1,050 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2018
    1. Step One. The first thing I do when I pick up a book is read the preface, the table of contents, and the inside jacket. Often, I’ll glance over the index too. This doesn’t take long and often saves me time, as a lot of books do not make it past this filter. Maybe it doesn’t contain the information I’m trying to gain. If it seems crappy, I’ll flip to a few random pages to verify. This filter is a form of systematic skimming. This isn’t my term, Mortimer Adler, a guy who literally wrote the book on reading, came up with it. Adler says there are four levels of reading. I tend to blend inspectional reading and analytical reading together for most books. This way, when I start reading a book, I have an idea what it’s about, the main argument, and some of the terminology involved. I know where the author is going to take me and the broad strokes of how they will bring me along. That’s very useful information. While reading, I take notes. I circle words I need to look up. I star points that I think are critical to the argument. I underline anything that strikes me as interesting. I comment like a madman in the margins. I try to tease out assumptions, etc. Essentially, I’m trying to engage in a conversation with the author. Maybe my questions will be answered on the next page or in the next chapter. Maybe I’ll need to find another book to answer them. Who knows. But I write them down. At the end of each chapter, I write a few bullet points that summarize what I’ve just read. When I’m done, I write a brief summary of the entire book and then I do something few other people do. I let the book age. I put the book on my desk and I won’t touch it for anywhere from a few days to a week. This is very important.
      1. Read the preface, TOC. Take notes while reading.
    2. Step two. When I pick the book up again, I re-read every scribble, underline, and comment I’ve made (assuming I can still read my writing). Sometimes I can’t. I’m not the same person I was the first time I read the book, two things have changed: (1) I’ve read the entire book and (2) I’ve had a chance to sleep on what may have seemed earth-shattering at the time but now just seems meh. If something still strikes my interest, I write a note in the first few pages of the book, in my own words, on the topic. Often this is a summary but increasingly it’s ways to apply the knowledge. I index this to the page number in the book. Sometimes, and this depends on the book, I’ll create a sort of mental summary of the book’s main arguments and gaps. Sometimes I’ll cross-link points with other books.
      1. Re-read upon waiting for a while. Write out the main notes in the first pages of the book.
    3. Step 3 (optional but highly effective). Wait a few days. Then go through the book and copy out excerpts by hand and put them into your repository or commonplace book. I use these notes to connect and synthesize ideas as I read. To aid recall, connect the ideas to something you already have in your mind. Is it a continuation of the idea? Does it replace an idea? Is it the same idea in a different discipline? I add these connections to my notes and percolate them in my mind. Often I turn out to be mistaken but that’s the process. Most of the time, you get to see the ideas on Farnam Street. You can see how I connect and contextualize ideas, linking them across disciplines. I find writing about the ideas really helps me develop my understanding. Even if you don’t share your thoughts with millions of people you can do the same thing with Evernote, which is searchable, easy to use, and free. Personally, I do not use technology as a substitute for the non-technological approach mentioned above but rather as a compliment. I rarely listen to books but if you are listening to a book, create a new note for that book and type in notes as you are listening. I know a few people that do not take notes as they are listening because they listen in the car on the way to work. They find that sitting down right away when they get to work and typing up notes is an effective way to improve recall although the notes are less accurate.
      1. Put the excerpts in a separate medium.
    1. It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words.
    1. Girls, even when their abilities in science equaled or excelled that of boys, often were likely to be better overall in reading comprehension

      What does this say about different skill sets? Is this biological or genetic, or is it just conditioned?

  2. Nov 2018
    1. Fourth, if you are still young, let’s say in the first third of your active reading life, you should indiscriminately devour as many books as possible – novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction of all sorts without any regard for quality.
    2. Anyway, after forty life is too short for reading poor books.
    3. I have limited myself to 100 spaces for the next 10 years. That’s an average of 10 books per year
    4. thrillers are excepted from the reading ticket
    5. I consider it time wasted if a book leaves no traces in the brain, either because it is a poor book or because one has read it poorly
    6. A book gets no more than ten minutes of my time before a verdict is reached – to read or not to read.
    7. I read as much as before, to be sure, but fewer and better books, and each twice.
    1. These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”
    2. while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.
    3. It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.
  3. Oct 2018
    1. The Migration of the aura through its facsimiles

      Also See....Sally M. Foster & Neil G.W. Curtis (2016) The Thing about Replicas—Why Historic Replicas Matter, European Journal of Archaeology, 19:1, 122-148

    2. Switching Codes

      Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts Front Cover Thomas Bartscherer, Roderick Coover University of Chicago Press, 15 Apr 2011

    1. The role of touch in the multi-sensory experience of reading turns out to be as important as we intuit it to be when we hold a volume or turn a page — or better yet, when we mark it up.

      I've found that the way I read and my reading retention have changed since I started to regularly use digital annotation. The act of selecting what sentence to highlight, how to tag passages and articles, and what to make public has changed how I feel about reading online. I still prefer paper for pleasure reading, but for news, research, and collaborative reading, digital now works just fine for me.

  4. Sep 2018
    1. teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read.
    2. Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.
    3. We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.
    1. students are not downloading texts in ePub format but, rather, as PDFs.

      Interesting. Because they're easier (more familiar?) to work with?

    1. reading may be linked to empathy. In a study published earlier this year psychologist Raymond A. Mar of York University in Toronto and others demonstrated that the number of stories preschoolers read predicts their ability to understand the emotions of others. Mar has also shown that adults who read less fiction report themselves to be less empathic.
  5. Aug 2018
    1. F or Z

      This study is very well done. I find myself using the F pattern often--and I wonder how it compare to print readers (#eyetracking). I also wonder how this might change with optimized font size, spacing, column width, etc. For example, writing this annotation, Hypothes.is is squishing the window and giving me a shorter column (still wider than would appear in a standard magazine that's been formatted to make reading easier).

    2. Here we are, going beyond skimming. In the margins. Terry took this piece over into Diigo for his annotation. Read his thoughts: https://www.diigo.com/annotated/30d001f7e33fbb45a08b27cbdc58e9a4 Others are here, off to the side. Please join in.

    3. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text.

      I don't know if this article is where I first read this idea, but maybe haptics are part of the equation?

      "Being able to flip back and forth between pages, to hold a physical item that changes appearance as one moves through it (e.g., early in a book or magazine there are more pages on the right, and as the reader nears the end his or her progress is marked by a stack of pages on the left), and to refer to the printed item’s topography to find information in it are all print features that onscreen media lack."

