Wanna help Dallas seniors tell their stories? (11/25, 11-3:00, Dallas Public Library)

Together with the Dallas Public Library and the Dallas Council of Senior Affairs, Sigma Tau Delta at Texas A&M-Commerce is co-hosting a National Day of Listening storytelling event.

DayofListening-BTG (1)We need volunteers to help facilitate hour-long sessions in which older community members are interviewed by friends and loved ones to capture and preserve their stories. This event is part of Storycorps’ National Day of Listening, which encourages and supports people to record their life stories the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving provides many friends and loved ones an opportunity come together and share stories about themselves and their lives. We want to help preserve stories like these!

What is Storycorps? 

What will volunteers be doing? 

Most of these storytelling events will be guided by the Storycorps app, which helps anyone conduct and record a productive, 40-minute interview by providing interview questions, prompts to record, and an opportunity to publish their stories and archive them at the Library of Congress.

Most will come with a friend or a loved one, who will be conducting the actual interview. They may need: (a) help getting started [these questions are terrific prompts!); (b) help with the Storycorps app (see “Five Steps to Help You Get Started” and video tutorial above for guidance; it’s easy!); additional troubleshooting support.

Some may come alone. In those cases, we’d need you to serve as the interviewer, using the same extensive support Storycorps provides, both in the above documents and the Storycorps app itself.

Plan to join us for all or part of these event? 

Terrific! Please let me know via email at Shannon.Carter@tamuc.edu and/or via Facebook so we’ll know who to expect and prepare accordingly.

 

CELEBRATION OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING

January 8, 2015, 6:30-8:00

Hall of Languages, Room 203 (Auditorium)

Texas A&M-Commerce

The Celebration of Digital Storytelling is a series of multimedia presentations featuring snapshots in the lives of their authors: 5-10 minute video essays guaranteed to move, inform, and enrich their viewers. Not all 18 students in this online course will be able to participate in this event, but a great many will. Join us! The projects featured were created by students in Shannon Carter’s graduate-level course English 697: Digital Storytelling, a workshop in the history and methods of digital storytelling. Objectives included understanding the fundamentals of dynamic digital storytelling, from seeing the story to assembling and sharing it. Students will demonstrate that understanding by assembling and sharing their own, original examples of digital storytelling.

Rebecca McKee, “The Perpetual Power of Story

Shadarra James, “Growth and Hope–Double Blessing

Mike Smith, “Panic and Rain

Megan Beard, “To the End and Back

Laura Catherine, “Not of the Past

Diana Hines, “A Knowledge of Water: Defining a Life at Sea

Shelby Miller, “I’ll Help You Remember

Katherine Gilbreath, “Like Crazy

Tawyna Smith, “Dear Sons 

The following students will not be able to attend this event but invited us to share their work with you:

Jo Anne Johnson, “Losing You

John Lewis, “The Life and Times of J. Ridley Lewis

Laura Langson, “Journeys

Wes English, “Gone Too Soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Caroline Carlson, “Dear Baby: A Story within a Story

Ginnette Wafford, “From 13 to 30

Joyce Sample, “A Performance to Remember

Benita Reed, “A Measure of Faith

 

Digital Storytelling: Winter Mini 2014

Course Number: ENG 697.01E

Course Name: Digital Storytelling

Course Description: ENG 697.01E (Digital Storytelling) will be a workshop in the history and methods of digital storytelling. Objectives include understanding the fundamentals of dynamic digital storytelling, from seeing the story to assembling and sharing it. Students will demonstrate that understanding by assembling and sharing their own, original examples of digital storytelling.

Check out the syllabus for assignments, schedule, and other details.

