Stephanie Schlitz's Blog

examination of stigmatized language varieties is complex stuff, especially in the context of dominant language ideologies, minority oppression, and the well justified – if sometimes too theoretical – debate about standard English. it’s not my practice to introduce highly controversial topics here, in a class, or in my research without representing more than one perspective. and i don’t find contrastive analysis and codeswitching, on the one hand, and interrogation of deeply entrenched dominant language ideologies, on the other hand, to be mutually exclusive topics. in my field, they’re intimately linked, and this means cross-examination of writings by rebecca wheeler with writings by sonja lanehart, for example, is not only necessary but essential to study of the past, present, and future of language ‘standards’, language variation, and institutionalized linguistic prejudice, perhaps most especially when these are examined in the context of educator responsibilities.

lanehart, after all, writing in 2002, summons Sledd (1969) to aid in her dismantling of the ideologies of opportunity, progress, and emancipation and to remind readers that even

“compassionate, liberal educators, knowing the ways of society, will change the color of a student’s vowels because they cannot change the color of their students’ skins” (p. 325).”

even now, a decade later (…over four decades later) — haunting words.

but perhaps cross-examination conveys the wrong intention, because i would argue that the two are allied. questioning what’s standard and why is commensurate with developing methods to address linguistic prejudice in the classroom. and the goal of each? a shared one: systemic change.

as i think ahead toward spending a month in post-colonial Cameroon or toward my History of English mid-term which will ask students to examine parallels between Jamaican Creole and AAVE in the context of debate about translation of the bible into the former, it’s impossible to escape how global and pressing these issues are.

this is the fastest and easiest (and briefest) speaker intro i’ve ever drafted. wheeler’s work and its importance make it easy, and brevity is essential (after all, the heavy lifting is in her talk).

It’s my honor and privilege to welcome Prof Rebecca Wheeler to Bloomsburg University and to introduce you to her this evening. Prof. Wheeler’s work as an educator, her numerous – canonical – books and articles, and her longstanding commitment to linguistically diverse learners underpin the teaching of standard English in many, many classrooms across the nation. But –  I would argue – there is considerably more work to do, and that’s why I’ve invited her to speak with us this evening —

Dr. Wheeler joins us tonight following a talk at Harvard, where she participated in the Annual Alumni of Color Conference dedicated this year to “Disrupting the Discourse” and to “Discussing the Undiscussable” – In every way, her talk this evening is designed precisely to ‘disrupt’ the discourse and to engage us in dialogue about the ‘undiscussable’. Why? So that educators at ALL levels:

• Recognize our responsibility to understand the facts about language variation
• Recognize our responsibilities to dialectally diverse learners

and so that we

• Recognize who and what we sacrifice when we fail to do these things

Please join me in welcoming Prof. Wheeler.

Monday, March 5 @ 7 pm – “Power, Prestige, Prejudice: Dialect as Elephant in the School Room”

possibly the most marked part of any classroom based discussion on language variation, perhaps especially ethnically-based dialectal variation, is the pronounced use of the pronoun forms they  and them (wish i could do a frequency count in class and measure the percentage of they/them). but that’s okay. i can see how it’s difficult not to focus on difference, difficult not to assume that “we’re not the ones who are speaking a different variety: they are.” refining our understanding of stigmatized dialects takes study, maybe even practice, and very often the first discussions are the most challenging, entailing radical re-evaluation of perspective. but even with difference as a point of departure, okay,  there are enough common threads eventually to weave a richly textured, more unified understanding. but when i hear future teachers disparaging vernacular/stigmatized varieties after a linguistics class themed around dialectal diversity: a difficult, disappointing day.

Good news: A new LSA publication, the journal Teaching Linguistics, is to be launched formally at the LSA meeting in January (congratulations to the founding Editor, Kazuko Hiramatsu!). This innovative, open access e-journal is adopting a cc licensing model (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike), with options for authors to choose more or less restrictive licenses, and is responding to a critical, longstanding need in the linguistics community by focusing on pedagogy and by defining its scope to include, among other areas, interdisciplinary, undergraduate, and graduate teaching and learning; qualitative and quantitative approaches; professional development for graduate students; and linguistics in higher education. I’ve committed to supporting the endeavor as an Editorial Board member and look forward to the first issue with much anticipation!

Why subsume transcription and textual study within a History of the English Language course? Because close textual study cultivates an understanding of the intimate link between historical language change, the human (i.e. social, political, economic, migratory…) forces responsible for it, and the speakers and writers (dead though they may be) whose texts we use for evidence.

Sometimes historical linguistics excises writers and textual context from study of language change (and sometimes this even makes a degree of sense, e.g. Grimm’s Law). But more often, yoking textual analysis to study of diachronic language change lays the groundwork for deeper, sociohistorical understanding of change, change which occurs neither immediately nor spontaneously, and certainly not independent of the speakers and writers of a language.

a Jane-ite trawling the internet would be confronted with an unimaginably large number of Austen biographies, fan sites, images, and editions – as well as an array of films and adaptations and even wilder extensions of the Victorian moral canon (in Google-ese: a search for Jane Austen returns about 22,400,000 results in 0.14 seconds).

While potentially tough to navigate, these many dueling Janes offer excellent fodder for serious discussion of digital editions and digital representations (esp. of primary source texts) and digital literacy in general, the kind of discussion that treats editions and digital representations as subjects for dissection, the kind that apply to textual studies and historical linguistics across genres and across historical periods. (and it’s Austen, so it’s fun)

For instance, the British Library publishes a beautiful, interactive, virtual version of Austen’s Volume II. The images are vivid; the pages are turnable; and if you’re unsure about the handwriting displayed on any page within the text, you can click the audio or text button to access an orally delivered or transcribed version. A wonderful resource – one I love to peruse and to share… but not one I would recommend (at least not in isolation) for serious literary or linguistic study.

