A fascinating interview with UConn Professor Jennifer Terni went live this week on the Humanities Institute’s new blog Brain Bytes: Digital Humanities and Media Studies. Professor Terni discusses her teaching methods and “experiments” incorporating 19th-century artifacts into the classroom experience. She reflects on a recent visit with her students to Archives and Special Collections where they examined 19th-century photographs with Archivist Kristin Eshelman. Below is a clip from that interview…
This past semester I taught a new graduate course on 19th-century media. It would have been impossible to give this course even a decade ago, since it was built on the shoulders of major digitized archives including Gallica at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Hathi Trust, and ARTFL, to name but a few. To make use of them effectively, however, I had to build an extensive website as a platform from which to organize the many primary sources that we explored as a group as well as to give a picture of what 19th-century media would have looked like. What is more, I tried, as much as possible, to get the students to experience what it would have been like to consume media in the 19th century, for instance, by reading a pulp fiction novel in installments in a newspaper.
This experiment was more successful than I could have hoped. What is more, occasionally I sent the students to the Dodd archive to encounter 19th-century artifacts more directly (illustrated newspapers, daguerreotype, stereoscopes, photographic technology). The impact of those encounters was intense in large part because the students had been engaged with primary sources throughout the semester: they had seen the exploding variety of media forms in the 1800s, but also knew firsthand how even very disparate forms were interconnected. They had also read theoretical and historical articles that helped them think about what kinds of cultural work these different genres and platforms were performing. Touching the actual artifact was meaningful because to them it was already embedded in a web of references and ways of thinking about media, but also because it contrasted with all of the digital content they had been using throughout the semester. It was thus doubly a material encounter with material culture.