Alice Neel, The Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation, 1933

An Anthology of Documents on  Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity in the U.S.

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Click Here to View Model Entries

Summary

The aim of this project is to encourage faculty throughout the UMASS system to contribute to an Internet-based anthology of primary documents on race, class, gender, and ethnicity in the United States.  These documents will include Supreme Court rulings, texts of legislation, political speeches, video clips, sound recordings, historical images, newspaper articles, and other non-copyrighted materials.

Documenting Difference will improve humanities education, both within UMASS and beyond, in four significant ways:

  • By staging workshops for professors and instructors on how to contribute materials and build the site into their courses, the project will demonstrate how information technology can be used to raise important social questions and dramatize historical events.    

  • By gathering compelling texts, images, and audio clips from faculty in many departments, the project will create a rich resource for both online and face-to-face courses in politics, history, gender studies, legal studies, sociology, economics, literature, education, and other fields.

  • By promoting the sharing of knowledge and expertise among a diversity of disciplines, the archive will enable professors and instructors to convey ideas across academic concentrations, educational divisions, and geographical boundaries.

  • By calling on faculty from different campuses to add to a collection that will form a common curriculum, the project will stoke a new sense of intellectual community and underscore the institutional identity of UMASS.

Click captions to view sample entries

Project Narrative

Documenting Difference will draw on the knowledge of UMASS faculty to create a multimedia anthology that will illuminate aspects of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in both past and present-day American society.  Since social diversity stands out as a central theme in most areas of academic inquiry, the project will promote intellectual exchange among professors, instructors, and students in a wide variety of fields.  By contributing annotated entries to the anthology and building its resources into their courses, faculty members will be able to share perspectives on important problems and develop a sense of community with colleagues who work in different departments and on other campuses, as well as with those who teach online.

While enhancing faculty collegiality, Documenting Difference will foster students’ awareness of faculty research, furnish them with a wealth of information, and save them significant amounts of money and time.  Year after year, we send students out to buy anthologies of documents that can be easily delivered to their desktops (or their laptops) over the Internet.  In the age of electronic information, it hardly makes sense for students to purchase or photocopy collections of Supreme Court opinions, government reports, political speeches, and similar texts when these and many other significant documents are accessible in digitized formats.  

Indeed, the trouble our students usually face in finding information on the Internet is not that there is insufficient material available, but that there is far too much.  Documenting Difference will solve this problem by presenting primary sources on a website that is easy to read, navigate, and digest.  At the same time, because faculty from all five UMASS campuses system will participate in this project, it will enable individual professors and instructors to draw from a deep pool of academic training, editorial experience, and pedagogical insight.

Building the Website

The first step that we will take to develop the web site will be to set up workshops on various campuses on how to locate and retrieve documents, images, and audio clips from the Internet.  To suggest how effective these materials can be as aids to undergraduate education, the initial round of workshops will be entitled “Teaching with Technology as Performance Art.”  These workshops will demonstrate how much drama can be created when the voices and images of historical figures are incorporated into electronic course materials and imported directly into the classroom.  We will also show how virtual exhibits and collections created by institutions such as the Smithsonian, the National Records and Archives Administration, and the NEH can be integrated into course outlines and web-based guides to undergraduate research.

While our main goal in these workshops will be to introduce participants to electronic resources and techniques, we also hope to promote an ongoing conversation on the ways that the increasing availability of documentary evidence is transforming research, teaching, and publication.  Now that materials ranging from Supreme Court opinions to eighteenth-century folk art are accessible on the Internet, we confront new questions not only about the definition of intellectual property, but also about the differences between information and knowledge, evidence and interpretation, exposure and education.  Without pretending that we will settle these issues, we hope that the process of locating, formatting, and posting materials that capture historical moments and communicate social problems will spark creative reflections on the manner in which information technology has changed and will change the roles of academics in American society. 

