New Digital Archives to Feature Unique Literacy Narratives
Three of our English Department faculty members have collaborated to initiate an online archive of literacy narratives that will be a valuable resource for scholars, teachers and the public.
What brought professors Cindy Selfe, Lewis Ulman, and Brenda Brueggemann together was a confluence of interests—in literacy, digital media, and disability studies—and a $40,000 Arts and Humanites Innovation Grant. As part of their larger digital literacy archives project, Ulman and Selfe enlisted the help of Brueggeman to create deaf and hard-of-hearing literacy narratives. The resulting video interviews will ultimately become part of the archives—which, Selfe and Ulman hope, will contain a variety of narratives from around the world.
The digital literacy archives will allow users to submit literacy narratives—on any topic related to literacy, and in any digital form—which will then appear on the website for use by scholars, teachers, and the public. "The whole objective behind this project is that we collect enough of these [narratives] to provide an historical trace of how literacy is happening and changing in this particular point in history," said Selfe.
"Louie and I got a grant to get a prototype of the archives built. The way we were going to do that was to collect about ten or fifteen literacy narratives and to use those to seed the archive," said Selfe. "While we were thinking about what kind of 'seeding' to do, we were trying to think about what literacy narratives would provide the most challenges."
"The rationale to challenging ourselves," said Ulman, "was to encourage and inspire others to submit; to show that we weren't just interested in spoken literacy narratives."
They found their challenge in a narrative about how deaf and hard-of-hearing people came to reading, writing, speaking, and sign language. The project required them to rethink assumptions, about things as commonplace as holding a camera. "I'd get behind the camera and frame it in for a couple of talking heads—but these weren't talking heads, but talking hands. That was the first of my revelations about my own assumptions" said Ulman.
The seven interviews showcase a time in deaf and hard-of-hearing literacy history in which rapid changes were occurring. "Almost all of the [subjects] were of a generation of people who were being mainstreamed [into hearing communities]," said Brueggemann, "and when technologies really began to take off—for example, the hearing aid became a digital technology. There was a lot of phenomenal shift in technologies."
"And we would have lost that," said Selfe. "If we waited long enough—twenty or thirty years—those experiences would have been lost." The literacy archives "preserve that historical trace of that literacy development. So once those people are gone that trace remains and we can recapture some aspect of that literacy history."
The video interviews will be available on the Ohio Digital Resource Commons (http://info.drc.ohiolink.edu) sometime in the spring, before moving to their permanent home in the digital literacy archives in the future.