    4. the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college

      In a recent conversation with my voracious literature-consuming son, I expressed impatience with (adult) reviewers on Goodreads who complain about books when they jump backwards and forwards in time and/or between different characters' points of view. My son pointed out that to follow these jumps is a learned skill, and it takes a lot of practice. Something I hadn't even considered, since these are adult reviewers.

      In a similar vein, I find the teens I teach to want immediate action and a linear path, regardless of the storytelling format (e.g. film vs. book). This saddens me, as there is so much richness in taking time to build characters, plot, suspense, etc.

    5. empathy

      I find it fascinating that there is a link between reading literary fiction and developing empathy.

    6. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

    7. We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate” reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or traditional mediums. 

      Huh

    8. use it or lose it

    9. fourth and fifth grade

      This age -- eight to ten years old -- seems critical in so many areas, not just screen reading and comprehension. It's also the same age here in the US where standardized testing kicks in, and where so many kids lose their love of learning as a result. That's my opinion, anyway.

    10. technology of recurrence
    11. skimming

    12. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

      Be helpful to know why ... what was different for the students?

    13. the reading circuit

    14. “cognitive impatience,”

      I agree with Ciara on Twitter about this term -- I like it.

      Cognitive Patience

    15. In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it.

      As a teacher of children, this is a key point -- one I grapple with every time I use technology with my young writers and readers. Am I providing a richer and more engaging content with digital text? Or am I teaching more surface reading of text with media intrusions? (prob neither and both)

    16. This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation.

      Thank you -- we want to make it clear that this is not an either/or situation here. Appreciate this statement early in the text

    17. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight.

      interesting .... the act of reading is always deeper, and forges deeper connections, than we think it might be ...

    18. read stories
    19. the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

      This has long been a concern, and I know there is all sorts of research happening in this field. I don't doubt this at all... what I don't know yet is whether this change in the way we read text is good or bad or neither. This article suggests a negative shift, and that may be true. Always hoping for some balance.

    1. I believe, and I try to emphasize to the students, that annotation is a deeply personal activity, my annotations may look different from yours because we think differently.

      We often think differently even on different readings. Sometimes upon re-reading pieces, I'll find and annotate completely different things than I would have on the first pass. Sometimes (often with more experience and new eyes) I'll even disagree with what I'd written on prior passes.

      This process reminds me a bit of the Barbell Method of Reading

  6. Jul 2018
    1. Welcome to the Newsela Instructional Content Platform. We solve the problem of reading engagement holistically for students, teachers, and principals. See our results See our results Fresh, adaptive reads for every subject. ELA Science Elementary Math SocialStudies Our Content Partners World-class students (yours)deserve world-class instructional content. History Bio National Geographic The Washington Post The Guardian ProCon.org Encyclopædia Britannica Scientific American Associated Press The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History PBS Newshour Smithsonian Perfect for elementary, too. With content and activities created specifically for students in grades 2-6, Newsela fits seamlessly into your elementary literacy routine. Learn more Assessments FTW. Every great love affair with reading begins with engagement, and Assessments are the ultimate in engagement. Know if students did the reading, if they’ve understood it, and much more. (All from the comfort of your mobile device.) Quizzes. Annotations. Writing Prompts. Teach vocabulary in context with Power Words. Forget word lists and memorization—the best way to learn new words is for students to encounter them in context while they read. Available on hundreds of articles. 5 Power Words with student-friendly definitions are embedded in hundreds of articles. Students can practice Power Words by completing 10 practice activities after reading. Words and points are collected on each student’s Word Wall. 123 Is your district missing something? Not anymore. We designed the Newsela Instructional Content Platform to fit perfectly into how your district already works. Integrate with Google Classroom, Canvas, Clever and more. Learn about PRO Learn about PRO It’s time to solvereading engagement. Join our community of 1,300,000 educators and counting. Join Learn about PRO Close Teachers Administrators Newsela About Newsela Pro Company Careers Content Partners Help Learning & Support Follow Us Press Blog Twitter Facebook Youtube Instagram © 2018 Newsela | info@newsela.com | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

      Newsela- Articles customizable to any reading level:) Keep as a future resource

    1. Interestingly, the word Internet is never used in the CCSS reading stan-dards (Leu et al., 2011), despite the fact that the writing standards specify the use of “digital sources,” “technology,” and the “Internet” repeatedly (CCSS, 2010, p.41). Because of this, many will ignore instruction in online reading, thinking that the CCSS only references traditional, offline read-ing comprehension. Many may also fail to integrate reading and writing instruction, an important part of any literacy program.

      There is a lot wrong with the Common Core standards, so I'm glad this article pointed this out. That is a perspective in the standards I had never thought of before and this gave me a new lens to look at it with

    1. like a picture in the newspaper

      I have noticed a lot of similes in this text. I think it would be interesting to create a function to help of find them and then do an analysis on what each simile refers to. Then we could derive a pattern from the out put. We could do this be creating an Ngram function to parse them out and then close read them for analysis. Or maybe a coordinates for the words "like a"?

    1. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.
    2. So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”
    1. dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become one’s dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether we’re reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.”
    1. the only filter worth having is the one that distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not; what matters and what doesn’t.When you filter by right or wrong, not only are you trying to paint a whole with the smaller component of its parts, but you’re also limiting what you understand. Who is to say that there isn’t a lesson in what is wrong? Or more importantly, who is to say that what you assume to be right or wrong is just a current bias that, one day, you will come to readjust?Any time I reread a book that has been important to me in the past, I always come back with new lessons. Most books contain more than one idea, and they say different things in different places.

      According to Zat Rana, reading is not about being right or wrong, but rather about being open new ideas and lessons.

    2. Every word, every sentence, and every paragraph of a good piece of writing has the potential to teach you something. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be selective about what you read or that you can’t give up on something that isn’t speaking to you. What it means is that for something to move you, you have to be ready to be moved.

      The challenge is to be open to the opportunity to be moved.

    1. Can't annotate stupid JSTOR page images. But: "When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters - for the most part - recede from our consciousness."

    1. On the other hand, computers cannot read.

      This is entirely too complex an assertion to be made without support. It seems easy to understand, and yet it is not.

  7. Jun 2018
    1. The first part introduces what Marjorie Perloff calls “differential reading,” which positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.

      Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

  8. Apr 2018
  9. Mar 2018
    1. An Open Approach to Scholarly Reading and Knowledge Management

      Key writing on opening knowledge practices (OKP), what we are calling the effort to enable people, when they are engaged in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge as students, teachers, researchers, scholars, and librarians, to develop and demonstrate (agency) themselves (identities), their understanding (literacies), their skills, and their connections to other people (communities) throughout their lives for their own benefit, for the common good, and to participate in a just and thriving economy.

