Ania Mauruschat
Hi! I am a PhD student at the English Seminar of the University of Basel.
Location Basel, Switzerland
Activity
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Thank you for the recommendations, I'll check them out. My personal recommendation: Uncivil, a history podcast about the continuing effects of the civil war in the US by Chenjerai Kumanyika and Jack Hitt for Gimlet Media https://gimletmedia.com/shows/uncivil
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
As I'm trained as a radio journalist and have quite some work experience, I'm very interested in the differences between radio making and podcasting. I'm also very interested in how to teach podcasting, so I'm kind of spying here a bit... ;-)
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Grüezi from Switzerland! I'm Ania and have been in radio journalism for quite a while before I switched to academia for researching and teaching radio art. Within my PhD I am also concerned about the future development of radio and it's "first cousin" podcasting, as Siobhan called it. So I'm very much looking forward to learn about podcasting from her as the...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Andrew C
Hi @AndrewC and @AnnaM , thanks for you recommendations! Unfortunately I am not as educated as the two of you are about the podcasting scene yet, I also just listened to Uncivil, Serial, S-Town, The Truth, TAL and some German podcasts. So I'm very much looking forward to discover some of your recommendations! :-)
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Rabie Mustapha
Hi Rabie, what do you mean by "software used for producing voice"? An editing software that's for free is Audacity https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Dear all, as our final week reaches its end, I would like to take up on Philipp Schweighauser's Farewell and express my gratitude as well: This has been an outstanding course with so many amazingly committed participants and discussions. It has been my great pleasure to read as much as possible and respond whenever necessary or appropriate. As the course...
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I am not sure if these are rhetorical questions and if you expect me to reply to them at all, @CharlesHall. However, they are of course very good questions. Regarding your first sentence: Of course, you have to be an excellent reader to research Pynchon, by which means so ever. My colleague Christian Hänggi certainly is such an excellent reader and about his...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Sue P
Dear @SueP , maybe this will give you some orientation: At Step 4.10 Philipp Schweighauser responed with several posts to a similar bewilderment of other participants. Please see here:
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/3/comments/27568870 -
So far Philipp Schweighauser’s reply regarding the question of audio books, which are not directly addressed in this course. I hope this answers your question.
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This happened in 1877. We could call this the beginning of the (pre-)history of audiobooks.
Audiobooks as we know them today emerged in the 1930s. In this phase, audio books were designed for the visually impaired, including disabled veterans from the First World War. It was only in the 1980s that audiobooks became a real force on the literary marketplace.... -
“Yes, audiobooks are indeed a reading medium that we do not address in this course. And in a way, that is odd because I do have a sustained interest in the relations between literature and sound. I even wrote a book about this (though it's not a book about audiobooks): “The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics”. The...
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No, unfortunately audiobooks are not an official topic of this course. In a previous run of this course Philipp Schweighauser responded quite extensively on this topic when asked why they are not included. Let me quote his answer:
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@MarleneJäger(UniFreiburgstudent) Very good points, I totally agree. I only whish more young people would be as conscious about the downsides of digital communication.
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Interesting considerations, @DebraWilliams. Although I agree that we are of course always somehow in the “room” of our own mind, I think it makes a huge difference to withdraw to a quiet place and to think an write there in really concentrated way. Just think for example about Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) in which she argues...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Sue P
I guess I can tell you a bit, @SueP and @JanB : Last year I had the pleasure to teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace’s seminal novel “Infinite Jest”. I designed it as a blended learning course, which means a combination of traditional reading at home and teaching in class with social reading online. The students had to get a first copy of the book for their...
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@JacquelineWilde Well, this is of course all right, John. However, I think to raise awareness and to push a discussion - or “research” in general - in a certain direction ,you have to make a strong claim and therefore also to risk to oversimplify. In this respect McLuhan was a genius, in my opinion. In addition to the amazing prophecies he made. For example he gave...
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Very interesting post and thoughts, Catherine. Thank you!
However, I would like to discuss one of your sentences:
“it is worth thinking that ‘watching’ may be replacing ‘reading’, which had replaced ‘listening’ as the human mode of communication.”
Regarding this statement of yours I just would like to remark: Maybe it’s this time not a replacement like it... -
Dear Sue, may I assume that you are older than 50 years? How your are describing the use of your cell-phone seems to be a perfect case of the so-called “digital divide” between the generations. I assume if you were born 1993, your handling of your cell or smart phone would be totally different. Please don’t get me wrong: This is just a conclusion, no...
