How to Celebrate "Whan That Aprille Day" (2017)

guest posting by COURTNEY RYDEL

[cross-posted at Global Chaucers]

Cover the program for “Whan That Aprille Day” celebrations last year at Washington College. Program designed by Olivia Serio (President of the Poetry Club, Washington College, class of 2017).

Coming at the beginning of April, National Poetry Month in the United States, “Whan That Aprille Day” is a holiday begun by the @LeVostreGC persona behind “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog” and “Chaucer Doth Tweet” in 2014. @LeVostreGC proposed medievalists unite in our efforts to celebrate “the beauty and great loveliness of studying the words of the past. Our mission is to bring to mind the importance of supporting the scholarship and labor that brings these words to us…and the teaching of these…languages. For without all of this, the past would have no words for us” [read the full 2017 iteration of this open call in this earlier post at In The Middle].

In spring 2016, I curated an event on Multilingual Chaucer, gathering students and faculty from across Washington College, the small liberal arts college in Maryland where I teach.  Since then, I’ve participated in another large-scale Chaucer project that was directed towards the larger community, #MedievalBirds with ornithologist Jennie Carr, work on which is still ongoing. Currently I am planning a major Chaucerian event for spring 2018, with guest speaker Kim Zarins, that will involve collaboration with the Education department and local high school teachers.

Based on these experiences, I would like to offer some suggestions for other medievalists looking to create exciting events to celebrate “Whan That Aprille Day” on their campus. Although the event originated with celebrating Chaucer, that context should not be limiting. “Whan That Aprille Day” has the goal of celebrating the “beauty and great loveliness” in all languages.  Any language, literature, or poetry is welcome!  In this contemporary moment when the NEA and NEH are threatened, we need to come together as humanists and poetry lovers.  The more that medievalists connect with scholars of modern languages and across disciplines, and with our larger community, the stronger we will be.

• Celebrate the gifts and skills of your students and faculty, and show them how they connect to Chaucer. At Washington College we hosted a reading of “Multilingual Chaucer,” which included students and faculty reading poetry in languages including Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, German, Hindi, Old English, and Middle English.  Some readers read their favorite poems in other languages, and some read Chaucer or Chaucer translations.  The mixture of languages and diverse poems brought alive how “The Father of English Poetry” inhabited a multilingual space, and allowed us to hear the many languages of our polyglot, increasingly international campus.

• If you’re going global, check out the fantastic Global Chaucers online archive, created by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington. This resource for post-1945 global non-Anglophone translations of Chaucer offers sample texts, blog posts and scholarship on Chaucer in modern contexts, and reflections on his impact in the contemporary landscape.

• Look to interdisciplinary and collaborative research. My biologist colleague Jennie Carr and I undertook a project on #MedievalBirds in fall 2016, in which we combined her expertise on ornithology with my research to create an interactive downtown gallery exhibit on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.  We involved students in creating a physical tree that branched onto the ceiling, showing how Chaucer’s categories of birds overlapped with evolutionary development, and in creating videos of students reciting passages from the Parliament of Fowls with present-day English translations in closed captioning.

• Think about going beyond your college into the community. For Spring 2018, Washington College is planning an event that brings together high school teachers with our community to think about Chaucer in relation to the brilliant YA lit retelling of the Canterbury Tales by Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth. This event will give us an opportunity to bring together our LGBTQIA student groups as well as our secondary ed community with lovers of poetry and medieval studies.  Kim has graciously agreed to come and do a reading and craft talk, and the Education department is collaborating with us on a workshop with high school teachers to help them craft more in-depth lesson plans and relate Chaucer to contemporary issues.

• Consider contemporary retellings of Chaucer, like the aforementioned Sometimes We Tell the Truth. Students at the Multilingual Chaucer event also read from Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, giving us a chance to hear Nigerian-accented English in a different perspective on the Wife of Bath.

• Include other medievalists, faculty, and even emeritus faculty with a love of Chaucer! Our beloved emeritus faculty Bennett Lamond, who taught Chaucer for decades at Washington College starting back in 1965, read at our Multilingual Chaucer event.  He gave a hilarious, spirited reading of “To Rosamunde,” likening it to the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

• Get students involved in their own retellings and rewritings of Chaucer. David Wallace’s undergraduate Chaucer course at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2014 held an event in which students debuted both their own readings of Chaucer in the original Middle English as well as inspired, irreverent translations into present-day English.

• Direct your event to increase opportunities for outreach on your campus. Are there other departments or programs with which you want to collaborate?  How can Chaucer connect to other time periods and topics?  Maybe you want to celebrate Chaucer’s influence on later art and media with your Media Studies or Art History departments.  Perhaps you want to work with your Gender Studies department on an event that looks at gender roles in Chaucer, or with Comparative Literature or Modern Languages scholars on an event that highlights translation.

