General Audience

by Jason Farman, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Since I’ve been teaching in higher education, I have always been very confident of my teaching abilities. I knew I was a good teacher; that is, until fall semester of 2012.

I had just been awarded a fellowship with the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Maryland, given to 10 faculty members each year from disciplines all across the campus. I then met with my fellow faculty members every Friday morning for an hour to discuss teaching methods, pedagogical theories, and the role of face-to-face learning in the digital age.

Working alongside these seasoned scholar-teachers, I realized that everything I had taken for granted about my own teaching wasn’t always the best approach. I very quickly realized that each one of my assumptions had to be reevaluated, beginning with the idea that I was a good teacher.

Throughout the academic year working with the Center for Teaching Excellence, I built my teaching philosophy from the ground up, holding each of my assumptions under close examination. In the end, I crafted the following Manifesto for Active Learning.

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By Jenny Hottle, The Diamondback

In the days following a massive donation of historical labor materials to the university archives, the collection is creating buzz not only on the campus, but also around the world.

Filling up six miles of shelving, the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive is the largest single donation to the university libraries ever, said Lauren Brown, manager of special collections. It is valued at $25 million and contains more than 40 million artifacts and documents ranging from campaign buttons and photographs to books and even a pair of old work boots.

The archive was curated and collected by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, an umbrella organization for 57 U.S. labor unions that represent more than 12 million workers. It joins several other university-housed collections of labor history, making this university among the largest union research sites on the East Coast, said Patricia Steele, dean of the university libraries.

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By Anne Midgette, Washington Post

So let’s talk Stravinsky. Heard anything about Stravinsky lately? The centennial of “The Rite of Spring” this year seems to me to have occasioned more tributes, spin-offs, and homages than I can remember seeing since the last Mozart year (2006) and Bach year (2000). Forget Verdi, forget Wagner (both of whom are having bicentennials this year); we’ve seized on “Rite” as a watershed moment in the development of contemporary music, and it’s being feted as the gateway to modernity around the world. (I may have been reactionary in pointing out in the Washington Post some weeks ago that Diaghilev, who commissioned the piece, was in the business of creating commercial as well as artistic successes.)

The New York Philharmonic got its “Rite” stuff in at the start of this season. Tonight, it’s closing out the season with another look at Stravinsky ballets called “A Dancer’s Dream”: a multimedia puppet-choreography-video production of “The Fairy’s Kiss” and “Petrushka,” overseen by director Doug Fitch, known to Philharmonic audiences for “Le Grand Macabre” and “The Cunning Little Vixen” in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

What the website doesn’t tell you, though, is that this “Petrushka” originated at the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra in 2008, where Fitch was an artist in residence. (The Philharmonic does credit James Ross, UMD’s director of orchestral activities, as the “music consultant.”)

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By Monette A. Bailey, Terp magazine

An African-American art collection valued at more than $2.2 million now belongs to the university’s David C. Driskell Center.

The nearly 270 paintings, sculptures and other works bequeathed by Sandra Anderson Baccus, who died last year, and her late husband, Dr. Lloyd T. Baccus, make it the center’s largest gift. Mrs. Baccus served on the center’s board from 2004 to 2006.

“She was impressed with what we were doing here,” says Dorit Yaron, acting director. “Usually 3 to 5 percent is shown on exhibitions while the rest of objects are stored. At a place like the center, she believed we would use the collection more often for study, classes and possibly an exhibition.”

Familiar names such as Clementine Hunter, Romare Bearden and Palmer Hayden are represented, as are a range of formats and subjects. The collection includes abstract metal sculptures addressing lynching, fine drawings evoking nights at the famed Apollo Theater and even a pair of creatively decorated shoes.

“There were a number of artists she was interested in, and her husband was interested in a different group,” says Curlee Holton, interim executive director of the center. He says it makes for a diverse and “exceptional” collection.

By Paul Voosen, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Sean Pue had an Urdu problem. An assistant professor of South Asian literature at Michigan State University, Mr. Pue was searching for a way to automate his analysis of classical Urdu's internal meter. As an adherent of the small but growing digital humanities movement, he had some coding proficiency, but not enough: Urdu poetry is not based on stress, but on contextual patterns of syllables. His program ran slow, and the problem proved to be, in computational argot, "combinatorially explosive"—the variables piled up, bogging it down.

While at his daughter's ballet class, Mr. Pue mentioned his difficulties to Tracy K. Teal, a microbial ecologist and postdoc at the university. The two had never seen each other on campus, but their girls, best friends, brought the families together. Ms. Teal began to see analogies between how the information in DNA causes proteins to form and the chain of transformations Mr. Pue used to extract Urdu's scansion. Perhaps, she offered, she could help?

The duo were soon in for a surprise, though. The central dogma of biology—that DNA makes RNA makes protein—had nothing on the ballads of Mirza Asadullah Khan. "As we discussed it further," Ms. Teal said, "we actually realized that Urdu poetry is a lot more complicated."

That revelation was one of many packed into a small, two-day meeting at the University of Maryland at College Park that brought together, for the first time, scholars engaged in the digital humanities with scientists from the data-heavy trenches of computational biology.

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health, among others, and held by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the symposium, titled "Shared Horizons," sought to present the fields together as equals. In application, though, it offered lessons to digital humanists from biology, a field that has already gone through its own, sometimes painful, computational revolution.

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