Midnight, Forecastle: A Classroom Database

I am developing an archive and database of images, music, and film clips that students can use to annotate a single chapter from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. I am also expanding the database to provide materials for the study of the other American authors I teach. I hope to use these materials as a resource for students' annotations of a literary text and for creating in-class presentations and reports. more...

Course Context

I designed this site (still certificate-restricted) for an undergraduate seminar, "Melville and Morrison," where students could examine issues of race, gender, history, and nationhood in Moby-Dick, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. In the next version, I will be teaching intermediate level students in a course, "The American Novel," where they will be reading Moby-Dick along with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors like Hawthorne, Stowe, William Wells Brown, Faulkner, and Morrison. New features in the database will allow students to interact with it more fully and to add materials, annotations, and commentaries of their own. 

Links

Project Demo

Herman Melville

Questions About Student Learning

• What is the value of multimedia annotation for close reading and analytical writing?
• Can media literacy help students make informed and nuanced speculations about print text?

Learning Activity I'll Be Tracking

Although annotation is a useful tool in all areas of the course, I will be especially focused on student presentations. Each student will be required to annotate a selection from the reading, using materials from the database or downloaded or scanned from other sources. Reports will be evaluated on both accuracy and imagination in the use of supplemental materials.