• Advertise! We had co-sponsors who also helped to publicize the event, including the Global Education Office, Department of English, Department of Modern Languages, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Poetry Club, and Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society).  Their efforts, along with our posters, tweets, and announcements, ensured a good turnout for the event.

• Use social media for collaboration, connections and archiving. This international holiday was created and promoted through social media, so it’s important to create records, post pictures and videos, and tweet, blog or Facebook with the hashtag #WhanThatAprilleDay17 (please note the spelling).

Of course, all of these reflections come from the perspective of a medievalist working in English, who teaches Chaucer. Although “Whan That Aprille Day” started from a Chaucer parody account and remains Middle English heavy, its goal is wide and universal, and it offers possibilities for global and multilingual exchange, just as Chaucer himself makes in his poetry.  In the words of @LeVostreGC, “we hope that the connections, affinities, and joys of this made-up linguistic holiday will widely overflow their initial medieval English context.”

Readers pose for a group photo after the “Whan That Aprille Day” event at the Rose O’Neill Literary House, Washington College (2016).

RELATED LINKS:

• Open Call for "Whan That Aprille Day" from @LeVostreGC himself (2017)
• #WhanThatAprilleDay video from Middle English Texts Series, with a nod to #MedievalDonut (2016)
• Online and social media celebrations of "Whan That Aprille Day" (2015)
• Recordings in dead languages by some of the ITM co-bloggers (2014) and twelve modern languages at Global Chaucers for "Whan That Aprille Day" (2014)

Summer Digest 2015: Digital Publics, Diversity, Disability, Donuts

by JONATHAN HSY

[First, read all about JEFFREY's two new collaborative projects!]

NOTE: UPDATED with a few more links on August 31, 2015.

Summer is coming to a close and a new academic year approaches. It was productive and eventful summer for me, but the downside was I never got around to writing any new blog posts here at ITM.

In the spirit of trying new things, I present what I'm calling an ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) Summer Digest 2015: my own idiosyncratic listing of some interesting links and noteworthy things that happened over these summer months. (This list also gives you a vague sense of "What Jonathan Did Over Summer Break.")

ICMY Medievalist Summer Digest 2015

Conference Roundups:

May: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI (#Kzoo2015):

• This #Kzoo2015 blogroll is my earlier compilation of blog posts and links [last updated May 30]; the 2015 conference also marked the emergence of the silly but somehow oddly compelling #MedevalDonut meme. JEFFREY also played a big part in all this. (A brief resurgence of #MedievalDonut also occurred on World Donut Day; check out these tweets archived by Sjoerd Levelt!)

• N.B. Leila K. Norako's writeup after Kalamazoo about the "Public Medievalist" roundtable and a lively session marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.

June-July: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, Lincoln, UK (#MAMO15):

• "Diverse Pedagogies of Medievalism" Roundtable (org. Helen Young). Presenters: Helen Young, Kim Wilkins, Molly Brown, Carol Robinson [virtually via recorded presentation], Dorothy Kim, and Jonathan Hsy. The full videorecording is available online (includes a link to Robinson's presentation and a link to the slides from my talk), and there's also bit more info at Medievalists.net.

July: International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (#IMC2015):

• Panel of public medievalists (org. by the Grad Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America). Presenters: Matthew Gabriele, Andrew James Johnston, and Erik Kwakkel: see Peter Konieczny's curated archive of live-tweets.

• Roundtable entitled "The Twitterati: Using Twitter in Scholarship and Pedagogy" (org. Carla María Thomas). Presenters: Dorothy Kim, Jonathan Hsy, Kristen Mapes, Angela Bennett Segler, and Kristen Mapes. Check out my curated archive of live-tweets from the session and this excellent summary of the conversation (by Carla María Thomas); note also a summary of the undelivered presentation by Shyama Rajendran. N.B. you can also read the full text of the informative talk by Kristin Mapes, and explore Mapes' collected data on twitter usage at Kalamazoo and Leeds in 2014.

• "Queer Manuscripts" thread: two sessions (orgs. Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt); check out Watt's archive of live-tweets from these conversations.

July: London Chaucer Conference ("Science, Magic, and Technology"), University of London, UK (#Chaucer2015):

• Plenaries by J. Allan Mitchell and Lisa H. Cooper; browse my archive of all the live-tweets.

Online Conversations and New Communities:

Public Medievalists (forum):

• Open access (i.e., FREE) postmedieval forum on "The Public Middle Ages" (featuring Holly A. Crocker, Marion Turner, Brantley L. Bryant, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Matthew Gabriele, Bruce Holsinger, Leila K. Noriko, David Perry).

• Over on his own blog, Perry offers this posting with his reaction to Bryant, his reaction to Kennedy, and reaction to Gabriele [more postings may be forthcoming].

• Richard Utz (at the Chronicle of Higher Education), "Don't Be Snobs, Medievalists." Note David Perry's subsequent response, and Utz responding to Perry.

