Student Projects (Undergraduate)

• ENG 382 and HNR 230: Infectious Language Podcast (Fall 2020)
• HNR 230: O Brave New Digital World! (Fall 2021) — 3D Printing & the Humanities
• HNR 230: Book Technology & the Reading Brain (Spring 2021) — Padlet Project
• HNR 230: The Humanities & Science: The Ties that Bind (Fall 2020) — Padlet Project
• ENG 200: English Literature & the Digital Humanities (Fall 2013-2018) — Frankenstein Machinima

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Infectious Language: A Podcast for the Pandemic (Fall 2020)

Infectious Language: A Podcast for the Pandemic addresses these questions. Over the 2020 fall semester, undergraduate students in two of my courses, HNR 230: The Humanities & Science – The Ties that Bind and ENG 382: History of the English Language, worked collaboratively to write scripts for 32 episodes of a podcast series exploring the impact that the vocabulary used (and misused) to describe COVID-19 and the stories told to disseminate COVID-19 has on the public’s interpretation of and reaction to the pandemic experience.

The episode scripts cover a broad range of topics. Students in HNR 230 explored the history of vaccines and how they work, the development of the public health system in the US, the radical revision to teaching students during the tuberculosis epidemic of the early 20^th century, the impact of COVID-19 on the performing arts, the opposing approaches of Sweden and New Zealand to handling the current pandemic, the lessons that the Spanish Flu could teach us, and even what the hoarding of toilet paper reveals about us as a society.

My HEL students investigated how COVID-19 has impacted (and continues to impact) our vocabulary, tracing the origins and development of such increasingly popular words as “pandemic,” “quarantine,” “lockdown,” “curbside pick-up,” “maskne” (acne from wearing facemasks), “zoom,” and “hydroxychloroquine.” The students also explored how the popularity of English vocabulary related to COVID-19 is influencing other languages, such as German, as well as how offensive geographic-based eponyms, such as “Chinese disease” and “Kung Flu” for COVID-19, have been used for diseases throughout history in order to marginalize people of other cultures. This fall, my students in ENG 381: Introduction to Linguistics are working on additional podcast scripts focused on second-wave pandemic vocabulary

Through their research and writing and eventual audio recording, my Honors and English undergraduate students have effectively demonstrated that public health is both an applied practice and an object of historical and communicative work in the humanities.

Please note: the recording of the podcasts has been delayed due to the pandemic (trying to social distance while recording proved problematic), electrical work in the building where we were to record (building was closed over winter break), and the weather closure (snow) of the university (two weeks in February when students were available to record episodes). This current semester, an undergraduate student is completing an independent studies project with me that requires her to revise and edit all the scripts in anticipation of recording the episodes in early January 2022.

IHI’s Coronavirus Outreach Grant has provided funds to purchase the professional-level audio recording equipment needed for students to record, edit, and produce audio for online streaming as well as a subscription to the podcast platform PodBean.

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HNR 230: O Brave New Digital World! (Fall 2021)

When Miranda exclaims, “O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” in William Shakespeare’s Tempest, she is expressing a naïve admiration of humanity; however, when John the Savage makes the same statement more than 300 years later towards the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, he is being bitterly ironic. This section of HNR 230 asks us to discover our place between the giddy euphoria of what the digital world seems to offer and the sober reality of its limitations.

We will explore a variety of current technologies and their applications across a broad range of disciplines, including but not limited to AR/VR in health studies and the humanities, 3D graphic design in gaming and the fine arts, data visualization in the social sciences and literary studies, gazemapping in neural marketing and education/reading studies, and AI in robotics, writing studies, and the arts. Together, we will set the course goals, choose the technologies, and design the assignments. And then we will analyze…and play…with the technologies to determine how they shape our current digital world and how they may reshape it in the future.

3D Printing & the Humanities:

Learning to 3D Scan with a Hand-Held Scanner:

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HNR 230: Book Technology & the Reading Brain (Spring 2021)

The advent of digital communications has prompted questions about how change in the technology of the book affects authors, readership, intellectual property, the business of publishing, and even the reading process itself. This section of HNR 230 introduced students to topics such as orality and writing systems; book production from wax tablet to medieval manuscript to printed page to digital interface; the development of printing; the concept of authorship; copyright; censorship; the economics of book production and distribution; libraries and the organization of information; print in other formats (comics/graphic novels, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, etc.); readership; and the neuroscience of reading. Students explored how “book” technologies influence, and are influenced by, diverse cultures and how reading communities form, transform, and perpetuate themselves.

This course was held synchronously online during the pandemic. Students completed an individual research project, but they also participated in a number of activities over the semester, including making their own ink from materials around them at home (restriction: nothing poisonous!) and a competition to “make a book” using materials around them that were not traditional paper or ink.

Padlet Project:

In addition, we analyzed our own abilities to write in cursive and baked some cakes:

• Cursive: How We Write by Hand
• Edible Books: Final Exam

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HNR 230: The Humanities & Science – The Ties that Bind (Fall 2020)

In a 1959 public lecture, the British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow famously argued that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” Snow identified these “two cultures” as the sciences and the humanities (specifically literature) and asserted that they were separated by “a gulf of mutual incomprehension,” even “hostility and dislike.” But was he right? If so, was such a divisive separation always the case? And, more importantly, is it true today?

This section of HNR 230 explored such questions, seeking to deepen our understanding of the relationship between science and the humanities — specifically literature, history, art, and music — across history and across cultures.

Padlet Projects:

For the unit on astronomy, students were asked to create a multimedia padlet board on the history and creative interpretation of a constellation of their choice from an interdisciplinary, historical, and cross-cultural perspective. The curated board had to include text (introduction, analysis, and bibliography), images, and audio/visual artifacts. Here are three examples of this project:

• Constellation of Orion the Hunter
• Orion, The Hunter
• The Constellation Pisces

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ENG 200LC: English Literature & the Digital Humanities (2013-2018)

ENG 200 is a General Education course that leads students to a deeper understanding and fuller appreciation of the literary arts. Human beings have been chanting poems, telling tales, and acting out stories from the beginning of recorded history. Over different lands, periods, and cultures, the genres and “rules” of literature have shifted and evolved, and the range of experiences that writers have presented in their works has continually expanded. Literature is first and foremost a form of entertainment, but the most significant literary works go further. As Horace wrote, the purpose of literature is “to delight and instruct.” Engaging literary works find new readers year after year, sometimes century after century.

This section of ENG 200, which I offered from 2013 to 2018 as a learning community paired with a section of INF 128 taught by a computer science faculty member, was designed as an introduction to new technologies, literary texts, and the questions they raise. The students read poetry, prose, and drama with a special emphasis on innovative technologies (ebooks, hypertexts, mobile apps, and virtual/augmented reality) in an effort to explore how the reading experience changes in the electronic environment and influences our interpretation of literature.

Machinima & Game Design Assignment:

For their final project, students could design a game or create a “machinima” based on one of the assigned texts in the course. Most of the game projects focused on the 14th-century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, particularly the opening Christmas scene at Camelot in Fitt I. Students who chose to create a machinima reinterpreted a scene from Mary Shelley’s19th-century gothic novel Frankenstein. Machinima is an art form that uses real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video game platforms or Second Life are used to generate the computer animation.

In fall 2014, Dustin Wheat, an undergraduate student majoring in media informatics, created such a machinima using the World of Warcraft gaming platform. He gave a digital presentation of his final project at NKU’s Celebration of Student Research and Creativity in April 2015. As a result of his successful demonstration, Dustin was one of two student Celebration participants invited to present their projects to NKU’s President Geoffrey Mearns and the Board of Regents in May 2015.

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