Primary Sources, Multimodal Literacy, and Creativity in the First-Year Writing Classroom: A Trajectory of Teaching Digital and Physical Archives

For students who are just learning how to wield digital literacy and assess sources in a critical fashion, digital archives provide a ready source of analysis. As a MA student at Oklahoma State University, I taught a section of First Year Writing which included the archive as a site of digital literacy. In introducing students to academic research, exploring digital archives can provide students with a host of critical thinking skills. After identifying a list of digital archives, I drew on these archives to model the research process, to demonstrate how to assess sources, and to invite critical thought regarding the curation of any given archive. Today, I draw on digital archives in my first-year writing classes at Northeastern University, where I find these resources offer gateways to understand the potential use of primary sources, while offering students the opportunity to engage with material histories of text and communication. Towards this goal, I have designed a first-year writing class which takes digital archives as a focal point for meaningful composition. My course connects students to archival resources within Northeastern and Boston. Students work with primary sources in consultation with Northeastern Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. By staging interdisciplinary encounters with multiple forms of primary sources, this course builds genre and audience awareness through community engagement, social justice, and digital literacy. I show my work by drawing on a small-scale digital archive which I created, the Shell-shock Popular Culture Archive, which models how texts can be a site of multiple literacies for students.

The Archive As Introduction to Primary Sources

In my first foray into teaching with the digital archive at Oklahoma State University, we addressed the archive as a site of digital literacy. Optimally, students would be able to define what an archive is, to describe the process of archival research, to identify and analyze the purpose, stance, exigency, and scope of a selected archive, and to use a finding aid in order to locate items within a given archive. For the unit’s assignment, students chose a particular archival to study through a journal entry which considered the following questions, informed by the work of scholar-teachers Jess Enoch and Pamela VanHaitsma:

• Who created this archive? What institutions, groups of people, or other scholars helped to assemble it?
• What is featured in this archive?
• How are materials collected from the archive? Where are the physical materials housed?
• What voices are present in this archive?
• Why was this archive created?
• What is the stated purpose of the archive? Is there a mission statement or other statement of purpose located on the website?
• How is this archive organized? Is there a tagging system? Is the system easy to navigate?

To model this process, I projected the websites of three different archives onto an overhead projector: the Martin Luther King Jr. Library and Archives website, the online exhibit Selling Smoke: Tobacco Advertising and Anti-Smoking Campaigns, and the online exhibit Women Working, 1800-1930. I then asked students to point out navigational features, objects of interests, and statements of purpose. Students latched onto mission statements located in prominent places in the archive. They also sought out featured material on archival homepages as a means of explaining representative materials housed in a digital archive. An activity I had planned to introduce students to institutional finding aids proved to be difficult to execute: instead of relying on the finding aid, students preferred to use any Boolean search systems. In this way, I was able to revamp my lesson plan: I focused on introducing students to basic Boolean operators to refine their searches, utilizing terms such as “AND”, “OR” and “NOT” to link search subjects together or to exclude items from their searches.

In assessing the Martin Luther King Jr. Library and Archives website (now indefinitely offline), students were immediately interested in assessing the Federal Bureau of Intelligence file on King. Many of the students were not aware that King had been under surveillance by the FBI, which led our class to a discussion regarding the ways in which the civil rights movement is often sanitized in official memory today. Students explained that their high school textbooks often simplified the civil rights movement down to a short timeline, without providing much contextual information. This particular archive served as a reference point for our class in considering how the archive can provide us with primary sources in studying the history of the civil rights movement.

Revisiting Digital Archives As Site of Learning: Teaching Digital Archives at Northeastern University

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself in the midst of writing my dissertation. I needed archival research across five different archives. However, when the archives were closed, the libraries were closed. I faced an issue of accessing the materials I needed. Enter open-access books from the library, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust, all resources I needed in order to access scholarly monographs and primary sources, along with digital collections from the archives I utilized. As a result, much of my dissertation was written in consultation with open-access digital archives, online collections, and other forms of digital texts. As someone who wrote a dissertation with copious reliance on digital archives, I’m aware of how necessary it is to focus on specific primary sources, keeping in mind that their historical materiality and influences may be quite different from our own. In the past, I noticed that students found the sheer volume of documents present in the digital archive to be overwhelming. I’ve since revisited and revised my unit on the digital archive in the first-year writing classroom, which I offer at Northeastern University.

