Ben Franklin Scholars

Peries Project Archive

~ devo3000

The annual NSSE benchmark study of universities is out and it has a handy “Report Builder” that allows you to generate reports drawn from their broad survey of freshman and senior undergraduates at a huge range of institutions in the US and Canada. I decided to play around with it a bit, and generated these two models of student opinions about their major at competitive research universities in the US:

Freshman Responses by Major

Freshman Responses by Major
Freshman responses by Major

 

Senior Responses by Major

Senior Responses by Major
Senior Responses by Major

 

 

This seems to confirm the counterintuitive reaction I get when I tell people outside the university that I’m an English professor. 9 times out of 10, they tell me how *hard* they found their English courses in college. Continue reading →

Teaching with Omeka: Presenting the Peries Project

~ devo3000

Yesterday the seminar I’ve been teaching at Penn finished their digital project: an online edition of John Leyden’s “Tales of the Peries,” a handwritten manuscript in the archives of the National Library of Scotland. Leyden was a romantic poet as well as close collaborator of Walter Scott’s, before traveling to Southeast Asia as a functionary of the East India Company. Once there, Leyden established himself as an Orientalist and specialist in Asian languages, and the Tales of the Peries is an example from this fruitful period before his early death in 1811.

As part of a larger class on historical fiction, fantasy, and the influence of empire, my students built an Omeka site that includes digital facsimiles of the manuscript, transcriptions using Scripto, a plugin for Omeka, and a “readerly edition” that incorporates their research into editorial practices and critical editions and links to supporting materials and entries in the Omeka collection and on the wiki. In addition, they built a host of supporting materials for the site, from critical evaluations of the Tales, its verse, and the influence of Urdu and Arabic literature, to information about Leyden, his involvement with the EIC, even an animated Flash map that walks the reader through the geography of the tale and details the main transformations of Melech Mahommed, the main character, over the course of the narrative.

Continue reading →