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Of course, @AnnOates. If an author is not particularly interested in free associations as in the writing method of “écriture automatique”, which was very popular among the surrealists around André Breton in the 1920s in Paris, the intentional and careful choosing of words is of course an important characteristic of literature. However, in their essay “The...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to David Pulford
Yes, @RaymondTay I agree. However, lay reading can be practiced in various ways, as we will discuss in this course. I hope you will enjoy to learn more about it!
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Interesting questions, @TabeaHrzibek(Baselstudent). As I cannot give you authoritative answers to them right way, I think your questions raise the awareness that true literary science always needs to be a mixture of different methods and research traditions. E.g. researchers who are undertaking a distant reading project will certainly consult literary...
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Yes, I guess this is a good, possible way to put it, @VickyMa
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@CatherineSweet Certainly you are right, Catherine. But what about the literature of non-western, first world countries? What about the poetry of oral cultures?
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@AlanM @CatherineSweet @MichaelRobinson @MichaelRobinson To all of you: Very interesting thread of discussion! Of course we have to be cautious if something that is offered to us as revolutionary is merely “old wine in new skins”, as Alan indicates. However, I think that Moretti’s approach is really revolutionary as it addresses very big questions and...
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Thank you for your interesting reflections on distant reading. Please, let me just add a remark regarding your first paragraph: Although we might think that distant reading only reinforces some facts we know by intuition anyhow, I think that a quantitative analysis can make a real difference. For example my colleague Christian Hänggi did a big research project...
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@JoanGreenleaf I agree. I think this is a very good point: "The past is the past", as Philipp put it in earlier works. Even by the means of distant reading we won’t have true access to it as sources, we might consider important and meaningful today, might have been lost forever because they were not regarded as worthwhile preserving back then.
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True, according to Wikipedia at least ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#Move_to_London_and_further_writing:_1850%E2%80%931860 -
Wow, such an erudite comment, thank you for sharing all your thoughts and results of your research with us, @MichaelRobinson . I guess you could start to work at any literature department right away ;-)
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Thank you, @DebraWilliams for the recommendation of Lesley's excellent comment. If you click with your mouse on the date on the right side above a special entry, you should be able to copy the link and insert it wherever you would like to refer to this comment. E.g. the link to Lesley's interpretation of the meaning of the petals on the black, wet bough can be...
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Hi Michele, welcome, nice to meet you! No worries, you can join the course whenever you have time while it is running. It's only that the most discussions of your peers take place in the current week. However, you also can follow other users whose answers you like. Thus you e.g. can look up what they wrote in each week.
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Thank you for your question, Ewelina. “Imposing” was one of the most discussed categories of hyper reading in this week, as you can read here https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/3/comments/27241258 or here https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/3/comments/27332805
However, picking just the one topic you are interested in probably... -
Great job, @Catherine Sweet, thank you for sharing your discoveries and insights in such a detailed way with us!
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Very interesting observation, @FionaVicent(BaselStudent) , we will discuss the so-called phenomenon of "remediation" of old media imitating new media in week 6, so - hang on ;-)
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Yes, I guess you are right, @MaryFagan , Sosnoski's defintion and investigations still can be regarded as up-to-date, this is also what Philipp Schweighauser stated here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/3/comments/27360605
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@JuliaBaumhoefer(UniFreiburgStudent) in Basel they offer courses on searching at the university library. Maybe the university library in Freiburg does this as well?
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Dear @CatherineSweet , good point. I agree that imposing is nothing that is restricted to hyperreading. In addition to that you probably already noted Philipp Schweighauser's reply to the intense discussion you and others had at 3.1, did you? https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/3/comments/27360605
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@MarleneJäger(UniFreiburgstudent)
Thank you, Marlene, I think you answered both of Catherine’s questions very nicely. I couldn’t have done it better.
@CatherineSweet
What do you think, Catherine? Does Marlene’s comment provide you with the answers you were looking for -
@CatherineSweet
Dear Catherine, good question! Regarding I.A. Richards claim on “good readers” being also “good citizens” I would suggest to understand reading and the highly developed subjectivity of an astute reader as the premise, the foundation of each society. I would say: We have to be good, critical readers to become sharp thinkers, who are able to... -
Ania Mauruschat replied to David Pulford
What do you consider "ordinary reading" to be, @DavidPulford ? Skimming and scanning will be discussed in more detail.
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Dear all, such an intriguing and interesting thread of discussions this is!
