This is a test of my Sound Cite clip. Click to listen to my Habanera

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Thinking about our session today, I came away thinking about how to approach sound in my teaching in a variety of ways. For my New York City seminar, I think the Roaring Twenties website that we looked at would be a great way to help students think about the city and urban space in a way that might be difficult to achieve just using text. I’m also excited about using SoundCite as a resource for student projects that they can create on their own and share with their classmates. I’m not sure about how to implement it exactly but working with Audacity to help students present a podcast as a class seems like it could have a lot of possibilities.

Of course, the thing I’m most excited about is laying down some more sick, fat beats on FDR speeches…

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Recently, my college added public speaking as a required skill for leadership classes. Digital sound tools are a perfect way to incorporate the goals of public speaking without taking class time for traditional (and often tedious) class presentations.

This fall, when I have students read a couple of chapters for homework, I’d like to assign 1-2 students per chapter to produce a 1-2 minute podcast to introduce the chapter. Instead of saying “Everything is important,” they’ll have to identify the argument, themes, and evidence in a concise manner. I can begin each class with these sound recordings to kick off conversation.

Another assignment I’d like to consider owes a debt to the “Memory Palace” podcast. In upper level courses, students produce 8-11 page research papers– traditional history papers, footnotes, primary sources, blah blah blah. I already have them write a twesis statement– a thesis in 140 characters or fewer– to make sure they are not cluttering their ideas with flowery language. For a sound component, I want them to produce a 3-4 minute podcast that tells the story of their research. This will emphasize writing a narrative. Then, the recording requires public speaking skills including tone, inflection, and speed. They can include ambient sounds or music for effect.

I’m also excited to begin using OHMS to preserve an archive of student oral histories. I would like to continue with the podcasting project in Oral History, but I’m learning more about how to manage the timelines and how to manage the archive. I’ll try to keep my sites tidy.

Generally, though, as someone who HATES being the only voice in a classroom, I’m so excited about the possibilities of digital sound in teaching. I cannot wait to play. But for now, play ball!

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As a teacher, I treat the classroom as a sacred space with only three participants: the student, the teacher, and the text. That I teach early American history and intellectual history makes this decision simpler than for scholars who teach, for example, modern history or cultural history. But it is also because I want to model for my students what it means to read closely—how to bring texts alive, and to see them as part of a shared conversation that connects us with the past. As a result, I aspire to create classrooms with minimal technological noise. As much as possible, I do not use Power Point. Educationalists speak of “flipping the classroom,” but we humanists have long worked in flipped classrooms anyway. Students read to prepare for class, and class is focused on making sense of the readings. The world is so noisy and distracting that  students—and even I—have a harder and harder time focusing on reading for its own pleasure. It takes discipline, and I want students to learn to enjoy the fruits of that discipline.

Yet the question of sound is a tough one for early Americanists. For starters, it was an age before  recordings. Recent works have sought to mine texts to re-create what early America might have sounded like. Historians of music have sought to understand how music functioned in a world before recording. But I think it matters most for public historians. The classroom is, by its very design, ideally a space apart from the world, a refuge for students and teachers to focus on reading and writing. But the world of public history is not—sites of public history bring visitors to real places, but those places are de-contextualized because the sounds and smells of the past are gone.

This strikes one most notably when visiting southern plantations. Today, plantation homes are sites of bucolic refuge. Trees sway by lazy rivers. One can imagine sitting on the porch, sweet tea and bourbon in hand, reading a novel. Again and again I hear tourists speaking of the beauty and peacefulness of southern plantations. This is true even when the sites go out of their way to remind visitors that plantations were working farms. We know that plantations were full of people, and the majority of them were enslaved. Plantations were crowded, loud, smelly, and violent places. But none of that comes through when one strolls the grounds of today’s beautifully restored southern manors. Indeed, it is the absence that brings present a different narrative of the South, a myth of the South that served the needs of white southerners after the Civil War. The loss of sound is the loss of truth.

