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0:00 Olivia: CAMPPFire Stories is a documentation of the work of members of the Collective to Advance Multimodal Participatory Publishing, or CAMPP, at the end of a three year incubation period at the University of Colorado Boulder. CAMPP’s mission promotes faculty and student curation, cultivation, co-creation, and publication of knowledge. Under this umbrella, members developed and published various projects that meet academic standards and are open and accessible to the community at large. These audio recordings contain first hand accounts from CAMPP and community members about their projects and their experiences throughout this period of development.

0:39 Catherine: In this episode, we will hear from Rachael Deagman Simonetta and Melanie Lo on Their work on the Shakespeare CoLab, an open online database of fully annotated Shakespearian texts "Dr. Melanie Lo is a cofounder and former Pedagogy Director of the Shakespeare CoLab. She received her PhD from the Department of English at CU Boulder, where she subsequently served as an instructor teaching literature, writing, and gender studies. Dr. Lo currently works as a curriculum developer and higher-ed learning design specialist for Wix.com. Rachael Deagman Simonetta is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Division of Continuing Education at CU Boulder. She oversees the Shakespeare CoLab: a digital learning environment for Shakespeare Studies.

1:31 Catherine: So thank you again Rachael and Melanie for coming to re-record this. What we're doing is we are documenting CAMPP stories from the CAMPP faculty, so we're just gonna dive straight in with question number one. Let's begin at the beginning: how did the Shakespeare CoLab start?

1:47 Rachael: Well thank you for hosting us Catherine and thanks for being here Melanie. So in 2016 Katherine Eggert and I applied to participate in an NIH funded pedagogy workshop at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC that was aimed at leveraging technology to teach Shakespeare to undergraduates, and after finishing the workshop with faculty from across the US the participants returned to their schools and started to work on their proposals. Our idea was to create a learning environment that's dedicated to Shakespeare studies, so a place where undergrads could learn to do the work we do as humanists and a place where they could also share their research and writing beyond the classroom and our goal when we set out was to create a true CoLab, and we are kind of playing with that word, so a collaborative work environment that also could take place in a humanities lab in Colorado in an active learning hands on space. So we put together a vertically integrated team, and what I mean by that is a team that included faculty, PhD candidates, masters students in the MA program, and also undergraduate teams. And we had two PhD team leads, Nodin De Saillan who was in charge of technology and Melanie Lo who is here who took the pedagogy and curriculum lead and so Nodin set out to work on choosing a platform for and worked on transferring the Folger digital text to our platform and Melanie developed the vision for pedagogy and she was in charge of the curriculum and so the CoLab was born and Melanie began her work.

3:30 Melanie: Exactly, thank you guys so much for having me here to talk about the CoLab, a project so near and dear to my heart and to kind of I guess build off of Rachael's description of our origin story, really where this started was an extremely ambitious idea to create scholarly editions of William Shakespeare's plays with undergraduates leading the way, with undergraduates being you know the people who were researching, creating the scholarship, and also figuring out ways to house those plays and their scholarship online. So that's really where I think a big heart and soul of the CoLab comes in, this model of collaboration that we developed. However the model also as I just described that, originated in a super lofty ambitious goal and so to create actual learning material around that, to ensure that you know undergraduates all are also learning what they're supposed to learn, we implemented a model known as backward design, meaning that starting from our big amazing head in the clouds idea we charted the outcomes that students would need to achieve along the way to actually get to that point of making both scholarly editing and web creation possible and then that, what evolved from that was creating assignments that met those outcomes. Now I could be biased because I did a lot of work creating these assignments, but to me they are kind of true master strokes and major achievements of the CoLab because of course while we were trying to facilitate this really innovative and interesting digital humanities work in the undergraduate classroom what we were actually doing was quite conventional in the realm of literary study. But it was the way that we were doing it that I think is so interesting and that produced such great results for students. Basically what we had to ask ourselves were what are the practices that we ourselves as literary scholars do all the time that maybe we're not even thinking consciously about when we're teaching students how to conduct literary study and how to study Shakespeare. This included practices like etymology, and tracing the history of words in their meaning, the work of using a digital archive if you don't have access to a physical archive to conduct comparative textual research, or even you know getting into images and performance analysis, the sort of more tactile evidence of Shakespeare's plays and how they've lived throughout time. So as a result of this we've created a series of assignments through which students received a very like scaffolded, very you know step by step immersion into the practices of literary scholarship and as a result they were able to apply this really robust set of tools, essentially a literary scholarship toolkit, to the digital humanities work that they went on to do in our courses.