@DebraWilliams
Indeed, this is a very interesting question whether “sensitive reading” can be regarded as a kind of “close reading”. I would say: If it follows the method of most thoroughly reading a text word by word, sentence by sentence it is a close reading. However, sensitive... -
Dear Emma, don't worry: As Philipp Schweighauser explained in his introductory video to "Close reading" (cf. 2.1), the poet's (maybe!) intended, "actural meaning", as you call it, is of no interest for a close reader. Being concerned with the author's intentation is what Wimsatt and Birdsley alreardy in 1946 called the "The Intentional Fallacy"...
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However, “amount of knowledge” does in the case of “close reading” not refer to any contextual information like authors’ intentions, biographies or “social, political, and historical contexts in which literary texts are written, published, bought, and read” (Schweighauser).
Close readers are aiming at doing justice to a literary work of art by paying their...
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@StefanieH.(BaselStudent)
Dear Stefanie, as Philipp Schweighauser explained in his introductory video of this week (cf. 2.1) and as my fellow mentor Rahel Ackermann very nicely stated in another discussion here, let me repeat their words: “Close reading is a formalist/structuralist approach and thus the author's intention or the author himself is of no... -
@SreerajNair and @MichaelRobinson Interesting discussion, please let me just add: There are indeed lay and professional readers who do a close reading of complex novels. For example, at our English Seminar in Basel we have a reading group of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”. Every four weeks the participants meet and during their sessions they manage to read and...
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@MichaelRobinson Regarding your fist comment: These are excellent observations of yours, I think. However, one certainly could now start discussing if your observations can be used as arguments to criticise close reading or if they are maybe even much more so the results of an astute close reading….
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Hi Ann, Thank you for sharing your experiences and thoughts. I think you touched a crucial point here, as the change of reading strategies not only is a behavioural matter but also brings new possible power relations with it. I am wondering if this topic will become more important within the discussions of this run of the course.
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So far Philipp Schweighauser’s reply regarding the question of audio books, which are not directly addressed in this course. I hope his answer is interesting for you anyhow.
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This happened in 1877. We could call this the beginning of the (pre-)history of audiobooks.
Audiobooks as we know them today emerged in the 1930s. In this phase, audio books were designed for the visually impaired, including disabled veterans from the First World War. It was only in the 1980s that audiobooks became a real force on the literary marketplace.... -
“Yes, audiobooks are indeed a reading medium that we do not address in this course. And in a way, that is odd because I do have a sustained interest in the relations between literature and sound. I even wrote a book about this (though it's not a book about audiobooks): “The Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary Acoustics”. The...
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Thank you for your interesting comment and your question regarding audio books, @DebraWilliams. No, unfortunately audio books are not an official topic of this course, but they certainly will be part of the discussions. At least they were in the last run of this course. Back then once Philipp Schweighauser responded quite extensively on this topic. Let me...
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Hi Kevin, welcome to this course! Thank you for sharing your experiences with different reading strategies like close reading, skimming and scanning. You certainly will have the chance to learn much more about these topics and will have plenty of chances to discuss their advantages and disadvantages with your fellow learners. E.g. in week 2 this course will...
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Hi Shirley, welcome to this course! Nice to meet you, too. It's great you joined and I am sure you will find some very different kinds of debates here than in the other course. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did when I first participated as a student in "Literature in the Digital Age".
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Well, I think "expert" is a relative term, isn't it? But as you seem to have stayed true to Joyce for round about 50 years, even increasingly in awe - this definetely makes you an expert in my opinion ;-)
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Hi Debby and Anna, this is just a little recommendation: If you like the comments of a certain participant of this course and think you might have some interests in the person's other comments, we strongly encourage you to follow this person by clicking on the "follow" link next to the person's name. Maybe you will become online friends and it will be even...
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Hi Irene, thank you for your interesting comment! As I am originally trained as a radio journalist and am writing my PhD on radio art, I think it's great that you mention podcasts and audiobooks on an equal footing with traditional books and ebooks. Maybe we'll have some more discussions on the relationship of print, digital and audio within the next weeks in...
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It's a pity you don't live in Basel, Michael! Our colleague Dr. Michelle Witen is an expert on Joyce, too, and started a 'Finnegans Wake' reading group last semester. Each meeting they manage to read and discuss about one page. So you are absolutely right: "Go slow!" seems to be the appropriate strategy, not only for 'Ulysses' but also for 'Finnegans Wake'......
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
A warm welcome from me to everyone, too! Together with Rahel and Marina I am one of the three mentors of this course. I am very much looking forward to help and support you during this terrific course. Please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question.