    1. To facilitate and promote the writing, publishing, and reading of literature in electronic media.

      I think that ELO's definition pretty much sums up what E-Lit, or Electronic Literature is. And I think that this concept is only going to grow bigger, and become the new norm for future generations.

    1. Reading might convey an actual bit of knowledge to the officious man. How much easier to open a book and talk as opposed to read and actually learn something

  10. Feb 2018
    1. Máire Ní Mhongáin

      As Ciarán Ó Con Cheanainn writes in Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán, the oldest written version of this song dates to 1814, and is found in MS Egerton 117 in the British Library. Oral lore in Conneamara has it that Máire Ní Mhongáin’s three sons joined the British Army, and that Peadar deserted soon after joining, and emigrated to America. It seems probable that their involvement was in the French Revolutionary Wars or the Napoleonic Wars, the major conflicts fought by the British Army in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth respectively.

      Máire Ní Mhongáin seems to have resonated among Irish emigrant communities in the United States. My evidence for this is that Micheál Ó Gallchobhair of Erris, County Mayo, collected songs from Erris emigrants living in Chicago in the 1930s, over a century after the occasion of ‘Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin’s’ composition. It features in his collection, which you access via the following link: http://www.jstor.org.ucc.idm.oclc.org/stable/20642542?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

      The virulent cursing of departed sons by the mother, named Máre, produces the effect of striking g contrasts with John Millington Synge’s bereaves mother, Old Maurya, in Riders to the Sea.

      My Irish Studies blog features an in-depth account of typical features of the caoineadh genre to which Amhrán Mháire Ní Mhongáin belongs. You can access it via the following link: johnwoodssirishstudies.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/carraig-aonair-an-eighteenth-century-west-cork-poem/

    1. Bean an tSeanduine - Sean Nós 2

      ‘Bean an tSeanduine’ features all of the conventions of the malmariée genre we have previously encountered in ‘An Seanduine Cam’. Also, it is a good example of the speaker blaming her parents for her plight, which is another regular feature of this song type.

      As well as being one of the finest examples of the genre, it is perhaps the most well-known and commonly sung, owing in large part to the simplicity and catchiness of its monosyllable end-rhymes.

      As well as Ó Tuama, Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail has written about the common features of the chanson de la malmariée. Her article ‘The Representation of the Feminine: Some evidence from Irish language sources’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Dá Chultúr is a rich source of information on the topic. In ‘Bean an tSeanduine’, we have a fine example of what Ní Úrdail calls the description of ‘the plight of a beautiful young woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage to an impotent elderly spouse who is ignorant of her mental and physical frustration’. However, when we consider the particular humour of this song, we can identify how it serves to empower the female speaker.

      ‘Bean an tSeanduine’ differs from ‘An Seanduine Cam’ in that there is no third-person narrator. Like ‘An Seanduine Cam’, the humour of the song relies on a ridiculing of the old man, although here the young woman herself is his detractor. Each of his brags meet a witty riposte. When he claims wealth, she calls him a miser, and when he wonders what would become of his if he died during the night, she jokes that death is an immanent danger. When mockery of this kind is voiced by the female speaker, it serves to empower her, and inspire in the listener a sense of sympathy and respect.

    1. An Seanduine Cam - Corn Uí Riada 2016

      The song’s first two verses are spoken by a third-person narrator. In its humorous exaggeration, the first verse caricatures recognized conventions of arranged marriage. This narrative consciously situates itself in a genre whose familiarity to the listener is a necessary part of the humour. It addresses the economic incentives which were the major precipitating factors of marriage arrangements in rural Ireland during the eighteenth century. It also invokes the misery which such marriages often visited upon young women.

      In his essay ‘Love in Irish Folksong’, Seán Ó Tuama identifies among typical features of the malmariée genre that ‘a young woman speaks (in the first person) of her anguish,’ that ‘the description of the husband can be unbelievably grotesque and ribald: he is humped, crippled; he coughs, grunts, whines at night; most of all, he is cold as lead, important, and completely fails to satisfy her desires’, and that ‘she discloses that she is going to leave him for a young man’ (149). ‘An Seanduine Cam’ provides clear examples of all of these traits.

      Moreover, because these tendencies find expression in a debate form, and are redoubled in response to the unfeeling man, the resistant character of the put-upon young woman is strongly emphasized.

    1. chúige

      ‘what you yourself and the late John O’Daly, following in the footsteps of Edward Walsh, to some extent accomplished for Munster, more than thirty years ago’ (iv)

      John O’Daly (1800-1878) was an editor and publisher. He published Edward Walsh’s Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1844), as well as two series of Poets and Poetry of Munster, the first by James Clarence Mangan (1849), and the second by George Sigerson (1860). In another of his works, Mise agus an Conradh (1937), Hyde wrote ‘Ní raibh éinne, lena linn, a rinne níos mó ar a shlí féin chun Gaeilge a leathnú agus a shaothrú’ (There was noone, during O’Daly’s time, who did as much as he did to popularize Gaelic’, my trans.) The most comprehensive biography of John O’Daly is that in Beathaninéis, vol. 2, by Diarmuid Breathnach and Mairéad Ní Mhurchú. It is available online at https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=1193

      The most comprehensive biography I have found in English is the entry in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, edited by Robert Welch.

    2. grádh

      ‘My Dear Dr. Sigerson’ (iv)

      The Dr. Sigerson in question is George Sigerson (1836-1925), a physician and an eminent translator of Gaelic poetry. When the Gaelic League was founded in 1893, Hyde was elected as its present, and so absented his role as president of the National Literary Society. Sigerson succeeded him, and was the society’s incumbent present when Love Songs of Connacht was published.

      A direct address to the National Literary Society was famously performed by Hyde in 1892. The central idea of his speech titled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ was that there was an indissoluble link between a nation’s language and its culture, and that it was a sign of cultural weakness to mimic English ways and habits of thought.

      The beginning of Love Songs of Connacht reminds us of the ideological backdrop from which the book emerges. For in-depth accounts of the development of the idea that language and nationhood are inextricably linked, see Diarmuid Ó Giolláin’s Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (2000), and Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (2006). You can read the text of Hyde’s 1892 speech to the National Literary Society at http://historymuse.net/readings/HYDENecessityforDeAnglicizingIreland1892.html

  11. Nov 2017
    1. Should the students bedisciplined for their disrespectfor authority and their flouting ofschool rules? Should the studentsbe praised for their ingenuity andtheir ability to figure out howsophisticated security systems reallywork?

