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A Labyrinth of Times
Paul Harris and Melanie Hubbard
This virtual labyrinth explores the plurality of the singular noun time through a series of temporal metaphors, images and concepts. Designed by LMU Digital Scholarship Librarian Melanie Hubbard, the rich diversity of critical and creative content was developed by undergraduate students in a seminar on David Mitchell’s fiction taught by Professor Paul Harris. The circuitous, reversible, unicursal path through the labyrinth (‘Ariadne’s thread’) is an archetypal image for both time and narrative and aligns well with the linear and cyclical structures evident across Mitchell’s novels.
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Digital Humanities & The Anthropocene
Paul Harris and Melanie Hubbard
This course, taught by Paul Harris and Melanie Hubbard, engages upper-division undergraduate and graduate students in the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH) through projects grounded in the study and analysis of literary texts. Students will develop research skills using digital tools (including textual analysis tools and mapping tools) and integrate quantitative methods with qualitative analysis and close reading. Students will develop individual and collaborative projects in both critical and creative modes, assembling multi-media projects. These projects will explore themes including networks, mapping and power; the environmental impact of digital technologies; literature, theory, and ecology in the Anthropocene era.
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The Myth of the Student Hero and the “Dreaded Lit Review”
Dean Scheibel, Susan Gardner Archambault, and Melanie Hubbard
This book uses images from 27 student comics from roughly 125 comics created in my course, “Introduction to Communication Inquiry,” over a three-year period. Most of the them were created in a couple of weeks, which was the time remaining in a semester after the students had completed a traditional academic paper called a “literature review.” I wanted students to reflect on the process of writing a literature review by telling a story about it. I wanted them to tell the story in the form of a comic. I thought I would get a deeper and better reflection if the process was more creative, something that used images as well as words, and that required a bit of planning and organizing.
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Archives, Race, and Justice
Melanie Hubbard and Julia Lee
Archives, Race, and Justice is an engaged learning project created in Critical Methodology, a Loyola Marymount University Graduate English class. The project, led by Professor Julia Lee and Digital Scholarship Librarian Melanie Hubbard, required students to work with archival materials provided and curated by the Southern California Library (SCL), a community archive in South Los Angeles. Students explored, researched, and contextualized the Library’s materials, focusing on articulating their connections to the Library’s mission. The students’ work culminated in the creation of the digital projects below, which are intended to illustrate their encounters with the materials.
Part of what inspired this project was a desire to demonstrate the value of archives, in particular community archives like the SCL, which house the materials of underrepresented people. Such materials, which are often overlooked by more traditional institutions, are necessary for a full accounting of history. It is our hope that this small project will help highlight the importance of such objects and such archives and that it will help inform visitors on how to engage with similar materials.
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Mapping Parable of the Sower
Julia Lee and Melanie Hubbard
A Knight Lab StoryMap that traces the geographic movement in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.
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Mothers Reclaim Our Children (Mothers ROC)
Melanie Hubbard and Julia Lee
The Mothers ROC materials include meeting agendas and notes, spreadsheets of police violence victims, and documents concerning the organization’s mission. In the following video, students explain the origins of the group and contextualize it within the long history of racial discrimination in Los Angeles.
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Pasadena Pest Control Program
Melanie Hubbard and Julia Lee
The Pasadena Pest Control Program materials consists of documents related to the development and running of the program. Among the documents are “Pest Control Awareness Test,” which were administered to trainees to gauge their understanding of both pest control techniques and the political mission of the program. The following videos illustrate students’ initial object analysis of these tests and a contextualization of the program that these tests help shape.
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Substance
Paul Harris and Melanie Hubbard
SubStance, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is a major interdisciplinary journal with a reputation for excellence, known for fostering new forms of thinking about literature and promoting a dialogue between contemporary theory and a multifaceted outside. To access SubStance issues online, please visit our Project Muse page. Here, we introduce a digital platform of the publication. Consistent with the journal's modus operandi, it features hybrid work that generates challenging conceptual frameworks, work that represents something more than a style, or, rather, truly a style: a creative way to address and express ideas or concepts, to push literary thought and thought about literature into new territories.