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Ania Mauruschat
Dear Kim, nice you joined the course but hurry up, tomorrow it will close down if you don't pay for it. If you want to adress the course in general it might also be better to post a comment on your own, see on top the empty field where it says "Add a comment ...". You now added to a more or less personal threat, so your comment might not get the attention you...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Ania Mauruschat
Thank you, Emily. I also started to work on Week 2 by now and it seems as it is not as demanding anymore as Week 1 was for me.
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
The classes I teach at university are maybe too small to try peer-review without guranteeing that a student can not find out who reviewed his/her text. But I had an interesting experience with this kind of peer-review as a mentor of the Future Learn Course "Literature in the Digital Age" of the University of Basel. The reviews were not anonymous, though....
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Certainly working in small, collaborative groups online can be effective and I hope Nickie is right that it might take more time in the beginning but the timesaving in the future will be a huge pay-off. However, this only holds true for two important prerequisites: It has to be a standardized course, which you will use over and over again, and the technology...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Nickie Sattler
Thanks :-)
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Nickie Sattler
Please, what does BYOB mean? The Glossary doesn't know it and Wikipedia says "Bring You Own Bottle", meaning in this context, I assume: "bring your own devices"?
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
I just would like to express my irritation here, as in the course description it says that this course takes four hours per week:
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/blended-learning-embedding-practice/4
As I am really trying to get out the most from it, I tried to read all texts and watch all videos, post my own comments and read at least a few of the... -
Ania Mauruschat made a comment
This is amazing, terrific! I am very much looking forward to using it.
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
As with all teaching methods in my opinion it is the same with digital learning designs: We certainly can adapt them to our needs, we just need a variety to choose from. A collection of digital learning designs would be nice to have.
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
When and how long they are working on the online task, how they progress and quizzes to see if they understood.
I guess this would be first and foremost interesting for me and my design of further online courses was I would be able to see what might be too easy or too difficult for them, what takes especialy a lot of time and how to deal with this...
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
In my social reading project I demanded from students that they post at least one post a week in our "weekly group discussion" (I was informed via mail about each post) as well as on their own research topic / field of expertise (I could look it up online). Of course I read all of their postings and replyed if necessary or helpful. Additionally to that they...
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
I think it is impressive with how many good points the students come up.
Of course it has to be like this to work as the proper example in the context of this online seminar about blended learning essentials. However, my first attempts to experiment with blended learning did not convince all of my students that much.
This was probably due to two...
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Thank you, Eileen, this is very helpful information! I have been wondering for quite a while and complaing about this but obviously to the wrong persons. Now I understand and won't complain anymore, instead just try to open a link with right-clicking on my mouse. Terrific! You made my day :-)
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Now I am a little bit proud :-) Although, I have to admid, it took me altogether probably 2 - 3 hours including little interruptions. Hope it was worth it...
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Wow, I just added "Turnitin" to the Glossary and learned that Moodle is a "VLF" which is the same as a "LMS". But first and foremost is set up my personal reflective teaching journal at tumblr, here you go:
https://aniaondiscoverytour.tumblr.com/post/161237096231/hi-fellow-learners -
Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Hi there! I am Ania and I am teaching at universities and art schools in Switzerland and Germany. I am very much looking forward to learn here more about how to make blended learning more effective as I see its advantages but find it immensely time-consuming.
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Marc Brik
Marc, I totally agree. I just had a similar experience when I tried to implement on online plattform in my seminar at uni, extremely time consuming. Hope tp learn here how to make it more effective.
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Ania Mauruschat replied to elaine conway
I am very sorry, but I cannot help you, as we are only rseposible for the content. Regarding your inquiry please contact the Future Learn Team via the support button on the right bottom of this website.
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Ania Mauruschat made a comment
Last but not least let me thank you and bid farewell, too. It was a great pleasure to meet so many interesting and interested people from all over the world here in this Future Learn course online. Despite being a mentor, whose task it was to support your learning, I learned a lot from reading your comments and questions. Thank you for sharing your ideas and...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Bethany Taylor
Thank you for your nice feedback, Bethany! Great to know that enjoyed it until the end.
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Ania Mauruschat replied to elaine conway
Thank you for telling us, Elaine and Bethany. Although this is the official policy of Future Learn and also a way of funding this terrific platform and therefore no changes are to be expected, I noted your objections and will report them in our team discussion. However, I hope you will have fond, substantial memories of this course, even without a certificate...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Helen Thomas
Wow, thank you very much for your terrific feedback, Helen. It is of course very nice and motivating to learn about your good experiences with the courses of the University of Basel! Take care and all best, hope to see you around again :-)
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Tara M
Thank you very much for your nice feedback, Tara. It is so great to know how much ispirations you could draw from our Basel course. Would be lovely to see you around again! And regarding the course "Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance" of Monash University: I can highly recommend it. I took it last year and enjoyed it equally as this one! :-)
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Suzanne Conboy-Hill
Thank you for your valuable, detailed and elaborate feedback, Suzanne. We will certainly discuss it. I am glad you stayed until the end, though, and even appreciated this course and profited from it.