      To answer this question, it may depend on what the outcome was. Did the students use this for personal gain? Did the students report the security flaw? How many times did this occur? This moral dilemma is not only taking place in school, but in the real world.

  12. Oct 2017
    1. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

      James Joyce is known for is his use of epiphanies: "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself" (Stone 371).

      The last line of "Araby" can be seen as the boy's epiphany. Leading up to this moment, Mangan's sister has consumed his mind, and he thought buying something for her from Araby would solve everything. Now that he finally made it to the bazaar, he is utterly disappointed.

      There are many interpretations about what the boy's epiphany actually is. Some scholars posit that the he relates to the men flirting with the sales woman: "The boy looks steadily at this vulgar avatar of his longings; and then his other vision—his vision of a comely waiting presence, of a heavenly dolorous lady—dissolves and finally evaporates. The boy, at last, glimpses reality unadorned; he no longer deceives himself with his usual romanticizing" (Stone 371). He is ultimately just like those two men, and Mangan's sister is just another girl.

      Another possible interpretation is that the boy's realization is a greater metaphor for the deterioration of Ireland's identity. He sees the French "Café Chantant". Moreover, while eavesdropping on the lady and the two men, the boy "remarked their English accents". Perhaps Ireland is not so Irish anymore.

      Yet another meaning could be that the boy is no longer a boy; he has transitioned out of the magical and imaginative world of being a child. The story begins with the boy telling us how he and his friends, "played till our bodies glowed". He then stops playing with his friends because he is infatuated with Mangan's sister: "From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street". After he hears about Araby the boy has "hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play". His whole outlook on life has rapidly changed. In an essay titled "Closing Time: 'ten minutes to ten' and the End of Childhood in Joyce's Araby'", Steven Doloff notes that the boy arrives at the bazaar at "ten minutes to ten": "While clock hands regularly meet twenty-four times during the course of a day, their particular occurrence at 9:50 P.M. at the end of 'Araby' may have a special contextual significance. Their juncture immediately precedes the boy's anguished self-revelation and what appears to be the near-simultaneous closing of the bazaar at ten o'clock. If we choose to see the longer minute hand of the clock as representing adulthood and the shorter one childhood, then 'ten minutes to ten' would symbolically portend the moment that adulthood overtakes the boy's childhood, eclipses it, and begins to leave it behind—a simple visual icon for a widely acknowledged theme in the story".

      These are just a few of many interpretations of the ending. Ezra Pound wrote that Joyce's "most engaging merit, is that he carefully avoids telling you a lot that you don't want to know".

      sources: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=cb6a19bc-74ce-46ea-a40d-117795dd7dfb%40sessionmgr104

      https://muse-jhu-edu.jpllnet.sfsu.edu/article/605563

      http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1305652712296879.pdf

    2. Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free

      "Araby" is filled with religious allusions; religion was important in Ireland. This passage could be interpreted in a number of ways. In one sense, the boys being set "free" could mean that they are finally able to enjoy being kids. They are literally released from the rigid structure of school, and now they can do what boys do: play. Furthermore, Khorand observes that it is possible that the school "constrains and limits [the boys] so much more with it's didactic religious teachings".

      source: http://epiphany.ius.edu.ba/index.php/epiphany/article/view/109/106

    3. blind

      A street "being blind" means that it is a dead end. North Richmond Street also happens to be a dead end where one is not able to see around the corner (see picture in the annotation for "North Richmond Street"). Furthermore, Joyce's use of the word "blind" has been a topic of discussion among literary scholars. In an essay about symbolism in "Araby", Golbarg Khorand notes that "This blind street (repeated twice in the same paragraph) could be a symbol of the boy’s character that is literally blind due to his young age and immaturity". The blindness could also be connected to all of the people living on the street, or all Dubliners. Perhaps Joyce was even thinking about all the people who never venture out from the little corner of planet earth where they were born.

      source: http://epiphany.ius.edu.ba/index.php/epiphany/article/view/109/106

    1. COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING

      Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on

    2. Listening

      A big part of social reading: listening to the text and to other readers.

    3. more engaging

      Because social and interactive, collaborative annotation can make reading more engaging.

    4. peer-to-peer conversations about big issues that defy yes/no answers and ask students to think more analytically

      Pretty good definition of social reading in fact!

    5. egularly working on teams

      Social reading makes reading a team sport!

    1. While one could manually “count” references across a novel or ouvre, or attempt to estimate relative occurrence, a text analysis tool like Voyant can more easily provide textual evidence necessary to support an essay’s claim, or, if the evidence proves the writer “wrong,” help the writer re-evaluate her argument accordingly.

      Just a tool of efficiency or for noticing unrecognized patterns through a different means of analysis. Both, IMO.

  13. blog.ashleyalexandraa.com blog.ashleyalexandraa.com
    1. Roosevelt

      Marshall Nunn states that "For Ruben, [Roosevelt] is the representative man of the United States...[and the poem details] The imperialistic attitude that Roosevelt took regarding the building of the Panama Canal" Here, Roosevelt is not only literally the leader of the United States, but also represents the same ideals the United States was founded on. Throughout the poem Dario no longer addresses Roosevelt, but rather addresses the United States as a whole. With the assumption that Roosevelt represents the greater collective beliefs of the United States.

    2. you oppose Tolstoy

      Another great contrast in the poem occurs when Dario alludes to Tolstoy. A Russian writer in many ways represents a great contrast to Roosevelt himself. Acereda suggests that in fact Tolstoy represents the a vastly different moral view than Roosevelt. Acereda suggests that in fact Tolstoy is an image for opposition against Roosevelt's "Big Stick" policy. Where Tolstoy was working to liberate and educate his people Roosevelt was living an alternate justice system.

