems to have what we might call a literary research question built into it from the outset and to be using digital methods to “discover” (to use another of Unsworth’s terms) an answer or answers to the question. I don’t mean to say this is a more proper way of proceeding than the curatorial/editorial approaches. Each has its benefits and limitations. I would imagine Martin-Rodriguez’s work would be a less flexible tool for other, future scholars precisely because it is asking a question from inception. Projects like Heather Bowlby’s and Marija Dalbello’s might well have broader applicability because they have fewer built-in assumptions about the kinds of inquiry pertinent to their study.

 

What do you think? Did elements come to light in the panel that I could never anticipate from reading only the abstracts? And, what’s going in your departments? Are the digital scholars you work with more interested in inquiry or edition-making? If this is a false binary, then how do you see things shaping themselves? What are the objects of digital literary study and what digital tools are required to make sense of them?

Posted in Conferences, Digital Humanities, outreach, Professional Development, Uncategorized | No Comments »

ALA MW Collections Discussion Group

January 5th, 2011

About Aaron McCollough

English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan

A note from Michaelyn Burnette:

Collections Discussion Group
Hilton, Hidalgo E
8-10 A.M.
Sunday, January 9, 2011

Nooks and Kindles, iPhones and Androids, Google E-Books, oh my!

Among the topics proposed for discussion are many connected to the changes in English librarianship being discussed at the New Members DG. Come see what your counterpartsare handling the new mobile library, the one that has nothing to do with bookmobiles.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

New Members Discussion Group at Midwinter

December 21st, 2010

About Timothy Hackman

Librarian for English & Linguistics, University of Maryland Libraries. Member of LES since 2006.

Visions of the Future of English Librarianship: A Discussion with New Members

LES New Members Discussion Group
Saturday, January 8
4-5:30 p.m.
San Diego Convention Center, Room 23A

You don’t have to read tea leaves to forecast the future of English librarianship: Current trends suggest that the profession will see great changes in the next decade. Consider, for instance, the rise of interdisciplinary studies, the application of social science methodology to the study of literature, and the increasingly vocational mission of universities that has resulted in challenges to the existence of humanities departments. What will the future of humanities look like in the university and what should English librarians do to prepare? Share your predictions and plans with the New Members Discussion Group

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Posted in Conferences | No Comments »

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