Our Course

Vermont Life’s Vermont or HIST/AMST 445 was created in Fall 2018 and taught again this term, Spring 2021. Prof. Michael Newbury (AMST) and Prof. Kathryn Morse (HIST and ENVS) created the course as members of the Davis Digital Capstone Group, funded by the Davis Family Foundation.

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Our Syllabus: History/American Studies 445—Spring 2021
Vermont Life’s Vermont:  A Collaborative Web Project


Prof. Kathryn Morse
kmorse@middlebury.

Office Hours Spring 2021:  By Appointment, please email (my schedule changes week-to-week)
Campus office:  Axinn 240

Course Description:  Students in this course will work collaboratively to build an online history project aimed at a wide audience. Since 1946, Vermont Life magazine has created particular images of the landscape, culture, and recreational possibilities in the state. Our goal will be to construct a website that examines the evolution of these images and the meaning of the state over time, paying particular attention to consumerism, the environment, tourism, urban-rural contrasts, local food movements, and the ways that race, class, and gender influence all of these. The course is open to all students and requires collaborative work but not any pre-existing technological expertise. 3 hrs. sem.  AMR, HIS, NOR

Course Objectives and Learning Goals:  Our objectives and learning goals include:  to apply critical thinking and analysis tools to one body of texts, the issues of Vermont Life for the entirety of its run (1946-2018); to experiment with a variety of data analysis and digital tools in analyzing our source and forming and sharing arguments about its cultural importance;  to consult appropriate scholarship regarding the analysis of cultural and media texts; to work collaboratively in all of these efforts; to share our analysis with colleagues and peers through the creation of web-based projects; to expand our skills with a variety of digital tools useful to cultural studies and the digital humanities.

Land Acknowledgement:  The following is Middlebury College’s shared acknowledgement that the college and the state of Vermont as human creations are recent arrivals.  This is particularly important in our course as we analyze the cultural meanings and claims in Vermont Life magazine across the late 20th and early 21st centuries:

“We pause to acknowledge that Middlebury College sits on land which has served as a site of meeting and exchange among indigenous peoples since time immemorial. The Western Abenaki [A-ben-A-kee] are the traditional caretakers of these Vermont lands and waters, which they call Ndakinna [in-DAH-kee-NAH], or “homeland.” We remember their connection to this region and the hardships they continue to endure. Let us take a moment of silence to pay respect to the Abenaki Elders and to the indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island, past and present…

We give thanks for the opportunity to share in the bounty of this place and to protect it. We are all one in the sacred web of life that connects people, animals, plants, air, water, and earth.”

Policies & Requirements

Discussion: The class encourages dialogue based on mutual respect, a willingness to listen, and openness to differing points of view. I hope that all of us can assume the good faith of those present and engage one another with intensity but also compassion, patience, and understanding.

Grading:  All percentages for grade calculation are approximate rather than mathematically precise.  I will not be using the grading system in Canvas to record or share grades, but will instead return work with comments directly by email or other electronic means. I will take into account the particular strengths (and, if necessary, weaknesses) of individuals in arriving at final grades. There may be some modifications to the syllabus over the course of the semester, so always consult the online version rather than a printed one. These changes won’t involve any significant increase in the amount of work.

Bring Hard Copies of Readings to Class, whether remote or in person).  It will generally be very helpful to have the readings for the day in class with you. On some days, you’ll work in small groups on some of these readings. If we’re talking about a book, bring it to class. If the reading is online, please print it for our class meeting. While we may not cover every reading in every class, it will be a good practice to have them handy.

Email: Before you email any professor, ask yourself:  “How might I find an answer to this question on my own?”  and “Might I find an answer on our class website or syllabus?”  That being said, I will do my best to respond to student email within 1-2 days, but I  do not regularly respond to student email from 5 pm to 9 am on weekdays, and I usually take an “email sabbath” from 5 pm Friday to 2-3 pm Sunday. 

ADA Office: Students who have Letters of Accommodation in this class are encouraged to contact Prof. Morse as early in the semester as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. For those without Letters of Accommodation, assistance is available to eligible students through the Disability Resource Center.  The folks there are:  Jodi and Peter. 

