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.

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? 

• Introduction to Storycorps 
• About 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.

• Download the Storycorps app (Interview your family and loved ones this Thanksgiving!)
• Video Tutorial: Storycorps app [2:30]
• Five Steps to Help You Get Started [pdf]
• “10 Conversation Tips for Your Storycorps App Interview” [pdf]

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.

Week 2: September 5 (docx)

Week 4: September 19 (Google Doc)

Week 9: October 24 (Google Doc)

Week 11: November 7 (Google Doc)

Katherine Gilbreath: Tyler and the Tribe Project

Brooke Butler: Mamma’s Journey with Huntington’s Disease

Benita Reed: Breaking the Chain

Jennifer Tolson: A Binge Affair

Jennifer Mims: The Sparrow

Lea Young: The Unraveling

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.

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 Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts (DH project)
• Before Mexico City: East Texas Activism, Global Justice (video)

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

Writing with Clay!

I. Introduce concepts (10 minutes)

II. Clay Activity (15 minutes)

III. Discussion

“Writers and Their Tools” [handout: docx] [powerpoint] (Use any way you wish!)

additional: (English 333, video / blog)

WRITING WITH CLAY [images, vid]

Description: From cave paintings to clay tablets and typewriters to new media, technological advances are constantly changing the way writers write. The purpose of this workshop is to help our writing students think more strategically about the “affordances” (Cynthia Selfe) of various technologies in order to choose the most appropriate one for the job.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore various roles played by a writer’s tools by experimenting with materials rarely associated with writers and readers in academic contexts: clay. We’ll begin with a brief discussion of the important ways new technologies have affected the way writers write throughout time. How did writers approach a writing task when the only tools available were clay tablets? How about later as paper became more cheaply and widely available? How did the invention of the typewriter change things–not to mention the pencil, ballpoint pins, correction tape, White Out? Together we will experiment with a variety rhetorical situations and a range of likely unfamiliar tools (clay!), then discuss their impact on the resulting composition and the composing process itself. In addition to experiencing this classroom activity, participants with come away from the workshop with teaching notes for this activity, including a sample handout for students.

Goals: The workshop brings into relief several other aspects of the writing process that writers normally take for granted. As they go about their assignment, students should consider these issues:

• How writing—whether on clay or on computers—forces them to deal with technology at the same time they are trying to get the writing done;
• How technology affects the content of writing as well as the writing process;
• How the type of writing they are doing influences the technology they are using
• And finally, how the technology affects the way that they read a document or text.

1. Submit RR11 (Mellix and Guerra)

2. Talk about conferences next week (you’ll sign up for these Thursday, and the conferences will take place on either 11/12 or 11/14).

Subject of conferences: your grades thus far and WA3. You’ll also receive WA2.

RR11 due today

RR12 due Thursday (11/7)

RR13 (submit to eCollege before 2:00 Tuesday 11/12)

RR14 (submit to eCollege before 2:00 Thursday 11/14)

That’s the last of your Reader Responses!

3. Talk about grade sheet and complete before next time. We’ll use this and the one I have completed as a discussion generator during our conferences before firming up your grade for this course going into WA3 and the Final Reflections.

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