I have a few goals for the end of the semester:

• I've been reading a lot of teachers' blogs lately, and I really want to get to the point where I blog about my experience as a personal reflective tool. I assume that most of the teachers whose blogs I read were not told that they had to blog, and it seems like a great way of processing your experience whenever you have time. I've seen similar things happen on twitter with #edchat, #ntchat, and #1stchat, but blogging can just be a record. For the rest of the year, I'm going to try to do a few shorter blog posts when I have things to say instead of gathering them all up at the end of the week.
• I want to continue working through my narratives in Literacies of music, tech, and linguistics.
• I want to engage more with the class community in Literacies--on twitter, here, and in person. I know that I've been spending a lot of my time looking out to the world through social media for this class, but I think more intra-class communication would help me grow more.

I'm thinking about using Storify to tell my thrice-told tale once. What storytelling method are you excited about?

Half the Sky has really gotten me to think about what the standard protocol and ettiquite for international humanitarianism is.

I remember asking my dean at the beginning of my freshman year, what classes can I take that can help me look more deeply into non-profit activism.  And she had told me that there really aren't any classes that focus just on that; You can essentially major in anything and go into non-profit activism.  When I think back, I thought that was very fair.  Anyone can go into the world and try and help.  However, my thoughts have shifted a bit.  While I still think it's great that the opportunity to help in ways such as the Half the Sky movement, I often wonder how organizations would be percieved if there were classes that were specifically offered about the organization of non-profit groups or international humanitarianism in general.  Perhaps I just haven't done enough research to find classes, but even as I look into classes for next semester, I do not see many classes that are offered that are about how to operate an organization that works in international humanitarianism.  Why can't it be like teacher certification?  You'd have to be certified to start a non-profit organization.  Is that too crazy of an idea?  If there is someone who is well-versed in this area, they could comment on how it works.   

http://www.nymag.com/daily/fashion/2012/03/mom-reacts-vogues-fat-7-year-old-girl-story.html?imw=Y

http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2012/03/diet-doctors-disapprove-of-dara-lynn-weiss-too.html

This article and the many many subsequent comments has made me think about a part of feminism, or at least my understanding of feminism, that hasn't come up in class so much--the "feminine" body image. This particular article (I never found the original, but only articles about it) concerns the personal response of a mother whose female 7 year old child is considered morbidly obese. Also this article was featured in the annual "shape issue" of Vogue, which may be why it attracted so much attention, and could be tagged easily as "Vogue article about fat seven year old girl" et cetera.

It appears that the overwhelming response to this particular mother's reaction is negative. Most comments cite her as narcissistic and effectively preparing her second grader for a plethora of eating disorders, and passing on her own personal psychosis.

Here is the link for And Tango Makes Three on Amazon.  You can see several of the pages through their product page and the reviews are worth skimming.  

An annoyance with the text that I neglected to bring up in class is the pure audacity of international humanitarianism. When there are still things being swept under the rug and out of our consciousness like the Trayvon Martin  case and this case (http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/29/killed_at_home_white_plains_ny) of a 68 year old veteran being killed in his home largely on the basis of race, I feel it is blatantly cruel to an extremely  marginalized portion of the population within our own country who is in need of justice, much often the same sort of justice aid groups like Half The Sky go peddling and pandering support for all around the world. James Baldwin, a civil rights activist mostly active in the 60s, expressed a similar concern in critique of sprouting aid initiatives like the Peace Corps, "We can't forget about the little boy in Harlem." Instead of solely being conflicted on whether or not to poke one's head into another culture's and country's problems, perhaps it is time we take time to assess the mirroring issues on our own turf.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a gutter appears in the form of the novel. Breaks between thoughts and ideas, rewinding time, switching settings are clearly shown by a "..." in between short stories. I'm not sure if the "..." break was used for formatting reasons, one of many possible icons of a break, or if it was intentionally chosen as an ellipsis to point at the untold information. Either way, it breaks the train of thought, filling up the missing storylines with blank space and a "..." for one to ponder. Sometimes, the breaks are used to fill in with an extra piece information, breaking from the flow of the story to note on a detail. It is also used to point at a switch in setting. It makes the reading very conversational, as if Vonnegut is just filling in on the story in conversation with random, not necessarily in chronological order, events. According to Vonnegut himself, the book is "jumbled and jangled...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" (pg.24). His intentions in the breaks therefore emphasize the inevitable lack of structure in a novel about a war, against war. The text break emphasize the blanked memories of Vonnegut and the other Dresden bombing survivor O'Hare as they try to reconstruct what happened and the information on the war that probably should not be shared.

(Digital Humanist, Katherine D. Harris tweeting on Hema's and my citation method)

Since my collaborator, Hema Surendrenathan and I have already presented this (at Re:Humanities), I'm posting this up on Serendip with hopes that it helps solve some of the questions surrounding digital citation and citation of discourse. We have produced the barebones of a citation that allows for more freedom with citation yet still gives credit to an individual scholar. As we have discussed the problems with citation in class, I wanted to put this up as a solution to perhaps, some of our problems.

Over winter break, I came across this video for Mr. Pole Dance Germany 2011:

Okay, my title doesn't necessarily match the post that I'm about to write BUT it cracked me up at the Re:Humanities conference on Friday. But I disgress. This weekend, I attended and presented at two conferences: Re:Humanities at Swarthmore and the Mid Atlantic Writing Center Association (MAWCA) Conference at Shippensburg University. I got a glimpse of the digital tools that are being implemented at various institutions in terms of student projects and at writing centers across the country and this experience has really made me consider the questions that you should ask yourself when planning on using digital technology. In this post, I want to really gear these questions towards using digital tools in academic writing which this class really allows freedom for.

"With freedom comes great responsibility"

I hate to be really cliche but this is starting to crop up as a theme in terms of writing a digital "webevent" (To borrow Anne's language). I've questioned my postition as someone who is media literate and I've started to realize that to become media literate, you need to start asking the right questions otherwise you will end up with some not-so-great papers. (Check out the link and find some of my experiments gone wrong) So here are some of the things that I will be thinking about in terms of writing digital papers:

After reading Thrice Told Tale and discussing the importance of different retellings of the story, I wanted to further investigate the process of documenting a story. In the case of this collection, this story was chosen to be told by people outside of the community. As we discussed in class, community memebers did not express interest in telling the story of Mrs. Tan. Researchers outside of the community decided that this was a relevant story to tell; based on its appeal because of drama and suspense, it makes an interesting story to write about. Readers of these accounts have three different ways of thinking about Mrs. Tan, but all three stories relay information that presents an image of chaos and community disruption. Mrs. Tan's story is probably not the story that memebers of this community would want to share with others. This incident does not represent the entire community and is not a way of sharing stories that represent a more accurate and informed picture of this society. Researchers, writiers, and other documenters enjoy positions of power because they allow themselves to enter an existing community or situation and choose what they would like to write about. They can afford to write what they want and express what they see because often, they are not the ones who put a part of their identity on the line for criticism. Although maybe others disagree with the way Margery Wolf documents the findings, what readers focus on most is the content of the stories.