November 3, 2014

Presentation: Remixing the “Silent Protest” (1968): Oral History and the Strategic Potential of the (Public) Digital Humanities

Originally delivered October 2013, at the Oral History Association’s annual conference (Oklahoma City, OK), as part of a panel called “Remixing Oral History:  Toward a Federal Writers’ Project 2.0″ (abstract below)

Remixing Oral History:  Toward a Federal Writers’ Project 2.0

Keywords: local, digital humanities, activism, 1960s, civil rights, rural, urban, agency, race and racism, East Texas, Brooklyn, New York, WPA, FWP, oral history, video, archival development, community

 Summary: The proposed panel features two projects–funded, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. Both make strategic use of oral history interviews for the recovery, interpretation, preservation, and delivery of forgotten, contested, or otherwise underrepresented stories about local activism in the 1960s—one urban, Northern, and community-led (Brooklyn); the other rural, Southern, and initiated by students on a recently desegregated community (Texas). Both projects, funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, have been inspired by the Federal Writers’ Project, especially the American Guide Series (see Hirsch 2008). After sharing two brief videos emerging from each project, the panelists will discuss FWP and the potential role to played by the digital humanities in bringing communities and universities together to capture hidden histories and to remember those forgotten.

 Speaker 1-3 will present “A Clear Channel” (ACC), a short (18:16 minute) documentary about East Texas activism in 1967-1968, remixed from primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and contemporary texts. The first three speakers are the Project Director and research team for Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts, the larger project from which “ACC” emerged. As they will illustrate, RRT makes strategic use of digital tools to bring together archivists, historians, instructional technology professionals, and humanities scholars with students and the community for archival development and interpretation of local stories surrounding race and race relations at a particularly divisive moment. The impact on our local community and these particular activities has been significant, bringing together campus and community by renewing attention to historical examples of civic engagement. Through RRT, the African Americans in East Texas Collection at Texas A&M University-Commerce library witnessed unprecedented growth in both its content and use. RRT alone has contributed dozens of oral history interviews and related artifacts previously scattered across the region.

 Speaker 3 will present The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project, which also brings together campus and community to tell forgotten stories. She will describe her work with the Brooklyn Civil Rights Oral History Collection in connection to the educational program Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA), directed by the Brooklyn Historical Society and supported by a Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education grant, and the Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Startup grant. As part of SAFA, which brings first year college students into the archives to do primary research, a team of LIU Brooklyn

Forums: Grading Rubric

​​Forum __: __  points [link]

Description: You will have 5 Forums throughout the term. For each Forum, you can earn up to six points—totaling 30 points or 30% of the final course grade. The rubric below should help explain your overall score. As always, let me know if you have any questions or concerns.


1. Reflections on Assigned Readings: __ point(s)

2 thoroughly explores each of the readings, including effective use of direct quotation or detailed reference. The author then extends the ideas in the readings by relating it to classroom experience, to other material studied, and/or to personal experience.
1 explores some of the readings; little or no direct quotation or reference is given. Little attempt is made to extend beyond or comment upon the reading.
0 work not turned in or is so cursory it does not reflect familiarity with the text.

 

2. Reflections on Larger Conversations: __ point(s)

1 refers specifically to a point raised in previous discussions as it relates to current week’s assigned readings, or otherwise addresses the larger scholarly conversation in meaningful ways. Added bonus if some aspect of classmate’s contributions are drawn in and engaged within this context
0 no engagement with conversations taking place in our readings our discussion areas before the assigned week. Makes the auditor wonder if the commentator has been engaged with discussions of previous weeks.


2. Timeliness of Posts: Minus __point(s)

Minus 0 points Posted initial contribution on or before the deadline
Minus .5 point Posted initial contribution after the deadline
Minus 0 points Posted follow-up in response to classmates on or before the deadline.
Minus .5 point Posted follow-up in response to classmates after the deadline. 
Minus 1 point Did not post follow-up response at all (only one post to Forum)

English 570 Course Description

Description
In English 570 (“Strategies in Composition”), students will examines strategies in composition for community engagement, especially with respect to the ways writing might help bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between universities and the communities in which they are situated (the “town”/”gown” dichotomy). Together, we will consider questions like the following: How have everyday people used writing to make a difference in their local communities? How do/can ordinary people “go public”? How do/can college students go public, and how can educators best support them? We will cover issues in community literacy studies, featuring historical examples of ordinary people garnering rhetorical agency across local publics and contemporary examples of civic engagement both within and beyond the college writing classroom. Continue reading