Storybook Favorites of Spring 2019

I just finished one of my favorite get-ready-for-the-semester tasks: updating the list of Storybooks for both classes, and adding those Storybooks into the randomizer. It is really inspiring to go through all the Storybooks from last semester and to realize that there is going to be another beautiful collection of projects at the end of this semester. One of the things that is especially exciting for me is the way that people come up with totally new approaches — new topics, new styles, new designs, new technology — every semester. I've been teaching these classes since 2002, and so I have seen hundreds and hundreds of projects... but every semester is full of surprises.

For this assignment, I picked out three Storybooks from last spring that had something completely new and surprising about them, something I had never seen in a class project before: new topic, new style, and new technology.

Tales from Silesia. This was a Myth-Folklore project last semester, and it was a totally new topic: stories about the mountain spirit Rubezahl from Silesia in what is now Poland. I was a Polish major in college, and I've been to Silesia, so I had so much fun learning more about Silesian folklore from this project: the character of Rubezahl was new to me. I learned a lot from this project! For a crash course in Rubezahl, there's a Wikipedia article about him.

Swa-Shakti: The Year of Women's Empowerment. This Indian Epics Storybook is like the Bechdel test taken to extremes: ALL the characters are women; there are no men in these stories. Given the emphasis on male characters in the traditional epic stories, I thought this was a great stylistic challenge, and maybe it will inspire students this semester to try that approach in a storytelling post or for an entire Storybook like this.

Slick Streets in the Lamplight. This website is built with Grav, which is one of the website builders you can use with the OUCreate project. I know a little bit about Grav but I've never built a site with it, so it was exciting for me to see this site come together page by page last semester. This Storybook also has a great stylistic twist, retelling Buddhist jataka tales as film noir, a combination nobody has used for Indian Epics before.

Now I am just waiting to see what totally new things I get to learn about from this semester's Storybooks-to-come.