Spring: Research Project

 

Assignment

After evaluating multiple primary sources and surveying the scholarly conversation that surrounds potential topics, select a primary source related to our cycle theme of Worldbuilding. Conduct extensive research on the topic, and then compose an expository academic paper that makes an argument about your chosen primary source’s humanistic significance. How does the form or genre of the primary source shape its meaning? How did the primary source come to make meaning, in what contexts, and for what audiences? How do other scholars understand and interpret this primary source or ones like it? How does your own humanistic interpretation of the primary source enter a larger scholarly conversation? What world does this primary source imagine and/or work toward enacting?

Your primary source and research questions must be approved by your seminar instructor. As part of the process, you will engage and collaborate with your seminar and program community and produce a series of prewriting and reflective components, including activities in your Digital Archive: the Research Log and the Multimodal Work-in-Progress. The required process-oriented assignments will be determined by your seminar instructor and must be completed in the order assigned. Your final Research Paper must incorporate and engage in depth with at least 6 scholarly, peer-reviewed articles or books and should be 10–12 pages (approximately 3500–4000 words).

Learning Goals

• Reinforce and hone compositional skills acquired to date in Humanities Core: to make specific, clear, arguable claims; to produce unified, cohesive body paragraphs; to integrate well-selected evidence from primary and scholarly secondary sources; to exhibit fluid transitions between ideas; and to develop a rhetorically-effective title, introduction, and conclusion
• Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of humanistic research-based writing as well as the methodology/methodologies relevant to the chosen primary source (e.g., cultural/ethnic studies, literary, visual, filmic and media studies, historical, and/or philosophical analysis)
• Demonstrate the capacity to critically survey, read, and assess primary sources and scholarly conversations across a variety of genres and media
• Demonstrate advanced information literacy skills by locating, evaluating, and integrating information gathered from multiple sources (the university library, online academic databases, and digitized archival collections) into a research project
• Produce accurate, rhetorically effective, multimodal communication using the appropriate genres, stance, and citational practices of scholarly digital media
• Develop flexible and ethically responsible strategies for generating, revising, and editing research writing and online multimodal compositions
• Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing, and multimodal communication

Required Reading

You may find it worthwhile to revisit the chapters and appendices you read in the Humanities Core Handbook during the fall and winter quarters as you conduct research and draft your paper. The following chapters cover the research process in general:

Stewart, Robin. “Determining the Topic of a Humanistic Research Project.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 191–203.

Connell, Christine. “Engaging in a Scholarly Conversation.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 241–56.

Morse, Susan. “Developing Titles, Introductions, and Conclusions in Research Writing.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 257–70.

Additionally, the Handbook includes chapters that walk you through the terminology and methods that humanistic scholars employ when analyzing genres of primary sources which we haven’t yet covered in lectures this year.

If you intend to research a work of philosophy, plan to read:

Siakel, Daniel. “Analyzing Arguments.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 75–86.

If you intend to research about a film, plan to read:

Buhanan, Kurt. “Analyzing Film.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 204–218.

If you intend to research a video game, plan to read:

Ruberg, Bo. “Analyzing Video Games.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 219–229.

If you intend to research a built environment, plan to read:

Broadbent, Philip. “Analyzing Built Environments.” Humanities Core Handbook, XanEdu, 2022, pp. 228–240.

The Writing Process and Your Audiences for this Project

As you can likely tell from the Learning Goals detailed above, the spring Research Project is an integrative and cumulative experience of the Humanities Core program as a whole. We hope that you can take the academic writing skills and tools of rhetorical, literary, visual, historical, and cultural studies analysis that you have developed in the past two quarters—as well as those you will learn this spring—and apply them to a topic that interests and excites you. We invite you to take an expansive view of what the theme of worldbuilding can mean and how it relates to the work we do in humanities disciplines, just as our lecturing faculty members have done. While some of your secondary sources might come from disciplines outside of the humanities, the majority of your sources should reflect the kinds of interpretive methodologies that you have been learning about over the course of the year.