      Comic illustrating Roosevelts "Big Stick" policy

    3. Liberty raises her torch in New York.

      Several people have determined that this poem suggests that Dario is harshly judging the United States for their involvement in imperialism and slavery throughout the world. Hal L. Ballew argues that "the torch held by our country's most famous landmark directs its light into the far corners of the world in order to search out the innocent and helpless so that they may be conquered and enslaved"

    4. verse of Walt Whitman

      According to Marshall Nunn Dario "far from admiring of his [Whitman] democratic ideals," With Dunn's information the inference then becomes that Dario believes the only way that the American people will understand his message through Walt Whitman's poetry. However, given the knowledge that Dario does not respect Whitman this line can be seen as an insult to the American people. Or in contrast, as Acereda states Dario can be speaking on the American people's terms, Whitman being a classic American poet, in a desperate attempt to communicate a message to them. )

    1. Howard Rheingold

      Howard Rheingold is a psychologist/neurologist incredibly invested in the effect today's digital net world has had on society. He has written a large amount of article, launched a magazine, and delivered a TEDtalk on his findings. His about website is http://rheingold.com/about/

    2. We must teach our children to be "bitextual" or "multitextual," able to read and ana-lyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text .... My major conclusion from an examination of the developing reader is a cautionary one. I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming just what Socrates warned us against-a society of decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of their intellectual potential. It does not need to be so, if we teach them well, a charge that is equally applicable to our children with dyslexia.

      People might start feeling so smart and "all knowing" that they will shut out anything they personally don't intellectually identify with. The main problem in today's society is that others don't think they should know anything else about other people's experiences and ideas and they'll label these types of informations as unnecessary. Basically, they will make up their mind that they are right anyway so they shut out anything that will probably enhance their culturization and most likely change their minds on a certain topics. It's easy enough for people to surround themselves in a community that will agree with their views and thus they will no longer mentally grow because they only expose themselves to their own side. this is the type of distraction that Wolf claims hinders "intellectual potential".

    3. Democratization enables vulgarization. As cultural practices become more common, they also become more coarse and misinterpreted. In the early twentieth century, the young print journalist Walter Lippmann claimed that U.S. citizens are too gullible and ill informed to govern a modern, complex society. In response, philosopher-activist John Dewey responded that in a democracy, the answer was not, as Lippmann sug-gested, to confine governance to an elite but rather to make the entire pop-ulation less gullible through better public education and better informed through better journalism.6

      This hits the nail on the head in reference to one of my previous annotations on the fact that the only reason Russia felt bold enough to invest time to create fake American profiles was because they felt the American people were gullible enough to fall for their propaganda. It is up to the people to educate themselves into not falling for this series of media directed attention.

    4. our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specializa-tion for recognizing patterns of information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically.

      It's interesting for me personally to read about how the brain basically rewired itself when we started developing our own system of reading and writing. Neurons connected themselves in different ways to accommodate our new method of communication. Most likely, our hippocampus enlarged to support this new feed of info. It makes me wonder how exactly the mechanisms in our brain changed to make space for this enhancement, like did we lose some sort of heightened senses such as sight and hearing to make room for our reading abilities? Are our brains changing once again since the advancement of the internet? For example, will we become near sighted to increase our short attention span since we spend such a long time reading information and needing to pay attention more today than ever before?

    5. self-control along with the skillful use of attention, participation, crap detection, collaboration, and network awareness through social media ought to be taught to future netizens as early as possible.

      It is vital that from now on people grow a sensitive sense of detection of false information. In this day and age it is easy to become engrossed in the multitude of data being spread. People need to reverse look up anything they are not sure of, and have a general idea of which sources can be trusted and which cannot. Otherwise, it is easy to fall victim and be guilty of spreading misinformation. Ultimately, it was this lack of skepticism that enabled Russia to spread its agenda undetected throughout facebook.They stole a Brazilian man's pictures and made up false addresses and education in order to do this, when a simple search of this fake profile would have been easily exposed.

    6. I conclude that teaching people how to practice more mindful mediated communication seems the most feasible remedy. I like Jackson's query in an excellent Boston.com article about attention training: "If focus skills can be groomed, as research has begun to hint, the important next question is whether, and how, attention should be integrated into education.

      The key to understanding the world around us is face to face communication that is "mindful" and "mediated". Personally, I believe that people lose their sense of empathy online because they don't have a physical face in front of them talking about their experiences. Usually, all you truly see online are either data or opinions, and it becomes incredibly easy to side with one issue because one absorbs information with no consideration on how different types of people are involved. According to the article "is the internet killing empathy?" it is stated that

      Their brains have become "wired" to use their tech gadgets effectively in order to multi-task -- staying connected with friends, texting and searching online endlessly, often exposing their brains to shocking and sensational images and videos. Many people are desensitizing their neural circuits to the horrors they see, while not getting much, if any, off-line training in empathic skills. And the effects may even reach young people.

      http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/18/small.vorgan.internet.empathy/index.html

      The effects of widespread media and propaganda most likely will make it easier for the consumers to become self centered and desensitized to others and thus fall for the Russian social media plants which caters to these types of mentalities.

    7. A search engine," he writes, "often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we're searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole."

      Although Google is made out to be a great search engine for whatever people want to look up when they need to be distracted, Google still doesn't use a database containing everything that's on the internet. in "Mystery of Russian Fake on Facebook Solved, by a Brazilian", it is mentioned that

      Before publishing the photos, The Times tried to find their source using Google’s image search function, but nothing turned up. This suggested that they might belong to a Brazilian Facebook user because Facebook blocks image searches of its profiles. The company declined to say whether it had searched internally and found the photos before Mr. Costacurta came forward.

      This shows that even when our attention could be completely focused on finding as much information as we can for one subject, in the end our dedicated attention may have been in vain overall.

    8. Only you can know your goals, and only you can determine which stimuli are relevant at any moment.

      Because almost the entirety of the country already had predetermined that the most relevant issue in 2016 was the presidential election, it became all the more easier for Russia to create fake profiles in the heightened scrutiny that both of the candidates were under, and repeatedly post about politics and their "opinions", and influence people who's goals were to figure out who to vote for.

    9. Humans pay a lot of attention to other humans-hence the success and seductive distractions of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The discovery of "mirror neurons" in primates strongly implies that paying attention to others is one of the few human cognitive capabilities that may be neurally "hardwired." Mirror neurons fire when you do something, but they also fire in the same way when you watch someone else doing the same thing. The scientists who discovered mirror neurons believe they are fundamental to social behavior: "If we want to survive, we must under-stand the actions of others. Furthermore, without action understanding, social organization is impossible. In the case of humans, there is another faculty that depends on the observation of others' actions: imitation learn-ing. Unlike most species, we are able to learn by imitation, and this faculty is at the basis of human culture.

      This is quite possibly the main reason the Russian government was creating fake profiles in the first place. They wanted to spread propaganda about Hillary Clinton and her emails in order to sway the public vote to Trump. It has already been proven that Russia had a hand in hacking the 2016 elections, but it appears that they wanted to go a step further with this propaganda. Because they had a lot of plants in the social media community highlighting the problems with Hillary, due to mirror neurons, it most likely caused the people who saw these posts to attribute a "regular American person" to thinking that Hillary was bad, thus swaying their thinking to gear more toward Trump.