#ILookLikeAProfessor (twitter hashtag):

• This twitter hashtag was created to combat stereotypes in academia and started a number of conversations about gender, race, class, disability, and the "public face" of university instructors and educators. Read accounts by co-creators Adeline Koh, Michelle Moravec, and Sara B. Pritchard; see also this piece by Kelly J. Baker (addressing gender as well as disability). The meme was also picked up by Buzzfeed, Colorlines, and Mashable (with a few medievalists featured each time).

The Lone Medievalist (community):

• New online network oriented toward anyone who is the only medievalist scholar in their campus or community; access via the website (requires login), Facebook community page, or follow on twitter @LoneMedievalist.

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (SSDMA): 

• The SSDMA launched a Facebook group that is open to anyone interested in the study of disability, impairment, and varied modes of embodied difference in medieval culture.

Various other things (for academics on and off the tenure-track):

• Katie Rose Guest Pryal (at Chronicle Viate) offers an excellent perspective on freelance academics as public intellectuals.

• Eric Anthony Grollman (via Conditionally Accepted) collates some sound advice for new assistant professors.

New Open Access Publications:

• Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. Entire inaugural (2015) issue "Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation" is available online; among a stellar international array of contributors are Simon Gaunt, Karla Mallette, and David Wallace.

• The Medieval Globe (edited by Monica H. Green). The inaugural (2014) issue "Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Plague" features a range of interdisciplinary and international contributions. Green's essay on "Making the Black Death Global" is well worth your time.

Upcoming Dates and Deadlines:

• Aug 31 (thread/session proposals due): Medieval Colloquium “Medieval Natures” in Sewannee, TN (plenary lectures by Caroline Walker Bynum and Carolyn Dinshaw; with "Defining Nature" seminar by Kellie Robertson), Apr 1-2, 2016.

• Aug 31 (individual paper proposals due): International Medieval Congress (Theme: “Food, Feast & Famine”) in Leeds, UK, Jul 4-7, 2016.
  
  
• Sep 1 (initial abstracts): edited volume on Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (co-editors: Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman)

• Sep 15 (early registration ends): BABEL Meeting “Off the Books” in Toronto, ON, Oct 9-11, 2015 (featured speakers: Micha Cárdenas, Malisha Dewalt, David Gersten, Alexandra Gillespie, Randall McLeod [aka Random Cloud], Whitney Anne Trettien).

• Sep 15 (proposals due): Fordham Conference “Manuscript as Medium” in NYC, Mar 5-6, 2016 (confirmed speakers: Jessica Brantley, Kathryn Rudy, Andrew Taylor).

• Sep 15 (paper proposals due): International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016.

• Sep 15 (paper/session proposals due): MLA (Modern Language Association of America) International Symposium "Other Europes: Migrations, Translations, Transformations” in Düsseldorf, Germany, Jun 23-26, 2016.

• Sep 30 (session proposals due): International Medieval Congress (Theme: “Food, Feast & Famine”) in Leeds, UK, Jul 4-7, 2016.

• Oct 15 (paper/sessions proposals due): GW MEMSI (Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute) Graduate Conference "Premodern Disorder” (keynotes: Sharon Kinoshita, Drew Daniel) in Washington, DC, Feb 16, 2016.

• Oct 15 (paper/panel abstracts due): “Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies" at GWU (speakers include Sunaura Taylor and Riva Lehrer) in Washington, DC, Apr 7-8, 2016.

• Oct 16 (abstracts due): BABEL, punctum books, and Studium join forces for the MLA (Modern Language Association of America) Subconference, Austin, TX, Jan 6-7, 2016.

• Oct 15-16: “The Provocative 15th Century” at the Huntington, CA (orgs. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown). Presenters: Anthony Bale, Anne Bernau, Jessica Brantley,  Lisa H. Cooper, Andrea Denny-Brown, Shannon Gayk, Alexandra Gillespie, Robert Meyer-Lee, Jenni Nuttall, Catherine Sanok, James Simpson, Daniel Wakelin).

• Oct 30: “Futures of the Past” Conference at GWU in Washington, DC. Presenters: Kim Hall, Patricia Clare Ingham, J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Coll Thrush, Henry S. Turner.
  
  
• Nov 1 (proposals due): “Method and the Middle English Text” at UVA (plenary pairings: Alexandra Gillespie & Patricia Ingham; Andrew Cole & Kellie Robertson; Steven Justice & Emily Steiner), Charlottesville, VA, Apr 8-9, 2016.

• Nov 1 (proposals due): “Romance in Medieval Britain” at UBC in Vancouver, BC (plenaries: Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Corinne Saunders), Aug 17-19, 2016.
  
  
• Nov 2 (proposals due): Vagantes Grad Student Conference (including keynote by Diane Wolfthal on “Occupy the Middle Ages: Representations of Household Help”) at Rice University, Houston, TX, Feb 18-20, 2016.

