I will be presenting a keynote talk at Children’s Literature and Digital Humanities Conference (22-23 October 2020) University of Antwerp on my digital humanities research.
The conference itself promises to be quite brilliant, so I hope you can join us (bright and early for the East Coast folks!) See the conference program for more details!
It is a bit surreal when a project you have been working on for years is finally ready for public consumption. The edited collection that I have been working on with Casey Wilson for the past 800 million years (or 4 years, depending on your perspective) is finally live in the University Press of Mississippi catalog. The book is scheduled to be published April 2020, so you can’t quite hold it in your hand yet, but it does look and sound very real from the catalog description.
You can find the complete University Press of Mississippi Spring-Summer 2020 catalog here!
I’m delighted to announce that my most recent article has been published in the Lion and the Unicorn‘s January 2019 issue. This article came out of a very public kerfuffle on Twitter that played out in real-time while I was teaching my course on Bestsellers, Best Of and Banned Books at Georgia Tech. I was blessed with 75 students who helped unpack the events as they happened in real time as well as two incredible co-authors, Karen Viars and Liz Holdsworth, who brought their expertise in fan culture and library acquisitions to the project. Come for the public spectacle, stay for the nuanced reading of best-seller lists, public interactions of YA professionals via Twitter, and a look at the impact of faking bestseller status on library acquisition policies.
Article Citation: Fitzsimmons, Rebekah, Karen Viars and Liz Holdsworth. “YA Twitter versus Handbook for Mortals: A Case Study in Bestseller List Manipulation, Controversy, and the Effects on Library Acquisition.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 43 no. 1, 2019, pp. 108-132. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.2019.0006
I have officially started a new position at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor of Professional Communication in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. I will be teaching courses in Strategic Public Speaking and Writing for Public Policy to the very talented graduate students in the Heinz School!
If you find yourself in Pittsburgh, please come visit me in Hamburg Hall!
Presentations:
Session 7A: “Intersectionality, Social Justice, and Pedagogies: Classroom Strategies” (co-sponsored by ChLA’s Diversity Committee and Membership Committee). 8:00 am – 9:15 am
Slide Show Available here: CHLA2019 Digital Resources
Script Available here: 2019 Accessible Digital Pedagogy
Video – Features in PowerPoint to Aid Accessibility
Session 8A: 9:30 am – 10:45 am
Syllabus Swap: “Intersectionality, Social Justice, and Pedagogies” (co-sponsored by ChLA’s Diversity Committee and Membership Committee).
Handouts:
A photo of me presenting at CHLA 2019 on my Caroline Hewins information
Discussing the role of Digital Humanities and computers in our work as literature scholars.
Session 9D: Pedagogy, Digital Humanities, and Civic Engagement : CHAMBER, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm
Chair: LASANA KAZEMBE, IUPUI
Slide Show of Presentation
CHLA2019_HewinsScript
CHLA2017 Digital Futures Baldwin Panel Abstracts
2017 Presentation – Hewins Book List
2017 Hewins Paper
6:30 pm – 7:30 pm………………Pre-1900 Scholars’ Meeting
“Crash Course on Archives,” round table participant
I will be presenting at the Ivan Allen College Advance Lunch and Discussion this Thursday, February 28 from noon – 1:30. The overall theme of the discussion is “Envisioning & Shaping Futures: On-Line Teaching and Learning” and I will be talking specifically about using Twitter in the online/hybrid classroom to help bolster discussion and community exchange.
My newest article, co-authored with Suzan Alteri, titled “Possibly Impossible; Or, Teaching Undergraduates to Confront Digital and Archival Research Methodologies, Social Media Networking, and Potential Failure” is available in Issue 14 of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Issue 14 is a Themed Issue on Teaching & Research with Archives.
The Table of Contents is available here: https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/table-of-contents-issue-fourteen/
This article details an undergraduate student research project titled “The Possibly Impossible Research Project,” a collaborative effort between the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida and the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The article outlines the pedagogy behind a multimodal digital research project that provided Georgia Tech students with in-depth instruction into archival research processes while improving the Baldwin’s annotated bibliography. The article then details the process of teaching the course and how students responded to the project both during and after the course. This assignment also offered students an opportunity to uncover and make meaning as researchers in their own right, and to distribute that new knowledge through public facing digital platforms such as Twitter and Wikipedia. The authors conclude that the collaborative project had meaningful impacts on the undergraduate students, the course instructor, the curator of the Baldwin Library, and the larger academic community; further, it can serve as a model for engaging undergraduate students with archival research, analysis, and dissemination. This article outlines the assignment in detail, including the interactive digital scaffolding assignments. The article cites student research journal tweets and final reflective portfolio essays to demonstrate the successful fulfillment of the student learning outcomes.
Student work from my Spring 2018 course “The History and Rhetoric of Science Writing for Children” is currently on display on the first floor of Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.
I am presenting today at Code4LibSE 2018 @ The Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. My presentation today is on a project I completed with my Spring 2018 Georgia Tech course on the History and Rhetoric of Science Writing for Children.
Presentation Slides: “The Possibly Impossible Research Project”: Using Digital Research and Social Media to Teach Archival Research Methods
Text Only Version of Presentation Script
Gallery Talk: Children’s Literature, Illustration, and Collecting Books
Discover insights into children’s literature, understand illustration styles, and learn how book collections are curated, featuring four local panelists. Free.
Wednesday, July 11, 7:00pm
Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking 500 10th St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30332
I’ll be talking specifically about the creation and marketing of the Golden Book series and their role in the landscape of children’s literature today.
Rebekah Fitzsimmons 