Assignment
Your voice matters, and this project is designed to support you in developing your academic voice online, potentially beyond your class, by learning to use some digital tools for critical and creative expression.
Through three guided activities over the course of this quarter, you will build a basic website of at least three webpages to communicate your reactions to the course material and your applications of concepts or interpretive methods introduced in lectures to a larger academic audience. Alongside the writing of your academic essays, these short activities will give you opportunities to think about and engage with the material and ideas of Animals, People, and Power in different, complementary ways and explain through visual, sound, and verbal expression what you find interesting, relevant, beautiful, or troubling.
What kinds of writing can you do on a website that you could not in a text-only document? As explained in the Humanities Core Handbook chapter “A Website for Online Writing,” your website will allow you to compose multimodal communication, persuasive and informative communication for a particular audience in a wider range of modes than just plain text. For the webpage you create for each of the three activities, think of the contents of the page as a webtext: a piece of writing created for online presentation and thus taking advantage of a website’s opportunities to enrich writing with images, audio, video, links, and choices in layout (including choices of font sizes, headings, and spatial arrangement of components of the text). The images, audio, video or other media may be created by you for presentation in this context, or you may find and present primary source material from another source, cited appropriately. In the writing style of an academic blog, you should employ precise and grammatical language, but in a somewhat more personal and informal voice than in your essays.
Examples of 2021-2019 Student Website Projects (Access to UCI Google Sites may require @uci.edu login.)
By setting up your site (probably using the easy and free Google Sites in UCI G Suite) this quarter, you will learn through experimentation about the possibilities of digital multimedia for academic writing and communication. As you add more pages to this website over the year, it will document your own humanistic research interests and, in Winter and Spring quarters, serve as a space for more independent creation and presentation of your research experience. This Fall assignment is focused on exploring and playing with possibilities, starting to develop technical skills and interpretive methods, and producing an organized set of webpages that demonstrate those skills and methods; by the end of the year, you will have an online portfolio displaying your growth as a writer, researcher, and thinker in the Humanities.
Your work this quarter will be assessed for evidence that you have engaged critically and creatively with the course material and lecture ideas and tried thoughtfully to use the possibilities of multimodality in a website to achieve your rhetorical purposes. The reflection you will write at the end of the quarter will help your readers, including your seminar instructor, understand what you were trying to do and trying out in expressing your own academic voice.
The Fall website project, including the reflection at the end of quarter, will be worth 20% of your writing grade this quarter.
Your instructor may adjust these activity instructions for the particular emphases of your seminar.
Fall Activity 1: Illuminate multimodality in medieval bestiaries
After creating your website (probably a Google Site in UCI G Suite), add a new page on which you compose your own words and insert illustrative images (screenshots, enlarged details, marked-up images) to develop answers to the following questions:
How does the multimodal (verbal and visual) depiction of an animal in a medieval illuminated manuscript represent the animal? What is conveyed by the image that correlates to what is conveyed by the text, and what does the image suggest that the text doesn’t? Is it even possible to distinguish between image and text when some of the initial letters are so decorative?
This activity will help you familiarize yourself with the capacities of your UCI Google Site to present ideas and information in styled and organized text as well as inserted images. It will also allow you to practice skills in image manipulation (cropping, marking, etc.) and source citation in the form of image captions.
Reflection
At the bottom of the page for this first activity, reflect and write a few sentences sharing your own perspective:
Have you ever composed a website, part of a website, or a piece on an online platform to communicate academic or creative writing? Does publishing your writing online for a wider academic audience feel different from posting text or images on social media? How? And how does the sense of self, authorial voice, or ethos you present through text and images in an academic situation compare to the ways you choose to present your self in other online situations? What kind of ethos do you plan to cultivate on your website for Humanities Core?
Before submitting the URL for this assignment, be sure to “publish” your site, copy the site link of the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename, and click “publish” each time you add to or edit your site.
Fall Activity 2: Perform or adapt a speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Choose a short speech or part of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that interests you and that relates to the theme of Animals, People, and Power. These lines may be part of the passage you are analyzing for Essay 2. Compose a webpage presenting either:
– A performance of the speech you have recorded and a short written reflection.