6:37 Catherine: Why did you choose Shakespeare?

6:41 Melanie: Great question.

6:41 Rachael: So good question because there are so many texts that we could have engaged.

6:45 Melanie: Exactly.

6:46 Rachael: So I guess the simple answer is that we both specialize in early literature, so medieval and early modern studies, and CU has a robust Shakespeare community, so we have Kevin Rich in theater, we have three early modernist research faculty in the english department, CU has Coursera Mooc, which is a massive open online course that focuses on Twelfth Night and also an applied Shakespeare graduate certificate. So I think it made sense with the robust community and for us too it made sense to involve our students and there was also a demand at the time, the Shakespeare for non majors class was really popular.

7:29 Melanie: Absolutely and I could of course Catherine give a sort of selfish answer to this question and say like, well Shakespeare was the only thing I thought about for like six years because I was writing a dissertation on it, but more importantly the CoLab was also founded at this time in higher ed and kind of in like you know I guess US, UK culture as a whole where we all had Shakespeare on the brain so to speak. The project was founded in 2016 which also coincided with the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death, he died in 1616, so there was sort of this historical moment, and in an effort to collaborate it the Folger Shakespeare Library organized both the micro grant that Rachael talked about at the beginning but also what they called a First Folio Tour. And what I mean by that is they took a almost four hundred year old copy of Shakespeare's first collected edition of plays and toured it around the US like a rock band or Taylor Swift or something, and so it stopped in every state. It was this huge deal, it would stop at some of the most famous museums and institutions of higher learning and CU Boulder was the place where it stopped in Colorado, and so again at this sort of moment of Shakespeare being on the brain it got many of us thinking about these issues of you know text circulation, publication history, and even more basic question of like why are crowds of people turning out to look at this four hundred year old book object? Like why does this matter so much? So this kind of moment also I think led us to these questions about accessibility and the subject matter we were teaching our undergraduates and Rachael will talk more about this, but you know the fact that we all knew that Shakespeare is notoriously difficult to teach because students find both the language and the history and the culture inaccessible, it's so far away from our own moment. So at a moment when everybody was kind of more in tune with Shakespeare for whatever reason we saw it as a chance to rethink how we were teaching and why we were teaching this material to our students.

9:52 Catherine: What were some challenges you faced, and what were some accomplishments?

9:57 Rachael: Well I think that I'll let Melanie talk more about the challenges with teaching Shakespeare as the expert in that area. It's hard, it's really hard, and it's hard enough to do it in person but we were also trying to do it online, and this was actually before COVID so we were designing assignments that would work in an asynchronous environment. And so I would say in general I think our biggest challenge was figuring out technology, figuring out how to teach in person, how to teach an asynchronous course, and to make sure that students were engaging. I think as Melanie just mentioned we also encounter challenges around accessibility. I didn't know much about web design when we started out and so one of the things that I really hadn't thought about at all was some of the accessibility issues that we would come across, and when I talk about accessibility there are like standards that need to be met for a website to be accessible, and the digital accessibility office, Laura Hamrick and Anna Reid, were incredibly generous with their time, and educating us, and helping us to identify some of the problems with the play text that we were using, and then also helped us to identify some ways to make our version of the play more accessible. So we were specifically focused on screen readers, and I didn't know how to, for example, address an issue where there's a character's name in a play, let's say we're talking about Duke Orsino. And so normally when you're reading a play you'll see Duke Orsino in boldface and so you know, that's the character speaking, and sometimes the first word out of Duke Orsino’s mouth will be another character's name, so Olivia. What didn't occur to me until we were sitting in the digital accessibility office with Laura and Anna was what a screen reader is going to do when it reads that, which is going to be “Duke Orsino: Olivia,” and it becomes really confusing. So there are ways to improve the accessibility of the text which we had advice on and we have now been able to go back and implement, so we really had to go back and revise our work several times to kind of overhaul the site so that it would be accessible to all users.

