Spot Collaboration #2: Texts in Conversation

The students were given some texts: Two Emily Dickinson poems, one Tomas Transtromer poem, and one prose piece by Jorge Luis Borges:

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[1212]

A word is dead

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

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[761]

From Blank to Blank—
A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet—
To stop—or perish—or advance—
Alike indifferent—

If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed—
I shut my eyes—and groped as well
'Twas lighter—to be blind—

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Homewards

A telephone call ran out in the night and glittered 

      over the countryside and in the suburbs.

Afterwards I slept uneasily in the hotel bed.

I was like the needle in a compass carried through 

     the forest by an orienteer with a thumping heart.

~

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On Exactitude in Science

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

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We spent time with the texts--reading them aloud multiple times with different people reading them each time, making observations and connections, and so on. We then put the students into pairs (mostly) and told them to make some sort of digital artifact that puts the texts in conversation with visual information, which they could make themselves or find. Below are the results. (Click for larger views.)

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Some of what we've been doing....

We've been slow to update the blog lately, but only because the semester, which was supposed to be lighter for us, has turned out to be busier, instead. However, we've been looking at and reading a bunch of great stuff these past weeks, some of which we're putting down here, as a kind of three-weeks-into-the-semester index: Billie Holiday, Marianne Moore, Thelonious Monk, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Elizabeth Gilbert, Joseph Cornell, Dorothy Sayers, Awad Afifi, Jorge Luis Borges, Tomas Transtromer, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Merton.

First Spot Collaboration of the New Semester!

It's time for VVP 2018, and the students have already begun making cool stuff. Below are the results of our first spot-collaboration, something we do every semester. The text was taken mostly from the webpages of open tabs on my (Chris's) computer. The students were given printouts, scissors, and tape. They took care of the rest.