This spring, DTLT is kicking off a project called “Texts that Matter.” TtM will invite faculty, students, and staff to record texts in the public domain that they have found intellectually inspiring. Each audio recording will be contributed back to the Librivox project, an initiative aimed at “freeing” texts in the public domain so that more people can listen, reflect upon, and enjoy them.
Through the end January, we’re inviting any member of the UMW community to visit the TtM site at texts.umwblogs.org. After enough volunteers have signed up to start collecting and contributing recordings, we’ll be in touch with volunteers with instructions about how to participate.
In addition to the recordings, we’re asking each participant to write a brief reflection on the text they chose–sharing their own insights into why this text was important to them intellectually.
We hope this project will become the nexus of a conversation about who we are as a teaching and learning community, and a place where we can share our common inspirations and explore new sources of inspiration together.
TtM was inspired, in part, by the amazing work of Marie McAllister and her students at Eighteenth Century Audio. Recognizing that students studying 300-year-old poetry often needed to hear the text in order to really understand it, Marie has worked diligently to collect audio recordings from around the Web as a resource for her students and any eighteenth century scholars. Over the years, Marie’s students have also contributed their own recordings to the collection.
More information about the Texts that Matter project can be found at texts.umwblogs.org.
