Sam's Senior Seminar Blog: Digitalizing English Studies

In Jet Fuel Review , every editor is required to fill out a manual that describes in detail what their job entails. The manual is an over twenty-page long Word document and, after creating four of them with one more to go, I will admit that the manual does nothing for me anymore. It’s falls a bit flat, especially having filled one out multiple times and I do not feel that it describes my process as managing editor as well as it could. However, our faculty advisor has been using this document as our final project for the class and internship for several years, so I don’t know how open she’d be to change that, however, what I want to transform the manual into is something that can be utilized outside of being a JFR editor: a comprehensive, digital process journal. The manual is essentially a hybrid of what our weekly responsibilities as editors are, a weekly reflection on other factors in our life that influence our work as JFR editors, and how what we learn in JFR can be applied...

In the short story “The Library of Babel”, Jorge Luis Borges contemplates epistemology and concludes that knowledge comes from an “infinite amount of hexagonal galleries” that make up the universe: aka libraries (51). The most telling part of this story is the title because it is a reference to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), a myth about how people came to speak different languages. In Borges’ narrative, the library is a version of the tower as it is constantly being built upon with a variety of texts throughout history with an ever-evolving collection of humanity’s documentation. Libraries store information as it is revealed over time and essentially act as inanimate historians with archives that grow like the blob. As time passes, people get more and more distant from the past, but the textual archives are always there to remind us of what took place before our time which is important in understanding our purpose. As the timeline of human existence continues to expand, arc...

For my final project, I really want to do something that showcases my most significant accomplishments at Lewis University; I want my project to be about the thing that I am most passionate about, the thing that drives to me get an education. During my time as an undergraduate English major, I developed a special interest in poetry and indie publishing, which go together like bread and butter. I have my creative writing classes and my internship at Jet Fuel Review to thank for my discovering of my specialization in the English field, a field that is extremely vast. Poetry is my form of creation and editing a literary journal also promotes the creation of art which makes me feel like I am somehow positively contributing to society--I believe that literature and other art forms can help better our world and to be a catalyst in the distribution of a wide variety of art forms gives me solace not only as an editor, but as a person. Creating my own art and showcasing other people's is so...

The conversation of the Digital Humanities is a highly-debated topic across universities, however, at UCLA, advocates and enemies of this new culture are going as far as writing white papers and manifestos to take a stand on the subject. One faculty member wrote a blog denouncing the furthering of digitalism in the classroom because h umanities departments at UCLA are in serious peril if administration decides to “cut budgets” by dispersing language classes into the summer months and only remain ing as online classes during the regular academic year. Bob Samuels refutes this proposal in “ Race to the Bottom: A Critical Response to the UCLA Humanities Task Force” by explaining that technology cannot replace traditional live classroom instruction and that it would actually hinder UCLA’s finances even more to implement online courses in the humanities because of the cost of technology. More importantly, students are also less likely to finish online courses because of how autonomous on...