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Stories that Speak to Us

Narratives from the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives

by Lewis Ulman


Published by the Computers and Composition Digital Press, an imprint of Utah State University Press


The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) is a project initiated by Cynthia Selfe in 2005. Selfe had been for many years conducting and archiving interviews that recorded the literacy narratives of a broad range of individuals. Her interest was motivated by a keen sense that with the gradual transition from print-based literacies to digital literacies, the ways that contemporary individuals learn to make meaning were changing, and she felt it was important to document this massive cultural transition. With collaborators at several institutions, and with the conviction that a "Big Humanities" model was necessary to support it, Selfe has built an archive, open-access, that includes a range of material formats-text, audio, and video-recounting contributors' literacy histories, values, and practices in their own words. Currently, the DALN contains and preserves over 3,000 narratives, and is seeing increasing usage by literacy researchers.

For the current project, Stories that Speak to Us, H. Lewis Ulman and collaborators have selected a number of the literacy narratives held in the DALN, and have prepared them, contextualized, and analyzed them for presentation in sort of digitally curated exhibit. The various exhibits employ different formats and may contain embedded media aswell as links that allow readers to download ancillary materials and/or entire exhibits in alternate formats. A foreword and introduction are provided, but aside from reading those first, the editors stipulate no particular order of reading; they suggest that readers follow their own impulses, in keeping with the ethos of common digital navigation practice. Each of the sixteen exhibits is organized similarly, offering a reader-friendly and predictable navigation experience.

The goal of the CCDP imprint is to honor traditional academic values of rigorous peer review and intellectual excellence, but at the same time to create a venue for innovative digital scholarship and expression in the field of English composition and rhetoric. Volumes in the CCDP series are published under a Creative Commons copyright license.

 

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Details

  • Publication Month: March
  • Publication Year: 2013
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: by Lewis Ulman
  • ECommerce Code: http://ccdigitalpress.org/ebooks-and-projects/stories

University Press of Colorado University of Alaska Press Utah State University Press University of Wyoming Press