Liberal Arts Voices

Read the perspectives of our current students

Mapping the Penn State Archives – Part Three

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Interior Tato.jpgDuring the spring 2013 semester, students in one section of English 030 took part in a unique experiment to bring together research, writing, and technology in a way that was both meaningful to the students and relevant to the Penn State community.  “Mapping the Penn State Archives” is being featured in this blog during finals week.  

In this final installment, appropriately titled “Gentle Thursdays,” Jennifer Tato (right) talks about the process of uncovering a long-forgotten student tradition.  Her article and some of the photographs she discovered are available here.

By Jennifer Tato
Researching in the archives. That phrase made me really anxious and hesitant to begin a research project in the Penn State Library. Whenever I heard the word research, I would shudder and think of someone working on pages upon pages about a boring subject. The moment I stepped into the archives I could not think of what was so boring about it after all. The archives have everything! It was in that moment that I got excited to begin my work. I did not know what I was going to be researching at the time, but I knew it was going to be an adventure. I think it was when my English teacher, Laura Brown, proposed Gentle Thursdays as a potential research project to me–that’s when I dove full throttle into research at the archives. I spent a lot of time in there uncovering the history behind Gentle Thursdays, which was considered as a “day of sharing” amidst the 1970s anti-war sentiments. This event was a well-known and celebrated student tradition; it brought together everyone in State College by simply caring and giving. The reason it really captured my attention was because, during a time of violence and hopelessness, the student body and community came together to share and to create a peace-oriented, accepting environment. I knew instantly I wanted to propose to bring this tradition back for my project, the only problem was that Gentle Thursdays was canceled in the early 1980s because of substance abuse. Therefore, I knew bringing this student tradition back would mean having to reform the event.

Piecing together all of this information about Gentle Thursdays was the best part of my experience. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and I was the one that needed to make sense of it.

The puzzle pieces were the boxes of pictures handed to me at the archives. I wore blue rubber gloves so as not to damage these delicate old photographs. Other pieces were newspaper clippings of the event and little weekly booklets from the 1970s that gave information about events and courses that were happening on campus. These were all the resources available to me in the archives, along with the archivists, who proved to be my heroes when it came to finding more information on participators at the events. Overall I would have to say that my all time favorite and most memorable part of this research project was getting in contact with Dr. Thomas Benson. He is a Penn State scholar and Professor of Rhetoric, or as I know him, the famous Gentle Thursdays still-life photographer. I had an interview with him about my project, and he was so helpful and ended up giving me the contact information of one of the three student founders of Gentle Thursdays, Jon Lange. I was able to interview him as well over the phone, and I was simply ecstatic. These two people and the archivists gave me all the resources I needed to make my research project a success. I would highly recommend the archives to anyone who is interested in a specific topic, the archivists are more than helpful, and in the end you could stumble upon a piece of history that no one has ever uncovered before!

Mapping the Penn State Archives – Part One

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Historic Rec Hall

During the spring 2013 semester, students in one section of English 030 took part in a unique experiment to bring together research, writing, and technology in a way that was both meaningful to the students and relevant to the Penn State community.  The resulting project, “Mapping the Penn State Archives,” will be featured in this blog over the next three days. 

Today, in part one, instructor and graduate student, Laura Michael Brown, reflects on the project, the process, and the transformation she witnessed in her students.

By Laura Michael Brown

In our Honors First-Year Composition class this semester (ENGL 030), my students were tasked with an archival research project. This challenging assignment was initially met with a healthy level of skepticism, but these students dove into the research process with positive attitudes. We visited the Special Collections Library for the first time together as a class. Archivists Jackie Esposito and Paul Dzyak introduced us to the incredible variety of sources available in the University Archives, which houses the collections that my students worked from. They each investigated a particular aspect of Penn State’s history that they found interesting, using primary sources to stitch together a story about our university’s past. For their research papers, they used that history to inform a discussion of a current issue on campus. Topics ranged from the history of the mascot to the history of student activism on campus, but every member of the class was able to develop a detailed and persuasive contemporary argument. They learned to value Penn State’s past at the same time that they looked for ways to better the community in the present. Archival work invigorated their research and writing processes by encouraging them to explore unique connections between historical and contemporary issues and by creating a real opportunity for them to discover something new and unexpected about our university.