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Contested Representations: Debating Britain’s Imperial Legacy
Melanie Hubbard and Amy Woodson-Boulton
History 4910: Topics in Public History: Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, was an upper-division History course at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, taught by Prof. Amy Woodson-Boulton in Fall 2017. The course introduced students to the issues and practice of public history, which is dedicated to addressing and engaging the broader public in issues of history, memory, commemoration, and identity. We considered public history through a study of the British Isles in relation to the world. What forms has public history taken in Britain, Ireland, and the former British Empire? How have the British and Irish debated their role in Europe, their own national identities, and their role as colonizers and colonized? How have they engaged with meaningful debate about the role of history in politics and national identity? What debates over commemoration, visibility, and invisibility or erasure have become important for people in Britain, Ireland, and their former colonies? Students identified and researched a specific topic related to Britain, Ireland, and the world, and collaborated to translate their research into this website. By putting their study of public history theory into practice in a public forum, students were able to connect their (virtual) out-of-classroom experience with their academic content. Public history as a practice means connecting past ideas, lives, and experiences to the present day, illustrating the need for continual re-interpretation, and communicating the gripping interest of historical research to those outside of academia. The experience of considering the broader implications of their academic work has invited students — and invites our broader audience — to consider the meaning and uses of information in general, and of history in particular, in public debates and in the formation of communal (national, racial, ethnic, religious) identities. I include my syllabus, schedule, and website assignments for other instructors to use and adapt. Please get in touch with comments, questions, and suggestions: awoodson@lmu.edu.
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Notes from a Southern Pacific Railway Porter
Julia Lee and Melanie Hubbard
The Southern Pacific Railway (SPR) menus collection have on the back notes written by Alfred Ligon, a dining car porter in the 1930s, and later the owner of the first African American-owned bookstore in Los Angeles. Students created a Story Map that takes viewers through an overview of SPR porter history and Alfred Ligon’s biography. They also provide a video (located toward the end of the Story Map) that explains their initial observations of the menus.
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Reanimating Frankenstein
Melanie Hubbard and Alexandra Neel
Celebrating the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), students from Loyola Marymount University’s “HNRS 2300: Literary Analysis” were tasked with generating digital projects that bring to life various aspects of the novel and form the body of Reanimating Frankenstein. Take a deep dive into the water imagery in Frankenstein, or enjoy short films on how the physiognomy of the monster has been represented in film from Thomas Edison’s 1910 short to Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, or on how Frankenstein and Blade Runner compare in terms of their conceptions of the posthuman. How does costume and dress determine how we read the creature in James Whale’s 1931 film versus Liam Scarlett’s 2017 ballet? We hope you enjoy these experiments!
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Israel Handbook For Travelers
Melanie Hubbard and Holli Levitsky
In this Israeli Literature* course, we investigated modern representations in literature and film of longing for the land of Israel. For whom is this land the object of longing, and why? Who feels a sense of ownership, or belonging, in the land? Does the feeling of belonging necessarily create an excluded other? Can one feel a belonging for the land while living outside of it, or conversely, can one live in a land and still long for it (or an idealized or imaginary other)? We neither solved nor resolved the real-life issues imaginatively realized by the writers and filmmakers. Rather, in this "HANDBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS," students had the opportunity to contemplate the issues by focusing on the ways in which four iconic Israeli authors presented a real landscape in their imaginary poetry and prose. The students were asked to locate at least three geographical sites suggested by the literature, and then to create text and find supporting visuals that offered a way to more fully understand--and visualize-- the landscape of Israel as seen in the literature. They paid close attention to what the imaginary representations—or stories-- could reveal about the people narrating them as well as their history and geopolitical underpinnings.