While some first-year writing classes include digital archives as a component or unit, my course is designed around experiential and interdisciplinary encounters with multiple forms of primary sources to promote critical and digital literacy, by connecting students to archival communities within Northeastern and Boston. Students work with primary sources in consultation with Northeastern Archives and the Massachusetts Historical Society. By offering students the chance to build multiple literacies through digital and physical archives, this course addresses writing program goals of building genre and audience awareness through community engagement, social justice, and digital literacy. I also blend multimodal rhetorics by asking students to create their own creative piece, as long as they include multiple forms of meaning. Students have created introductions to their chosen archival pieces via PowerPoint, podcasts which introduce the listener to a passion project, and short videos in which they explain their arguments to a viewer. I have even had students create short photo essays, using their own photographs as material to inspire writing. As a digital humanities practitioner, I am passionate about digital archives as a tool for emerging writers. By bringing digital rhetorics and multimodality into the context of primary sources, digital and physical archives offer inspiration and hands-on experience for writers as they become comfortable – and even confident – in the writing classroom.

Delving into the Digital Archive

In teaching the digital archive, I ask students to choose from a short list of digital archives, identify any subcollections (if applicable), and identify a navigating system, whether through Boolean search operators or a tagging system. Within that archive, I ask students to identify one item, describe its contents, identify its tagging system or other means of organization, and consider any metadata as a means of curation. Building on these means of engaging with the archive, students then prepare a statement regarding their own argument for why they believe this item was chosen to be preserved in the archive.

Most successfully, we have used the various tag searches for Massachusetts’ Digital Commonwealth website, which acts as a general directory for many institutional archives within the state of Massachusetts. We worked together to find items of interest, to describe them, and to sketch them. For this sketch activity, I asked students to select an item, work together to describe all of its components (size, color, shape, etc.), and then use paper and pencil to sketch the item from memory. We then used these physical components as a gateway to discuss how metadata acts as data about data, and how it might be difficult to create a system which covers all the descriptive elements needed for an item.

Digital archives are also a great chance to build multimodal skills, such as website building and repository organizing. My class had an optional activity where students could use Storymaps to web information geographically. To support this activity, we searched through the online collection of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at Boston Public Library, which has one of the most significant digital collections of any North American map library. They also archive their exhibitions online, which are fascinating tools for classes which are not long enough to allow for field trips.

Alongside our digital explorations, we visited the Massachusetts Historical Society, which included a short tour of their themed exhibit on the Boston Tea Party, as well as a general overview of some archival items from their collection. We also toured Northeastern Library’s archives and had the chance to embark on an archival scavenger hunt. Students were especially struck by the physical items, choosing to write on items as diverse as a bottle of preserved tea and how it was saved, a ceramic punch bowl originating from China and global trade routes, and the rhetoric of John Adams’ letters, all of which were on display. A student disappeared from the group: I found him jotting down notes as he looked at Phillis Wheatley’s writing desk.

We also visited the special archives at Northeastern University. I collaborated with our special collections librarian to bring students down into the archives. Before starting, I asked her to set out items on various tables which reflected the university’s history of protests, student organizing, and its sponsorship of diverse student organizations. Here, students gravitated towards open letters on behalf of peace protestors, posters advertising nascent feminist organizing in the 1970s, handbills advertising scholarship programs for students of color, and a booklet discussing anti-gentrification measures in downtown Boston’s Chinatown, among others! One student, who had been very quiet for the majority of our course, spent the entire time reading through a zine on a housing project in Boston’s South End.

I structured several questions as a scavenger hunt, which I include here. I invite other instructors to adapt and remix these questions for their own needs!

These questions were intended to invite students to think about who made these items, to address these sources as primary sources, and to respond to these items as physical, material culture. I then offered a journal prompt so that students could create a journal entry or annotation within a particular archive or museum exhibit, and then draw on those engagements to write a short paper, where they are asked to analyze the central components of that archive.

After completing the archival inventory, students worked to research, pre-write, and write research papers to identify, to research, and to position these archival objects within historical context. I asked students to write a critical, argument-driven project on their chosen archives, selecting 2 peer-reviewed sources to serve as further research.

Potential Reading Assignments To Spark Discussion

When students consider digital archives, I pull in physical primary sources, contemporary scholarship on design, and nuanced questions to enrich our understanding of access beyond simple aesthetics, or whether a website simply looks appealing: does it work in multiple ways, for multiple users?

To introduce the question of how to describe difficult concepts through words, I suggest Eula Biss’s short nonfiction essay “The Pain Scale,” which draws on the common doctor’s office tool, a pain scale stretching from 0 (No Pain) to 10 (The Worst Pain Imaginable) to convey the elusive quality of writing about a subjective experience of agony, which might be mental, might be physical, might be the pain of others. At any rate, it might be nearly impossible to put into words. This essay offers visceral moments in which Biss tries to impress upon the reader the visceral and slippery nature of pain, both first-hand and vicarious: in one memorable moment, she depicts the sensation of watching her mother use a hammer to drive a frozen pipe into the ground, her hand bearing a blue-black thumbnail. Multiple students mentioned how they enjoyed this piece in their final reflections, and this short piece is a great way to consider how design might render disability invisible, how words can convey what might be elusive, uncertain, and difficult. We discuss this short nonfiction piece as a form of data about data, metadata- if Biss’s story serves as to elucidate the unthinkable, what are the limitations of what we call metadata?