• Dec 15 (queries and proposals): “Making Early Middle English” at University of Victoria, BC, Sep 23-25, 2016.

• Dec 31 (proposals due): “Anglo-Saxons 2016: Exchange, Cultures, Ideas, and Materials” in Edinburgh, Jun 9-10, 2016.

• Jan 31 (submissions welcomed from Fall 2015 term): Digital Medieval Disability Glossary, Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (see the CFP here; if you you have difficulty reading the image file, try this link).

#GWDH15 and Embodied Digital Communities: Openness, Danger, Care

by JONATHAN HSY

[First read JEFFREY’s moving post about loss and spaces of care.]

GW Digital Humanities Symposium 2015: DISRUPTING DH (poster by Shyama Rajendran).

[Click image to enlarge]

Dear ITM readers: It has been a while since I wrote one of my “post-conference blog posts,” and here I’d like to offer my reflections on DISRUPTING DH: a symposium held on January 30 and organized by the GW Digital Humanities Institute, in coordination with many units/programs across George Washington University.

This event brought together activists, students, publishers, members of the public, academics, and librarians to think critically about how communities create and use digital archives and other online media. Enacting a “big tent” vision of Digital Humanities (DH), we invited speakers and participants varied in rank, gender, and background (activists, academics, grad students, para-ac and alt-ac folks) and the day as a whole deliberately centered women and people of color (including participants who in other contexts identify as queer or are involved in LGBT communities). We gave no proscriptive directions to our speakers and varied modes of presentation emerged: everything from scripted papers (with or without slideshows) to more extemporaneous remarks. Some presenters have already made their materials public (links provided throughout this posting), and the event had an active twitter presence with an engaged audience well beyond the auditorium. Note for instance this impressive archive of #GWDH15 and #DisDH tweets gathered by @alothian (Alexis Lothian) and a curated collection of tweets by @transliterature (M.W. Bychowski).[1]

Our invited speakers included medievalists who are no doubt quite familiar to this blog’s readers: ITM’s own Eileen Joy (director, punctum books), Dorothy Kim (author of some of the most widely read/shared/retweeted postings on this blog!), and Angela Bennett Segler (creator of Material Piers). Non-medievalists included Jesse Stommel (Founder, Hybrid Pedagogy), Roopika Risam (Co-Founder, Postcolonial Digital Humanities), and Suey Park (Co-Founder, Feminist Killjoys). The event also follows a recent MLA session on Disrupting the Digital Humanities with a related collection (edited by Kim and Stommel) forthcoming from punctum books.

CRITICAL SPACES

Final roundtable at #GWDH15.

The day’s events began with an overarching question: how can different kinds of people come together to transform the spaces of the ARCHIVE, CLASSROOM, and IVORY TOWER?

In my own opening remarks (with my hat on as Co-Director of the DH Institute), I echoed Dorothy and Jesse’s call to reclaim “disruption” from its (over)use in corporate culture and Silicon Valley tech circles, and I maintain that we can be observant critics of discomforting spaces that surround us. I mentioned, for instance, my own unease with the histories of locations on my own campus: a dorm formerly named “Ivory Tower,” and a performance venue that was once racially segregated. In my view, digital archives and platforms offer an opportunity to both confront the histories of such spaces and shape new kinds of open communities.

ARCHIVE. The first session featured Angela Bennett Segler on “Medium Data—Machine Reading, Manual Correction, and the End of the Archive” [check out her reflections on this session, along with her archive of session tweets] and Dorothy Kim on “Disrupting the Medieval Archive: The Ethics of Digital Archives” [her prezi presentation is now online]. On her Transliterature blog, M.W. Bychowski (doctoral candidate and former Graduate Assistant to the DH Institute) offers an excellent summary of the session:

Bennett Segler and Kim set the tone for the rest of the day by grounding the disruption of DH in social justice, the invisible labor and exploitation of women, people of color, and other under-paid, under-publicized radical librarians who have been leaders in the movement to digital archives but have since been erased as institutions, directors and users who recode these projects as typically white male spaces. This is perhaps not surprising, notes Bennett Segler, “today’s revolution is tomorrow's institution” but this domesticating of women of color's digital labor can be resisted. Kim added that by refusing to see archives as a politically “neutral space” of universal access we can redirect social and financial capital back towards the exploited and forgotten progenitors who continue to revolutionize the field and disrupt the digital humanities.

As Dorothy notes in her posting on “divergent bodies” on ITM (and also in her excellent posting on twitter ethics), no archive is neutral and users are not always benevolent (in her talk and in the ITM posting, she notes the harassment that the @medievalpoc tumblr blogger has received from internet users who resist anything but a “monochrome” view of the historical past). Digital spaces—even medievalist ones—can invite trolls, harassment, and abuse, and we must explicitly prioritize the safety of our various communities, digital and embodied. [Just yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted that “we suck at dealing with abuse” (particularly harassment and threats directed at women) and we’ll see how the company addresses this.]

