All year, our lecturing faculty members have been sharing their research, their methods, and their engagement in scholarly conversations. Now that you are engaged in your own worldbuilding-related project and revising your Research Paper, it is time to share your research and interpretations so that other community members can learn from you–and you can understand what others need to understand your project’s contribution to the scholarly worldbuilding of Humanities Core. This addition to your Digital Archive will not be delivered as an in-class, oral presentation; instead, you have the opportunity to make use of the multimodal rhetorical skills in online communication that you’ve developed through the year and create an inviting page for others to visit on which you share your research in the form of a short video essay, a short audio essay, or a multimodal webtext.
As you plan this presentation, consider the following: What aspect of your topic do you think is the most interesting, and why should others pay attention to it? How can you convey to others why your primary source is worth studying closely to reveal what can be learned about kinds of worldbuilding? What would be the best online genre for creatively and effectively communicating your tentative thesis and research methods to peers who might not be familiar with scholarly approaches to that kind of primary source? Will you choose to use the mode of audio, video, images, or some combination for a multimodal webtext?
The immediate public for this activity will be your Humanities Core seminar or, if arranged by your instructor, the broader Humanities Core community. As a culminating contribution to your collection of ideas on your Digital Archive, this activity should communicate your research ideas and share where your research progress has taken you so far; it will not be a final presentation since you will not have finished your Research Paper yet.
Your research presentation will be evaluated according to the rubric and will 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
- your tentative thesis
- your ideas about how your approach to the topic is interesting for thinking about worldbuilding
Your site visitors’ experience of your research presentation 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 this last page is easy for members of your Humanities Core community to find and appreciate.
Visit student digital presentations from the past (keeping in mind that past Digital Archive assignments were slightly different):
