Archived narrative project run by Ohio State and Georgia State reaches 6,000 submission milestone
U.S. President Jimmy Carter was the first person on his father’s side of the family to graduate high school. According to the former leader of the free world, because education and reading was always emphasized in his home, Carter was reading before he began school. Because of his parent’s attention to the importance of reading at such an early age, Carter was a speed reader, reading up to 2000 words per minute.
Unique and interesting facts, especially when contrasted with the first line of his recent contribution to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives: “I’m afraid I don’t have a very good story,” said Carter.
The Ohio State University, in conjunction with Georgia State University, run The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), which is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change. It is intended as a resource for students, teachers, and scholars interested in how we learn to read, write, and make meaning of the world around us.
Carter’s contribution is significant not only because of his contribution to history as an American president, but also because it comes at the same time the DALN reached a milestone of 6,000 submissions. Other significant contributors to the literacy archives include: U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown; former Ohio State President, E. Gordon Gee; and Columbus, Ohio Mayor Michael Coleman, not to mention British spy novelist Frederick Forsyth and U.S. figure skating champion Rachael Flatt.
"We had a lot of books in the house, and my parents ordained that anyone could read at the table during mealtimes...." President Jimmy Carter
According to DALN project co-director Ben McCorkle, an associate professor of English who teaches courses in composition, rhetoric, literary publishing, and digital media at Ohio State Marion, the project goes well beyond just archiving individual stories.
“The ultimate goal, said McCorkle, is to create this ongoing sustainable collection of how people learn to read and write. Its value lies in its ability to continue growing, because each new submission adds to a data set that can help us better understand how we learn literacy skills, the kinds of things that motivate or discourage us when learning.”
“More broadly than that, even, we collect stories about how people acquire knowledge and skills related to a variety of activities that define their lives,” he explained, “like workplace literacy, gaming literacy, academic literacy, and military literacy, just to offer a few examples.”
Organizers of the archive will accept submissions in a variety of formats, video, audio, text, or whatever format people would like to submit.
“Sometimes people submit a narrative and send additional digitized files such as an old report card, pictures of children’s books, or things they’ve written themselves,” explained McCorkle.
“Technology is an interesting facet of these submissions,” said McCorkle. “When you have someone like Jimmy Carter come in and he writes about learning ‘Gregg shorthand’ in a typewritten narrative, those kind of details are lost to history if you don’t study them and keep those narratives alive.
“The idea behind figuring out how to navigate those social spaces is itself an act of literacy. That is obviously far more complicated than just learning your alphabet, and something we're very interested in archiving.”
“That is essentially what the DALN is collecting,” McCorkle surmised.
Initially developed in 2006, the DALN started at OSU under the leadership of English professors Cynthia Selfe and H. Lewis Ulman, with the help of faculty at institutions including Miami University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Illinois State, among others. In addition to McCorkle, the project is currently co-directed by Michael Harker at Georgia State. The DALN invites people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how — and in what circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so (or helped others learn). They welcome personal narratives about reading and composing all kinds of texts, both formal and informal: diaries, blogs, poetry, musical lyrics, school papers, videos, etc.
To submit your narrative or learn more visit: http://daln.osu.edu/