Requirements:

Attendance and Participation: Students should be in class having read course material and prepared other work for each day. We’ll spend time in discussion and working collectively on a range of projects. Everyone will benefit from thought comments and discussion and the course includes sharing a lot of your work publicly, so don’t be surprised by that. We may call on people to respond to particular texts, film clips, and images. (20%)

Smaller Projects: The course calls for you to work with a range of tools and create several projects over the first eight weeks of the semester: time lines, story maps, a brief podcast, etc. (40%)

Large Group Web Project: Groups of about 3 students will work together to build a section of a larger WordPress website about Vermont Life Magazine and its depiction of the state. Groups should plan to share work in progress routinely over this period and to offer thoughtful insights into the ongoing projects of others in the class. (40%)

Failure to complete any required assignments for the class will lead to failure in the class. You should also be fully aware of Middlebury’s honor code and abide by it on all work for this class.

Weekly Schedule (subject to change given, well, everything).

Week 1 (a short week): ALL CLASSES on Zoom at our scheduled time.
Thurs. Feb. 25  (technically a “Tuesday” in MiddLand”):  Meet on Zoom, address above. Before class, please watch Introductory Video from Prof. Morse, on Canvas Page.  In class:  Intro and Organization and one big question:  Why do magazines matter?  How do they matter? We’ll spend some time with Vermont Life.

Week 2 (March 1-5):  ALL CLASSES REMOTE, on Zoom at our scheduled times.

Tuesday 3/2:  Looking at Images/Image Annotation

Reading: Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17:1 (Spring 1982): 1-19 (pdf in our class google drive). Focus your reading on the methodology Prown outlines starting on p. 7.

  • Mini-project: Collaborative Annotation of Vermont Life issues using Perusall application (linked through Canvas).  Each team of 2-3 students will open a pdf of one issue of Vermont Life magazine and use the tools in Perusall to annotate a total of four individual pages within the issue (2 pages each).  See video in Canvas/Panopto for a guide.
  • What is annotation?   Following Prown’s technique/methodology, make physical annotations on the pages simply describing what you observe.  Make at least seven annotations  for each page.  Each annotation should observe a detail. You’re not looking for meaning but detailed observations about parts of the picture. 
  • In class, students will pair up and share the annotations in their shared issue, and then be prepared to share your annotations with the group.


Thurs.  3/4: Text Mining: Possibilities and Pitfalls in Voyant

  • Reading: From From Blake Harrison, The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape, 2006, Introduction and chapter 3 (pdf in google drive)
  • Reading: Reed College’s Instructional Technology group has posted a brief (one page) and useful introduction/ to using Voyant in the classroom, Text Analysis Using Voyant.  It will be helpful to you.
  • Mini-Project due in class: Each student should run one year (all four issues) of Vermont Life through Voyant, an open-source text-mining tool. You don’t need to read the text of the magazine for this assignment.
  • You’ll have to copy and paste your input from the plain text format of the magazine.
  • You may want to “clean up” your plain text by pasting it into a Word or google doc first and making a few basic corrections.
  • Voyant will create a word cloud and generate other data from this input.  Save your Word Cloud and submit on Canvas s directed.
  • You should also search for three words that Harrison claims are important in making the meaning of Vermont (e.g:“unspoiled”, “tradition/traditional”, “rural/country/countryside”). Where and how do they appear in your year? Take informal written notes on your thoughts and bring them to class.
  • Think of another two words that seem to be important in the word cloud and note how and where they appear.
  • What might you be learning or missing with this kind of research, which Harrison surely would not have done? Again, make some informal notes to organize your thinking on this subject.

Week 3 (March 8-12):  We may be able to meet in person…stay tuned for further details.

Tues. 3/9:  Reading the Tangible Magazine: Distant Reading and Close Reading

  • Reading: Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (1994), ch. 3, pdf in Google drive.
  • Reading: One hard copy issue of Vermont Life from the year that you previously ran through Voyant (Prof.Morse has hard copies in Axinn, we will figure out how to share them).
  • Write 1-2 pages comparing reading and text-mining and submit on Canvas as directed.  People sometimes call text-mining “distant reading”.
  • How would you compare the potential advantages and disadvantages of “close reading” as opposed to “distant reading”?
  • What is something that jumped out at you in Voyant that you might have otherwise missed in this close reading? A particular word or pattern of word usage?
  • What is something that jumped out at you in the close reading that Voyant seemed to miss or underemphasize? You might think about how sustained narration creates meaning, the absence of images in Voyant, or the impacts of holding a physical object
  •  Are these distortions of meeting? How should we understand or use tools like Voyant and what is worth spending the time to read?
  • Be ready to present to our group and talk about a specific image or passage that illuminates the advantages of close reading or its failures.

Thurs. 3/11:  The Big Picture, Part I.

