Irish Literary Studies at Washington and Lee: A Web Portal
A Proposal for an ACS Teaching With Technology Fellowship
Marc C. Conner
Department of English
Washington and Lee University
Background and Description: Since teaching my first seminar on Modern Irish
Literature in 1998, I have created a vigorous program in Irish Literary Studies
at Washington and Lee, a program that is meeting with tremendous interest and
enthusiasm on the part of our students. In the spring of 2000, I took twelve
Washington and Lee students to Ireland for an intensive six-week study of Irish
literature, history, and culture. Many of these students had studied Irish literature
with me previously; several enrolled in my new upper-division course on Modern
Irish literature the following fall; and I directed three of them in a year-long
Honors Tutorial on James Joyce's Ulysses in 2000-2001. I am now planning a second
semester abroad to Ireland, and already have nearly thirty interested students.
A major part of my work in this area has focused on web-based teaching technologies.
To aid in my teaching and research interests in Irish literature, I am seeking
ACS support to continue !
an ambitious web portal project devoted to Irish literary studies.
Technology: While in Ireland I shot nearly 800 slides of important Irish sites, ranging from prehistoric dolmen burial tombs to early Christian abbeys, monasteries, and priories; from medieval castles to 19th-century famine villages; from breathtaking vistas of the Irish landscape to detailed images associated with the major Irish poets, writers, and dramatists. This past year I have scanned these slides into TIFF and JPG files, and incorporated these images into a searchable database that allows one to search by keyword throughout the 800 images. From this substantial "Images of Ireland" database, I am working to produce a wide range of teaching applications that have far-reaching effects for a number of classes that I teach.
Learning Outcomes and Curriculum: One of the major teaching applications of
this database is my entire "Spring Term in Ireland" program. I am
in the process of completing a detailed narrative and pictorial "Travel
Log" of the 2000 trip, which offers descriptive text, giving the importance
and location of each site, with accompanying images that illustrate the site's
structure and meaning. Already this Log has allowed the students who took the
trip to reconstruct their experiences; and it has proved invaluable in preparing
current students who are interested in the program. Furthermore, the "Spring
Term in Ireland" section offers a complete description and itinerary of
the 2002 trip, as well as numerous links of importance to the program, and web-based
Discussion Forums that allow students from the previous trip to communicate
with one another, and current students preparing for the 2002 trip to chat and
consult with the veterans of the 2000 trip. Furthermore, this section!
offers other faculty and students, both at Washington and Lee and at other institutions,
an example of how this abroad experience was structured and developed.
In addition to the "Spring Term in Ireland" program, I teach an upper-level
course on Modern Irish Literature (English 352), an Honors Tutorial on Joyce's
Ulysses (English 493), and a senior seminar on Irish Poetry (English 380). The
resources of this database have already been of great use in the classroom.
I can produce web-based "slide shows" for my lectures simply by downloading
and preparing the necessary images. More important, I am at work on constructing
pages devoted to each of the major authors covered in my courses, associating
the author and his or her work with the landscape that so influenced that work
(for example, "Yeats and the Sligo Countryside," "Joyce and Dublin
at the Turn of the Century," "Synge and the Aran Islands," "Medieval
Bards and the Monasteries," "The Blasket Island Storytellers and the
Life of the Islands," and many more). The images show students the intimate
connections in Irish literature between place and poet, and help bridge the
diffic!
ult cultural gap between America and Ireland.
This section, "Irish Authors in the Irish Landscape," extends to
other teaching arenas as well. This fall semester my students in English 105
(our basic composition and introduction to literature course) are spending four
weeks studying the work of the great Irish poet, W.B. Yeats; one of their writing
assignments is, in groups of four, to construct web-site "readings"
of classic Yeats poems. To assist their web-page construction, they have access
to the more than eighty images of Yeats's countryside available in my database.
