project check-in, group e

Group E, Monster: Harris, Dylan, Tiffany

WHAT: The current intention is to first collect a number of court room transcripts from hearings where black and/or latino kids (may not limit to juveniles) are being charged, then collect transcripts of hearings where white kids are being charged with similar crimes. The aim is to evaluate the language that is used by the prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges; and to make note of any similarities and potential differences in the language used to address and describe the white kids on trial and the black/latino kids on trial. We would theoretically post each compared transcript, side by side, on a website with minimal design (possibly just a solid colored background). We may caption each pair of cases with a comparison of the language used, but have not determined if that would dissipate the intended effect.

WHY: In Monster, our protagonist is a black male that is, with the other men he is arrested with, labeled a “monster” by the prosecution. We, as readers, however, have insight into the life of our young protagonist, and are moved to sympathize with him. Although his lawyer successfully defends him, she is suspicious of her client and refuses to celebrate his win with him.

A black male who goes into trial does not enter the court room as himself, the individual–he enters with all the biases, stereotypes, and judgements that precede him. Prosecutors need only use a handful of words, insinuations, and allusions to win their case. Fear, ignorance, and conditioning of the American people do the rest of the job. Language, which is taught and learned, is the foundation of our understanding of the world, and while we as a group (Group E) have not yet sought out any of the transcripts we would potentially use, we are confident we will find stark contrasts in the lingual treatment of minorities and white defendant. Access is a most important factor of education, and we feel that compiling these transcripts so that they are easily accessible can only serve as a positive addition to any viewer’s self-education.

I really like this idea of bringing in the court transcripts and trying to explore how language works and how it shapes ideas about person, adult, child, innocence, good, and bad in ways that are raced, classed, and gendered.

I have a mix of logistical and conceptual questions/thoughts:

-ON THE TRANSCRIPTS: How many court transcripts are you thinking of looking at? Will you narrow your search to those in NYC jurisdiction? Will you have any other way of deciding which transcripts to look at? (Only black males? Only black males in high school? Only black males in high school from Harlem?) Have you already tried accessing these materials? It’s amazing idea, but you need to act now so you know how easy or not easy it is to access the material. Also while I have no doubt the transcripts will yield some seriously interesting rhetorical ways of handling race, particularly blackness, and our ideas of criminality and monstrosity, you need to remember that the Wilson transcript I assigned and told you exactly what part of the transcript to focus on. And Monster, which is also assigned, is fictional and Myers crafted all the words so as to signify around particular themes and questions. My point is that you didn’t have to work to hard to get to the part that resonates with your interest and concerns. There will be no such curating when you go looking for transcripts. You’ll have to direct your own search, which means you’ll also have to read the whole thing to see what if any part of the transcript fits with the comparisons you’re trying to make. Let me be clear, I think the idea is totally possible. I just think it’s the kind of thing where you need to spend the next week aggressively trying to find transcripts that might work. If after a week you’ve looked at 20 or so transcripts in the demographic area you think should best put you in conversation with Monster and with the Wilson transcript, you want to assess where you’re at. Have you found three or four examples that are perfect? Have you found 15?! Have you found only one one? or none? Or have you found things you think work but you’re not sure how? In the case of the latter you might send me an example and tell me what you think the relation is but where you think there might be a stretch. I can help you weigh in. If you find 3-5 perfect examples out of twenty, then you might choose to highlight large sections of those transcripts. Meaning, you might think of yourself as creating profiles or portraits with the transcripts that you will put into conversation with each other. If you find that over half of the 20 speak to what you’re getting at, you might consider a form that allows you to bring really small and focused quotes from a lot of examples so that the thrust of your point is made in part by the number of examples.

If you’re not finding anything at all, then you will need to regroup and maybe rethink what you will do.

AUDIENCE and OBJECTIVE
Who is your audience? Young people? Law makers? People in solidarity? Teachers who teach Monster in the classroom?