Thus, to me, the question of sound is important—not in my classroom, where I seek to isolate my students from the noise of the world, but in places where the absence of sounds distorts the story of the past.

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Tonight while attending the Nationals game with the #doingdh16 crew, we discussed sounds. The conversation moved from scholarly to popular culture and the question arose: what is your theme song? I went with a classic. Feel the grove and join in by dancing. While I tend to ramble, I do eventually get around to my point which is actually another question: how does sound influence us and our classrooms?

My guess is that we all incorporate sound in diverse and complex ways. I would like to start to intentionally add this element into my classes. I have two assignments in my mind that I will revise utilizing the tools that we learned today: Ballads – Narrative and Themes and as a option for the service learning project. Since it is late, I am signing off, but am happy to share them in person.

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American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

Bob Benson is a reflective glass artist. I met him at the American Visionary Art Museum and asked him if I could have my picture taken with him near his work “The Flatulence Post.” Instead of the photo, he offered this, teaching me about the power of sound in museums. As you can see, I was thrilled to hear what he had to say.

You can read more about Mr. Benson in the Huffington Post.

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During the last couple of days of the #doingdh16 workshop we’ve been consciously discussing technologies and methods that perhaps challenge traditional historical methods more than those we covered previously. Yesterday we talked about public history vs. being historians in public, aka public intellectuals. Today we discussed and previewed methods for a more fully phenomenological approach to sharing stories. In shorthand, that approach means considering all of the human senses when studying a landscape or culture. Today we talked about using sound to amplify understanding.

Archaeologists have been working on this for around 20 years, with most of the credit for bringing phenomenology to scholars’ attention going to Christopher Tilley, though folks have been using experiential methods to recreate historical construction, crafting, and cooking methods for much longer–quite a while before “serious” scholars deigned to study the process. Is this a good time to mention my MA is in Archaeology?

As with all of the tech we’ve discussed so far, there are two essential choices before us as what Denise Meringolo (though she cribbed this term from someone else, who’s name escapes me at the moment) calls “digitally inflected” scholars. Will we use digital tools to replicate historical methods or will we use them to do things that traditional academic scholarship cannot? There’s no right answer to that question, and many projects will be a combination of the two.

This afternoon, institute leaders asked us each to consider how we might use the audio tools we reviewed today in our current work. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure quite how I’d use them in what I’m working on right now. However, I can see more applications for sound than for textual analysis because I tend to work with living communities. Instead, I can’t stop wondering how I can use sound or video to work on projects that are both born digital (is that the right phrase for something without a traditional publishing equivalent?) and truly collaborative. At a minimum, these new-to-me tools have expanded my frame of reference for sharing layered histories. That keeps my mind open as folks want to share and create their stories in new ways.

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In 2015 I helped to organized a conference at the University of Utah: “Black, White, and Mormon: A Conference on the Evolving Status of Black Saints within the Mormon Fold.” The conference panels were filmed and posted at YouTube. Here is the panel on Race and Mormon Women:

I can now envision using OHMS for each of the long panel sessions to make them much more user friendly and accessible. This is just one of the many great ideas I’ve learned at the Doing Digital History Summer Institute and am excited to experiment with. #doingdh16

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A useful sound addition to my website would be to add soundcite notations to a select group of my uploaded adobe files, by producing sound files using Audacity to produce “podcasts” of reading the contents of the historical info contained in the adobe newspaper articles. So in stages, first select which articles I would want visitors to listen to. Next read them into Audacity and create a sound file (mp3) for each article. Upload the mp3s into my WordPress.com media. Then I could either simply identify them within WordPress as sound links, or use SoundCite to more explicitly show them as audio links. For SoundCite, I’d need to embed the java link from SoundCite at the top of each page in which  a sound file would be identified. Then finally I’d embed the code for each sound file at the appropriate spot. I think I’d want to limit these audio files to articles I thought truly important, as they would involve a bit of time developing “podcast” files.

M

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