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Thomas Horsfall in Context
Melanie Hubbard and Amy Woodson-Boulton
At Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, California) in Spring 2016, the students in Dr. Amy Woodson-Boulton's undergraduate History seminar "The Artist and the Machine" conducted research into the work of Thomas Horsfall and his context. Each student chose a topic related to his work, and then formed groups around relevant themes - art, nature, labor, children, and the city. From the beginning and throughout the process, the students relied on the vital support, instruction, and expertise of LMU's Digital Scholarship Librarian Melanie Hubbard as they translated their research into a digital exhibition format. The project developed in concert with the Horsfall Space and the University of Manchester, and the seminar class visited Manchester in February 2016, when they shared their initial ideas and website plan with the Horsfall Space web team. The work on this site therefore reflects the students' work and ideas about Horsfall and his historical period. It is intended to examine specific objects, texts, and images from the Ancoats Art Museum and the broader culture, in order to understand the ideas behind Horsfall's work. We hope that visitors enjoy how each student explored the period in a unique way, and how the exhibits combine to provide a kaleidoscopic view of late Victorian Manchester. Please direct any questions to Prof. Woodson-Boulton.
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Watts Collection
Melanie Hubbard and Dermot Ryan
The Watts Collection came out of The Digital Watts Project, a graduate-level English class taught in summer of 2016 that focused on the 1965 Watts “Uprising” or “Riots.” The class worked with the Southern California Library (SCL) to make available, through a digital public humanities project, primary sources intended to expand the narrative around the events of 1965 and to situate them in a broader context of the history of race and racism in Los Angeles. Exploring the ways in which our background in the humanities could positively enrich our work with the SCL, Melanie Hubbard, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at LMU, and Dermot Ryan, an Associate Professor of English, designed a class that drew on literary texts, history, information science, as well as a number of speakers with disciplinary expertise and firsthand experience to inform the generation of metadata for this project.
- “Digital Humanities as Community Engagement: The Digital Watts Project,” a preprint version of a chapter Melanie and Dermot wrote for the book Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Network, and Community.
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The Digital Eighteenth Century
Melanie Hubbard and Dermot Ryan
The Digital Eighteenth Century is an ongoing collaboration between the English Department, William Hannon Library, and students at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Its goal is to use digital tools and platforms to help students of the eighteenth century immerse themselves in the literature and culture of the period.
British Literature 1660-1800: The Digital Eighteenth Century not only offeres an advanced introduction to the literature of the Enlightenment and Romanticism (1750-1830), but also introduces students to the range of projects, methods, and debates within Digital Humanities (DH). We will explore how DH might transform literary scholarship in the long eighteenth century. Will it allow scholars to discover new aspects of the literature they are studying? Can new digital tools work in tandem with qualitative analysis and close reading? Using a variety of digital tools (which will include the textual analysis program Voyant and the online database ECCO), we will explore the research and pedagogical opportunities offered by DH. While our course will explore the potential gains—scholarly, interpretive, and pedagogical—of using these digital tools, we will also discuss some theoretical and practical questions of researching, analyzing, and teaching literature using these technologies. For more information, see the course materials designed by Dermot Ryan and Melanie Hubbard.
Literary movements and historical events told through timelines and maps:
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The Shanghai Jewish Experience
Melanie Hubbard and Holli Levitsky
The Shanghai Jewish Experience was a research project conducted in Holli Levitsky’s Literature of the Holocaust (English/Jewish Studies 434) in spring 2015. The project, designed and led by Melanie Hubbard, Digital Scholarship Librarian, centered on LMU’s Archives & Special Collection’s Werner von Boltenstern Shanghai Photograph and Negative Collection, which contains among other subject matters, images of Jewish refugees in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai.
Students were tasked with researching Jewish refugee life in Shanghai, identifying themes within the collection, choosing a theme to focus on, and contextualizing images that fit within that theme. The final result was a digital essay using Tumblr.
- Read their class blog to learn about the student’s research and brainstorming process.
While the students have done a lot of great work, these essays may have errors.
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
