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Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications

Alyssa Arbuckle, Alison Hedley, Shaun Macpherson, Alyssa McLeod, Jana Millar Usiskin, Daniel Powell, Jentery Sayers, Emily Smith, Michael Stevens, Authors

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6. Proposal

For a significant chunk of the semester, you've been developing ideas for a digital project. By the semester's end, you'll provide a proof of concept (i.e., a working example that requires more content and polish) for that project. But for now, it's time to concretely explain the project's aims and motivations, not to mention some questions and concerns you have.

Learning Outcomes 

For you to:

  • Flesh out the particulars of your 507 project, including its audience, data model, and content,
  • Articulate how your project is intervening (or could intervene) in your field(s) of study,
  • Circulate the early state of your work for feedback from me and your peers, and
  • Gain experience writing proposals for digital projects (a common practice in digital humanities and digital literary studies).

What You Should Include in Your Response

Before seminar on Thursday, March 15th, please provide the following in your Scalar path:

  • A brief description (250-300 words) of your project as it stands (including project motivation, concise lit review, method/approach, and potential contributions to/interventions in DH, DLS, &/or your field of study),
  • Project rationale (50-150 words), including not only why you are studying what you are studying but how it figures into your educational/professional/personal trajectories,
  • The project type (see prompts for each below) you are selecting,
  • Data model (if you are selecting the scholarly exhibit or data visualization), which you are welcome to run by me prior to submission (note: you need not provide all of your data; just your model for now; don't reinvent the wheel),
  • Sample media/data, provided either via a link (e.g., to a spreadsheet or diagram) or in your actual Scalar page (e.g., images to the left of your text),
  • Intended audience(s) for the project, including what exactly they would expect from a project such as yours, and
  • Any questions you have for me and/or your peers, meaning your proposal is an opportunity for getting feedback and circulating ideas in the rough. Embrace that.

During seminar on the 15th, you will individually present a Pecha Kucha version (20 automated slides/20 seconds each) of your proposal, with an emphasis on describing your project, articulating its rationale, and posing questions for your audience (i.e., me + your 507 peers). We'll then have 6-8 minutes to respond to your questions and discuss your project. (I'm setting aside ~15 minutes for each presentation, including Q&A.)

Please reference your presentation in Scalar, mentioning it somewhere in your proposal, with a link to the slides (stored on the Scalar server or elsewhere). Let me know, too, if you need help automating the presentation. (If you're using Google Presentation, then it's a bit tricky.)

The proposal (including the Pecha Kucha presentation during our seminar meeting) is 10% of your final mark.

Get in touch with questions. As per usual, the first person who responds to the prompt will need to convert the Scalar page into a path. 

For your reference, below are the prompts for each of the project types.

Option A: The Multimodal Essay

Thanks for the tremendous amount of creative, compelling, and exciting work you’ve done this semester, folks. I’ve learned a great deal from each of you. Here, then, is the prompt for Option A: Multimodal Essay. There should be no surprises here, but let me know what questions or concerns you have. I’m happy to clarify anything that’s muddy or ignored.

Learning Outcomes

For you to:

  • Combine text, video, images, and/or audio in the construction of a persuasive academic argument,
  • Thoroughly engage a particular issue relevant to the seminar (in particular) and to digital literary studies (more generally),
  • Consider the relevance of design and interface in humanities argumentation, and
  • Produce a seminar essay pertinent to your trajectories as a graduate student.

The essay should demonstrate competencies in how to use multiple modes of knowledge production to articulate a persuasive argument. Your object(s) of inquiry (e.g., your primary sources) need not be digital. For instance, you are welcome to examine print texts or analog media; however, some of your methods must be digital in character. This option differs from the Scholarly Exhibit in that your argument should be more explicitly stated, and it should be oriented toward a particular scholarly journal (which you will need to identify). It also does not require the remediation of any artifacts; instead, existing content on the web can be embedded in the context of your Scalar essay or integrated into an audio or video production. Additionally, it differs from Data Visualization in that your primary argument will be expressed through modes other than graphs, maps, clouds, or the like. Furthermore, this essay option does not require “data” in any conventional sense.

What You Should Include in Your Essay (due by Thursday, April 19th)

Your response (composed entirely in Scalar) should consist of:

  • A combination of text, video, images, and/or audio,
  • 3000 − 5000 words,
  • An abstract (~300 words),
  • An annotated bibliography,
  • A statement of future development (~150 words), and
  • The name of a journal that would be an appropriate venue for your essay.

How you include each of these elements in your essay is your decision (as long as they fall in your author path). The annotations in your bibliography need not exceed one or two sentences for each source. The key here is to synopsize the argument and/or the relevance of the source to your work.

The statement of future development should briefly but concretely speak to how—with more time and labor—you would develop the project, acknowledging what exactly needs more encoding, research, analysis, trial runs, theorization, or the like.

As for the journal requirement, I encourage you to consider venues that publish multimodal scholarship. However, where necessary, you are welcome to identify a relevant print journal. 

Looking forward to reading, watching, or listening to it!

