Grad Research: Eric Covey's Intro AMS course creates photography Tumblr

It should come as no surprise that our department takes digital and new media very seriously. Many of our professors and instructors have integrated online tools into their research and in their teaching with fascinating and wonderful results. So, needless to say, we're thrilled to share with you a photography project that emerged out of recent Ph.D. graduate Eric Covey's summer introductory American Studies course, which centered on foodways in America.Here's what Eric had to say about the project in a blog post, the full text of which is available here:

This time around I decided to slightly refocus the course—engaging more closely with the field of American studies that has been my intellectual home for a decade now— but to still maintain an emphasis on US foodways. I would draw from many of my previous lectures, but each day’s class (this was a small lecture with about 40 students) would begin with a discussion of a selected keyword from  editors Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s collection of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007). The resulting course would be dubbed “Introduction to American Studies: Keywords and Key Foods.”In practical terms, what this meant was that when I lectured about rice in West Africa and the Stono Uprising in South Carolina, students came to class having read African (Kevin Gaines). And when I lectured on barbecue and cotton culture in Central Texas, they read Region (Sandra A. Zagarell). Since this was a summer course, additional reading beyond keywords was light. Students read William Cronon’s “Seasons of Want and Plenty” from Changes in the Land alongside Colonial (David Kazanjian) the day I lectured on maize. My lecture on bananas was prefaced by Cynthia Enloe’s “Carmen Miranda on My Mind” from Bananas, Beaches and Bases and Empire (Shelley Streeby). I explained to students on the first day of class that what I expected was for them to develop a vocabulary that they could use in a variety of settings.Of course I also expected them to demonstrate some mastery of this vocabulary in their coursework. Three exams asked students to identify material from the class and explain its significance using the language ofKeywords. I also assigned a photo project that required them to take a photo of a local food site and write a brief caption (450-900 words, also drawing on Keywords) to accompany the photo. These photos and captions were posted to a collective Tumblr at http://amskeywordskeyfoods.tumblr.com. When I initially described the project to my students, I suggested two approaches they might take: first, they could show how their photo illustrated a particular keyword; Or, second, they might use one of the keywords to analyze the photo. On the due date, students e-mailed me their photo and caption. Because Tumblr is mostly user friendly, it only took me a few hours to upload all the images and uniformly-formatted text.

Grad Research: The End of Austin, a Collaborative Documentary Project

Here at AMS :: ATX, we're - perhaps not surprisingly - huge fans of academic projects that engage with the digital realm in meaningful ways. We're particularly excited by projects like the Archive of Childhood, which we featured last week, and other digital archives like these (among myriad others, naturally). Public access, multimedia, and interactivity all open up possibilities for innovation in research.But what about digital academic work of a different sort - those that blend the creative and the scholarly on a digital platform?One graduate seminar held this fall at UT had a chance to experiment with creating a digital scholarly and artistic project as a class assignment. Randy Lewis’s “Documenting America” class was charged with the task of creating a collaborative, interactive documentary project using the Tumblr platform. The topic? The end of Austin.Here’s what Randy had to say about the project’s inception and its future possibilities:

Our seminar on documentary had looked at cinematic "city symphonies" from the 1920s like Berlin and Rain, and I wondered if we could track a particular thread through the landscape of Austin. All I came up with was the thread—the idea of "endings" that evokes borders, walls, boundaries, eras, nostalgia, death—and the rest reflects the talents of grad students working within a tight schedule of 7 days.Students, especially grad students, work very hard each semester, but relatively little of their work appears "on view" anywhere public. So we all liked the idea of something enduring beyond the fall semester, rather than going into a file cabinet, and Tumblr provided a public, permanent location that could accommodate writing, photos, sound files, and video equally well. We could even add to it in future semesters, and in that way have a "living project" for years to come.

Each student contributed one (or more) pieces to the site in a wide variety of forms: sound, image, text, video, and considered the questions from any number of angles – the end of place, the end of time, the end of culture, the end of living.So take a look here at the END OF AUSTIN – explore and engage with how this class imagined our swelling city’s possible, eventual, inevitable decline. And, of course, keep checking back for more.Lest we end on a bummer of a postapocalyptic note, though, it’s worth noting that projects like this might point to a new future for creative and scholarly work. The lasting and public frontier of the digital world has the potential to breathe new life into traditional scholarship in academia and into documentary production.Ultimately, as Randy notes, American Studies is a perfect place for experiments like this to begin: “Creating a site like this seems like the next step for fields like American Studies: it invites scholarship, art, and the wider public all to the same party.”