CLASSROOM. This session turned to digital pedagogy and public humanities. Jesse Stommel’s “Stand and Unfold Yourself: MOOCs, Networked Learning, and the Digital Humanities” offered a preview of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on “Shakespeare in Community.” This endeavor seeks to “invert” the MOOC by not thinking along the lines of a “sage on the stage” (one professor, bazillion students) but rather setting the stage for dispersed authority (expertise arising from varied experiences of students, actors, poets, academics, enthusiasts). A clear point from Jesse’s talk was that we must not police the boundaries of “what counts” as DH. Roopika Risam’s “Toward a Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” considered how even more conventional classrooms can also crowdsource knowledge (her example was students creating on online map-based Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness). While the content and presentation styles in this session were quite distinct, a few shared themes emerged. Both speakers agreed that teaching can mean abdicating your own authority and letting expertise emerge from students, and discomfort (on the part of the teacher and students alike) can be a productive pedagogical tool.

IVORY TOWER. The final pairing of the day included Eileen Joy who offered a forceful case for “The Importance of Illegitimacy.” In her artfully stylized talk, Eileen reflected on the need for independent “out-stitutions” and publishers (including open access venues) that can create new forums and new intellectual publics. In making a call to change a culture of authority into a shared ethics of care, her talk anticipated an intimate presentation by Suey Park. In “Theorizing Transformative Justice in a Digital Era,” Park not only revealed how activist communities can themselves engage in behavior that is bullying, controlling, or abusive; she also worked through racialized language of "toxicity" that has been used to describe activists and women of color on twitter, and she stressed the need to create online communities whose members safeguard each other and foster transformative (rather than reparative) justice. One of the most intriguing aspects of this pairing of speakers was how both talks revealed the intertwining potential of creation and destruction. In her remarks introducing Suey, my wonderful colleague and poet Jennifer Chang likened Park to a lyric poet, observing that tweets are an expressive and constrained form—beautiful, and dangerous.

The concluding roundtable including all the presenters was co-moderated by me and Lori Brister, founder of the DH Graduate Working Group at GW. The discussion quickly reoriented itself toward students (especially graduate students being cultivated as the “future” of the profession), considering the structural inequalities and constraints many DH folks can face. How do we remain committed to our various causes or “labors of love,” and how do we also address the realities of uncompensated labor or inequalities inherent in our various spaces?

COMPASSION, CARE, FUTURES

Conclusion of #GWDH15: roundtable participants conversing with audience.

I end with an observation about #GWDH15 from doctoral student Alan Montroso, who blogged from his experience as an audience member:

Although I had to miss the presentations by Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, it was a pleasure to see Stommel lead the collective of speakers out of their chairs during the roundtable discussion and onto the edge of the stage, thereby breaking the fourth wall that marked their bodies as authoritative and their space as exclusive. This act evidenced a real commitment to the democratization of information that each of the speakers desires, as well as the group’s willingness to relinquish the power granted them by the Academy – at least temporarily. Sure, the act was rather symbolic, but it was a risk nonetheless, and one which underscores the precariousness of our field and the digital humanities as a sub-discipline.

One of the aspects of #GWDH15 that will stick with me for some time were its moments of disturbance and discomfort. In the discussions that have unfolded in person and online (note JEFFREY’s public Facebook thread, for instance), I’ve been thinking a lot about how “breaking the fourth wall” (via blogging, tweeting, or otherwise putting oneself “out there” through publication or presentations) can be an empowering experience—but it can also make a person vulnerable. I do hope that our medievalist/academic/etc. spaces will increasingly become ones where we all feel safe and can be more adventurous.

CALL TO ACTION

The call for sessions at the next BABEL gathering (“Off the Books” in Toronto in October) has been extended to February 15, and the New Chaucer Society (NCS) Congress in London 2016 is now accepting submissions by April 15—and it’s very exciting to note that NCS includes some bold, risky options.[2] As the ITM community thinks ahead to these events, I hope we can all be more mindful of “divergent bodies” (to use Dorothy Kim’s coinage) moving through our professional / personal / public / digital environments. How can we be the change we want to see in the world?

I’m so very gratified that ITM has become a venue not only for talking about “medieval things” but also a way to provoke attentive, earnest conversations about what it means to be in medias res (“in the middle of things”)—to live with others in real life and also in variously mediated digital spheres.

If I can end this blog post with my own “call to action,” I’d just say this: let’s try to take more risks with how we think about our materials, experiment with writing styles and presentation formats, and carefully consider how we perform in our shared spaces. If you’re in a position of power (tenured professor, administrator, mentor, advisor, trustee, benefactor, journal editor, chair, peer reviewer, hiring committee member, the list goes on), support and defend people who take risks and chart different paths. Let’s create conditions where we can move out of our comfort zones and re-code what it means to work in/alongside/outside of humanist communities.

