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ERIC Number: EJ937275
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011
Pages: 23
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0730-3238
EISSN: N/A
Ceremony Earth: Digitizing Silko's Novel for Students of the Twenty-First Century
Mott, Rick
Studies in American Indian Literatures, v23 n2 p25-47 Sum 2011
Many students the author has taught get frustrated when they read Leslie Silko's canonical Native American novel, "Ceremony". Not only do they struggle with Silko's disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, but they also struggle with the novel's geographic and cultural location. To help students better understand the novel, the author offers them a variety of multimedia artifacts, including video, audio, static images, 360-degree panoramas, and traditional texts. Because "Ceremony" is so integrally connected with landscape and location, he uses Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to attach these artifacts to specific geographic locations that correspond to places and events in "Ceremony". Students open these files--which the author has collectively called "Ceremony Earth"--in any geobrowser, the most popular of which is "Google Earth". In this essay the author provides background and context for this location-based multimedia project, including reasons why digital literary artifacts attached to specific geographic points on geobrowsers are so appropriate for teaching "Ceremony". In doing so, the author investigates the Puebloan webs of meaning inherent in "Ceremony's" spatial organization, all of which originate in the location-based discourse of Laguna cultural conventions. Treating digital pedagogy as a mash-up (a mix of different elements), the author also discusses students' development of a secondary literacy as they learn about the protagonist and his reconnection with the landscape, which plays an essential role in his process of healing. After describing the purpose and function of geobrowsers in general and "Google Earth" in particular, the author lays down some of the structural building blocks upon which "Ceremony Earth" has been designed and constructed, including an overview of KML. Finally, he provides an overview of the materials available on "Ceremony Earth". (Contains 11 figures and 6 notes.)
University of Nebraska Press. 1111 Lincoln Mall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0630. Tel: 800-755-1105; Fax: 800-526-2617; e-mail: presswebmail@unl.edu; Web site: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/catalog/categoryinfo.aspx?cid=163
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: New Mexico
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A