they should add the JavaScript that does the work. Your approach can range from a description of what you want the students’ scripts to do, followed by a “Now, go to it!” (for students who already know how to code, or for a second or third project in the semester class), to providing some base code and asking students to modify and augment it (for novice students or those in generally noncoding academic domains). It may very well be that you will have a classroom composed of both types of students; in those cases, I have found an “if you know what you are doing, go to it!” combined with an “if you don’t know what to do, take this base code and watch me” seems to suit most needs for a classroom of mixed-skill students. Figure 6.2 shows a small excerpt of my approach at JavaScript code for solving a textCompare problem that we cover in the class.
In either case, it is of utmost importance to embrace creativity and let your own vision of the perfect tool go. This is not your tool. Look at it like an art teacher would: you would not be happy with students who simply copied your painting, would you? Do your own working version of the project before assigning it to your students, but keep it in your back pocket and let the students grow into their own versions.
Figure 6.2. Example of JavaScript code for the textCompare problem.
Next, display and gently critique exemplary student work during class. The ones who “got it” (and, therefore, whose works you choose to display) will be thrilled. The students who struggled will see that someone like them really can do this. If a member of the class has touted herself or himself as particularly adept at coding from the start, displaying and critiquing that student’s work will be less helpful. It is better to choose the students with hidden talents that have blossomed during the class, as a kind of EveryStudent.
Figure 6.3 shows an example of JavaScript written by students for an interactive information form that generates new combo boxes based on user selections. Each student group was given an information knowledge base to model that would provide users with customized information based on their entered preferences. The JavaScript code in figure 6.3 was written early in the semester in a web programming course by a group of students who had already taken an introductory programming course but who otherwise had little prior experience with writing JavaScript code.
Figure 6.3. Example of student JavaScript code.
Finally, give them someplace to go from there. HTML5 and JavaScript are there for the taking. Literally, if students can figure out how to solve a problem in their heads, they can program a computer to solve the problem. It is important to help them realize that HTML5 and JavaScript are freely available to them at any time, in any place (even those places that do not have internet access), so how and when they engage problems on their own is totally up to them.
Figure 6.4 depicts the textCompare tool that I created to compare the Skelt and Folger versions of the Othello play.7 Though it could stand some further refinement, it succeeded in allowing me (and my students) to compare, side by side, the two scripts and determine that Skelt used a strategy of erasure—starting with the full script and “erasing” large parts—to reduce the full Othello play down to a toy theater play that could be performed in under an hour. This determination would have been quite difficult to make while going back and forth between two hard copy scripts.
In cases where the students have few or no programming skills—and are reluctant to acquire them—you may have to provide your version of the tool for the students and just skip to the analysis part. This is sometimes necessary, because it assures you that every student will have adequate data to investigate in analysis. However, this approach perpetuates the computer programming as “magic” myth. In that scenario, students throw in text from two different sources, and “Abracabra!” a comparative visualization appears. How will they truly be able to analyze the data unless they have at least a fundamental idea of how they were generated?
Figure 6.4. The working textCompare tool showing output.
I have also used HTML5 and JavaScript tools to visualize linguistic complexity in Shakespeare’s works and to classify genre-rich words among dramatic and fictional versions of Shakespeare’s Othello. In addition to textarea and text objects, the canvas object (provided in HTML5) is a powerful tool that deserves more attention than I can provide here for its graphic display capabilities. Figure 6.5 is an example of a more complex tool using both the HTML5 document.getElementById attribute and canvas object for web pages. I developed this script during the EMDA 2015 institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
And this brings us to the most exciting part of using HTML5 and JavaScript in the classroom: students can use it to answer their own questions about literature (or any of the text-focused areas suggested above). Once they know how to get text into the tool, how to use textboxes or the coveted canvas object to get results out, and a few string processing methods, there is an immense amount of analysis that they can do entirely on their own!
If you need to assess your students, it is best to assess their analysis of the data provided by the tool. If you have two sections of the same course, try using this project in one section and have students do the book balancing and hand transcription assignment in the other. My bet is that those doing the coding project will produce better analyses of the text and will have higher familiarity with the texts than those who simply compare the print copies and transcribe. I have not been able to gather assessment data to support this hypothesis, as I teach programming courses that require a programming approach, even in a digital humanities framework.
Figure 6.5. Linguistic complexity visualization of Othello.
As a low-cost way to allow students to create their own tools to answer their own questions about their own text-based areas of interest, HTML5 and JavaScript cannot be beat in terms of their ubiquity, flexibility, and ease of use. Experiential learning on a zero budget is the direction to go in any text analysis–based course.
NOTES
1. I was accepted into and attended the “Early Modern Digital Agendas: Advanced Topics” institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2015 through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
2. M&B Skelt, Skelt’s Characters and Scenes in Othello (London: Theatrical Warehouse, 1823).
3. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, Folger Digital Online Texts, accessed (and downloaded) May 27, 2017, http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&play=Oth&loc=p7.
4. Skelt, 6.
5. Educational scholarly research has produced a huge volume of scholarly support for experiential learning, beginning with Arthur Chickering’s seminal work on the method. See, Arthur W. Chickering, Experience and Learning (New York: Change Magazine, 1977). However, there is some recent discussion that current English literature teachers are not commonly using experiential methods to teach Shakespeare,