    10. Oversimplification num-ber one: attention, memory, and executive control are the fundamental com-ponents of thinking-and the executive control process is the particular power you can tap to control your use of social media.

      Attention to detail, one of the vital necessities of media navigation, was needed for the people who were being exposed to things such as fake profiles, like that Russian propagandist that was posing as a regular man on facebook that spread certain types of information for whoever followed him to see. If they were not paying close enough attention to whoever was behind the propaganda being exposing them to these ideas, then they will fall victims to the pushed ideas.

    11. The supplemental reading I chose was the article "Mystery of Russian Fake Facebook Solved, by a Brazilian" This article examined the fake profile the Russian government made during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.The reason for this was to perpetuate the email scandals that Hillary was involved in to sway public opinion toward Trump. one specific fake profile, Melvin Redick, had pictures stolen from a Brazilian man from 2014 that was only identified when the pictures were made public in an effort to find out who the man really was. It was also discovered that the addresses, jobs and schools claimed to have been attended never had heard of the person in the profile, raising quite a few red flags to the investigators. In all, when the true man of the photographs was contacted, he was unnerved at the fact that his pictures had been taken from him due to the fact that he had had his facebook profile on private, not to mention that when reverse looking up his pictures on Google, it leads to zero results because Google blocks Brazilian Facebooks. It just goes to show that no matter what type of privacy precaution one can take, hackers are still able to take pictures without permission and use them to their own gain. This also personally makes me realize how undeniably corrupt governments can be in order to influence elections not even in their own country.

    12. There are two main issues that need to be addressed when talking about this Russian, and by extant all, propaganda endeavors: internet privacy and gullibility. Everything can and will be seen on the internet, no matter how many precautions one will take, that's why it's important to limit the amount of media you post publicly. Governments will have access to your information and could use it to push their own agendas.Tying more closely with the main text, Net Smart by Howard Rheingold, is the gullibility issue. It's brought up that paying attention in the age of the internet has become incredibly difficult for today's society. Because people aren't paying attention to the world around them, and to an extent the world on their phones, they are missing the crucial details in life. People are letting this excess flow of information take over their lives and influence their opinions and ideas. This is the main reason why Russian propagandists posed as regular American people in the first place; they knew the Americans scrolling through the posts of this fake profile will inadvertently subconsciously take into account the posts that the fake profile feeds to them. One needs to become aware of what they are reading online, why is was posted, and by who. By researching, becoming skeptical of online presences, and overall being aware of their thoughts while reading texts online, one will be more prepared to deflect propaganda planted into their social media feed.

  14. Sep 2017
    1. Textbook maker Pearson is also getting in on the action by developing adaptive learning software and launching virtual tutors for students as they “read” through digital textbook resources.

      Ok, here I'm getting a bit more worried. It's not that I don't think this is helpful. But I do think it's skipping some possible better, more human solutions.

      One concern: the premise here is that comprehension struggles are mostly questions requiring answers rather than discursive situations requiring more interaction. A second related concern: is the ultimate goal of "learning" to get the answer or to acquire facility with that discursive process? (Answer: the latter.)

      I think simple social annotation, perhaps backed by some AI, could go a long way here. Allow students to ask questions, answer each others questions, and surface those questions and answers in a useful way to teachers...

    1. The studying strategy with “the greatest power,” she adds, involves deeply questioning the text — asking yourself if you agree with the author, and why or why not.

      Etexts have an advantage in the annotation department in that they're not limited to the marginal space. Annotations can be as lengthy as they need to be. They can also be organized through tags, and thus easily searched. They can contain hyperlinks and be hyperlinked, tying texts together. I wonder how many people are taught, in any meaningful or systematic way, to use digital texts. And if they were, how would that change this dilemma.

    2. out of 878 potentially relevant studies published between 1992 and 2017, only 36 directly compared reading in digital and in print and measured learning in a reliable way. (Many of the other studies zoomed in on aspects of e-reading, such as eye movements or the merits of different kinds of screens.)
    1. a reading group is a common activity amongresearch labs. The purpose of a reading group is to stay on topof newly published research in a specific field. In most formats,one student is selected to present a research paper to the restof the group. Most reading group formats meet weekly from30 minutes to an hour.
  15. spring2018.robinwharton.net spring2018.robinwharton.net
    1. The significance of basic materials created within a certain cultural structure is vital to the advancement of the traditions and ideals of the cultures. In both "Mohegan Wood-Splint Basket" and "Mark Their Words: Medieval Bookmarks" two incredibly overlooked yet culturally significant material usage objects are observed. It's the simplest of items, the ones that are rooted in the daily routine of the people, that have the most stories to tell.

      The woven baskets (and other materialistic cultural items such as bookmarks) should not be considered and analyzed as texts according to the Mohegan Wood-splint Basket chapter, and therefore not be treated as such. In general, doing so would result in missing some of the most critical components of the reason they exist or what they truly symbolize. There is no true author, there is no audience, and there are no literary devices to analyze.

      Rather than analyzing the literal contexts of the materials, one has to make meaning of each three dimensional detail and why it is there. For example, in the case of the Mohegan basket, the lining contains scraps of newspaper from 1817, which gives an accurate time period of when it was made. The same can be said about the found item type of bookmark during Medieval times. For example, a leaf used as a bookmark can tell you that the person had been reading outside, and you can even go as far as to find out what type of tree the leaf was from, and draw conclusions based upon that.

      There may exist some opinions that stake the claim that typical items that were used in the general lives of individuals are not as important as written primary source documents. Although it is true that written documents are more likely to contain confirmed specific details, they sadly cannot provide a true visual perception of the writer's life. Materials are far more tangible and physical to provide a deeper look and the historical aspects of a culture that cannot be represented on text.

      Culture analysis does not have to solely focus on written media. Looking past the surface of materialistic culture is also as vital to the development of ideas of how a certain community lived in the past.

  16. Jul 2017
    1. se a reader’s ability to effectively scan a page, as opposed to reading every word

      importan skill when reading a foreign text!

    1. In short, online reading compre-hension is online research. Second, online reading also becomes tightly integrated with writing as we communicate with others to learn more about the questions we explore and as we communicate our own inter-pretations. A third difference is that new technologies such as browsers, search engines, wikis, blogs, e-mail, and many others are required. Addi-tional skills and strategies are needed to use each of these technologies effectively

      Literacy, in general, is not simply knowing how to read read text. It also extends to know what to do what the information you acquire from reading. Reading also encompasses underatanding. For example, underatanding traffic lights and signs are a type of literacy that not involve text, but they communicate meaning that you need to know how to read and synthesize into action.