When the British Library Volume II is assayed against the Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts (JAFM) edition of Volume II, students see almost immediately that the British Library version is incomplete, displaying only Austen’s The History of England, not the complete set of writings she compiled within the vellum binding. And when assessing an identical page from each version, quickly noted are disparities in pagination, which in the British Library edition is inaccurate (albeit deliberately & I think for end-user utility) and therefore misleading; the British Library transcriptions are undoubtedly meant to be helpful, but they’re unmistakably editorial, failing to correspond linearly with the original, failing to represent line-end hyphens, and failing to represent the insertions, deletions, underscores (and so on) which punctuate Austen’s hand (and on this point, they’re counter- end-user utility).

A particularly astute student of mine yesterday pointed out (happily, before I even needed to) the presence of the Head Note in JAFM, noting that it detailed critical textual attributes such as size and provenance, details, she suggested, which would matter in understanding the language, the text, and the author. Excellent. But stuff you won’t find in most Austen versions…

To be fair, the intentions of the British Library and JAFM versions are distinct. And the access the British Library provides to Austen as well as Carroll, and Blake, and Mozart – freely – is invaluable. Still, the scholarly utility of the British Library’s virtual books is finite, and I wonder if it needn’t have been.

The in-class dissection continues in the next few days as I introduce a Project Gutenburg version of Austen’s Persuasion and we compare it to the JAFM edition version, and as we press on to distinguish our synchronic study of Austen from the kind of diachronic analysis enabled by historical corpora, where again, consideration of a source’s scholarly intentions and its utility is critical (and where again, given the technology available to editors, I’m not so sure creating editions and corpora as distinct entities with distinct ends is necessary).

An in-depth technical how of JAFM and similar sources is tough to cover in a history of English class, but a little of the how beside a lot of the why is important, since our understanding of virtually every period in English’s pre-twentieth-century linguistic and literary history relies on text, and our understanding is only as good as our texts.

It is challenging to write about my work while I’m in the midst of it, since proposals, abstracts, and indeed project tasks and oversight require tremendous amounts of time and attention… Stealing away to write for a moment, however, makes a lot of sense just now as I immerse myself in the complementary tasks of teaching and doing linguistics while developing a digital archive.

Though I’m trained formally as a historical linguist and maintain a primary interest in understanding how and why language changes, for historical linguists to describe and understand language change, we need text, lots of text. And, to do our work well, we eschew normalized, edited, (prettified) texts, the kinds that are designed to promote readability (and/or to sell copies) — but often at the expense of textual preservation.

We seek out digital representations of texts as the texts were written – orthographic, morphological, lexical anomalies and all. Such texts, particularly in the form of parallel collections or parallel corpora, enable us to study (using computational methods) patterns of variation (orthographic, morphological, lexical, phonological) and to analyze and better understand language change.

The days of the index card and pencil method have long passed (okay, it’s only been thirty years or so, but that’s thirty in an era of Moore’s Law). Computational analysis has altered our ability to analyze linguistic data, our methods, and our findings. And it has exciting implications for socio-historical linguistic study as well.

But we cannot do this work well unless we have digital representations of texts as the texts were written (and here I use representation deliberately because a transcription or facsimile is not a primary source document in the strict sense; it is a representation of a text, and this is a critical distinction). Our methods for digital representation continue to improve, and we’re ever closer to advancing Matthew Driscoll’s ‘everything but the smell‘ model of text editing to include the smell…

Yet even with some cool new developments that enable us to leverage the aid of extra hands, this work is as time and labor-intensive as it is invaluable.

My own role in creating resources such as a digital archive that grants priority to textual fidelity, facilitates artefactual philology and historical linguistics, and disseminates an important cultural heritage collection — for me: an ideal hybridization.

Just returned from an excellent trip to Berry College where I spent the last two weeks working on the Martha Berry Digital Archive Project. I initiated the project in 2010 and, working collaboratively with Berry Library and Museum staff and students, colleagues in History and English, and a programmer from Penn State, I’m in the process of making the documents in the Martha Berry Collection, including over 160 fileboxes of manuscript and typescript papers (i.e. many, many thousands of papers), freely available for cultural, historical and linguistic research.

The collection is arranged chronologically and includes personal and business letters written to Martha Berry and/or the Berry Schools between 1885 and 1941. Berry was an extraordinary record keeper, and typed copies of virtually every letter composed in response to those received have been retained within the collection, offering a rich and complete picture of the discourse between correspondents.

When letters are reviewed by year, the collection offers a synchronic snapshot of the school, of Berry, of her correspondents, and of the milieu, linguistically as well as historically. When writings are studied across decades, the collection chronicles the longstanding friendships and business relationships maintained by Berry (e.g. decades-long correspondence between Berry and Clara Ford, Berry and Emily Vanderbilt Hammond, Berry and Corra Harris), narratives which are in many cases more compelling in their revelations about those writing to Berry than they are about Berry herself, as, while Berry largely remains on message, focusing her communications primarily on the development of the Berry Schools (an impressive testament to her unwavering devotion to the schools), her correspondents are far more generous in their personal revelations, sharing insights ranging from concerns about the war to educational reform to family gossip.

The scope and range of the collection - from letters imploring Berry to take on a ‘poor child’ to a letter calling on her to participate in a protest against a ladies magazine which published a beer advertisement extolling the virtues of the beverage as a children’s tonic and therein as the key to a calm and happy home to one which criticizes her for the cut of her neckline - yields a fascinating subject. I look forward to sharing more soon as our work continues!