The project culminated in the creation of a website. Librarian Dawn Childress helped us to develop a site that features a digital archive and an interactive historical campus map. This public element allows their work to leave the walls of our classroom and continue to reach the Penn State community well past the end of the semester. The website helped students to see their individual projects as a part of larger conversation about our institution; I loved seeing the students develop and discuss connections between their topics. We held a public presentation of the website on our last day of class. I was impressed by the confidence and enthusiasm of each student as they shared their contributions, and I could not have been more proud to see their work come together so successfully. It is my hope that this project taught my students to rethink possibilities for research and writing, but that it also taught them something about what it means to actively engage with their community.

Fall 2012 Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit

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The third iteration of the Liberal Arts Scholarship and Technology Summit (LASTS) will be held on Thursday, August 16, 2012, in Foster Auditorium.  The College of the Liberal Arts is again partnering with Education Technology Services (ETS) and University Libraries to provide Liberal Arts faculty and graduate students a forum in which to share insights and learn from one another regarding the use of technology for teaching and research. 

A new feature to LASTS is the addition of a pre-conference workshop to be held on Wednesday, August 15, 2012.  The workshop will provide a forum for attendees to explore and discuss the nature of digital humanities and its role at Penn State.  More information about the pre-conference workshop can be found on the Humanities @ Penn State Libraries blog.

Thursday’s event will feature presenters from Liberal Arts, Education Technology Services, and the Libraries, as well as a keynote address from Cole Camplese, Senior Director for Penn State Teaching & Learning with Technology.  Below is an overview of the presenters and their topics:

9:05-9:15: Dawn Childress (University Libraries)
Brief summary of the pre-conference workshop on digital humanities.

9:15-9:50: Cole Camplese (TLT)
Keynote address from the Senior Director of Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology.

9:50-10:05: Christopher Long (LAUS/Philosophy)
Discussion on how the research for his book, Socratic and Platonic Politics, was carried out in public through his Digital Dialogue podcast and his blog, The Long Road.

10:05-10:20: Mike Furlough (University Libraries)
Overview of how some libraries around the country have supported digital humanities research, as well as one example at Penn State.

10:20-10:35: Allan Gyorke (ETS)
Overview of key technology trends in higher education–including MOOCs, badge systems, learning analytics, and electronic textbooks–and how they are connected to activities occurring across the university.

10:55-11:10: Brian Young (ETS)
Demonstration of Doceri, a software that allows control of a computer (podium computer or laptop) with an iPad.

11:10-11:25: Jessica O’Hara (ENGL)
Discussion on how “intensive blogging” has been implemented in first-year honors rhetoric and composition courses.

1:20-1:35: Mark Fisher (PHIL) and Christopher Long (LAUS/PHIL)
Description of plans for an open peer-reviewed online journal of public philosophy.  

1:35-1:50: Daniel Tripp (ENGL)
Discussion on instances when the technologies that make digital scholarship possible threaten it with obsolescence, as related to the post-publication history of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars.

1:50-2:05: Chris Stubbs (ETS)
Overview of the creation, design, and student testing of EconU, a brand new web-based economics game.

2:05-2:20: Emily Rimland (Libraries)
Discussion of the Research Project Calculator and the Penn State iPad User Group.

More information on the presenters and their topics can be found on the complete schedule.

For those unable to attend in person, we invite you to join us online, where we will be streaming live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lasts-12. 

The event can also be followed on Twitter at hashtag #LASTS12.

Videos and slide handouts will be posted here after the event, so be sure to check back for additional resources.

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