12:20 Melanie: Yeah and I'll continue on that thread with technology, because of course with this project being as it is both a digital humanities project but also a pedagogy project you have challenges both, you know, within the realm of teaching and tech, so I'll just kind of finish with the technology issues. Choosing a platform on which to house this creation of ours sounded like the easiest first step in the world and proved to be the most incomprehensible difficulty. It just, it was maddening, it still irritates me to this day that you know we considered three or four different options, we all had this idea of what a, you know, digital edition online should look like, but for some reason we could not communicate our vision to any tech platform. Which also was a learning experience for myself and for Rachael, was learning how to communicate you know across the spaces, like we just lived in the world of the humanities and an english department and we did have to learn and I think that this has benefited us so much, how to you know speak the language of people in the computer sciences and to learn the language of accessibility and really get ourselves into that world so we could communicate our needs. But eventually we found Wordpress and made it work for us, so a delightful problem solved there and I think that you know other technology issues such as you know finding our source text, and then encoding that and working with and modifying code, but then transferring that sort of into the realm of teaching and pedagogy, a kind of real sticking point for myself was always the fact that we were doing this project with non english majors. And to me that was where the real sort of I think heft of the project came in, or like what something that gave it so much strength and that makes it matter so much is that we're asking, you know, business majors and biochem majors and engineering students, people all across the University of Colorado who have vastly different interests and areas of concern to participate in this project. And so to do that we really did have to think creatively about our teaching and think about how our students were coming to the material and create those assignments and those opportunities for students again to connect with Shakespeare despite all of those roadblocks and things that actually make us disconnect from it so easily. And so again I think that's where the assignments come in, is that they're designed you know for non traditional learning environments. Of course you know after COVID I guess learning online is a traditional learning environment now, at the time it wasn't, but, and hence, you know, anyway, but, of course, and also you know asking students who are not the students people would think of when they think of, oh a Shakespeare digital humanities project, you know, really empowering them to engage with the material on their own terms, which I think led to the richness of scholarship our students produced. And so I think yeah Rachael if you want to now take over so we can focus on the accomplishments which is always fun, yeah.

15:45 Rachael: Yes yeah I think you were transitioning us there and I think actually I have a lot of overlap with you in terms of describing accomplishments. So I love what you were saying earlier about one of the challenges was wedding traditional literary study with digital work and how we had to learn to speak new languages and so engaging in language acquisition I think both in terms of us learning HTML, us learning TEI which is short for the text encoding initiative, I think these are examples of us learning to speak languages that we didn't know before, and then in turn teaching these languages to our students as a way to really break down silos. And so I think a big accomplishment was just educating ourselves about first of all the fact that TEI existed and that it's you know and then learning about what it is it's a community of practice that develops basically standards for how to represent text using XML, so they use XML to create and then also to mark up machine readable texts, and so venturing into that I think was a big accomplishment, and then as you were saying we started to teach a little bit of technology in an asynchronous online environment which for me was new, I hadn't ventured into that yet.