  • Reading for Class:  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), excerpts of chapters 1, 2, 25 (pdf in Google Drive).  I’ve made specific notes in the text as to which passages to read–the reading is not quite as long as it looks.  This is nearly-fifty-year-old literary criticism, so read for the broad themes that connect Williams’ analysis to Vermont Life‘s ideas about Vermont over time.

Week 4 (March 15-19):  Visualizing Change Over Time: Timelines

Tues. 3/16:  Visualizing Change in Vermont Life  on TimelineJS

  • Timeline JS is a pretty friendly, open-source tool allowing users to place various sources, including text, on an interactive timeline. It’s best to use your Middlebury Google account to download the necessary Google Sheet. 
  • Look through these timelines on the TimelineJS home page: Women in Computing, Mandela: A Life of Purpose, and any others that look interesting.
  • Where do you think these timelines succeed or fail? What do they do well? What do they ignore or do badly?  Take written notes on your thoughts and bring them to class.  We’ll talk about the usefulness and shortcomings of these timelines in class.
  • IN CLASS: Begin building your own timeline in the Timeline JS google sheet (have to follow specific directions!).
  • Your timeline should document a change (or possibly a lack of change)  in Vermont Life‘s themes and portrayal over time.  You don’t need to cover the whole span of 1946-2017–you my cover a shorter time period or a longer one. You’ll need to have a specific idea to work on, so bring that with you.
  •  Your timeline should have only seven entries.
  •  Strive to tell a story. Avoid listing five mostly unconnected points across time.
  •  Think carefully about economizing on your words and the relationship between your text, sources, and background images.
  • Think carefully about how to include sources so that a reader knows how to trace those sources.

Thurs. 3/18 Share Finished Timelines, Edit and Refine, and turn them in.

  • Everyone should have a completed version of a timeline ready for class.  We’ll spend most of class talking about your finished work.
  • Ask yourself where you think your project succeeded and how it might be improved if you had more time to work on it.
  • Do you think you were limited by the platform or that it helped to organize and strengthen your presentation?
  • What’s the difference between a timeline, an essay, and a Powerpoint presentation??
  • Try to tell a story about change and development that has beginning a middle and an end.
  • Time permitting, we’ll look at timelines created on other platforms.
  • AFTER class and a bit more troubleshooting, submit links to timelines on Canvas as directed.

Week 5 (March 22-26):

Tues. 3/23: Story Maps: Burlington’s Lakeside Neighborhood–group assignment  

  • Browse through the arcgis gallery (link below)  and find one example that strikes you as particularly compelling. Be ready to tell the class why it drew you. 

LINK TO ARCGIS website and examples

  • In-class: Begin working with story map tool and primary sources.
  • Story map templates are something like a slide show centered on understanding maps and geography and combining images with words.
  • You should tell a story about change over time in the Lakeside neighborhood. It should have 5 or 6 entries, each one of which makes a particular observation that moves forward your narrative of change in the Lakeside neighborhood. As an alternative, you could focus on one map and highlight what that map reveals about the neighborhood at a particular moment in time.
  •  I’ve given you several maps ranging from 1890-1942 and some census forms from the early twentieth century. You don’t need to cover the entire 52-year period of the maps. It might make more sense to concentrate on a shorter period of time. (Google Drive)
  •  Feel free to find and use other documents.

Thurs. March 25: Story Maps 2: Draft of your Story

  • Be ready to share a draft of your project.  It should have at least 5 images/entries.
  • We’ll share about half of the in-progress projects in class and think about what is and isn’t working in them. Be prepared to share yours, thinking about its strengths and weaknesses.

Week 6 (March 29-April 2): From Industry to Podcasts

Tues. March 30 (Course Drop Period Ends):  Story Maps 3: Final Projects and Industry in Vermont Life

  • Find at least two articles in Vermont Life that talk about a factory, quarry, mine or other industry in the state at some point in the 1940s or 1950s. Write one paragraph about how that article or an image in it portrays industry in the state. Submit on Canvas as directed.
  • Come to class ready to share your final StoryMap.  Your final story should include at least 7 and no more than 9 images. Any text should be concise and carefully proofread.
  • We’ll share some final versions of the projects.

Thurs. April 1:  Vermont Tourism, Branding, and Podcasts

Overall Project (over several classes):   Make a podcast about Vermont’s brand by interviewing at least two people about their views of Vermont’s brand and what attracts visitors to Vermont.  

  • In Class: Interview one or two class members about their views and experiences of the Vermont “brand”—how they define it and why, where it came from?
  • Transfer the interview to the cloud and play some examples.

