Today, as I sit here to reflect on my entire Rhetorical experience with Professor Hayden, and explain my knew found knowledge, I want to acknowledge how my ability to view materials and events has expanded, along with a new found perspective. Currently, I am working on several projects, for several classes, at CUNY Hunter College . One is for my Rhetoric course where I am making a digital archive! This is super exciting, words can’t even describe how awesome it is; but I’ll try. The way this works is by you (well me; I’m just explaining the methodology), the archivist (yes, I am an archivist because I am creating my own archive; my insides are scretching Hooray!) deciding what you want the world to know. As simple as it sounds, it is actually quite important because I am the one who must acquire adequate information to present to the world. In the archive that I am constructing, I am using my rhetorical mindset to have my viewers learn about gender norms that exist in society and evaluate their consistency and lack thereof. The heart of this information will be elaborated through the interviewing of teachers from P.S. 25 Bilingual School located in the Bronx. The method in the interview is to inform the world about student development and how, as children grow, act in an uncommon behavior in aspect to their gender. My class has allowed me to create and feel confident enough, to make my own digital archive.
Another class of mine, was an education course on social foundations where we discussed readings and evaluated and criticized their importance. One reading by Blickenstaff, Jacob Clark. “Women and Science Careers: Leaky Pipeline or Gender Filter?” really upset me. I, being the rhetorician, viewed his narrative from an outside perspective, and instead of looking at the information and it’s content, I looked at how he presented and worded his information. During this class discussion I express how biased his entire research sounded and the instructor didn’t want to hear it and neither did the class. The instructor had the power and rhetor to keep the class discussion on her viewpoint and perspective. From this experience I could physically see how some rhetor has more power than others.
The blog post prior to this one, Hmm…So what exactly can one find in an archive? was about my discoveries at the Berg Collection at NYPL. This experience is highlighted throughout the entry and my favorite aspect of the cat paw letter opener that belong to Charles Dickens, is also elaborated on. The point of the blog is for you, the viewer, to learn about how life-like an archive hall/room really is, versus how it appears on the TV screen. The experience at the Berg Collection has given me a deeper perspective on how information can be represented and also physically see how important materials can be, based on the rules that visitors must comply with in order to enter the archive; rule is to not touch material or take photographs.
Now, since we are going backwards, the blog before going to the Berg Collection was related to guest speakers who came to our class to essentially be rhetorical with us. Traveling through time and space with Padgett and Hayden is a blog where I wrote about how I have learned from my professor, Hayden, and how the guest speaker Padgett, a former student has also learned from her as well. In my blog I use my rhetorical abilities to plunge my favorite TV show Doctor Who into the talk about my experience with the guest speakers. Throughout the blog I am rambling with excitement on how similar I was to Padgett who had learned from my professor and then I divert to talking about what I liked about the guest speaker. It might not seem like a rhetorical learning experience but that is where the tricky part comes in. Throughout my writing I am getting the viewer, you, to enter into my whirlpool of looking at time and is overlapping tendencies. Not only do I get you to think like me in my writing, which is a rhetorical action, I also get your curiosity going by relating my method of archival research to Padgetts, addressing how similar our styles of research may be. I also leave the reader a hook and desire to find these similarities by providing a link to our archival methodologies.
As you have probably guessed, the blog before this is my archival methodology, The Inclusion of God in Literature where I discuss my time spent at the Hunter Archives and Special collections. At first I start to dwell on all my emotions from the start of this course to explaining what I found in Muriel Fuller’s archive. What I found was the impact God had in her time period through the literature and multiple bibles Muriel had in her possession. Through this experience is where I started understanding how to be a rhetorician and also how to explore the mindset of the archivist and that of Muriel Fuller. I viewed Muriel Fuller’s documents to see what she was like and then by viewing the archive on Muriel Fuller, witnessed first hand how the archivist decided to to categorize and place her content.
The very beginning of my confusion portrayed in blog number one, How can a Captain be a celebrity, Cook? (Play on words with Captain Cook) is my first time ever exploring archives. I had no idea what I was doing and spent an hour or more talking on the phone with a classmate in order to figure out what I had to do with the assignment. I was frantic about finding my question for research. In the blog I explore how my learning on archives and research started to grow, like a seed grows into a tree at stage one, watering. I had to learn what compromise was in researching and looking at what I have found, and not dwell on what I haven’t found. I needed to take what my digital archive presented to me and make some understanding out of it. I did just that, and this blog on the celebrity captain is what resulted from my ability to comprise. Now, just because I was able to complete the assignment does not mean that I understood how to view a digital archive, that came later in the course, nor did the blog completion reflect that I did the assignment correctly, which is why I met with Professor Hayden. In this meeting that has only been discussed here, I questioned the professor about the assignment and whether or not I completed it correctly. Apparently I did understand because I had earned a very good grade along with words of advice about not overthinking. I was informed that I was understanding, “You’re doing Good” Hayden said. This made me really happy because I thought I was lost when according to my professor I was actually being rhetorically correct! That was my biggest challenge in the class, contemplating whether or not I understood the course content and assignments.
I applaud you if you have read this far in my rhetorical experience. I’d like to leave you with some last comments. Exploring archives can be very time consuming and most likely you won’t find what you’re exactly looking for, regardless of the type of archive you view and how many times you search. What the archive holds is exactly what that archive holds and that’s just the way it is. The archive cannot give you information on what it does not contain. Yet, if you are a rhetorician and in the process of becoming one, you have the ability to use what the archive has provided to you and construct your personal theory and outlook on the material. You as the rhetorician can create something from what you might have thought was nothing. It is a very enlightening experience. I also wrote about this type of researching in my essay Find the Hunter With, here you can learn about how to research within an archive. I strongly suggest learning how to be a rhetorician and how to use archives. You’ll definitely benefit greatly. You will see the world from other life experiences, through their ideas and also you yourself will develop an entirely new way of viewing the world and literature/information.
Archival Research and Rhetoric: Undergraduate REflections 