James Armstrong

A Day in History: Glimpsing the Land as Primary Source

James O. Armstrong et al. — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:16:43 PST

For nine years, three Idaho professors have researched the early culture of the irrigated settlement communities along the Snake and Boise Rivers in southern Idaho. Massive federal projects in the early 1900s transformed southern Idaho from desert into arable land, thereby creating the foundation for Idaho as it is today. Through historical photographs and writings, the work of historians, and first hand visits to historical sites, we have tried to understand this brief, pivotal period in Idaho history. We have presented our findings through in poetry and videos, what Richardson (1994) calls “evocative representations” of research data. A host of current technologies has insulated all of us from our immediate physical surroundings. We are using some of these technologies in an attempt to reconnect the public with the land and our historical roots. Our research process has been a journey into the lives and landscapes of cultural figures of the irrigated settlements. On January 11, 2012, we visited Twin Falls, Idaho, and advanced our knowledge of Clarence E. Bisbee, a professional photographer. While viewing 2,000 of Bisbee’s digitized photographs and some of his original 8 x 10” glass plate negatives, we gained a visceral sense of his passion to document the explosive growth of crops and communities in the Magic Valley. near Twin Falls, we photographed the Greenwood School, named for Annie Pike Greenwood, a farmer’s wife and teacher who wrote about Idaho life in We Sagebrush Folks (1934). The buildings current owner, Don Morrill, pulled up in his truck and we started talking. He told us stories about the school, which closed in 1952; then he took us inside where he and his mother were students. Our presentation will include highlights from this “day in history” and our resulting poetic and video responses to the cultural contributions of Bisbee and Greenwood.

VideoPoetry: Collaboration as Imaginative Method

Peter Lutze et al. — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:10:08 PDT

Virtual presentation of paper and video.

VideoPoetry: Collaboration as Imaginative Method

Peter Lutze et al. — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:59:10 PDT

Three Idaho professors (a poet, videographer, and historian) have been collaborating for eight years on a cross-disciplinary project called VideoPoetry, which integrates historical narration, narrative poetry, historical photographs, and videography into the video medium. To this point we've worked primarily on a specific program, Culture of Reclamation, which explores the culture of the early irrigated landscape communities in southern Idaho. In reflecting on our work-process, we’ve discovered that we’ve fundamentally changed as scholars as a result of our collaboration. This paper identifies the nature of our changes and documents instances of the ways in which we have been challenged to expand our ideas about other academic disciplines and our own. To work within the constraints of VideoPoetry, a new mode of expression, each of us has had to modify our traditional methods. For example, the poet altered a poem’s imagery to suit the sequence and duration of video images. Through the poet’s exploration of the inner lives of historical figures, the historian learned how the imagination can take us beyond what historical sources are willing to tell. Culture of Reclamation is grounded in the transformation of the arid American West, which occurred about one hundred years ago. By focusing our work on the irrigation of southern Idaho, we have come to a greater understanding of the region where we work and live. The video medium allows us to share these insights as public history—the dissemination of scholarship and research to audiences outside of the academy. VideoPoetry compels us to envision collaboratively a narrative about our regional foundations. Through video, we are able to present to a broad audience the often overlooked but transformational power of irrigation projects to turn the arid West into a land of bounty.

VideoPoetry: Integrating Video, Poetry and History in the Classroom

James Armstrong et al. — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:51:00 PDT

VideoPoetry: Integrating Video, Poetry and History in the Classroom

James Armstrong et al. — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:49:56 PST

VideoPoetry integrates video and poetry to explore historical or geographic subjects. VideoPoetry is both a process and a product. This paper will use a short VideoPoem, "Mary Hallock Foote at Stone House," to demonstrate how students of all educational levels can become engaged in creating VideoPoetry. Each VideoPoem offers students a cross-disciplinary experience that involves research, analysis of information, imaginative writing and video composition leading to a classroom presentation of the final product.

As a process VideoPoetry requires the investigation of a subject, in this case, Mary Hallock Foote, artist and illustrator of the Western United States. Based on the historical research including her published reminiscences, one of the authors wrote a narrative poem imagining Foote's reflections on her life at Stone House. The poem evoked mental images which we brought into the video through historical photographs, Foote's woodblock drawings and present-day video footage of the landscape. Spoken by a woman narrator, the poem along with appropriate sound effects became the soundtrack and structuring element for the VideoPoem. Preceding the VideoPoem is an introduction which uses an objective voice to establish the historical context. As a product, this VideoPoem expresses an interpretation of the life and thoughts of an historical person and the place where she lived. The pictures both illustrate the poem and extend its evocative quality.