17:06 Melanie: Yeah absolutely and kind of tying up accomplishments I have to say this is somebody who had a relatively expand like in depth digital humanities experience just from graduate school, we launched our website in less than a year, which back in the day was unheard of actually for most digital humanities projects. So you know, while we had the like growing pains and learning pains of finding a platform and understanding the technology, this is really where our colleague Nodin De Saillan shone forth and why he was such a brilliant collaborator for us. We basically began building the site in the spring of 2017, so we had a year to develop the pedagogy model, get that running in our courses, and then we turned our attention really in depth to tech and by October of 2017 we launched our website. Which is incredible and was incredible for us as graduate students because we had an actual product to showcase when we would you know go on job interviews and you know showcase our research and do these things we could point to something that lived online, which is a huge thing. And I just cannot, I think, talk enough so I will censor myself slightly about the amazing work our undergraduates produced. One example that just, it just lives with me forever because it's so incredible, was a biochemistry student of mine who developed a fascination with twins in Shakespeare's plays, which how could you not? I think he also is just captivated the idea that Shakespeare himself had twins, and so he just really loved this sort of biographical connection to them, the dramas themselves, and so from his you know science and you know medical focus background he just dove into the early modern medical discourse such as it existed at the time surrounding twins. And so he did all of this incredible work in terms of the history of language, in terms of medical history, looking at these super old what I guess we would call medical textbooks but they're not really that they're all sorts of different things, and just like learning you know what early modern people thought about twins, thought about childbirth, thought about you know women's health like such as it existed at the time. And so it just became this incredibly rich and in depth project, and now all of those annotations live in our digital edition of Twelfth Night, images that were sourced from the medical books. He looked at all of these really interesting and sometimes weird quotes about women's health and you know childbirth and things, but just again something that as you're reading your textbook of Shakespeare like you'll see a footnote that says like, oh people thought this about twins and it's like, neato, moving on, if you even read that footnote, but what the student created was this, you know, when you click on it a whole new world of information opens up for you, and it was rooted in something that he was already like studying and was interested in but also a way in which the text personally touched him, where he just thought it was so cool that it's like Shakespeare had twins, there's twins in this play, like let's get into it and out of that produced just an incredible scholarly project.

20:34 Catherine: That is super interesting how in depth that gets but,

20:39 Melanie: Exactly oh there are wormholes as well but that's what's fun about it.

20:45 Catherine: I am gonna bring it back a little bit, how did the Shakespeare CoLab lead to CAMPP?

20:51 Melanie: Excellent so I guess Rachael I could, I can close us out with the Shakespeare CoLab part.

20:55 Rachael: Okay.

20:56 Melanie: Since Rachael and I had a really unique and wonderful opportunity to team teach a course in the english department in the spring of 2019, that's when it was, and so this class was focused on basically integrating literary study and the data sciences and teaching english majors how to conduct data science and data analysis approaches on literature, which was a learning experience for everyone involved and a really wonderful one at that. Rachael and I had this I think at the time maybe unformed idea to teach TEI, the text encoding initiative, as part of this course, which was an again as I said an unformed idea, but from it what we learned was first of all how to even begin the process of introducing the TEI practice and system to students, you know giving them the basics of how do you represent you know the structure and all of the features of a book or a play or a poem. Rachael's previous example of the character you know speech prefect Duke Orsino in Shakespeare is a perfect example, so we just had them apply it to sonnets. We asked students to use sort of some basic tools for you know TEI encoding and they had to encode and mark up a sonnet and it went much better than we expected and actually produced some of the single best close readings of poetry that any of us had seen in quite some time, and so it was great, but what we also realized was that we had no idea what we were talking about when we were talking about TEI and you know XML markup and so out of that, Rachael stuck with it, I promptly abandoned ship, but Rachael stuck with it, and then this evolved into her pursuing the opportunities with CAMPP.

23:06 Rachael: And so Melanie I think should take a little more credit for helping me to realize, as you say, that this was not fully formed and helping me to realize that in fact this topic does not belong in a data science class, that it belongs in its own class, and then helping me to link back to the first folio and textual transmission and editing and publishing and some of the early thoughts that we had about that was really driving our project with the CoLab to begin with. And so she helped me to realize that what we needed to do was come up with a longer term goal that was to create a digital editions and web publishing class, and we talked quite a bit about how that class would look, and this was kind of our pipe dream at the time, someday we'll teach this wonderful class, we'll create it and all of this will come together in this beautiful model where students can learn about the history of editing and publishing and they can read Shakespeare's plays and then they can annotate and then they can make their own editions. Melanie has extensive background in this subject, she's a specialist, and she even was able to lend me some books so that I could kind of start thinking about what that might look like in the future. But at the point, it was at that point, it was kind of a pipe dream, and then at the same time ASSETT was running the advertisement for the innovation incubator, so they were inviting faculty to think about innovative ways to use technology in the classroom, and I thought that it sounded pretty interesting, and so when I applied I was actually thinking more about creating online learning modules for the digital humanities, so using the CoLab as an example. And in the back of my head I kind of had this editing and publishing thing going on but I really was more interested in what online learning modules might look like and how we might leverage some of the work that we were doing with the CoLab and also with this kind of nascent data science class into artifacts that faculty could use in their own classes.

