Hello! My name is Scott DeWitt, and
I am here today with the founders
of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives,
Professor Cynthia Selfe and Professor H. Lewis Ulman,
known to most of us as Cindy and Louie.
Today, we are here to talk about
the collection The Archive as Classroom,
edited by Kathryn Comer, Michael Harker, and Ben McCorckle.
The Archive as Classroom is organized
around the four words that make up the DALN:
Digital, Archive, Literacy, and Narrative.
Reading this collection has prompted us
to think of four other words
that reflect the work in the collection
and teaching with the DALN in general.
Unruly.
An example would be metadata.
Not all of the metadata fields are required . . .
right . . . so some entires are more richly annotated
than others, and what I'm fascinated with
in the collection is how students and teachers
turn those constraints into opportunities,
into ways to ask unique questions
or to reflect on the nature of archives,
some of which are more formally organized-
and some of which are less-
and how you deal with messiness in information.
One of my favorite terms in this collection was in the Reid and Hancock chapter,
and they talked about "uncollected collections."
And that's such a lovely term.
Presently, we have a lot of individual narratives
that are in one big collection, but in the future,
and at any moment, there's that possibility, that potential for a collection
that you can make as a user, or that you can make as a teacher.
The Archive's apparent acceptance of unruliness in its structure
is really one of its strengths.
Historical.
It's that historical nature of the DALN
that may be its greatest value for the profession
because it's been going now for so many years.
We have within the DALN traces
of all these cultural movements that have happened
in and around and in association with literacy.
They are just fascinating:
the Somali Diaspora, for instance,
the Black Chuch and Civil Rights and literacy connection,
LGBTQIA issues and the public nature of those issues,
and then disability studies.
Multifaceted.
Media for example. There's audio in here-in the DALN-
there's video, there are written literacy narratives.
The format is often different,
and that's something we don't talk a lot about,
but there are interviews in the DALN, there are images;
some are stories without an interlocutor or interviewer,
some have an interviewer who plays a more active part.
The subject-while they're all literacy narratives,
it shows the richness of that umbrella term.
I mean, there's narratives about learning to code,
there's narrative about learning the literacy of music.
Labor-intensive.
It was a term that every single contribution
to this collection suggested implicitly.
So much of the labor that surrounds and is involved by the DALN is invisible.
The editors of the DALN-the senior editors,
Ben McCorkle, Michael Harker-have a huge job
of collect . . . of making sure that the DALN is available online.
They have to get designers to contribute to this;
they have to get techical help; they have to get institutional support.
This collection looks beyond to this vast community
of teachers who are using the DALN and therefore bringing it to life.
We should take one minute to thank Katie, and Ben, and Michael
for this collection, and every one of the contributors
because I don't know where the DALN would be
unless there were people who make of sense of it.