Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean

DATAM Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean 01000100 01000001 01010100 01000001 01001101 00111010 00100000 01000100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01100001 01101100 00100000 01000001 01110000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100001 01100011 01101000 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01010100 01100101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000001 01101110 01100011 01101001 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01001101 01100101 01100100 01101001 01110100 01100101 01100101 EDITED BY SEBASTIAN HEATH DATAM: Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean Edited by Sebastian Heath The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota Grand Forks, ND 2020. The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota Unless otherwise indicated, all contributions to this volume appear under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935190 ISBN-13: 978-1-7345068-1-5 (ebook) ISBN-13: 978-1-7345068-2-2 (Paperback) Download a full color version of this book from: http://thedigitalpress.org/datam/ DATAM: Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean Table of Contents Editor’s Preface Sebastian Heath................................................................................................1 Preface Helen Cullyer ......................................................................................................5 Foreword Shawn Graham ..................................................................................................9 Futures of Classics: Obsolescence and Digital Pedagogy Lisl Walsh ..............................................................................................................17 Teaching Information Literacy in the Digital Ancient Mediterranean Classroom David M. Ratzan ...............................................................................................31 Dissecting Digital Divides in Teaching William Caraher ................................................................................................71 Autodidacts and the “Promise” of Digital Classics Patrick J. Burns ..................................................................................................83 Playing the Argonauts: Pedagogical Pathways through Creation and Engagement in a Virtual Sea Sandra Blakely ...................................................................................................97 Programming without Code: Teaching Classics and Computational Methods Marie-Claire Beaulieu and Anthony Bucci ......................................127 Digital Creation and Expression in the Context of Teaching Roman Art and Archaeology Sebastian Heath................................................................................................149 Digital Janiform: The Digital Object from Research to Teaching Eric Poehler ..........................................................................................................171 Contributors ............................................................................................................191 Editor’s Preface Sebastian Heath An email that went out early in the process of organizing the conference Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean from which this volume follows, included the sentences: “Our focus is on what is working (and what isn’t) in the un- dergraduate classroom. Actual assignments, syllabi, which cloud-based tools we use are all of interest. Stepping back and asking what new and ‘2018-relevant’ topics can be brought into the classroom with digital approaches is also on the agenda. ‘How and why?’ are the questions when put most briefly.” That language itself worked, in part because no one took it to mean that there were strict bounds on the hoped for discussion. Accordingly, I write now with great gratitude to the speakers who came to NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) in October of 2018 and shared their thoughts and practices with an active and engaged audience to whom I am also grateful. It was like- wise a great pleasure to collaborate with my co-organizers at ISAW, Tom Elliott and David Ratzan, and to work with Helen Cullyer of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), who was our partner in organizing the event. The idea for DATAM rose out of the series of digitally themed conferences that ISAW has been hosting since 2015. But it takes a lot of thinking and care to turn a vague idea - “How about digital tools and teaching?” - into an actual conference and much of both went into making DATAM a success. Long before the day itself, and then when ISAW was filled with participants, many colleagues at ISAW were essential contributors. I particularly thank Marc LeBlanc and Diane Bennett and their staffs for working on travel and lodging logistics and for helping to make ISAW a welcoming venue while DA- TAM was underway. ISAW offered financial support, as did the SCS, 2 which made it possible to bring in speakers from distant campuses. Every contribution, of whatever form, was necessary and I repeat my gratitude for them all. It was also early in the process that I reached out to William Car- aher to ask if the University of North Dakota’s Digital Press would be interested in publishing the papers. His initial interest and sub- sequent willingness to be a speaker were part of building early momentum. When it came to working with speakers to turn their presentations into the chapters that you will find in this volume, I also sent out emails. In one of those was the phrase, “[a] collection of thoughtful writing with a practical bent,” that I used as a description of what the contributions could collectively be; though I was also clear that I was interested in each contributor writing in their own voice. I hoped that this language would come across as following naturally from the tenor of the event, and again, I believe it worked. All the essays combine both description of practice and the pedagogic thinking that informed that practice. I do take this opportunity to thank Patrick Burns and David Ratzan, who were at the conference but not presenters, for agreeing to add their chapters. I also encourage readers to consult both Shawn Graham’s and Helen Cullyer’s contributions as both are thought provoking in their own right. The former was written as part of reviewing the volume as a whole, for which I’m also grateful; the latter follows from both the SCS having been a partner in the event and from Dr. Cullyer having calmly facilitated the end- of-day discussion that included substantial input from the audience. The idea of “discussion” is important to this volume. I believe I properly represent the intent of the contributors when I say that none of what follows is meant as a definitive and final statement. All of us recognize that digital tools introduce new tensions into the classroom and that those tensions often reflect, and are a sub- set of, tensions that exist more widely in society. Similarly, no single short volume and no single one-day conference can adequately range across all possible topics that can fall under the rubric implied by the title here. Using digital tools within the ancient world classroom is properly now under active consideration. As this volume was being prepared, Teaching Classics with Technology edited by Bartolo Natoli 3 and Steven Hunt became available and readers will find much overlap between the chapters there and what follows here. A theme of the current volume is a sense that experimentation is good and that it comes with a risk of failure. Shawn Graham’s new collection, Failing Gloriously and Other Essays, also published by the UND Digital Press, explores that topic in greater depth. As we worked to incorporate the diversity that could fit within a single day, my co-organizers and I were able to include speakers from a range of types of institutions. Public, private, large, small, liberal arts and research oriented colleges and universities were represent- ed. And there was gender balance, even if there may not have been full gender diversity as the term is now understood. Nonetheless, there is more work to do on that front so I am taking the opportunity of writing this preface to brainstorm a follow-up event that would build on the success of the first. Starting with possible titles, “To- wards Digital Foundations for Diverse Ancient World Teaching” or “Building Diverse Teaching on Digital Tools for the Ancient World” are options that indicate the central place that diversity would have at the event. I would like the speakers to be diverse, again within the constraints implied by a one-day event. I would also very much like to de-center the civilizations of Greece and Rome. Coptic and Syriac (or Aramaic) should be present in the room not as adjacent subject to Classical Studies but as starting points in their own right. How might the efforts that these scholarly communities have undertaken to digitize themselves allow students to explore the Mediterranean and neighboring regions as places where the ability to navigate mul- tiple cultural traditions was common and was an advantage? And as we ask students to explore these issues, what should we ask them to produce? I am comfortable that writing will remain an important mode of human communication, and I am equally comfortable with the idea that there are students who can express themselves visually with greater skill and

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