Similarly what is your specific objective? I understand that you want to initiate a dialogue of sorts between the language in one text and the language in another, and that the dialogue you’re interested in emphasizing revolves around the construction of race, personhood, and criminality in legal narrative/record. But is your project about the novel Monster and how it resonates with what’s continues to go on today?
Are you trying to make a kind of radical interpretative claim for students reading this book that there’s nothing fiction about it or rather that it’s a fiction that’s not contained to the novel but which is actively at work in legal record and jurisprudence decisions that determine the lives of so many people? OR are you trying to make a less (though not necessarily un-) political pedagogical effort to give documentary contextualization for the novel for students to think about the ways in which the novel is engaged with political cultural realities of it’s late 20th century moment and continues to be engaged with those of the early 21st century.

Or perhaps your goal here isn’t really to think about Monster per say. Perhaps your goal is to think about how what happens in the Wilson transcript is an everyday happening in NYC courts, and you use the novel here as a kind of tool for reflection afterwards by pointing out how Myers engages these dynamics?

ON ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSCRIPTS
I like the idea that you want to create a form/forum in which the highlighting of the transcript section and the side by side comparison speaks a lot on it’s own. However, I think that you will need to do more in the way of analysis. How you do so might depend on the audience and objective. If you are aiming your project towards students and/or your goal is to instruct in the ways in which the language of legal record constructs black peoples in certain ways then you may very well need captions. Or you might need an “about” page that explains what’s going on, and then either as part of your “about” page or as a separate page, you need to walk your viewers through the side by side analysis and the conclusions/interpretive claims you’re asking them to take note. If you’re really trying to instruct, you might have one that you do in a detailed way, and then another one where you invite your viewers to engage in a similar kind of analysis, which you would then follow up with either a discussion page, or a post.

Now if your purpose is less to instruct and more to bring attention to and to insight alarm or indignation so as to promote action, then you might not need all the teaching aspects, but you might still need to highlight certain passages with a color code to help draw people’s attention to your point. You will still need some “about” page even if you don’t intend for viewers to start there. You might also want to include a page with reading lists and activist groups that viewers who do want to act in some way have a starting point.

Lastly (at least for now), web pages are not in and of themselves engaging a community. There are all kinds of online site with no traffic, so just putting your project on the web isn’t enough. You need to get out news about that page and generate some traffic. Ways you can make sure you’re doing that (and that I know): circulate the link (preferably with an enticing thumbnail) on social media. Include some sort of section for comments and posts for people who visit the page, which will make a record and hopefully start a productive dialogue.

If you’re not online/social media savvy, the other option is to use the online creation as a tool for in person lecture or workshop or installation. That is to say while you put the materials on line in a provocative way that you hope engages a random viewer, you actively focus your engagement with people you’re interacting with face to face. For this option, you would need some sort of general script or plan for how you would engage the particular face to face audience you choose.

One thought on “project check-in, group e”

ACurseen says:

April 25, 2017 at 12:34 pm

I really like this idea of bringing in the court transcripts and trying to explore how language works and how it shapes ideas about person, adult, child, innocence, good, and bad in ways that are raced, classed, and gendered.

I have a mix of logistical and conceptual questions/thoughts:

-ON THE TRANSCRIPTS: How many court transcripts are you thinking of looking at? Will you narrow your search to those in NYC jurisdiction? Will you have any other way of deciding which transcripts to look at? (Only black males? Only black males in high school? Only black males in high school from Harlem?) Have you already tried accessing these materials? It’s amazing idea, but you need to act now so you know how easy or not easy it is to access the material. Also while I have no doubt the transcripts will yield some seriously interesting rhetorical ways of handling race, particularly blackness, and our ideas of criminality and monstrosity, you need to remember that the Wilson transcript I assigned and told you exactly what part of the transcript to focus on. And Monster, which is also assigned, is fictional and Myers crafted all the words so as to signify around particular themes and questions. My point is that you didn’t have to work to hard to get to the part that resonates with your interest and concerns. There will be no such curating when you go looking for transcripts. You’ll have to direct your own search, which means you’ll also have to read the whole thing to see what if any part of the transcript fits with the comparisons you’re trying to make. Let me be clear, I think the idea is totally possible. I just think it’s the kind of thing where you need to spend the next week aggressively trying to find transcripts that might work. If after a week you’ve looked at 20 or so transcripts in the demographic area you think should best put you in conversation with Monster and with the Wilson transcript, you want to assess where you’re at. Have you found three or four examples that are perfect? Have you found 15?! Have you found only one one? or none? Or have you found things you think work but you’re not sure how? In the case of the latter you might send me an example and tell me what you think the relation is but where you think there might be a stretch. I can help you weigh in. If you find 3-5 perfect examples out of twenty, then you might choose to highlight large sections of those transcripts. Meaning, you might think of yourself as creating profiles or portraits with the transcripts that you will put into conversation with each other. If you find that over half of the 20 speak to what you’re getting at, you might consider a form that allows you to bring really small and focused quotes from a lot of examples so that the thrust of your point is made in part by the number of examples.