25:11 Catherine: So how did CAMPP begin for you?

25:15 Rachael: It was so weird, I had no idea what was going on to be honest. I mean I remember that I applied and that I was put into this team which did not yet have a name, and it was not entirely clear what we were doing, and I remember even thinking about whether or not I wanted to commit to this kind of three year project with all this collective work. And I think part of it was that I tend to think I mean I think this relates back to what Melanie was saying earlier on about backward design in my teaching, and I think just in my life I tend to try to think about outcomes before I start building things and it was not entirely clear what the outcome was going to be, and so I was a little bit uncomfortable and not sure about what we were up to, but then as the conversation started to happen I think what I began to recognize was that our various projects really do, I mean they stand individually which I think is neat, and I think that we do each project has a unique aspect but then also I started to see how our various projects intersect and they overlap and many of us are using technology and we're leveraging it to teach students how to publish and how to research, how to research, how to publish, and then how to share that work I think beyond just the bounds of the classroom and beyond the bounds of the university.

26:39 Catherine: When you first set off, what were you expecting?

26:43 Rachael: I don't think I was expecting anything. I was hoping that maybe I could address some of the CoLab challenges, so at that point thanks to Melanie our pedagogical model was up and running and I felt pretty good about the assignments because we had taught quite a bit of Shakespeare and we had worked on those assignments and had gone back and revised them, and I thought that that end of the CoLab was really functioning well. I felt a little bit less qualified to handle some of the work that Nodin was doing when he moved to an academic adjacent job in educational technology. I don't know how many times he showed me the back end of a website and explained HTML and explained CSS and I nodded and said yes, I don't know if you remember those meetings Melanie, yes we've got it.

27:34 Melanie: Mm hm, completely over my head at every stage.

27:39 Rachael: Yeah, so at that point when I started with CAMPP I think I was expecting or hoping maybe to try to make a case to receive some funding to hire someone else, like maybe an external consultant, to take over the website and to address some of the accessibility issues and to get the annotation links working properly and so on.

28:03 Catherine: Is your destination the same now as when you set out?

28:07 Rachael: Yes and no. So when I set out like I said I was hoping to or expecting to make a case to hire someone to work on some of the back end stuff, and so I reached that destination not by hiring someone but by learning it on my own. So as Melanie said we knew about TEI, we were dabbling in it, but I really needed to take a class I think to learn more about TEI and CAMPP provided the funding for me to do that, to learn the XML, and what I realized is that that is not exactly what I want to do. Sometimes you realize what you don't want to do by doing these things, I don't think that there's any reason to teach TEI to undergraduates, I think TEI might be appropriate in a graduate class, I think it would be great in a either generalized digital humanities graduate course, or maybe something specific to librarians where you're thinking about how to represent texts and digital format, but I don't think that undergraduates necessarily need to know that kind of specific information, and it's also really complicated. And so I think what I realized was that I did want to learn HTML and CSS well enough to teach english majors how to build websites, and I think part of that, you know, it was my destination when I set out and it's a kind of an ongoing interest of mine is just making sure that I'm trying to provide our students, our english majors, with transferable skills so that they know how to leverage what they're learning in my classes, in jobs, in career situations or in what they kind of tend to refer to as the real world.

29:53 Catherine: So what role did CAMPP play in your teaching?

