Lynne Stahl earned a Ph.D. from the English Department at Cornell University in 2015 and is now humanities librarian at West Virginia University. Stahl was selected as a fellow in Olin Library's Summer Graduate Fellowship for Digital Humanities in 2013. As part of the fellowship, Stahl created a tutorial for use in teaching a Freshman Writing Seminar.

Project Title: Film Tutorial

Project URL: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-tutorial/st-block-3

Project Statement:

Teaching first-year writing seminars that incorporated but did not focus exclusively on film, I found myself struggling to equip students with a sufficient critical framework and lexicon to write about film amid time and page constraints. The Digital Humanities Fellowship enabled me to create an interactive, open-access film tutorial on the multimedia platform Scalar, which has served well to introduce my students to film analysis in a more flexible engaging way than traditional textbooks can. I also had the chance to publish a piece related to it through Cinema Journal’s Teaching Dossier, which was an unexpected bonus.

In fact, the DH program, the thoroughly wonderful Olin staff who made it possible, and my peers in the program were all a large part of what spurred me to pursue a postdoctoral Master’s in Library Science, which is what I’m doing now, along with working in a public library. I realized fairly early on in the PhD program that traditional professorship wasn’t for me, but I still wanted to be involved in research, intellectual inquiry, and working with students, so I changed course slightly toward academic librarianship–and I expect that Digital Humanities projects will continue to be a part of my scholarship. Next semester, I’ll be starting on an independent study in which I’ll create and publish an open access reading guide to Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, using Scalar’s flexible platform to illuminate the meanings and interplay among the numerous literary allusions Bechdel includes throughout the storyline.