If you’re not finding anything at all, then you will need to regroup and maybe rethink what you will do.

AUDIENCE and OBJECTIVE
Who is your audience? Young people? Law makers? People in solidarity? Teachers who teach Monster in the classroom?

Similarly what is your specific objective? I understand that you want to initiate a dialogue of sorts between the language in one text and the language in another, and that the dialogue you’re interested in emphasizing revolves around the construction of race, personhood, and criminality in legal narrative/record. But is your project about the novel Monster and how it resonates with what’s continues to go on today?
Are you trying to make a kind of radical interpretative claim for students reading this book that there’s nothing fiction about it or rather that it’s a fiction that’s not contained to the novel but which is actively at work in legal record and jurisprudence decisions that determine the lives of so many people? OR are you trying to make a less (though not necessarily un-) political pedagogical effort to give documentary contextualization for the novel for students to think about the ways in which the novel is engaged with political cultural realities of it’s late 20th century moment and continues to be engaged with those of the early 21st century.

Or perhaps your goal here isn’t really to think about Monster per say. Perhaps your goal is to think about how what happens in the Wilson transcript is an everyday happening in NYC courts, and you use the novel here as a kind of tool for reflection afterwards by pointing out how Myers engages these dynamics?

ON ANALYSIS OF THE TRANSCRIPTS
I like the idea that you want to create a form/forum in which the highlighting of the transcript section and the side by side comparison speaks a lot on it’s own. However, I think that you will need to do more in the way of analysis. How you do so might depend on the audience and objective. If you are aiming your project towards students and/or your goal is to instruct in the ways in which the language of legal record constructs black peoples in certain ways then you may very well need captions. Or you might need an “about” page that explains what’s going on, and then either as part of your “about” page or as a separate page, you need to walk your viewers through the side by side analysis and the conclusions/interpretive claims you’re asking them to take note. If you’re really trying to instruct, you might have one that you do in a detailed way, and then another one where you invite your viewers to engage in a similar kind of analysis, which you would then follow up with either a discussion page, or a post.

Now if your purpose is less to instruct and more to bring attention to and to insight alarm or indignation so as to promote action, then you might not need all the teaching aspects, but you might still need to highlight certain passages with a color code to help draw people’s attention to your point. You will still need some “about” page even if you don’t intend for viewers to start there. You might also want to include a page with reading lists and activist groups that viewers who do want to act in some way have a starting point.

Lastly (at least for now), web pages are not in and of themselves engaging a community. There are all kinds of online site with no traffic, so just putting your project on the web isn’t enough. You need to get out news about that page and generate some traffic. Ways you can make sure you’re doing that (and that I know): circulate the link (preferably with an enticing thumbnail) on social media. Include some sort of section for comments and posts for people who visit the page, which will make a record and hopefully start a productive dialogue.

If you’re not online/social media savvy, the other option is to use the online creation as a tool for in person lecture or workshop or installation. That is to say while you put the materials on line in a provocative way that you hope engages a random viewer, you actively focus your engagement with people you’re interacting with face to face. For this option, you would need some sort of general script or plan for how you would engage the particular face to face audience you choose.

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