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[1] For a summary of events note M.W. Bychowski’s overview on the GW English blog (with other links) and a more detailed summary on her Transliterature blog.

[2] Katie Walter and I are co-organizing the “Corporealities” thread at NCS which includes a number of great collaborative endeavors.

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

by MICHELLE R. WARREN [Guest Posting]

[Hello readers! This is the first in a series of blog postings on diversity and (medieval) academia that we will feature on this site. This posting comes to us from Michelle R. Warren (on twitter: @MichelleRWarren). Stay tuned for more perspectives. - The ITM co-bloggers]

[EDITED 24 August 2014: In this thread, note also Dorothy Kim (on twitter @dorothyk98), Helen Young (on twitter @heyouonline), and Jonathan Hsy; note Karl Steel in a related thread here and here.]

Diversity and #medievaltwitter

"When things break, make collage." I made this my Twitter motto when my students convinced me to branch out and open an account. Never could I have predicted that tweets would bring me to a blog post on this space, sharing some of thoughts on racial and ethnic diversity in the US academy. For the past four years, I've served as the faculty director of Dartmouth's Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF), a research and mentoring program for students committed to diversity issues and curious about earning a PhD. The fellows pushed me to those first tweets. Almost immediately, a bunch of medievalists—friends, acquaintances, strangers—followed me. It was exciting. I ignored them. I had joined for other reasons.

Recently, those distinctions collapsed, and all for the best. In MMUF, I engage students (most of whom identify as minorities in one way or another) to consider the "hard choice" of an academic career. While I help demystify academia for them, they help me identify the structural barriers and individual concerns that make diversifying the professoriate difficult—time to degree, expectations from family, presumed incompetence, stereotype threat, employment prospects, lack of mentorship, etc. Numerous programs, policies, and organizations are dedicated to countering these pressures, supporting individual success while working toward institutional change. So my ears perked up when a medievalists' conversation (as retweeted by Jonathan Hsy) turned to academic diversity. And instead of ignoring them, I chimed in. Then, in a reply to the thread, Adrienne Boyarin retweeted an announcement about the Faculty Diversity Program at SUNY: immediately I sent off a nomination for one of our MMUF alums. Now everything is connected.

"Lead from wherever you are." This is one of our mottos in MMUF. Many people feel helpless in the face of the numerous problems that plague the education system; few of us have direct influence on hiring practices. But everyone has influence on something. The potential to diversify the professoriate is affected by many things that happen well before anyone gets to college. Change seems slow and uneven at best. The pipeline is not flat. So just about anything can be a contribution (I'll leave aside why diversification matters). Transformation is possible—whether it's teaching something you don't know, speaking out against injustices, finishing that dissertation…or even just sharing a tweet.  

#medievaltwitter revisited: #kzoo2014 (BuzzFeed-style wrap-up)

by JONATHAN HSY (@JonathanHsy)

Visualization of #kzoo2014 twitter activity, courtesy of data gathered by Kristen Mapes (@kmapesy); TAGSExplorer developed by Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey). I was apparently the most active tweeter at Kalamazoo! … Or, at least, I was the person to use the #kzoo2014 hashtag most frequently. Screenshot captured May 13, 2014, 11:53 PM EDT.[1]

Kalamazoo 2014 (or rather the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 8-11, 2014) is already feeling like the distant past. JEFFREY has foregrounded some of the exciting new blogs that have emerged (or established blogs that have been resurrected or recently picked up steam again) since the conference, and Anna Smol is collating a grand list of Kalamazoo 2014 “wrap up” blog postings and videos on her blog, “A Single Leaf.”

#medievaltwitter and #Kzoo2014: background, history, stats

In this posting, I’d like to pivot from the blogosphere for bit to reflect on recent medievalist activity on twitter. I feel that this social media platform really “came into its own” at the 2014 Kalamazoo conference. Earlier this year, Dorothy Kim (@dorothyk98) wrote a guest posting here on ITM urging medievalists to make active use of twitter at Kalamazoo. See her #medievaltwitter posting before this year’s MLA Conference; in it, she offered some common-sense guidelines for using twitter at Kalamazoo: e.g., only tweet with permission of presenters, attribute the statements of others, use conference and session hashtags consistently, and respect others on twitter as you would in real life. These principles are in line with the guidelines set forth by Roopika Risam (@roopikarisam) for the MLA. Just before the start of ICMS at Kalamazoo, Dorothy publicized the Wikipedia Write-In organized by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (see also this follow-up posting on ITM, cross-posted from the SMFS blog). The ICMS organizers, meanwhile, publicized #kzoo2014 as the official hashtag of the conference. Although there was some initial confusion about the official hashtag before the conference and not all tweeters were consistent in providing hashtags for session numbers (see this Storify feed for my record of the meta-commentary on twitter about #kzoo2014 as it unfolded), twitter was a lively venue for conversation and dissemination of info throughout ICMS. According to this tweet by Kristen Mapes (@kmapesy) at the end of the conference (well, May 11, 2014, 10:41 PM EDT to be exact) there were a total of 6374 tweets across 1001 nodes (people).

