By Hannah Z. Morley
Thanks to UC Santa Barbara’s Creative Computing Initiative, graduate student Kevin Whitesides received funding to teach a new Linguistics course Memes: When Language and Culture Go Viral .
Whitesides, a graduate student in Religious Studies, used concepts from various disciplines to show how people – like memes – make their mark on the world by “remixing” or adding to already existing work.
Creative Computing Initiative instructor Kevin Whitesides goes over his Memes course syllabus on screen. Photo by Kevin Whitesides.
The hands-on course, which premiered during summer session, was funded by alumnus Ross Dowd, ‘94, CEO of the financial investment firm Acadian Asset Management, who graduated in English and Political Science. Launched in 2019, the Creative Computing Initiative is designed to incorporate specialized coding and other technical skills into courses for humanities and fine arts students.
Inspired by its mission, Whitesides revised Linguistics’ memes course to teach students the fundamentals of multi-media work and the essence of human collaboration. The course was designed so that the hands-on, experiential, creative computing aspects would complement the academic readings and discussions. Other Creative Computing courses have been developed in English, Music, Art and Spanish.
The multilingual song “Beautiful” was made by Catherine Zhu, April Rutherford, Mika Minami, Makayla Lo, and Sunyoung Park for their course project.
Ideas, Whitesides says, arise from group collaboration. This past summer, he acquainted students with “Scratch” and “HitRECord,” two project building sites that encourage users around the world to collaborate with one another. Students used these platforms to team up with their classmates to create large-scale multi-media projects. Their extensive use of HitRECord prompted a surprise, high-profile visit on the last day of class by HitRECord co-founder, the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Whitesides recently sat down for an interview with HFA to discuss the Meme course. The interview has been edited for length.
Q: Why did you think that this course would be a great fit for the Creative Computing Initiative?
A: I love the idea of a more hands-on approach that brought a certain level of training or experience with technology into the fold. I liked the idea of getting involved with outside initiatives that are trying to do things over and above the sort of normal standard curriculum and innovate.
One of the things I liked [about the initiative] was that it was asking grad students, which was good for me, to innovate, to bring new teaching techniques, technological techniques, and to take courses that they’ve seen or can imagine and just haven’t seen done.
Q: What inspired you to create this course?
A: I had been involved with Professor John W. Du Bois’ meme course and I was always thinking about what I would do differently, and it always involved incorporating some sort of extra technological layer. A really nice thing about the Creative Computing Initiative is that grad students are teaching the courses and they are being more innovative because they can meet the students where they are at, in a different way, and can allow the students to be themselves.
Memes students Ebony Givens and Erika Egg created a rhythm game for their final project called “Catch the Star,” with music by Anthony Liberty (Click on the image)
Q: Why use memes as a hook for this collaborative course?
A: Students are going to come into the class thinking that memes are just pictures on the internet with words attached. The idea is to broaden their sense of “memes” — where people take something and then remix it and then make something new with it and then combine some things together. That same process is true in languages and in technology and in culture broadly.
Q: How did your class structure reflect the essence of your course
A: Some of the terminology I taught my students came from Mitchel Resnick’s book Lifelong Kindergarten: low floors, high ceilings and wide walls. So low floors means easy entry, … high ceilings means there’s the space for really sophisticated projects to happen. … and wide walls just means that it supports a wide range of different projects. So, both of these websites were good at that.
The game “Make Your Own Pond” was created by students Sophie Korver and Sabrina Osterhoudt, with Kimberly Segura-Rojas creating a remixed animated version. (Click on the image)
Q: How did you get your students invested in their projects and the wider ideas for the course?
A: Nobody could work on a project by themselves. They had to have at least one other core partner on the team, so they had to find someone interested in the same project and then to see what that’s like. Sometimes when you get people together working on the same thing you get butting ideas. Sometimes they really work together, because they have different skills. And I wanted them to see that it wasn’t just about creating the perfect project or even necessarily succeeding. It would have been totally fine to me if their project failed. The thing was for them to watch see what it was like to work with other people toward a mutual goal that they were both invested in and to use different digital technologies to do that.
Q: How did the students react?
Actor, director Joseph Gordon-Levitt, co-founder of HitRECord Zooms into Whitesides’ class in a surprise, end-of-course visit.
A: They really got [the point of the class], even more than I had hoped. From reading their papers it’s clear to me that they can see these processes at work in a way that changes their relationship to the world. And it empowers them in a certain way. If we think of memes as ideas and fads and trends, and how they get started or how they move among people, it also shows students how important their voice is in things. They can make a meme and they can throw ideas in the cultural pool and they have an impact.
Q: Would you want to teach this course again?
A: I would love to teach this course again! This is the course that I would most like to teach anywhere… I’m trying to see if I can teach it for the Initiative again next summer.
To learn more about the student projects please click the link here or explore their final versions below
1. Outside the Window (Animation)
2. “Beautiful” a Multilingual Song About Inclusivity
6. Catch the Star (Rhythm Game)
8. Sounds & Visuals of the Ocean
Hannah Z. Morley is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Writing & Literature at the College of Creative Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.