As an example of an argument-driven piece of writing on archives, I like to draw on chapter six from Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing With Scissors, in which Garvey discusses the way in which women readers clipped newspapers to produce curated scrapbooks, sophisticated databases in their own right. While one might read these scrapbooks as mere filing systems, Garvey draws our attention to their organization and arrangement on paper pages, as well as the many uses which scrapbooks held, from household catalogues of tips and tricks, to making sense of political movements, and creating material for moving speeches. By treating scrapbooks as a form of archive, I help students think about how technologies for controlling and managing information overload have changed over time: they do not exist in a void, but also act as a means of preserving and expressing stories.

In considering the shifting technologies used to create words, we as readers and scholars can interpret writing through its history. In Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew Kirschenbaum argues that writing and how it is produced by writers should be an object of study and analysis. When we write about word processing as a form of composition, we should “acknowledge not only the hybrid, heterogeneous nature of both individual persons and their personalities, but also the highly complex scene of writing (and rewriting) that we observe today, one where text morphs and twists through multiple media at nearly every stage of the composition and publication process” (45). In teaching first-year writing, the history of word processing can assist in judging how authors compose and edit their work, especially when assembling a material understanding of authorial influences.

In classes which deal with digital archives, I also take time to discuss universal design and algorithmic justice. This helps students to quantify what accessible design might look like for an archive, as a means of providing an assessment for digital design. I’ve had students who focus on engineering, design, and architecture light up when faced with a design problem: treating writing as yet another design problem can help students see the value of composition classes to their discipline. Instructors might want to guide students through a short reading from Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (2020) which begins with a personal anecdote about the impact of algorithmic injustice. While going through the airport security line, Costanza-Chock is ushered through the millimeter wave scanner, where her body is flagged as anomalous. The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) operator visually assesses Costanza-Chock, and selects the pink button for female, but since the design of the millimeter wave scanner is trained to a statistical norm which excludes her physical form, she is flagged for a pat-down. This can happen for anyone with a disability, anyone who happens to be trans, or for any number of issues, such as a cuffed pant leg. This reading might be a great way to show our work can intervene within the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, which is often trained on models that mark people of color as criminals, marks disabled people as threatening, a form of algorithmic injustice. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of the matrix of domination (Collins 246) and Kimberle Crenshaw’s legal concept of intersectionality, designs which do not operate with justice in mind, Sasha Costanza-Chock defines systems of oppression as systems which “erase those of us on the margins, whether intentionally or not, through the mundane and relentless repetition of reductive norms structured by the matrix of domination” (Constanza-Chock). Costanza-Chock defines “design justice” thus:

A framework for analysis of how design distributes benefits and burdens between various groups of people. Design justice focuses explicitly on the ways that design reproduces and/or challenges the matrix of domination… design justice is also a growing community of practice that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design’s benefits and burdens; meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community-based, Indigenous, and diasporic design traditions, knowledges, and practices (Constanza-Chock).

Costanza-Chock points to those who are often sidelined, those whose work is often overlooked, those whose work as designers is pushed to the margins, and rendered invisible. We also spend time in watching documentaries like Coded Bias (2020) which features Joy Buolamwini’s research on facial recognition software.

What might change if we considered not only aesthetics, not only practical intentions, but communities of people who are affected by such designs? Who is ignored when designs are considered, and who is excluded? Overwhelmingly, people with disabilities, who make up 15% of the world’s population, according to the World Health Organization, are excluded from participation in public life. They encounter barriers to full social and economic inclusion in the form of inaccessible physical environments and transportation. If we could change anything about design, what would make it more accessible overall?

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A screenshot of the Vessel after it closed down between 2020-2024. The Vessel has since re-opened.

One example of exclusive design is the Vessel in New York City. Lauded at its unveiling, the massive hexagon-shaped structure is designed for those who are able to climb stairs and walk (Wachs): people who use mobility aids such as wheelchairs or canes, or people pushing children in strollers, must rely on the few elevators, but are not fully able to appreciate the view from the sculpture. At its opening, the art installation lacked substantive barriers, and tragically, four people have committed suicide at the Vessel (Brandon). Since the community had no place in designing or discussing the art installation, they had no say in making the Vessel a space which could address accessibility for all, not just a few.

Moreover, since digital archives show the complexity of human life, they are a space where students can experience perspectives which expand their understanding of access, ability, gender, and race. In The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives, Melanie Micir brings together a number of unfinished efforts to create biographies, intended document the lives of queer modernist women, located across a number of archives which inclde “the personal, intimate, and private” (Micir 3). These archives all share a common goal: they were written by queer feminist writers to “resist the marginalization and exclusion of their friends, colleagues, lovers, companions and wives from dominant narratives of literary history” (Micir 3). As marginal projects, these biographies are found in a multitude of personal documents from archives, including full manuscripts, individual fragmentary texts, collections of photographs, letters, and journal entries. While I personally would not assign all of Micir’s book, I have used quotes (like the ones above) to show how archives provide multiple purposes: they may be personal, not just institutional.

