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Recommendation: Luis Miguel

Today’s blog post brings a music and television recommendation all in one. 

Luis Miguel: La Serie is a Netflix drama series that follows the life of legendary Mexican singer Luis Miguel throughout his early life and rise to superstardom. This show intimately explores Luis Miguel’s private life, focusing on the challenges he went through to balance his public image with his relationships with friends and family. With beautiful camerawork, fun 80s aesthetics, and a heavy dose of LuisMi’s most popular songs, this series keeps you hooked from beginning to end. It’s no surprise that it has become a favorite in the Spanish-speaking world.

Luis Miguel is currently available on Netflix. Keep an eye out for the third season, coming out today (October 28th)!

Or, if you’re just looking for something to listen to, here are some of my favorite Luis Miguel songs:

  1. Soy Como Quiero Ser
  2. Ahora te Puedes Marchar
  3. Cuando Calienta el Sol
  4. La Incondicional
  5. Tengo Todo Excepto a Tí
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Creating a Photo Archive Website Through Omeka

A photo of Reed in the 1950s, featured on the website I created. Viewable at this link.

Last year, I embarked on a semester-long project to create a website using the Omeka software. Omeka, if you are unfamiliar, is a web-publishing platform designed to showcase large archives.

I set my focus on the Reed College Archives. Although already accessible to Reed students through a searchable website, the archives themselves were very large and not sorted into accessible categories for casual viewing. My first step was securing the rights to use photographs from the Reed Archives. Since my project was internal to Reed College, the archives had no problem with me using their photographs.

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Non-Russian Russian Music for Your Consideration

One thing I’ve learned in my year learning Russian is that the Russian-speaking world is very much massive. With speakers of the language spanning across the entirety of the Post-Soviet Union and its allies, it’s almost impossible to find Russian language books, shows, movies, and music without finding some that are decidedly not of Russian origin. So for your consideration, dear reader, I have compiled a list of some singers and bands from outside of Russia that you can add to your Russian language playlist. Keep in mind that while none of these songs are obscene by any means, you may want to find translated lyrics before playing them in public. 

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A Translation Project

I admire translators. Fan translators, in particular, who are often well-respected in Internet spaces involving content from another country. They relay information quickly for English-speaking fans so everyone can take part in the joy. But having read countless “translator’s notes”, I’ve constantly started thinking about how often meaning and nuance might get lost in translation, and how huge misunderstandings can spring from a mistranslation. I wanted to try translating text myself to experience how difficult it could be.

The first task was finding a text to translate. Translation differs across mediums, but I chose to translate an excerpt from a novel. Novel translation differs from other types of translation, such as interpreting dialogue, which I understand to be more literal. For novel translations, factors such as preserving the author’s style and intent must be taken into account.

The book I translated from is《废墟曾经辉煌》 (Fei Xu Ceng Jing Hui Huang) by female fiction writer Zhang Ling (张翎). It’s a book of lighthearted travel anecdotes, and the section I attempted translating was 成都散记 (Chengdu San Ji), a three part collection of prose about the city of Chengdu. 

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Six Spanish Shorts to Watch Over Winter Break

Headed into the break but still want to practice your Spanish? Check out these six Spanish short films for quick and easy immersion! Each film is directed and filmed for and by native Spanish speakers, and they come from a wide range of countries. Many of the shorts are also favorites at film festivals around the world! Make sure to check out Uno by Javier Marco. For more Spanish shorts, check out Short of the Week, and sort by country to find more foreign language short films.

Detrás Del Espejo (Behind the Mirrors) by Julio O. Ramos

Best for: Beginners
Genre: Action
Location: Peru
Watch for: an exciting short with a dramatic end
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Microsoft OneNote: An Answer to Online Note-taking Woes

Pre-COVID, I would’ve never considered taking notes digitally—I’ve been told, time and time again, that physically taking notes helps you remember your content better. However, Zoom classes led to a change of heart. I realized, like many others, the advantage of having notes up on your computer while on a Zoom call. I’ve come to realize many other advantages to online note-taking: easier organization (and reorganization), more layout and design freedom, and—my favorite— command F capabilities.

The software one uses for note-taking is also essential. I started out using the built-in Apple Notes app but quickly realized the limited capability. The only variability in text allowed is a pre-set list of five options: title, heading, subheading, body, and monospaced. Users can also bold, italicize, or underline. Past that, there are no further options.

So, I went in search of a better alternative. My favorite: Microsoft OneNote (free for college students with the Microsoft Office Interface).

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Investigating Narrative Levels in the Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

For a semester project here in the language lab, I chose to investigate narrative levels and how they interact and change in stories. To do this, I attempted to replicate a project published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics, a journal focusing on the intersection of data and human action. The project aimed to understand how narrative levels work, as well as how uniformly standard definitions of them could be identified by different scholars in different places. The project lays out three main types of narrative that deviate from the main speaker, narrator, or story:

Uninterrupted narrative: this is just a narrative by itself. It has the same speaker, the same time period, and the same point of view. 

Embedded narrative: A story within the original narrative. The original narrative will always signal a reason for an embedded narrative. These typically take place in dialogue, when a character is prompted to tell a story.

Interruptive narrative: a structural separate narrative in the midst of the original narrative. It is usually signaled by some sort of stopping point in the original narrative, such as a chapter end or a section break, and often changes narrator or time period. Unlike the embedded narrative, there is nothing within the original narrative that prompts an interruptive narrative. 

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Crowdsourcing Ed-Tech Resources for Higher Education

Speculating on how COVID-19 will shape the future of higher education, Mousumi Mukherjee, an Associate Professor and Deputy Director for the International Institute for Higher Education Research and Capacity Building, asks, “When we have failed to build respectful and inclusive on-campus teaching and learning environments to build societies, how can we do it online?”

The challenges educational institutions are currently forced to grapple with illuminate existing difficulties that arise from stark disparities. Consequently, Mukherjee emphasizes that solely relying on digital alternatives to resolve the current educational crisis is inadequate. However, educators and scholars speculate on whether the recent turn to ed-tech platforms represents a “watershed moment,” foreshadowing a long-term educational innovation, or whether it functions as an unsustainable stopgap to long unaddressed issues.

Regardless of what the future holds, institutions and schools struggle to find suitable and equitable solutions to manage the present crisis. Below, I provide an overview of crowdsourced resources that educational technology platforms, strategies, and resources that higher education institutions have adopted in the transition to online education and distance learning.

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COVID-19 and the Digital Divide

Students in Peru use laptops from the OPLC Initiative. The initiative asserted its goal to revolutionize education in the developing world through the distribution of innovative software and educational devices. When Negroponte pitched the idea at a Tunis summit, a participant emphasized the greater urgency of facilitating the obtainment of “clean water and real schools.”

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the capacity of education technology to overcome the the national and global digital divide was already under debate. In late December of 2019, blogger Audrey Watters published a commentary highlighting ed tech’s exacerbation, appropriation, and oversight of the structural inequalities — including educational, racial, social, and economic inequities — that constitute the digital divide. Watters discussed the catastrophic failures of the self-serving projects of Ed-Tech philanthropists and initiatives, such as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OPLC) Initiative.

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