 

Collecting Entries for the Anthology

The manner in which the materials for Documenting Difference will be gathered is relatively simple.  Having already created a destination site that includes instructions and model archive entries, we will periodically e-mail requests for primary materials to faculty throughout UMASS.  In an effort to promote widespread participation, we will emphasize that contributors may use the site to publicize UMASS initiatives, call attention to specific courses, and provide information about their own research and publications.

Contributors will have some control over how their entries will be displayed.  However, the size of each entry, the number of elements included, and the final formatting will be determined by three basic rules: that the entry should address a major aspect of race, class, gender, or ethnicity; that it should be tasteful and aesthetically appealing; and that it should be easy to read.  

While entries may vary, we expect most to follow the pattern set by the examples included on our Model Entries Page.  There we have included historical images and a brief summary of hyperlinked texts, as well as the contributor’s name, department, program affiliation, and home institution.  While some of these entries include audio clips, we expect others to feature links to video clips or web animations.  Also, these entries transport viewers to outside sources that are known to be reliable providers of accurate information.  In other cases--if for example, contributors send scanned documents—the links will take viewers to pages maintained at UMASS Lowell.  In all cases, however, all of the texts and images included in the site must be either in the public domain or clearly available for non-commercial educational purposes.

While we will certainly take advantage of the spectacular wealth of resources that is already posted on the Internet, we would like to emphasize that the entries in our anthology will be designed to express specifically the research and teaching interests of UMASS faculty.  What we aim to create is neither a dumpsite for primary texts, nor a compilation of links to other web sites.  Instead, contributors will compose entries to the anthology by writing clear annotations and configuring elements to convey what they see as emblematic of specific issues and events. 

Click Here to View Sample Entries

Project Outcomes

While the central result of this project will be the site itself, we hope to use Documenting Difference as the means to carry out additional initiatives.  Specifically, once the site is up and running, we aim to formulate workshops for high school teachers and professors from other colleges and universities on using the Internet to introduce students to primary documents in American history and politics.  These workshops will demonstrate that Documenting Difference can serve both as a means to deliver primary documents to students’ computers and as an opportunity to convey specific interpretations of social problems and historical events.  Documenting Difference will thereby provide UMASS with a particularly effective way to service other sections of the educational community and communicate the strengths of our faculty to a wide audience.

In the longer term, as Documenting Difference evolves into an established feature of the UMASS curriculum, we hope to use the site to explore the extent to which the Internet can be used to integrate or at least coordinate face-to-face and online programs.  Since Documenting Difference will become a common resource for both traditional and online courses in many different disciplines, we believe that it will provide faculty members with a new way to find out what students are learning in various courses and, consequently, a better way to build on the efforts of their colleagues. 

The chance to see what students are learning elsewhere is, in our view, especially important with the advent of online education because those who teach online may not have venues in which to socialize with colleagues to discuss research interests and curriculum development.  Likewise, many of those who teach traditional courses find it difficult to monitor what is being offered online.  Since our site will provide access both to a common library and to information on the research and teaching interests of contributors, we hope that it will serve as a meeting place for faculty who would otherwise be unlikely to exchange ideas.

 

Institutional Context

Over the past few years, UMASS has established itself as a leader in distance learning and online education.  While many faculty members in the humanities and social sciences have embraced this initiative, others have been uneasy about the introduction of information technology into academic life.  There might be a few who still view the Internet as a contraption that impedes rather than enhances serious study.  However, the main reason that faculty members have shied away from electronic approaches to learning is that they haven’t had sufficient opportunity to see how technology can be manipulated to enliven intellectual inquiry, enhance educational interaction, and invent new ways to synthesize, interpret, and present research. 

Fortunately, Documenting Difference will not only furnish faculty with hands-on technical guidance, it will enable them to see materials that they have designated as particularly informative displayed along with the work of their colleagues in an unusually appealing context on the World Wide Web.  At the same time, by creating a space in which to take advantage of the considerable investments that UMASS has made in technological innovation, Documenting Difference will allow them to participate actively in programs and initiatives that have become increasingly vital to the future of the University.