The students will use these images, along with a variety of other resources,
to construct their web-based "readings," and these web pages will
then become a permanent addition to my "Irish Authors" section of
the Irish Web Portal. This allows my freshmen students to gain experience in
web composition, and also to contribute directly to a faculty-supervised web-publishing
project. I plan to continue this assignment each year with different Irish autho!
rs--Heaney, Swift, Wilde, Shaw, and many others. (Please see the 105 assignment
at http://home.wlu.edu/~connerm/ENG105A01/Yeats_poems.main.html.) These pages
will also include short essays written by my students from the 2000 Ireland
program, who went to several of the Dublin sites that Joyce makes use of in
his Dubliners (1914) and Portrait of the Artist (1916), and wrote interpretive
essays based upon Joyce's descriptions and uses of these sites. These interpretive
essays will be accompanied by images of the sites both today and, when possible,
in the past. There are many other classes and forums where I hope to be able
to include this sort of student work in the construction of the web portal.
In addition to these elements of Irish literature, I am working to integrate material on Irish history onto the site. Irish literature is incomprehensible without a fairly detailed understanding of Irish history; but I find that I need to devote so much class time to filling in historical material that I am unable to cover as much of the literature as I would like. An historical section on the site, complete with maps, timelines, brief essays outlining the major events and figures, interactive discussions, and quizzes, would allow me to guide the students through that material and have more time in class to devote to the literature of Ireland. This will increase the "time on task" work of the students, and make them even more active participants in their own learning. As only one example, I am at work on a section titled "Mapping Ireland," an interactive cartography that locates Irish literary history through computer-generated maps.
Other Support: My work on this project has been greatly aided by our technology
communications specialist, Jeff Overholtzer, who has patiently instructed me
in web-page construction and interactive technology teaching. For my Ireland
trip this coming spring, Jeff and I have received a Class of 1966 Teaching-Scholar
Grant from Washington and Lee to fund further data-gathering work. We plan to
collect many more images, from sites that I was not able to visit in past trips,
but we also plan to enhance our data-gathering techniques through the use of
an on-site palm pilot data recording system. Not only will this make the subsequent
cataloging of our data much more efficient and effective, but it also will lay
the technical groundwork for future trips to Ireland, in which my students can
be trained in these data-gathering techniques, further enhancing their abilities
to contribute to this constantly growing database. We also plan to expand from
static images to more interacti!
ve technologies, including the use of Quicktime VR for capturing 3-D images
and panoramic scenes. One example of the potential for this technology is my
project titled "Viewing the Celtic Cross"--a 3-dimensional, interactive
viewing site of the High Crosses at Clonmacnois, Monasterboice, and other sites.
These thousand-year-old crosses are embedded on all sides with intricate pagan
and Christian carving, an artistic complexity that can only be understood through
three-dimensional, interactive viewing. We hope to produce the first web-based
interactive view of the Celtic crosses.
I also plan a section devoted to multiple links of interest to Irish Studies, including the Irish Times web page, various regional web sites throughout Ireland (the Kerry web site for west Ireland, the web site for the Irish Georgian Society, the major Irish museums), as well as links to Irish scholarly groups such as the American Conference for Irish Studies, and the numerous graduate programs in Irish Studies. All of this material will aid students who want to pursue Irish studies both during and beyond their time at Washington and Lee. My site would also be available to these other programs, as a database and as an indication of the growing strength of Irish studies at Washington and Lee. Furthermore, this site would be available to my colleagues in other departments--politics, art history, history, geography, religious studies, et cetera--further enhancing the possibilities of interdisciplinary and interactive engagement between teachers and students.
So far I have accomplished all of my work without any internal or external
funding. I am finding this increasingly difficult, as the demands placed on
my time by my various teaching and research projects keep me from devoting as
much time as is necessary to this project. In addition, I need to hire skilled
student technicians to assist with such tasks as maintenance and continued data
entry on the database; web-page maintenance and clean-up of broken links; data
cataloging and data entry; and web-page construction. I also hope to continue
my own technical training, through additional workshops at W&L and through
ACS, as well as through supervised training with the computer staff at W&L.
