Associate Professor in Rhetoric Robert Glenn Howard and his Comm Arts 610: Folklore in a Digital Age course is featured in a news article on UW-Madison’s campus news page in an article by Kiera Wiatrak titled “Restructured folklore class brings local culture to life”.
The course, which is crosslisted with Folklore 560, allows students to customize their own course content for the semester by having them document cultural ethnography and folklore around the state of Wisconsin.
“The students were supposed to look at their own world, the lives they lead, and ask, ‘Where is everyday performance of identity? Where is everyday communication doing something important and meaningful?'”
— Associate Professor Robert Glenn Howard
Students conducted video and audio interviews and gathered images to create final digital projects that documented portions of local culture using the video/audio and image editing features of workstations in the Hamel Digital Media Lab.
“This class stuck out because it was something kind of new and different. I assumed it was essentially creating a mini documentary, which is kind of what’s happening.”
— Communication Arts alumnus Emma Vasseur (’09)