Melville by Design

Abstract

Wyn Kelley describes how students in her seminar Mapping Melville use tools developed in MIT’s HyperStudio to make new and surprising discoveries of deeply canonical texts. As students experimented with digital tools for reading, mapping, editing, and comparing texts, they expanded their power to track verbal patterns, share comments, and develop reports and essays. Kelley thinks of her pedagogical methods as a platform for design thinking in the humanities classroom, and she demonstrates how nineteenth-century American literature is especially hospitable to such an approach.