[FYI—just in case anyone’s curious—the most tweeted session at Kalamazoo was #s391, the BABEL session on punctuation organized by Rick Godden (@RickGodden); see also the text of “, (A Breath)” by Josh Eyler (@joshua_r_eyler), the YouTube video-broadcast of “Interrobanging Chaucer” by Corey Sparks (@CoreySparks), and my talk entitled “&” [ampersand]. The second most-tweeted session was #s560, “Strange Letters: Alphabets in Medieval Manuscripts and Beyond II” (org. Damian Fleming, @IPFWMedieval). The third most-tweeted session was #s511, a roundtable sponsored by the MassMedieval blog on “Medievalists and the Social Media Pilgrimage: The Digital Life of Twenty-First-Century Medieval Studies” (it is perhaps not surprising a roundtable with that topic was so actively live-tweeted!).]

So why should we care about twitter? Isn’t this all just ephemeral and frivolous background noise? Well, I’d like to make the case that twitter is not just a diversion or pastime for conference attendees but can actually be a useful tool—and it’s a platform that can be transformative socially, intellectually, and politically.

I shall make my case in the style of BuzzFeed:

8 Reasons You (Medievalist!) Should Use Twitter

1. Twitter is your inside source.

On a very practical level, following tweets can (simply put) give you a timely sense of “what went on” in session if you weren’t physically there—this could be the case if you were presenting in a concurrent session, or indeed if you couldn’t attend the conference at all. When attendees live-tweet the presentations that transpire at a session (thoughtfully and with the presenters’ consent), you can often discern the major points of each presentation and get a feel for the dynamic flow of the conversation—an aspect of conferences that can be difficult to capture for people who aren’t physically present. Such discussion creates a backchannel that emerges via the session hashtags. Kisha Tracy (@kosho22), one of the bloggers at MassMedieval, has used Storify to retroactively collate tweets from the “Relevance of the Middle Ages” roundtable for instance [note archived tweets on Storify sometimes appear in reverse chronological order]; see sessions archived on Storify by Yvonne Seale (@yvonneseale): #s373, “Beyond Women and Power” and #s385, a roundtable on Sean Field’s 2014 English translation of The Rules of Isabelle of France. If you are attending at a session and decide to live-tweet the proceedings, then your tweeting helps to broadcast the session and also act as a memory aid. Going through your twitter feed afterwards can be a great way to refresh your memory on the conversations that transpired.

2. Tweeting can be engaged note-taking.

It’s often difficult to process academic papers when they are delivered aurally, so being forced to listen carefully to a presentation and break the information down into manageable 140-character chunks can help you to focus your attention. The formal constraints of the medium invites the tweeter engage in a kind of rhetorical abbreviatio, compressing complex thoughts into their essence—getting at the heart of an argument more effectively (or composing a series of tweets to convey a sequence of ideas). The kind of “translation” one must do in converting aurally-processed talk into a tweet seems similar to something that teachers do in the classroom all the time. We must be able to rephrase complex ideas (e.g., the operations of a literary text, or a critic’s dense and florid argument) into terms that are accessible to a broader audience (in the classroom, our students; on twitter, a wider public).

3. Tweeting opens up new teaching strategies.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that twitter has implications for teaching. In the MassMedieval roundtable, Josh Eyler remarked on his use of twitter to facilitate conversation through a backchannel outside the classroom. The character-limit constraints of the twitter format can also foster creativity-within-constraints, developing new kinds of thinking and writing practices. Check out this twitter essay assignment by Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) [Not a medievalist, but hey we’re cool with that!] posted on the blog Hybrid Pedgagogy; for more on this, consult his collated twitter-conversations about teaching with twitter.

4. Twitter is a megaphone (or spotlight; pick your metaphor).

Twitter can help to spread awareness and broadcast projects underway—and it can be especially timely to when one has the “captive audience” of a major conference. How Did We Get Into This Mess?, a public blog by David Perry (@lollardfish), was referenced in the roundtable on writing for multiple audiences. A Material Piers Living in a Digital World, a blog on digital visualization and Piers Plowman manuscripts, was created Angie Bennet Segler (@MedievalAngie) and debuted at Kalamazoo. A twitter-project by Carla María Thomas (@cmthomas) on translating the Ormulum also received some play over twitter. I’ve found that following certain session hashtags (such as the #s511 for the MassMedieval’s roundtable on medievalists and social media, mentioned above) helped me to discover new online projects that weren’t on my radar before.