You can make a video or sound recording of yourself reciting or acting out the speech, or record a dance/movement piece based on the speech. (You may choose to post your recording on YouTube, Anchor.fm, or another public platform, or, to keep control over your material and who can see it, you may choose to upload your video, audio, or image files to your UCI Google Drive and then embed them in your webpage.) Complete your page with a short reflective paragraph explaining what in Shakespeare’s play you are responding to and communicating: How does your performance of the speech express the meaning of the passage and respond to specific cues in the passage?
or
– An idea for an adaptation of the play, with this speech as your focus, and a short written reflection.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been set in all sorts of environments: ancient and modern, natural and urban – even “Zoomland.” Each production idea brings out different aspects of the play’s inquiries into love, sex, power, conflict, and the relationship of human beings to the natural world. Choose a setting for your play, and pitch your production idea using a written description and images or other media to show how the speech you have chosen would be adapted for this setting. What would the character be wearing? Where would they be speaking? Complete your page with a short reflective paragraph explaining what in Shakespeare you are responding to and communicating: Why did you choose this setting? How do you want us to understand the character and the references to animals in the speech?
Be sure to “publish” your site, copy the site link of the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename, and click “publish” each time you add to or edit your site.
Fall Activity 3: Connect and reflect
For the end of the quarter, expand your website with a third page on which you connect what learned about/from Kalila wa Dimna, Gorby and the Rats, or Conference of the Birds to the works you studied earlier this quarter or to a contemporary social or political experience. What comparisons can you draw between the works you studied with Professor Rahimieh and the works we explored earlier this quarter with Professor Lupton and Professor Davis? Are there thematic, formal, or rhetorical similarities in the uses of animals? Alternatively, can you apply the message or methods of Kalila wa Dimna, Gorby and the Rats, or Conference of the Birds to what you see happening in your world today? Use the skills you developed in the first two activities to create a page that conveys your ideas through text as well as images, links, or other media you find rhetorically effective.
Reflection:
Finally, write a reflection of about one paragraph examining your experience of composing webpages to build an academic website. Why did you choose the kinds and combinations of media that you did? Who was your intended audience, what did you aim to convey to that audience, and what kind of ethos, or persuasive voice of scholarly authority, did you develop? Would you like to change anything for next quarter?
Be sure to “publish” your site, copy the site link of the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename, and click “publish” each time you add to or edit your site.
Learning Goals
- Exhibit rhetorical awareness of purpose, audience, genre, and context in choices of style, multimedia, and textual and visual organization
- Engage critically and creatively with ideas learned in lecture and from course materials
- Produce accurate, ethically responsible communication with citational practices appropriate to scholarly digital media
- Demonstrate information literacy skills by locating, evaluating and integrating primary sources from digital archives and databases
- Practice active revision of form and content, and develop flexible strategies for generating and editing online writing
- Develop digital literacy and transferable technical skills through the design of a basic website
- Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing, and multimodal communication
Required Reading
Before you begin brainstorming for this assignment, make sure you have read the following:
- Beauchamp, Tamara. “Rhetoric and the Writing Process.” Humanities Core Handbook: Animals, People, and Power 2020-2021. XanEdu, 2020. pp. 121–30.
- Herrmann, Amalia. “A Website for Online Writing.”Humanities Core Handbook: Animals, People, and Power 2020-2021. XanEdu, 2020. pp. 131-136.
The Site Building Process
In the online writing activities for this course, we want you to have the freedom to choose your own modes of communication within an academic website of your own design, while also providing you guidance and guidelines to help structure your work. Thus, you will start your website project this quarter by engaging in short, focused tasks directly tied to the lectures and course material.
How public you make your work is up to you. You are entrusted with exercising your own good judgment in deciding whether you would like to restrict access to your online writing to your instructor and classmates or to the UCI community, or you would like to make your online writing public, under your name or under a pseudonym. In the beginning, you may prefer to restrict access to your website in order to give yourself the time and space to explore the possibilities afforded by this kind of communication.
To make sure you never lose the digital material you have created, always save copies of the text, images, videos, or audio you have made and save screenshots of your pages to document how they looked. UCI Google Drive is a convenient place to store files; your Google Site will automatically be saved as a file in your Google Drive.
While the design options are somewhat limited, we recommend starting with a UCI Google Site because it is easy, free, ad-free, integrated with Google Drive, and governed by a contract between UCI and Google. To create a simple website, go to https://sites.google.com/new. Make sure you are logged into your UCI Google Apps account by using your @uci.edu login. Explore the options for themes and choose one for now. Try to think of an identifying name for the site that is more specific than “untitled site,” On the default Home page, explore the options for inserting different media and formatting elements in a page. Use the plus icon to add another page to the site. For help setting up your site, click “Help” under the three-dots icon, visit the support pages, or come to a help session offered by Humanities Core.
To submit your work on this activity, first make sure your site is “published” and the sharing settings adjusted as you see fit, then copy the URL of the page you made by clicking the link icon in the upper right. The URL you submit to your instructor should take the form https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/yoursitename/pagename.
