Monthly Archives: May 2016

Happy Trails

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Just a quick note to say that I’ve just finished evaluating your final projects (and everything else). It was a real pleasure to see the amazing, creative work many of you did at the end of the course. I hope everyone has a great summer and look forward to seeing you around campus in the fall (and perhaps even in English 390, “ABC of Modernism”?).

A couple of notes:

  1. You’ll get a link via Google from me to the same doc I’ve been using to share evaluations with you. There you’ll see comments on the final project and on other aspects of the course. In some cases, you’ll get links to essays with marginal comments or comments via hypothes.is. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. There’s a final grade at the end (or there will be by about 2pm).

  2. I’d love the liberty to post or link to your projects on our course site. If you want to OPT OUT of this, feel free to do so via email. Otherwise, if I can get organized, I’ll put together a little showcase of your work for future students to see.

  3. Speaking of opting out, remember that our course site and our hypothes.is feed are open to public view. If you like, you are welcome to delete any or all materials from those platforms. If not do not do so, that’s great, and I might even share your brilliance with future students now and then.

That’s all for now. Good luck with the end of the term!

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Blog post #6 prompt: due Tuesday, May 17th before class

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For your sixth and final post (yay), you will reflect on the data visualization exercise we’ve been working on. In a post of the usual length (500-800 words), please reflect on the following:

–Process: What did I personally do to contribute? What were some of the challenges of the process? How did I figure out what to search for, how to categorize items, etc.? How does this kind of work compare to the customary work in an English course?

–Product: What do you think about what we made? What light does it shed on literary history? What surprises emerge from visualizing Melville’s revival in this way? What problems exist with the data set in terms of accurately reflecting the re-emergence of Melville?

–Possibilities: Knowing what we now know, what would you change? What kinds of metadata did we omit from our search that would have been useful? What other modes of visualization might we have used? Given bigger budgets of time, what else might we look for in revising this history?

Presentation on final project (for last class on Tues. 5/17)

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For our last class, we will have a festive (I hope) session in which we’ll talk about our final projects. I don’t expect anything time-consuming or formal, just a three-minute sketch of your project, knowing full well that a few of you might have procrastinated and have work to do prior to the Friday 5/20 due date. If you’d like to add visuals (purely optional) feel free to add a slide to this presentation, and I’ll handle the AV while you talk. Here’s what a good presentation will cover:

  • WHAT I found: the research question I posed to myself and the answer/s I discovered to that question. For an essay, this will be a quick thumbnail of the argument; for a more expository or creative project, this may be more descriptive: what I did with the source text to transform it or make it mean something new.
  • WHERE I found it: the sources or examples that were useful to me in my research/work. Again, for an essay this is straightforward, though it might be interesting to describe any pitfalls or barriers you ran into. For a creative project, you might note other artworks/projects that inspired you or provided a model (positive or negative).
  • WHY it matters: why should peers care about your project? What do you hope readers take from it? How has the project changed the way your think about your topic or, better, some aspect of your life?

The final project will be due by midnight on Friday, 5/20. This is a non-negotiable deadline, since I’ve given you extra time and since I don’t want to let you carry things into exam week. Late projects will be docked one letter grade per day they’re late.