5. Twitter builds community.

Earlier this year the online Medieval Disability Glossary project (discussed by Cameron Hunt McNabb in the “Disability and Digital Humanities” roundtable) tweeted about their entries (or works in progress) using the #DayofDH hashtag; see Kisha Tracy’s collation of tweets. The effort connected linked the work are doing on this project to the broader field of DH endeavors. Kristen Mapes has created a public list of (hundreds of) medievalists on twitter; subscribing to this list can be an interesting way to keep up with what medievalists are doing these days. In a detailed blog posting, she explains how she created the list, taking a tip from a list of DH tweeters created by Dan Cohen (@dancohen). Medievalist communities can be fostered not just through shared scholarly interests but also a sense of play. The Chaucer blogger (@LeVostreGC) is my one of my favorites twitter accounts, and #WhanThatAprilleDay (launched the first day of April in 2014) was his playful invitation to celebrate old languages through tweets and online media; this made for a festive party on twitter and the blogosphere (and also here at ITM).

6. Twitter helps create an archive.

My references to live-tweeted sessions throughout this blog posting have been referring you to Storify, a useful website and tool for curating a bunch of tweets into a more manageable thread [there are many online tutorials on using Storify; see this guide]. After Kalamazoo was over, KARL drew upon some twitter conversations to write his posting on periodicity, medievalism, and gaming, and he used Storify to embed that twitter-conversation into the post. JEFFREY’s post-Kalamazoo reflections opened up a twitter-discussion on how we (scholars and educators and contemporary culture in general) think about and discuss anti-Semitism in the past—and he has since transformed that conversation into a Storify feed.

7. Twitter can be transformative.

My final point about twitter is that it can be a mechanism for provoking meaningful social change: in the archive, in the classroom, on the streets. The use of twitter was a key theme in the roundtable organized by the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (SSDMA) entitled “Medieval Disability and the Digital Humanities.” As Rick Godden argued [read the whole text of his presentation on his new blog ParaSynchronies],[2] the use of twitter (e.g., live-tweeting) can be a form of note-taking that is just as effective and cognitively engaged as traditional pen-and-paper forms of note-taking. Indeed, there is not just “one” way to record and process information, and people who use digital technologies (such as tablets, text to speech reader devices, and other assistive technologies) should not be stigmatized or excluded from discussions if they don’t seem to conform to “normative” embodied note-taking practice.

This discussion wasn’t simply full of “twitter utopians,” as it did address some of the potential downsides and disruptive forces of twitter and social media. There is a palpable tension between the fast pace of twitter and the slow, deliberative processing of ideas that scholars tend to cultivate. The sheer immediacy of twitter can cause “information overload” or create venues for aggressive trolling or bullying. Not all people have affordable or reliable access to the internet in the first place—so one can’t assume that twitter is simply “there” for everyone to use. But twitter—for those who use it—is one technology among many, and it can have certain advantages. People who cannot travel to a conference can still benefit when they can participate in discussions virtually—however mediated such an experience from afar might be. And as I maintained in my own talk at the “Disability and DH” roundtable, twitter can be a tool for activism and politically-engaged conversation and a space to express ideas otherwise difficult to discuss openly; just think of the #NotYourAsianSidekick hashtag (shout-out to @suey_park here!) and the very recent #YesAllWomen hashtag conversations unfolding online. Just yesterday, JEFFREY took to twitter to urge users of Facebook collectively respond to a disturbing anti-Semitic “ritual murder” community page, and hopefully many more will pass along the message and act upon it. When the world erupts in violence and fosters online communities that promote discrimination or provoke violence, twitter can be one way we start to change the world for the better.

I could even extend this thinking about world-transformation a bit further and say that the expertise we have as medievalists can be mobilized via social media to change perceptions of the past and to address gaps or biases in present-day scholarship. The SMFS Wikipedia Write-In, for instance, set out to revise entries relating to women and the Middle Ages, and in the process it created entries about feminist scholars who are key figures in medieval studies. The #medievalwiki hashtag chronicled the endeavors of the project over the course of the conference [see my selection of tweets on Storify], and my hope is that such efforts to transform Wikipedia—often the first “point of access” for people researching medieval topics—will result in a more inclusive online resource and a better-informed readership.

8. Twitter (like any technology) is what you make of it!

Such examples show how twitter circulates much more than funny cat memes, as hilarious as they are! It does so many other things. It can also comprise a deliberate note-taking strategy (e.g., via live-tweeting). It can work as a dynamic teaching tool. It can broadcast information for people who cannot physically be part of a conversation (whether they are in another session or not even at a conference). It can capture some of the dynamic flow of conversation (face-to-face or virtual). And it can help to create an archive of links and ideas that can be processed into more meditative blog posts or otherwise advance discussions.

We are at an exciting point in the use of twitter at Kalamazoo and other academic conferences, and I hope that people will continue to find creative ways to use it!

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[1] For more on how to create interactive visualizations of archived tweets, see Martin Hawksey's helpful guide.

[2] For more about this roundtable and other disability-related sessions, see blog postings on MassMedieval by Kisha Tracy and John Sexton.