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Paul Filipek
Thank you for your nice feedback, Paul, and the terrific suggestion. I will try to convince Prof. Schweighauser and the Future Learn tem, I certainly wouldn’t mind to welcome the current Nobel Literature Laureate amongst us mentors… ;-)
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Valid means "gültig" in German, in the sens of: "McLuhans zentrale Thesen wie 'Das Medium ist die Botschaft', sind heute noch aktuell und gültig."
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Good you are telling us, Jo-Ann. If you would like to do the assignment of 4.6, you do have to write a little, 300 - 500 word long report about your research on "In a Station of the Metro". How to do the research according to our little game is explained here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/2/assignments/120436/submission/new
But you... -
Exactly. That's what Moretti calls "the little pact with the devil" :-) Or as he puts it: "We know how to read texts, now let's learn how not to read them." Distant reading is not concerned with the individual interpretation of one particular narration but with the interpretation of big data which can be gathered about literatary texts. For an example of such...
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Very interesting observation, Noman. Maybe this has to do with a certain German tradition of making-music in the home and a general popularity of the piano, which even lasts until the end of the 1990? But I am not sure, this is just my personal speculation.
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Would you like to elaborate a little bit more on what makes Distant Reading so confusing for you, Jo-Ann? Maybe I can help you with understanding it better.
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If you try "EnglishFiction", probably the results will be differently? Although Proust of course is no English writer... ;-)
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Well, Wikipedia doesn't know any other James Joyce than THE James Joyce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_(name)
It seems you made an interesting observation, for which we cannot easily find an answer. Which corpus did you pick, though? If you chose the category "English", maybe the results from 1820 onwards refered to the two first names James and Joyce... -
Thank you, Jennifer, you are very welcome.
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Alec, here it is quite well explained, how the Google Ngram Viewer works and what the y-axis displays:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
But it seems as if they don't tell you much more about the database and what it consits of. All it says is "a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French")".
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Jennifer Levin
I like your term "collaborative close reading", Jennifer. Yes, I think in some cases it might turn out to be such a "collaborative close reading" but not automatically. Via social reading you of course also can discuss very many different aspects besides the literary features of a text. Unfortunately I am not really an expert on social reading yet and don't...
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Ania Mauruschat replied to Michelle Tucci
Hi Michelle, I just strarted a social reading project in my seminar on "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. We are using the platform Glose.com, although its tools might not be perfectly developed yet, as Bob Stein stated in a more general way. - However, at Glose.com you can register for free and read parts of books for free, too. But to discuss the whole...
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Unfortunately I don't know. But if you would like to have a close look, Clare, you could go to the website of the Stanford Literary Lab, click on "Pamphlets" and scroll down to the very bottom of the page:
https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets/
There you can download the article about the experiment and if you register with your email, you even will get... -
You are welcome, Tara, as I also appreciated your question very much. And I find also Philipp Schweighauser's contribution very inspiring as it explains quite well why postmodernism and new historicists received comprehensive and severe critique, especially by literary schloars coming for a marxist tradition like Terry Eagleton or Fredric Jameson. Maybe it is...
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Sergio, according to the OED "tempo" is a loanword in English since a long time:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tempo -
Hi Tara, thank you for you interesting post, which made me think. I am not sure if one can say that New Historicists see history as “moving in a cyclical pattern”. I presume they see it rather like waves with troughs and peaks. Maybe there are also different tendencies within the movement of New Historicists, unfortunately I simply don’t know. But probably the...
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Yes, Suzanne, sorry for the mistake. And yes, the Bowie example is a good one. Regarding journalism: You are of course right that political and other sorts of journalism reporting about every day matter are supposed to be objective. However, I think is a little bit different in the field of cultural journalism, as there are besides the objective report more...
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Dear Stephane, thank you for your long, very strong and committed reply to Rahel. I also just posted another reply to the last, long thread, addressing your position, too. In case you want to have a look: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/reading-digital/2/comments/21112371
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Maybe we have to be careful not to mix up academic literary critics with journalistic critics? Although, having a background in journalism myself, I can understand why opinion and subjectivity are so important for a journalistic book review or journalistic approach to a literary topic. Last but not least: When I read your statement, Suzanne, that “subjectivity...