29:57 Rachael: So I think CAMPP was so formative, I think it partially goes back to what Melanie was talking about in terms of, I think she was talking about the lovely undergraduate research example right, where the undergraduate was researching medical humanities and thinking about twins in the early modern period, and that was one of the things that I think was really influential, was that I got to see, and sitting in these CAMPP sessions I got to see perspectives from different departments. So I had the chance to collaborate and innovate with faculty and staff from across campus, I had worked with Amanda and Blair amd ASSETT previously and then I had the opportunity to work with other faculty members who are engaging in these kinds of projects, so for me it was interdisciplinary, we were breaking down silos in really important ways. The thing that also really helped me with my own teaching I think and with the project in general was working with interns, so graduate level intern Sarah and Olivia and Alexis was so important in helping me to get the website up and running and to, she did a really good job so we, I had to address some of the accessibility issues with the office of accessibility and then Alexis came on as an intern and really helped me to rethink the design of the website itself and just to clean up some of the more visual elements. She developed what I think is a really lovely Shakespeare CoLab logo, she did a lot of consulting work in terms of just helping me to choose colors and layouts and design, and actually we have a joke in the CAMPP group that I now have a bumper sticker or if I wanted to take her logo and print it we could all drive around with Shakespeare CoLab bumper stickers on. Yeah and then working with you Catherine so I think you know.

31:57 Melanie: That's awesome.

32:02 Rachael: That and that all benefits my teaching because it helps me to think about the kind of work that we're doing in CAMPP at all levels of the curriculum. And then I think in particular I learned a lot from my colleagues especially Nikki Jobin and Caroline Sinkinson who's in the libraries because we presented at a conference together, and some of the conversations we were having in CAMPP I think helped to inform our presentation. So before I was in this group I knew that Melanie and I wanted the CoLab to apprentice students into the work we do in literary studies, but I don't think that I had the vocabulary and the kind of pedagogical framework that I now have to situate our project within larger curricular models, so CAMPP helped me to better understand and talk about the CoLab curriculum that we developed. So now I know that these assignments that Melanie was talking about you know in terms of the close reading and in terms of some of the visual studies and using early english books online, some of these assignments are non disposable assignments, so these students are doing this research that's traditional to literary studies and then they're creating annotations that will live on a website. And after working in CAMPP and presenting with Caroline and Nikki I now have the language of the non disposable assignment, so I understand that what we're doing is trying to create something that a student won't just crumple up and throw out at the end of term, hopefully in the recycle bin if they bin it but, but it'll be something that goes forward with them. And so I took this kind of non disposable assignment model and finally designed that new digital editions and web publishing class that Melanie helped me to think about, and so that course was something that I added to the curriculum and I taught that actually during COVID for the first time on Zoom, and in that course students learned about early modern playbooks. They learned about publishing, they learned about text circulation, they read three of Shakespeare's tragedies, and then they worked on annotations for the Shakespeare CoLab, and then they went on to create their own digital editions that were published on the web. And so they did editing and they thought about annotations and they engaged in a lot of the editorial practices that people who are creating scholarly editions engage in, and so I think also we were making that kind of labor the editors do visible to the students, and they I think that those assignments have lived on, they are labors of love. I've had several of them tell me that they are continuing to work on their websites and some of them have used those as work examples and they've gone on to apply for internships with those examples, and two of them have actually had luck with going into publishing internships, and two of them are actually now published authors. And so I think that the CAMPP model in talking about non disposable assignments and thinking about living assignments has been really influential in my teaching, and then also I can talk about the CoLab in a more informed way I think that fits into current pedagogy conversations that have to do with especially I think inclusion and access. So we've talked a lot about accessibility but I think also what Melanie and I are doing is creating open educational resources and we’re engaged in open pedagogy, so the idea is that the CoLab will allow students to publish their research and eventually these plays, when the play is fully built out, will be something that CU english classes can use as a digital textbook, rather than students going out and paying ninety dollars for a course text they'll actually have an open access and open educational resource to use in the class that has been student generated, and so that lovely reference about the medical humanities and the kind of world opening up for that student, hopefully will open up worlds for future students as well.

36:15 Catherine: Thank you. Melanie, similar question, can you talk about the impact that the Shakespeare CoLab has had for you both in your teaching and in your career path? Do you have an endpoint right now, and if so where is it, and then where will the journey take you next?