Week 7 (Short week—April 5-7):  One class, then a break!

Tues.  April 6:  Draft/script for  Podcast on Vermont’s marketing brand, its history and its connections to Vermont Life over time.  

There are many short “music (or other effects) behind voice in Audacity” tutorials online. I’ve used this one:

  •  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8g9vtQ9-D0. 
  • Tutors in the media lab are also trained in the use of Audacity.
  • Using Audacity as an editing tool make a short podcast (3-5 minutes absolute maximum) about the Vermont Brand including two voices other than your own.  You can choose any approach or question, and interview at least two people not in our class.  Possible questions/themes?  What is the brand? Has it changed? Should it change? Does Vermont need a new brand?
  • Don’t worry about perfect production quality, sound effects, and so forth. DO think carefully about building a narrative, about telling your story and that the story makes a point about the possible meanings of your image.
  •  There are thousands of video intros to Audacity on line. The basic cutting and pasting of audio isn’t much more complicated than it is in word processing software. Media tutors in the lab are all trained in the use of Audacity.
  •  You must include at least two voices other than your own.
  •  The challenge is to create harmony and/or contrast between the voices and to offer a story about an image from the past.
  •  You will, of course, have to edit these interviews and splice them together. If the cuts aren’t perfect, that’s ok.
  •  You must write out your part of the narrative. The examples you listened to were elegant in part because they had carefully composed scripts.

Week 8 (April 12-16): 

Tues. April 13:  The Big Picture, Part II.

  • Reading:  Theorizing Tourism:   Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, “Introduction,” in Tourism Promotion and Power:  Creating Images, Creating Identities (Chichester and New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 4-23. Also in class:  continue work on podcasts.
  • Questions about podcast polishing and editing.

Thurs. April 15:   Final Version of Podcast Due (ideally before class).  Upload audio files through Canvas Assignments.  In class we’ll listen to a few student podcasts and discuss emerging themes.

Week 9 (April 19-23):  Developing final projects about Vermont and Vermont Life.  


Tues. April 20:  Reading a Magazine Historically.

  • Reading: 3 readings total, but in three groups (so one reading per student)–groups TBA on Canvas:
  •  Group 1:  Wendy Kozol, Life’s America, 1994, ch. 5, “Resisting the Domestic,”
  • Group 2:  Blake Harrison, “Tracks Across Vermont: Vermont Life and the Landscape of Downhill Skiing, Journal of Sport History 28:2 (Summer 2001)
  • Group 3:  Jan Cohn, “Introduction” in Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (1989) (all pdfs in Google drive).

We will also  brainstorm possible topics for final projects.

Thurs. April 22:  Organizing and Examples

By now we will have developed a list of possible topics for the final projects/website over the previous weeks of the semester.  Come to class having chosen three topics from that list that you would like to work on.  We’ll build groups from these lists/choices.

  • http://revolution.berkeley.edu/about
  • Link to previous Vermont Life’s Vermont project: 
  • A class at the University of California made The Berkeley Revolution website (link above), and our previous Vermont Life course made projects as well (links also above). 
  • What are the strengths and weaknesses that you see in these projects? Are they useful models or not?
  • Find two other historically-oriented websites that you think are particularly well done.
  • Make notes to yourself about what they do well and be ready to share the sites and your thoughts on them..
  •  You should be specific. Comments must go beyond: “The content is good.” Think about the visual design of pages, the relationship of pages to one another, the way that various sources contrast or connect.

Friday April 23:  By 5 pm FINISH all final edits on StoryMaps and “Publish” them in ArcGIS StoryMaps for public viewing (Click on Publish and then switch setting to “Everyone” and save.

Final Weeks of Semester:  

Week 10:

Tues. April 27:  Meet in classroom for collaboration on workplan and research, and questions.

Thurs. April 29:  Work in groups according to workplan (KM will be in MBH 319 for consults).

Week 11:

Tues. May 4: Meet in classroom for updates, questions, problem-solving, collaboration.

Thurs. May 6: Work in groups according to plan (KM will be in MBH 319 for consults).

Week 12:

Tues. May 11:  Spring Symposium:  No class!

Thurs May 13:  Meet in classroom for updates, questions, problem-solving, collaboration.

Week 13: 

Tues. May 18:  Brief group presentations and self- and group-evaluations.

Thurs. May 20:  Rest of brief group presentations and course evaluations.

Fri. May 21:  Final edits to collaborative projects complete.