From a broader standpoint, Documenting Difference will help to extend the UMASS mission to disseminate knowledge for the public good.  Those of us who research and write about race, class, gender, and ethnicity generally focus on these issues because we care about the strength and purpose of American democracy.  Whether we study gender inequality, economic inequity, cultural identities, or civil liberties, the faculty members who will build this site all work for a public university that is committed to higher education not merely as a form of vocational training or increased revenues, but as a practical way to promote thoughtful consideration of fundamental problems in American society.  Given this common commitment, we hope that our site will become a seedbed for new forms of intellectual interaction, a forum for educational innovation, and a widely recognized source of reliable information on social, economic, political, and cultural diversity in the United States.        

 

Timeline

Having sent out preliminary inquiries, we have already received expressions of interest from professors in various departments at Amherst, Boston, and Lowell.  Given this level of interest, we expect to hold our first round of workshops for UMASS faculty early in the Fall of 2001.  Then, by adding entries to the anthology throughout the semester, we hope to have a substantial site up and running by January of 2002.  At that point, we will send out another round of requests for entries, and we will also encourage UMASS faculty members to build the site into their courses.  During the Spring of 2002, we will use the materials that we have gathered to formulate workshops for high school teachers and college professors from outside of UMASS.  Finally, during the summer of 2002, we will present this series of workshops to outside participants.

Looking further ahead, we hope that what we learn in this process will allow us to serve as a model for other universities that seek to create Web-based anthologies on particular topics by collecting submissions from their faculties.  At that time, we plan to apply for another grant that would enable us to share our experience with other institutions of higher education by setting up seminars on creating and integrating electronic curricula for face-to-face and online programs in the social sciences and the humanities.  By then, we hope to be able to convey how developing Documenting Difference enabled us to cultivate creative modes of communication not only with our colleagues and students, and with teachers and professors outside of UMASS, but also with strangers who found us while searching for meaningful information on the Internet.

 

Project Director

Susan E. Gallagher is an assistant professor of political science and Coordinator of the Gender Studies Program at UMASS Lowell.  Since the publication of her first book, The Rule of the Rich?: Adam Smith’s Argument Against Political Power (1998), she has focused increasingly on using information technology to research and teach issues related to gender, politics, and law.  She is currently writing a multimedia history of privacy that will be anchored in a web site and published as a CD-ROM.  Her course web site, Gender Studies, Legal Studies, and American Politics, has become a widely recognized resource for students and professors in a variety of disciplines. 

Project Participants 

Dr. Howard Kaplan is the Director of Educational Computing at UMASS Lowell.  He works closely with faculty and students on creating computing environments that enhance the educational process.  As the director of UML's Technology Learning Center he has worked with numerous faculty on creating course websites.  He has presented at Educause, Syllabus, National University (La Jolla), and MacWorld (Boston) as well as regional conferences sponsored by the University of Vermont, the University of Massachusetts, and the City College of New York.  His articles on distance learning have appeared in the Educause, Educom Review, The Journal, and Syllabus.  His website is a repository of practical information and software guides on how to build an effective course website (http://howard.uml.edu).

Noëlle McAfee is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of
Massachusetts Lowell and the associate editor of the Kettering Review, a journal of political thought published by the Kettering Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in May 1998 with a dissertation entitled, "Subjectivity and Citizenship: Habermas and Kristeva On Agency in the Public Sphere." She also has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master's degree in public policy from Duke University. She specializes in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and ethics. She combines her philosophic research with investigations in the public sphere, including new experiments in deliberative democratic theory being conducted around the globe. She is the author of Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press, 2000) and an editor of Standing with the Public: the Humanities and Democratic Practice (Kettering Foundation Press, 1997). She is currently writing a book on Julia Kristeva for Routledge Press.

Pilot Site: Documenting Difference (http://faculty.uml.edu/sgallagher)