As I imagine a future for myself as someone who actively teaches and writes with digital methods in the classroom, I have a few goals in mind. Consider this an ad-hoc manifesto, a statement of purpose. First, instead of letting digital methods take full focus, I intend to use digital methods alongside traditional methods of teaching archives. Even if your library is small, I encourage instructors to learn about its resources alongside your students. Second, as a digital humanities practitioner, I value the community and work of others, and actively bring in librarians and data specialists to enrich my classes. When I lead students through the process of creating digital humanities projects, I showcase their work as their work- they have full rights to anything they create in my classes. And third, passion for one’s work cannot obscure the value of one’s contribution: through commentaries, statements, and other forms of documentation, I intend to convey the stakes of these digital projects and encourage my students to do so as well. Together, these combined goals of methodology, community, and documentation offer a general code of ethics for my future as an educator who brings digital humanities into the first-year writing classroom.

Participation as Research

I also have engaged in digital archive creation, which I intend to bring into future composition classes. As a part of pursing the graduate certificate in Digital Humanities at Northeastern University, I created a digital archive, entitled the Shellshock Popular Culture Archive, which traces the diagnosis of shell-shock across popular culture. This archive is hosted on Omeka, a popular digital archive hosting site, and utilizes collection tools, the Dublin Core schema, a tagging system, and showcases open-access resources for text analysis, such as the Project ArcLight Timeline Search, HathiTrust’s Bookworm timeline search, and HathiTrust’s Data Analytics center. Through sentiment analysis of historical newspapers on HathiTrust, placed alongside a smaller corpus of poetry, comics, and music located in Omeka Collection, I show how gendered messages reflected the diagnosis of shell-shock. My digital collection of English language primary sources, including twenty-eight textual and ephemeral artifacts, aid in providing a digital exhibit on war poetry, to show how this genre influenced depictions of shell-shocked people after the First World War. I pair these materials with my included resources for potential digital archive assignments to improve the likelihood that this digital archive serves as a resource to instructors who hope to use primary sources in their classrooms. It is my hope that scholars and students alike will find that this digital archive serves as a helpful resource to broaden their own understanding of what texts and primary sources can do, and to embark on their own interdisciplinary projects, both inside and outside of the humanities. In the future, I hope to use my own website as a model for how students might want to engage with texts, and to show how metadata can be added to a project, which students might want to incorporate if they create their own webpage or digital exhibit to highlight their chosen archival items.

Conclusion

Digital archives can provide students in the first-year writing classroom with a host of critical explorations. We are all used to relying on archives as a site of research materials for students. When introduced to digital archives as curated, as intentionally organized, and arranged in accordance with a methodology, students hone digital literacy and critical thinking. What’s more, these assignments offer room for creativity. I had students who chose to create a true crime podcast about historical injuries, while others wrote lengthy essays on the different ways he had encountered Phillis Wheatley as an American poet. Yet another student created a short soap opera to show how to resolve issues among friends through utilizing different rhetorical arguments, and another student who was interested in religious artwork throughout history went on a self-guided tour of a nearby museum. Through digital and physical archives together, students learn how to research in a more rigorous manner. Through encountering primary sources and writing about them descriptively and argumentatively, students learn how to locate a source within its rhetorical context, giving them the authority to draw on these sources for their own creative literacies.

Works Cited

Biss, Eula. “The pain scale.” Creative Nonfiction 32 (2007): 65-84.

Brandon, Elissaveta. “Learning from the Vessel: How Cities Can Be Designed to Prevent Suicide.” Fast Company, www.fastcompany.com/90665053/learning-from-the-vessel-how-cities-can-be-designed-to-prevent-suicide. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. “Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.” Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency. PMLR, 2018.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2002.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press, 2020. https://designjustice.mitpress.mit.edu/

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” Feminist legal theories. Routledge, 2013. 23-51.

Digital Commonwealth, www.digitalcommonwealth.org/. Accessed 3 July 2024.

Enoch, Jessica, and Pamela VanHaitsma. “Archival Literacy: Reading the Rhetoric of Digital Archives in the Undergraduate Classroom.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, 2015, pp. 216–42.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with scissors: American scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.

Kantayya, Shalini. Coded Bias. 7th Empire Media, 2020.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Micir, Melanie. The Passion Projects : Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. https://www.leventhalmap.org/exhibitions/

World Health Organization & World Bank. “World report on disability 2011.” World Health Organization, 2011. https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/44575

This resource is no cost at https://open.library.okstate.edu/goodthingstoread/