Option B: Scholarly Exhibit 

Thanks for the tremendous amount of creative, compelling, and exciting work you’ve done this semester, folks. I’ve learned a great deal from each of you. Here, then, is the prompt for Option B: Scholarly Exhibit. There should be no surprises here, but let me know what questions or concerns you have. I’m happy to clarify anything that’s muddy or ignored.

Learning Outcomes

For you to:

  • Exhibit a collection of digital or digitized media, complete with relevant metadata,
  • Add a scholarly narrative to that exhibit and—in so doing—engage a particular issue relevant to the seminar (in particular) and to digital literary studies (more generally),
  • Consider the relevance of preservation and curation to humanities research, and
  • Produce an exhibit pertinent to your trajectories as a graduate student.

This approach entails the remediation of existing print, analog, or digital artifacts related to literary studies but not currently available online. Artifacts not only need to be converted into a digital format; they also need to be accompanied by, or encoded with, appropriate metadata (e.g., Dublin Core). They should then be uploaded to an online archive (e.g., Internet Archive), exhibited in Scalar, and put into conversation through a scholarly narrative. The exhibit should demonstrate competencies in the scholarly curation, display, and interpretation of artifacts in a digital form. This option differs from the Multimodal Essay in that you need to remediate artifacts. Your argument need not be explicit, either. For instance, your exhibit might aim to communicate a certain aspect of literary history. This option differs from Data Visualization in that you will be expected to construct a narrative across your artifacts, rather than registering them in bulk. Also, no visualizations are required.

What You Should Include in Your Exhibit (due by Thursday, April 19th)

Your response (composed entirely in Scalar) should consist of:

  • Artifacts with proper metadata (e.g., Dublin Core),
  • A project description (~500 words),
  • A scholarly narrative of 2000-4000 words, and
  • A statement of future development (~150 words).

How you include each of these elements in your exhibit is your decision (as long as they fall in your author path). The project description should be written in such a way that it is easily pasted into another context (e.g., a website reviewing your exhibit).

The statement of future development should briefly but concretely speak to how—with more time and labor—you would develop the project, acknowledging what exactly needs more encoding, research, analysis, trial runs, theorization, or the like. 

Looking forward to reading, watching, or listening to it! 

(Image: Screen grab of The Deena Larsen Collection, created by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.)

Option C: Data Visualization

Thanks for the tremendous amount of creative, compelling, and exciting work you’ve done this semester, folks. I’ve learned a great deal from each of you. Here, then, is the prompt for Option C: Data Visualization. There should be no surprises here, but let me know what questions or concerns you have. I’m happy to clarify anything that’s muddy or ignored.

Learning Outcomes

For you to:

  • Persuasively visualize and interpret a properly modeled, humanities-oriented dataset,
  • Engage a particular issue relevant to the seminar (in particular) and to digital literary studies (more generally),
  • Consider the relevance of graphical expression and computational analysis to humanities research, and
  • Produce a visualization and interpretation pertinent to your trajectories as a graduate student.

This approach understands data visualization broadly to include geographical maps, graphs, clouds, radial visualizations, text analysis, and cultural analytics. It entails gathering data related to literary studies, expressing it graphically and in bulk (through one or more visualizations), and interpreting that expression in text. Data needs to be provided independently of the visualization itself (e.g., in a spreadsheet), and ideally the visualization is generated automatically based on a specific model (e.g., using Yoyant, Many Eyes, D3, or Google Spreadsheets) and embedded in (or linked from) Scalar. The text-based interpretation of the visualization should be published in Scalar. Additionally, it should convey how a distant reading of the data tells scholars something they did not already know (or helps them speculate toward a new line of inquiry), with references to existing scholarship on the primary object of inquiry. It should also demonstrate a modest degree of visual literacy. The visualization itself should be relatively easy for audiences to navigate and interpret, preferably in a fashion not typically afforded by print scholarship. This option differs from the Multimodal Essay in that it requires data and the primary argument is expressed via the visualization. It differs from the Scholarly Exhibit in that the model itself should be automated to compile an expression, and the interpretation should focus (at least in part) on what is gained from a distant reading.

What You Should Include in Your Exhibit (due by Thursday, April 19th)

Your response (composed in Scalar as well as the visualization app of your choice) should consist of:

  • Appropriately modeled and exportable data (e.g., in XML or CSV),
  • At least one visualization (or, if you prefer, “graphical expression”),
  • A project description (~500 words),
  • A scholarly interpretation of 2000-4000 words,
  • An annotated bibliography, and
  • A statement of future development (~150 words).

How you include each of these elements in your project is your decision (as long as they fall in your author path). The annotations in your bibliography need not exceed one or two sentences for each source. The key here is to synopsize the argument and/or the relevance of the source to your work.

The project description should be written in such a way that it is easily pasted into another context (e.g., a website reviewing your exhibit).

The statement of future development should briefly but concretely speak to how—with more time and labor—you would develop the project, acknowledging what exactly needs more encoding, research, analysis, trial runs, theorization, or the like. 

Looking forward to reading to it!


Author: Jentery Sayers
Word Count: 1975
Original Prompts: "Proposal," "Final Project: Option A," "Final Project: Option B," and "Final Project: Option C"

Example student responses to the "Proposal" prompt follow in this path.
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