Tags
digital grammar, Drupal, grammar, HEL, history of the english lanuage, language, Old English, Old English Primer, Scalar, Xerte
In the posts below, Megg and Patrick have done an excellent job discussing one of the biggest roadblocks we’ve encountered while seeking to get our DOEP up and running—platforms. I don’t want to dwell further on this topic (because they have the bases so well covered), but there is one thing I’d like to briefly mention on this topic. We began with an idea to maybe use Scalar, but soon moved on to bounce around from platform to platform (Xerte and Drupal were perhaps the platforms that we best liked, or at least most recently liked best), only to realize that each platform we looked into was ultimately unusable. This was not because the platforms themselves were flawed in their designs, but because we as a group were unable to access the technology necessary to use and install the platforms. Perhaps it’s somehow emblematic of the state of the field. There are so many good building tools out there for a small group of new DHers (such as ourselves) to use, and there is such fantastic encouragement and support from people already in the field, but there are few practical options to help a group like ours get a project up and running. That is, we have the tools, we have the ideas and the internal support, but we’re lacking access to the means necessary for actually creating anything digital. Though the field is within itself is highly collaborative, it is difficult to get those who are outside the field involved in our efforts at this time.
In any case, I wanted to discuss some issues I’ve encountered working on the OEP part of the DOEP. We’re designing this project to be used by a variety of people who come from variety of backgrounds and who possess a variety of interests. So naturally, we anticipate that our learners will have different kinds of experiences with and expectations of language. In order to facilitate the variety of learners we’re hoping to have, we’re attempting to create a layered learning experience that can give as little or as much grammatical and technical information as might be needed for a given learner. For example, when working through a lesson or set of lessons a learner can choose to access etymological information for certain words, lists of faux amis, pronunciation guides, and grammatical hints. I’ve been developing (alongside Joseph and others) this portion of the primer for the past few weeks, and have driven over a few metaphorical potholes in the process.
At the end of each lesson, learners will have access to grammatical information intended to help learners process what they’ve been reading. In order to ensure that a variety of learners are able to successfully interact with this information, I’ve been trying to write out descriptions of grammatical concepts that altogether avoid the specialized vocabulary typically used in discussions of grammar. This endeavor is more difficult than I expected, and I have spent perhaps too much time trying to figure out how to explain a prepositional phrase without using the words “preposition” or “phrase.”Maybe this is because my own grammatical background is so rooted in the old philological method that I can’t express grammatical concepts separated from their familiar contexts. Whatever the reason for my trouble, writing these little excerpts has shed some light on how I see language itself. Though I am a lover of dialect and language features that might be considered “variant” or otherwise outside the norm, I am awfully attached to my prescriptive grammatical rules. I find this especially odd since we are creating a primer for a historical language, a language that our learners will never need to speak or write, and a language that itself comprises variant forms of spelling and grammar across different manuscripts. So, I wonder if a prescriptive grammatical approach in this setting is really all that appropriate or useful. Maybe a more descriptive grammar, or a grammatical overview that focuses more on the descriptive than the prescriptive, might be more useful.
I appreciate that the way we’re designing this project will eliminate some of these concerns. A learner can have access to whatever information s/he likes and ignore the rest. Still, the pedagogical implications of the situation are of great interest to me.