Assessment and Dissemination: A key component of my web project is evaluation
and assessment, which will proceed at numerous levels. In addition to the standard
course evaluation material that will follow each of my classes in Irish literature
(and I am posting on the Spring Term section the enthusiastic student responses
to the 2000 trip), I will also solicit responses from my colleagues in study-abroad
projects and those interested in areas of Irish Studies. Furthermore, I hope
to be able to present my project at the annual national meeting of the American
Conference of Irish Studies next year. The ACIS has a section on its own web
page that contains links to the web pages of its members; at present, there
are only nine links, and none that go to an institutional site; and certainly
none of these links are of the scope and ambition that I am involved in here.
Thus this project would also make a needed insertion into the ongoing development
of American Irish Studies at t!
he national and international level. I hope to produce a study of this project
next year in the ACIS newsletter, which will lead to further interaction among
those interested in this sort of work. I will also use this study as a document
in my upcoming tenure review (this year), to direct attention to the time, energy,
and interest I am devoting to this crucial step in my teaching and research.
In addition, I want to pursue the intimate connections between the Southern
United States and the Irish immigration of the nineteenth century, much of which
is treated in admirable detail at the Museum of Frontier Culture in Staunton,
Virginia. The Museum has contacts with museums in Ireland, and they would be
able to make use of this material and also expand the horizon of the material
into other disciplines. This work would also be of interest to the member schools
of the ACS. I will also seek, along with Jeff Overholtzer, to present my work
at both the annual Educause conferenc!
e as well as the ACS IT Support Workshop, and at Washington and Lee's own Workers
in Instructional Technology (WIT) workshop series. Finally, I have received
numerous requests from scholars in the field of Irish studies to have access
to the images I have gathered, including Professor Lucy McDiarmid of Villanova,
past president of the ACIS, and Dr. Michael Kissane, director of the Irish College
for the Humanities in Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland. The possibilities for scholarly
exchange that this project would make possible are provocative, indeed.
Timeline: The timeline I propose is the Spring and Summer (April through August) of 2002. The spring will be spent in Ireland, gathering additional data in image, sound, three-dimensional, and text form, employing and testing the palm pilot data recording system described above. The summer will be devoted to the application and presentation of that data in the web portal. The specific elements of this project that I plan to complete in this time frame include the following:
* "Irish Authors in the Irish Landscape": complete pages devoted
to the work, images, and associated landscape of Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Gregory,
Swift, Heaney, and the Blasket Island writers
* material on Irish history: complete section detailing Irish history, including
timelines, maps, images, quizzes, associated links, and other readings
* "Mapping Ireland": complete section of an interactive cartography
that locates Irish literary history through computer-generated maps
* "Viewing the Celtic Cross": complete section, a 3-dimensional, interactive
viewing site of the High Crosses at Clonmacnois, Monasterboice, and other sites
* hire skilled student technicians to assist with such tasks as maintenance
and continued data entry on the database (including new data gathered on the
2002 spring trip); web-page maintenance and clean-up of broken links; data cataloging
and data entry; and web-page construction
* continue my own technical training, particularly with new, more robust web-authoring
tools
Conclusion: My enthusiasm for Irish literature has been a passion for years, and I am eager to combine these interests with my growing excitement about the potentials and possibilities of web-based teaching. I look forward to seeing all the work I have already put into the Irish Studies materials come to life on the web in these various formats. I hope you will give this project all consideration for an ACS Teaching with Technology Fellowship, which would give the project the boost it needs to be carried through to completion. Of course, if you have any questions or need any additional information, please do not hesitate to contact me. I certainly hope you will examine the Web Portal in its current, under-construction state, at http://ireland.wlu.edu/index.html.
Sincerely,
Marc C. Conner
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450
540-463-8924
connerm@wlu.edu