36:31 Melanie: What a rich, difficult question to answer, thank you. No but that's, it's great because in terms of I guess immediate impact what the Shakespeare CoLab did was make me an like night and day better teacher, better teacher of undergraduates, and somebody who understood in a much richer way what it meant for students to be sitting in these courses, to actually be choosing and paying their money to like be here and what my kind of responsibility and goals were, to give them an experience that they took beyond the classroom, to create assignments and learning opportunities that again, maybe some of them like their quizzes or what have you they would like never want to think about again, don't care, which is fair, it's also why I don't do quizzes anymore. But that creating again those learning opportunities that meant something and that translated into something beyond just Shakespeare, or beyond just literature, beyond that to actually have applicability in their real world experience. I've had students who have, you know, mentioned that they've worked on the CoLab on their resumes and that they were published there and it led to internships and various other opportunities. So coming to understand that what I was doing in terms of teaching this material didn't just live in you know the world of the material it had a much wider reach and you know, and I was able to then empower students through you know understanding that their skills that they acquired in our classroom could be applicable elsewhere. Another big thing I think for me was then from that teaching perspective then evolving into you know someone with a depth of knowledge about course development, developing the sort of pedagogical system that the CoLab implements in every class you know regardless of what Shakespeare class it is on campus led me to look at every class I was designing in a similar way, to say what are you know these bigger picture objectives that we're looking at, what is the big picture goal and how do we get there, and so from there you know my career has transitioned from academia to you know outside of academia but still academia adjacent. But I work as a curriculum developer and you know my day in and day out is developing learning material across you know all manner of you know different subject areas but always with the question of you know, what is the assignment going to look like that's going to enable students to understand this better or to do this skill better or to achieve this benchmark better, so again it evolving from me being you know a teacher and a student and a scholar of just Shakespeare and early modern literature to my career focus very much changing to a much broader emphasis on you know, how do people learn and how do we create learning opportunities for them that allow them to apply that learning in those skills in the best way. And so in terms of my end point I don't know if there is one, it's really just chugging along at this point, but what I would say is that had I not had the opportunity to be a part of the CoLab I certainly would not have had the professional success that I had, my I think professional life would never have developed in the very rich and interesting ways that it did, because what this project again really taught me was to you know connect with the students and to really you know see how their experiences could be brought into the classroom and how we could create learning opportunities for them that allowed them to again think creatively and generate scholarship in creative and different ways that then live in different ways. So I think that going forward you know a passion of mine is digital literacy particularly for students in the humanities who choose to study that and empowering students with these different types of skills, and thanks to Rachael and thanks to the CoLab I absolutely have now this depth of experience to be able to do that.

41:00 Catherine: And for Rachel the same question, do you have an endpoint right now, where is it, and where will your journey take you next?

41:10 Rachael: I'm becoming more comfortable with the “I don't know.” I know I'm not there I know I'd like to continue developing the CoLab, I want to keep teaching students to annotate, we really have just started as the tip of the iceberg with Twelfth Night, I'd like to continue building out more plays, I certainly could envision a second iteration for the digital editions class, I'd like to continue collaborating with my new CAMPP colleagues, and I think the biggest thing for me is just continuing to think outside the box and to innovate in terms of coming up with ways to have impact. And I think that, I have a hunch or I guess I have a hope for the future that Melanie and I will continue chugging along together. We share that interest in digital literacy, in the humanities, and I'm hoping to maybe head down the path of starting to do some research in pedagogy and how best to teach those practices. So hopefully Melanie and I will continue together down that path.

42:25 Catherine: Well thank you, any final thoughts before we wrap it up?

42:29 Rachael: I don't think so, I just wanted to thank you both for being here, and participating, and it was a pleasure to talk to you.

42:38 Melanie: Absolutely yes, thank you Catherine so much for your time, and as always I must thank Rachael for you know, reaching out in 2016, six long years ago, and saying do you want to be a part of this thing, and I said I have no idea what that is but let's do it. That corny line, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, it was much more than that, it gave me a career path that continues to fulfill my life in many ways so thank you Rachael and thank you CoLab and thank you Catherine for your time today, appreciate being here.

43:13 Catherine: Well thank you Melanie also for your time and for being here, thank you Rachael for your time for your being here, I am going to wrap it up.