As such "Mary Hallock Foote at Stone House" is an example of Imaginative Writing, an instructional strategy that encourages students to use their imaginations to create valid contexts in which historical figures lived and acted. For viewers, VideoPoetry conveys both historical information and a sense of what it was like to live in another era. VideoPoetry expands the possibilities of studying history by providing a multi-media and multi-sensory experience.

Developing a Culture of Reclamation: Integrating History, Poetry and Video

James Armstrong et al. — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:49:52 PST

Culture of Reclamation (Armstrong, Lutze, & Woodworth-Ney, in progress) is a sequence of "videopoems" about Idaho, integrating poetry, historical photographs, music and videography in a video presentation, which also includes historical narrative. Three Idaho scholars in the fields of history, literacy education, and communication—the historian (Laura), poet (Jamie), and videographer (Peter)—collaborated on this cross-disciplinary project to reclaim a portion of the history of this state in a creative and engaging medium. Culture of Reclamation expresses a response to the culture of the early irrigated settlement communities along the Snake and Boise rivers. Between 1894 and 1920, a land rush to the arid western United States occurred as private investors and the federal government built irrigation projects to reclaim the sagebrush desert for farmland. Both men and women settlers contributed to the culture of the early communities, the men with a vision of an irrigated Utopia (Smythe, 1895) and the women with literary endeavors and civic participation (Woodworth-Ney, in progress-b).

In responding to the landscape and to the creative work of the early settlers, such as Clarence E. Bisbee, Annie Pike Greenwood, Mary Hallock Foote, and numerous clubwomen, we have deepened our sense of belonging to this place. Our work is both professional and personal. Through this project, each of us has developed new ideas about working within our disciplines and discovered creative ways to engage the history and geography of southwestern Idaho.

Our project represents just one example of the potential for university faculty from different field to collaborate on arts-based scholarly projects. According to Diamond and Mullen, "Arts-based inquiry is art pursued for inquiry’s sake, not for art’s own sake" (1999, p. 25). We also intend our project to serve as a prototype for cross-disciplinary projects in secondary schools. We hope to inform and inspire students in the future to explore the past with imagination as well as historical records.

VideoPoetry: Historical Photography in the Desert Garden

Peter Lutze et al. — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:22 PST

Virtual presentation of paper and video.

Moon Haiku

James Armstrong — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:20 PST

Landscapes of Epiphany: Poems

James Armstrong — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:19 PST

Mountain Seasons [DVD]. Boise, ID: The VideoPoets.

Peter Lutze et al. — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:17 PST

25-minute video program integrating video clips, music, and poetry.

Moon Haiku [CD]. Boise, ID: Little House Recordings.

Ben Burdick et al. — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:16 PST

Mary Hallock Foote at Stone House [DVD]. Boise, ID: Wolf Peach Press.

James Armstrong et al. — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:15 PST

A VideoPoetry Project: Cross-disciplinary video.

Patterns and Connections

James Armstrong — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:14 PST

VideoPoetry: Historical Photography in the Desert Garden

Peter Lutze et al. — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:11 PST

This paper presents an integration of poetry, history and photography through the video medium to convey a cultural history of the irrigated desert in southern Idaho, USA, around 1900. The VideoPoetry project is an investigation of cultural history that employs video and poetry to make it come alive. This social history is revealed through the lives of Clarence E. Bisbee and Jessie Robinson Bisbee of Twin Falls, Idaho. Their marriage focused on their photography business that involved documenting the transformation of the desert into farms, towns, and cities. This project brings out for public view a selection of historical photographs from a vast archive of images, most of which were produced by Clarence E. Bisbee over a thirty-year period. His remarkable technical competence and extraordinary breadth of subject matter reveal the texture of daily life as the settlers struggled with an inhospitable environment. In the video, a narrator provides historical contextualization, linking the photos together to create a cultural narrative. Following the narrative introduction, spoken poetry provides an imaginative, but historically based, personal perspective within this new society. Video- Poetry integrates these elements to make these photographs accessible and engaging to viewers a hundred years later, especially to young viewers who may have very few images of the early history of their state. Such dissemination of scholarship is especially important now. Budget cuts, emphasis on external funding rates, and charges of irrelevance have degraded the role of the arts and humanities on many campuses. Public scholarship and scholarship of engagement with communities—known as public history in the field of history—are essential to the preservation of humanities in higher education. VideoPoetry offers a dissemination method that engages audiences in non-traditional ways and highlights the complex, important social functions of humanities research.

Reading Tools for College Study

James Armstrong — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:57:05 PST