Aviso: Lo que sigue es una reflexión bilingüe / Warning: What follows is a bilingual reflection
Con esta entrada, vuelvo a escribir en mi blog tras 3 años de ausencia. Mi público lector ha sido, principalmente, mis propios alumnos, y especialmente mis alumnos de Spanish 413, una clase de escritura avanzada en español en que los estudiantes publican su escritura en su propio blog, y estoy contenta tener una nueva motivación para volver a escribir otra vez en el mío. Regresar a este formato de escritura me ha hecho reflexionar sobre el por qué comenzé a escribir en un blog hace más de diez años, cuando establecí mi dominio elizabethfranklinlewis.net como parte del proyecto de “Domain of One’s Own” en mi universidad, University of Mary Washington.
Para aclarar, no es que no haya escrito nada en tres años, solo que no he escrito nada en este blog. En adición a los artículos y ponencias que he escrito, presentado y publicado relacionados al enfoque de mi investigación (cultura, literatura, y género en el siglo XVIII y XIX de España), también he creado un blog nuevo sobre “undergraduate research” en Mary Washington titulado «Beyond the Classroom.» Pero este blog, Bosquejos, lo había abandonado.
My first posts when I started writing on this blog back in 2013 were in English when I was part of a faculty cohort exploring the early adoption of the Domain of One’s Own Initiative. My very first post, Open or Closed, addressed an early reading in our group about open education initiatives at the time. How far we have come since then from the original MOOCS of the first decade of the 2000s. These questions still linger in education, accelerated and complicated by the COVID pandemic, and multiple other crises facing higher education today. In fact many of the topics of those early blog posts–libraries and the future of books (Is this the future of the book?), digital humanities–I am still contemplating and grappling with still, but in ever evolving ways.
Probably the most important lesson to me of these past dozen or so years is the ephemerality of everything that is digital. I knew this all along, but have come face-to-face with the loss of some great work that I and my students did over the years. I recently made the painful decision to kill several of the WordPress sites I created for various projects over the years, because they were out-of-date, their original plugins and themes no longer supported. I am mostly ok with this. They were projects of the moment that achieved their intended purpose and intended audience at the time: specific groups of students I hope to energize with new ways of looking at old texts like Don Quixote, or to forge a sense of community in a course called Communities of Engagement when we were isolated from each other during a global pandemic. It was fun, and creative, but destined to be fleeting, living on in the memories of those who experienced it at the time. Or will it really? Will my students remember this cool thing we did with my colleague Zach Whalen?: Don Quixote, Borges, Twitter Bots, and First-Year Foucault? Probably not. But I do!
Not all of it was lost: A digital humanities project that I worked on for three years with two sets of undergraduate research students, Mujeres y Caridad, lives on in an archived version. And now I am working with new sets of students to create a collection of digital editions in XML of nineteenth-century plays by women which we are calling “Genderama” and publishing to the TEI TAPAS Project (which is undergoing an update and overhaul in 2025, so more on that later when it’s back up and running).
Así que, por lo menos durante los próximos 3 meses de este curso académico, voy a volver a escribir con más frecuencia sobre la pedagogía, la investigación, y el blogging, para continuar con mi idea original de explorar en estos “bosquejos” algunas de las ideas, inspiraciones, sueños, fracasos, frustraciones, miedos, y (con suerte) éxitos de mi vida académica-profesional.
