published by the university of
michigan press as part of the sweetland
digital rhetoric collaborative book series. Playing in the Archives—Lessons Learned: An ED Talk (.txt version)
[Video: BEN and JASON appear in front of stage backdrop with purple spotlights and EDtalk logo in background; the majority of video is of this footage, with occasional cutaways to audience reaction or thematic images]
Announcer [offscreen]: Our next presenters want to share with you the joy and messiness associated with conducting archival research. Please help me give a warm welcome to Ben McCorkle and Jason Palmeri!
[Audio: audience applause]
Ben: Hi. Thank You.
Jason: We’re here to talk to you about our experiences playing in the archives, but before we can talk to you about play, we have to start by talking about fear.
[Video: cutaway to image of word “fear” spelled out with fluorescent lightbulbs]
Ben: Because as exciting as it can be to play in the archives, it can also be pretty terrifying trying to make your way through a collection filled with uncertainty. Before we can learn to play again, we have to confront the fears that grab onto us in our childhood and never let go—the fears that lurk in our closets, under our beds, in the hidden corners of our minds—the fears that keep us from living our dreams.
[Video: cut to image of clay sculpture of word “math” with mathematical symbols scattered about, and a distressed figure standing over them]
Jason: For me, one of these deep fears is math. I remember fourth grade, doing a long division problem on the blackboard, wracked with shame because I just couldn’t work it out right. To this day, I cannot . . . I will not do long division by hand. When our research project started to move into quantitative data, I freaked right out. I mean I couldn’t pass a fourth grade math test without a calculator! My last math class was in eleventh grade—we called it “trig for dummies.”
[Video: cut to audience laughing]
Jason: We had other names. As an adult approaching a big new research project, a fear kept gnawing at me: what business did I have making claims with numbers? I was sure I was a fraud. But, I stuck with it. I just kept recording data, I kept counting texts bit by bit. I spent untold days learning to make interactive graphs, then breaking them, then making them again. And, once the graphs finally worked, we both sat back, we looked at our graphs, and we had this eureka moment.
[Video: cut to image of human eyeball superimposed with code snippets]
Ben: I think that what we realized was that it was okay that our data probably weren’t statistically significant. It was okay that we couldn’t even begin to explain what had caused the trends we were noticing. We began to realize that numbers were just another language for us—that we could play with them like we play with words and images. We learned that it was . . . okay to play.
[Video: cut to poignant audience reaction]
Jason: Everything changed once we started to think of data visualization not as working out the right answer to some dreaded math problem, but as a playful way of asking new questions. Once we let go of our fear of getting the wrong answer, we were finally able to make friends with those numeric monsters lurking underneath our beds.
Ben: Let me tell you about another fear. About a little boy in fourth grade who was lucky enough to get a leading role in his class’s upcoming musical play.
[Video: cut to image of High School Musical cast]
Ben: He got picked to be Dick Clark, one of the few speaking roles in the production. He practiced those lines night and day, and had them down pat. But then come opening night, he froze. But, in a moment of inspired panic, he reached for a quick joke that wasn’t even in the script, and it got a laugh from the crowd, and then he went on with the scene. Everything was right with the world until after the show, when the director chastised him for improvising, saying he’d never make it in show business.
[Video: cut to sad audience reaction]
Ben: That boy? Well, it was also Jason.
[Video: cut to audience laughing]
Jason: Well played, sir. But you know, that boy, he was both of us . . . he was all of us. But you know what that mean director got wrong? The first rule of improv is to never say no . . . to always say yes . . . and. Yes . . . and.
[Video: cut to image of stack of cards, all reading “YES”]
Jason: I lived that truth in my time as a drama club kid. But something changed when I grew up and became an academic. Sometime back in grad school or maybe it was in the rush to tenure, I stopped saying “yes and.” I started looking at any new project idea with a series of NOs: no, this is not rigorous; no, this is not serious; no, this is not scholarship.
Ben: Look, I readily concede that there is so much value in learning to be critical, to being well trained in methodology, to becoming a contributing member of a discipline. BUT with all of that also comes a loss of imagination, a reluctance to be different or weird, or just a fear of sticking out.
[Video: cut to image of single dead tree; cut to audience with poignant reaction]
Ben: Especially if we carry with us those fears of the past and let them creep into our present.
Jason: When we first started trying to tell stories in alternative formats, we really struggled. All of our scripts for videos or audio work sounded so much like the academic prose we had already been so disciplined to write. But, then we just started talkin’, and laughin’, and saying “yes and”: Yes, and . . . let’s make a public access TV show. Yes, and . . . let’s make a GeoCities-style website. Yes, and . . . there ought to be cat GIFs!
[Video: cuts to TV Talk footage, screencapture of Act Four GeoCities-style site, and cat clinging to pants leg; cut to clip of audience laughing]
Ben: If there’s one lesson we want to impart to you this evening, it’s this: Let go of the fear, embrace the play.
[Video: cut to image of word “play” spelled out in metal shapes]
Ben: Play is a powerful, creative force that leads to real innovation in how we learn, how we present that knowledge to others, how we grow together.
Jason: For us, play has at times taken the form of humor, silly humor at that, but that’s really only a small part of what we mean by playing in the archives—no matter what archive you choose. In the end, when we invite you to play with archival materials, what we really hope is to inspire you to take creative risks, to imagine new forms of historical storytelling, to remain open to letting an archive lead you in totally unexpected directions . . .
[Video: cut to poignant audience reaction]
Ben: When I think about what it means to play, I think back to some of the teachers we got to know on the pages of English Journal.
[Video: cut to image of English Journal (100th Anniversary Issue)]
Ben: They weren’t afraid to be silly, or to be weird, or to risk scornful looks from their more serious colleagues. They took the risk of play to make spaces for truly deep learning. They took the risk of play to reimagine and transform education as we know it. So, we want to tell you today: Let go of the fear of being weird. Seek out an archive that ignites your passion even if others can’t see why it matters. Find creative ways to make that archive come alive again. And, perhaps most importantly, try as much as you can to say “yes and!”
Jason: Yes . . . anddd. Yes, and . . . thank you for coming to our ED Talk!
[Video: cut to audience applause; BEN and JASON wave to audience and leave stage]
Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.
published by the university of
michigan press as part of the sweetland
digital rhetoric collaborative book series.