    2. With our extensive prior knowledge derived from offline reading, we naturally interpret this standard, using a lens to our past, and teach infer-ential reasoning with narrative text offline.
    3. (1) reading to identify important questions, (2) reading to locate information, (3) reading to evaluate information criti-cally, (4) reading to synthesize information, and (5) reading and writing to communicate information

      When I think of reading comprehension, I think of a person being able to read a text. While reading a text, they are processing, analyizing, and inferencing the text. Finally, they are able to discuss the text and answer questions. Then, I see this definition of and realize that there are some other important pieces that I'm missing.

  17. Jun 2017
    1. Don’t we have to actually read the books, before saying what the patterns discovered in them mean?

      Yes, of course. But it's ironic that this three post tirade begins with a rather distant reading of the MLA program.

    2. But does the data point inescapably in that direction?

      In the above performance of close reading, is the evidence more "inescapable"? Isn't is always in the fullness of the argumentation no matter where the data comes from?

  18. May 2017
    1. and modeling content, practices, and strategies

      Link to Lewis et al (2006) Lesson Study, Afflerbach et al (2008) modeling and explaining, Fagella and Deshler, (2007) reading strategies

    1. Novelist Mary Rakow in conversation with the Rev. Liz Tichenor

      "Novelist Mary Rakow in conversation with the Rev. Liz Tichenor"

    1. Now one feels blithe as a swimmer calmly borne by celestial waters, and then, as a diver into a secret world, lost in subterranean currents. Arduously sought expressions, hitherto evasive, hidden, will be like stray fishes out of the ocean bottom to emerge on the angler’s hook;

      This section of Lu Chi's text explains that only after we accept the tranquil inner depth of the mind, will the hard work of searching for inspiration payoff and wild creativity finally emerge to the surface. We see this in his use of words such as “Blithe,” “calmly,” “secret,” “lost,” “subterranean,” “arduously,” “hidden,” “out,” “bottom,” “emerge,” and “hook.” Going from a place of being carefree (blithe) and reaching below the minds surface (Subterranean) will the writer come out the other side (emerge) victories (angler’s hook). He uses the juxtapose of “celestial” and "Subterranean" as a metaphor of going from a "celestial" place of security above and being conscious, to “subterranean” as going to that unknown place below, the subconscious to find oneself. Also he uses “water” as referencing to the limited and small mind, “Current” as the mind breaking free and drifting, to the “Ocean” to become a massive and unlimited force of creative energy. Lu Chi also uses the transformation of the writer as the “diver,” who enters this unknown water and becomes the “fish” searching and finally metamorphosis into the “angler” who has found what he is looking for and pulls inspiration and creativity with "hook."

    2. Let the full-blown garden flowers of the ancients in their own morning glory stand; to breathe life into late blossoms that have yet to bud will be his sole endeavor.

      In this section of Lu Chi’s text, he is describing the most important task and responsibility of a writer is to teach future generations present and not yet born the importance of proper writing. We see this with his use of words such as “Let,” “full-blown,” “morning,” “ancients,” “own,” “stand,” “life,” “late,” “yet,” “bud” and “endeavor.” Lu Chi uses the metaphors of a garden and its plants to illustrate this with “full-grown garden” who are a group of mature writers in all their “glory,” who give clarity on how to write with the word “morning” and are beacons with the word “stand,” for present and future writers that will come after they are gone and he demonstrates this with the use of “late blossoms” and “yet to bud.” The words “full,” “late” and “yet” is the juxtapose of past, present and future. Lu Chi use of garden also exemplifies how proper writing are order, beauty and neat, because he doesn’t use words like jungle or forest, which grow wild. Also “Ancient” means that history will prove which writers will stand the test of time to teach others in the future.

  19. Apr 2017
    1. joy

      Her description of the writing process reminds of Douglass' recounting of when he first learned to read. Reading was painful for him at first, because he realized the extent of his oppression, but it becomes a tool for liberation.

  20. Mar 2017
    1. “Well, Miss Dashwood,” said Mrs. Jennings, sagaciously smiling, as soon as the gentleman had withdrawn, “I do not ask you what the Colonel has been saying to you; for though, upon my honour, I tried to keep out of hearing, I could not help catching enough to understand his business

      This stood out to me, because although sense and sensibility are the prevailing themes in this book, I believe that Austen also had a lot to say about gossip, and its harmful effect within society. Here, we see the worst gossiper relish in her acquired information, though she was in no position to do so, and she decides to share this piece which is not hers to share.

    2. Yes. But I did not love only him; — and while the comfort of others was dear to me, I was glad to spare them from knowing how much I felt. Now, I can think and speak of it with little emotion. I would not have you suffer on my account; for I assure you I no longer suffer materially myself. I have many things to support me. I am not conscious of having provoked the disappointment by any imprudence of my own, and I have borne it as much as possible without spreading it farther

      I believe this shows remarkable character development. Elinor is no longer suppressing her true feelings, and is confessing them to her sister. She is gaining more sensibility while still holding onto her sense.

  21. Feb 2017
    1. Over the past two decades, the collective union voice view has been challenged as research has broadened to include direct voice mechanisms within a variety of non-union settings (McCabe and Lewin, 1992; McLoughlin and Gourlay, 1994; Terry, 1999; Benson, 2000; Gollan, 2003, 2006; Butler, 2005; Dietz et al., 2005; Dundon et al., 2005; Haynes, 2005; Machin and Wood, 2005; Taras and Kaufman, 2006; Bryson and Freeman, 2007; Dundon and Gollan, 2007).
    2. (Freeman and Medoff, 1984).
    3. (Gospel and Wood, 2003: 2; see also Lewin and Mitchell, 1992; Haynes et al., 2005; Freeman et al., 2007).
    1. While the backgrounds of the writers varied, a theme began to emerge: the more reading moved online, the less students seemed to understand.

      It seems like there is a disconnect.