Even more so than the other academic expository essays you have written this year, the research project is all about the process. In your seminar, you will be completing a range of scaffolded assignments that will help you to select a feasible topic, identify and engage with secondary sources, and generate your own interpretive intervention into a larger scholarly conversation. Along the way, you will be writing for multiple audiences. Many of the assignments you will undertake in this process are part of formal academic genres; for example, the prospectus is a formal proposal to an academic supervisor or committee (in this case, your seminar instructor) that your research is feasible and will produce a worthwhile contribution to a field of study. The audience for your research project is first and foremost your HumCore seminar and program community: you should anticipate working closely with other students in peer research groups as you explore your topic and build your ideas. You should also envision yourself addressing lecturing faculty members and your seminar instructor, in as much as they are also immersed in the humanistic study of Worldbuilding and thus represent a preliminary scholarly community for your ideas. Perhaps more importantly, you should imagine yourself addressing the scholars in the field or fields you will be exploring, interacting and arguing with them across space and time through your writing. While we certainly don’t expect that you will be an expert in your field by June (though you will certainly be able to identify who is!), you should anticipate that you will likely know much more about your particular topic by the end of the quarter than your seminar instructor.

Digital Archive Research Log

For the last two quarters of Humanities Core, you have engaged with texts and ideas discussed in lectures, readings, and events by archiving your own multimodal reactions and collections of thoughts on your Digital Archive. This quarter, during the process of researching and writing your Research Paper, you will build on your collection and share research log entries documenting and reflecting on your own worldbuilding journey as a budding researcher, with its challenges and successes.

First, think about the multimodal online genre you prefer for recording your reflections on one Research Log page of your Digital Archive. Options available to you include:

• An audio log, using your preferred app for recording your voice and embedding each recording on the page of your Google Site
• A video log, using your preferred app for recording video and embedding each recording on the page of your Google Site
• An illustrated log, or visual diary, using whatever physical or digital drawing materials you prefer and embedding (with a label or caption) on the page of your Google Site
• A webtext, combining various embedded (and properly cited) media with text you write

Each log entry should be about two minutes or the equivalent of 300 words long, and five entries are suggested. Your seminar instructor will instruct you in the expectations for your seminar.

Digital Archive Multimodal Work-in-Progress

As you near the last stages of your Research Paper, you will have the opportunity to share in the scholarly worldbuilding of Humanities Core by assembling and exchanging your in-progress research ideas with other students. The immediate “public” for this activity will be your Humanities Core seminar or, if arranged by your instructor, more than one Humanities Core seminar. As a culminating contribution to your collection of ideas on your Digital Archive, this activity should allow you to take advantage of the multimodal rhetorical skills you have developed this year with the aims of communicating your research ideas, your own contributions to scholarly conversations about worldbuilding, and your reflections on where your research progress has taken you; it will not be a final presentation since you will not have finished your Research Paper yet.

First, consider which online genre would best suit your research method or topic. Media modes available to you for showing your peers why your research is interesting include audio, video, images, and multimodal webtext. Whichever you select as most rhetorically effective, prepare to present your work-in-progress on one last page of your Digital Archive.

The content of your work-in-progress page, whether a short video essay, short audio essay, or multimodal webtext, should include the tentative title of your project, an introduction to the primary source and its context, an introduction to the scholarly conversation around the topic, an explanation of the methods and analytic concepts you are employing, and a thesis.

Your site visitors’ experience of your work-in-progress on your Digital Archive site (watching, listening, reading) should be about 5-10 minutes long. Be sure to update the navigation and homepage of your site so that the last page is easy to find.

Grade Allocation in Spring Writing Course

Your writing grade in Humanities Core this quarter will be allocated as follows:

Research Project Components	Writing Grade Allocation
Process Writing Assignments (including Annotated Bibliography, Prospectus, and Digital Archive Research Log)	35%
Digital Archive Multimodal Work-in-Progress	10%
Final Research Paper	45%
Participation	10%

The Work and Insights of Past HumCore Students

Many students find that the work they do in the spring quarter of Humanities Core inspires them to take additional coursework in a Humanities department. Humanities Core Research Projects have formed the foundation of many undergraduate honors theses. Past students have even reported that this project sparked their interest toward future graduate study. You can read award-winning examples from past cycles of Humanities Core on our Student Awards page; be aware, however, that some past students were writing about a different theme than Worldbuilding and/or may have had different technical expectations in place for their projects.

The winners of last year’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Awards will share their insights on this process with you at our Annual UROP/Humanities Core Research Symposium on April 14 (please see the Calendar page on the Canvas Lecture site for more information).

 

Posted 7 March 2023