  22. Jan 2017
    1. they may not be ready for that this year, or on the first day, and so there must to be online spaces where they can practice this kind of engagement safely and receive constructive feedback so that they can become responsible and thoughtful participants in the digital public sphere.
    2. Now you can create a hypothes.is group and invite others to join you in annotating a text or set of texts amongst yourselves
    1. In the knowledge section, you can create the outline of your thesis or paper. The individual knowledge items can be dropped on the categories on the left, which correspond to your chapters, and within each chapter, they can then be ordered to develop your argument. Thus, your paper is taking shape before your actually start writing.
    1. lthough it is clear that reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience, the stumbling blocks are real, and it is up to each scientist to identify and apply the techniques that work best for them.
    2. At the beginning, new academic readers find it slow because they have no frame of reference for what they are reading.
    1. An important distinction, however, must be made. Whereas now the social nature of reading is enhanced through ubiquity and accessibility, reading during the Middle Ages was social because of scarcity and inaccessibility.

      Fascinating distinction!

  23. Dec 2016
  24. Nov 2016
  25. Oct 2016
    1. Books mentioned throughout this comment thread. Add your suggestions! - de Mesquita and Smith's The Dictator's Handbook - Machiavelli's The Prince - Sun Tzu's the Art of War - Saul Alinski's Rules for Radicals - David Nickle's Eutopia - Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (as per a previous CGPGrey video) - Erica Chenoweth's Why civil resistance works
    1. Several studies found the decrease in comprehension on digital devices was more due to distractions on the internet than to the medium itself. Perhaps self-control is among the key skills to teach students expected to read more online.

      Distractions as a researched problem, but where is the citation?

  26. Sep 2016
  27. Aug 2016
    1. Page 8

      Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

      … in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

    2. Pages 7 and 8

      Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

      What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.

    3. Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

    1. istinction between "writerly" writing and "readerly" writing to that made by Roland Barthes in his book on literary theory, The Pleasure of the Text.

      Compare with the definitions of these terms in original text by Barthes here: PDF of Pleasures. Relevant quote "If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer's complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee-guarantee me, the writer-my reader's pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must "cruise" him) without knowing where he is, A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader's "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictabilIty of blIss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game" (Barthes 4).

  28. Jul 2016
    1. But the passage from de man does disservice to the discussion of close reading in one important respect. It makes it sound as though all you need is a negative disci-pline, a refusal to leap to the kind of paraphrases one has been led to expect, so that effective close reading requires no technique or training, only an avoidance of bad or dubious training. The suggestion seems to be that if one strips away these bad habits and simply encounters the text, without preconceptions, close reading will occur. If, as de man puts it, you are “attentive” and “honest,” close reading “cannot fail to respond to structures of language” that most literary education strives “to keep hidden.” atten-tion is important but not, alas, enough. Readers can always fail to respond—though then de man might not want to dignify the practice with the name of reading.

      Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

    2. Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

    3. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contempo-rary Poetry, Peter middleton calls close reading “our contemporary term for a hetero-geneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions”

      Discussion of the methodology of close reading: middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of alabama P, 2005. Print.

    1. Page 16

      One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

    1. p. 6

      Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

      This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

    1. (Crooks, 1933; De Zouche, 1945; Kirschenbaum, Simon, & Napier, 1971; Linder, 1940; Marshall, 1968)
    1. school often neatly reinforces the hierarchies of our socio-economic world

      Though it came out a few years after the texts listed in the previous paragraph, Randall Collins’s Credential Society would be relevant.

    2. The phrase comes from his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, published just 2 years after the book he’s probably best known for, Deschooling Society.  These are just two of a number of very interesting, progressive if not radical texts about education from roughly the same period: Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-education (1964). Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967). Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969). Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese in 1968 and in English in 1970). Everett Reimer’s School is Dead (1971).
    1. series of radical educational paperbacks, published by Penguin in the series Penguin Education Specials in the 1970’s. These included: Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Opprressed ; Paul Goodman Compulsory Miseducation; Ivan Illich De-Schooling Society; Everett Reimer School is Dead. 
  29. May 2016
  30. Apr 2016
  31. Mar 2016
    1. It seems to me that by its very nature annotation would have to be lightweight.

      Lightweight is its own weighted phrase. It seems to suggest that nothing of meaning or value, beyond something skirting the surface, would be worth writing or reading. But I think it all depends on how one uses the margins of a text. If someone writes a racist post, I can't take it down, necessarily, but I can target the writer and the words with annotations, making my views known and inviting others to do the same. Perhaps then, the weight of the annotation protest might have some value. With annotation, we can target specific words and phrases and sentences, as opposed to comments, where observations are more general in nature. Maybe it is the comment bin that is lightweight.

    1. When I saw my students working in this hybrid fashion with the book, I realized that I have shifted into reading much the same way. Audio is for multitasking. Kindle is for quick reading and convenient reading. Print reading is for serious reading and studying.
  32. Jan 2016
    1. In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the viewing of TV programs at the time of their broadcast went up 20% with the advent of Twitter, indicating a desire to consume collaboratively. My ten year experience with social reading suggests that we might see a similar increase if long-form texts began appearing in platforms enabling people to gather in the margins with trusted friends and colleagues.
    1. If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve?

      Maria Konnikova also cites a 2014 study in a New Yorker article on this topic that concludes by offering annotation as a kind of deliberate, slow online reading practice. (Note: the article has been annotated by two sets of college students!)

    2. But a 2011 study by the cognitive scientists Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith suggests that this may be a function less of the intrinsic nature of digital devices than of the expectations that readers bring to them.

      Very interesting. So an intentional online reading practice--fortified, let's say, by a collaborative annotation tool--might produce different results...

    3. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips.

      Love this line!

    1. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse

      At first glance, Sumner seem to be saying: Let's punish those who are successful and reward those who are not. I think what Sumner really means by "penalties" is the consequences that come with not being successful (e.g. poor living conditions). Similarly, when he discusses giving the "rewards" to the less successful, he means that we should share the benefits of success (e.g. money) with those who may not have had the opportunities to succeed like their counterparts so that they may live better, healthier lives. For example, Carnegie had libraries built for the public so that they could access books for knowledge and entertainment, whereas they may never have had access to readily available, free books before.

    1. unlawfully assembling themselves together

      in other words, if you are black or mixed-race you have to have permission to gather in a group. Did they have permission to gather in churches? Might this be one way they "legally" gathered and help explain the prominence of black churches in the Civil Rights Movement many years later?

    1. Here’s what the Finns, who don’t begin formal reading instruction until around age 7, have to say about preparing preschoolers to read: “The basis for the beginnings of literacy is that children have heard and listened … They have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed [things] with them … They have asked questions and received answers.”
  33. Dec 2015
    1. “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

      Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

      Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

    1. slow readers down

      Does the slow reading movement parallel the slow food one? In some ways, there might be a point against “consumption” in both cases. Or, at least, utilitarianism.