Assignment
Archiving, as a kind of collecting for study, allows for placing objects or ideas into different contexts and connections in order to bring different aspects into relief. Continue assembling your worldbuilding collection of materials, speculations, and interpretive ideas this quarter so that you can critically and creatively connect what you learn in lectures to what you are interested in exploring in your upcoming Spring research.
In the Fall quarter, you set up a website to house your Digital Archive, and you engaged with the texts and ideas presented by the lecturing faculty by collecting what sparked your interest and drawing connections to other media you selected or created. In the Winter quarter, the writing assignments and the lectures by Prof. Cooks, Prof. Robertson, and Prof. Wasserstrom will teach you to analyze visual and historical primary sources and to begin engaging with the interpretations of other scholars through conversations with secondary sources. While developing skills in source evaluation and multimodal presentation, you will add to your growing Digital Archive journey further toward selection of your own research topic in the Spring.
Your additions to the Digital Archive this quarter, including all three Winter activities you complete, will be worth 20% of your lecture grade. Keeping in mind that your audience, or “public,” this quarter is your seminar community, be sure to “publish” each time you add to or edit your site. You will share the link on the Canvas site for your seminar and also submit URLs for your assignment submissions.
Learning Goals
- Engage critically with ideas learned in lecture by identifying and applying interpretive methods and concepts and drawing connections among course materials and topics
- Engage creatively with ideas presented in lecture and with course materials and topics through reinterpretation, rearrangement, or drawing connections to other cultural works or contexts
- Exhibit rhetorical awareness of purpose, audience, genre, and context in choices of style, multimedia, and textual and visual organization
- 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 institutional digital archives and databases
- 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
Digital Archive Activities
Note: Your instructor may adjust these activity instructions for the particular emphases of your seminar.
Digital Archive Activity 4: Explore and Reflect: Locating Primary Sources
To engage with what you are learning from Prof. Cooks’s lecture, Humanities Core Handbook chapter, and/or assigned reading, explore where and how the artwork of Sanford Biggers, Titus Kaphar, or Carrie Mae Weems is (re)presented online, and reflect on the complexity of presenting material artworks online by using the multimodal capacities of your Digital Archive.
Sanford Biggers, Of Many Waters…, 2022, Orange County Museum of Art. Photo by Yubo Dong.
The citation of an artwork in the MLA format you use for your essays includes not only the artist’s name, artwork title, and date of creation but also the location of the work, if available. Why? How can you think about the physical presence of a one-of-kind painting, photograph, or sculpture somewhere in the world–unlike a book printed in thousands of copies housed in libraries and sold by booksellers? The image above, for example, captures one view of the 24-foot-wide multimedia sculpture by Sanford Biggers installed outside a museum five miles from the UCI campus; visiting the museum location would offer you a much richer experience of the artwork than the photograph can. To locate an artwork or artworks you find interesting both in its materiality and as presented online, choose one of the three artists and start exploring the sources listed on the Essay 3 assignment prompt.
As you explore online and develop your ideas, consider the following questions: How does the artist’s website (or gallery website) present their artwork in relation to information about the artist or in the context of the artist’s body of work? How does the contextualization provided by that online collection (a kind of archive) help you understand the work in a different way than you might by simply doing an internet image search? Does the way in which the artist represents themselves on social media provide another context for understanding their work? How does information about the medium, materials, size, and physical location of an artwork that interests you contribute to your own understanding of that artwork’s significance for worldbuilding?
To share your exploratory answers to these questions, present the artworks and relevant contexts, including what you have learned from Prof. Cooks, on a page of your Digital Archive, and explain your choices of media (high-resolution images of an entire work, enlargements of details, information from a gallery, screenshots from Instagram, etc.). Be sure to cite and link sources.
Length: A HumCore seminar community member should be able to read/view the contents of this page in about 5 minutes.
Digital Archive Activity 5: Active Reading of Secondary Sources
To start engaging with the scholarly conversations introduced by Prof. Robertson, reflect on and present your own approach to reading and taking notes on scholarly secondary sources.
How do you engage in reading a scholarly secondary source? Taking advantage of the opportunities for multimodal presentation on a webpage, examine your reading practice and show others how you do it, using the example of one or more of the secondary sources recommended on the Essay 4 assignment prompt.
Choosing one or more secondary sources that represent a scholarly conversation in which you’d like to participate in your study of I Am Cuba, record and share your best strategies for reading secondary sources strategically: How do you make notes on the journal article or book chapter? Do you use Google Drive or Adobe Acrobat or some other application? Do you print out the reading and mark it up? Do you write or type notes on a separate page or document? And what do you look for in order to annotate meaningfully? Who do you think is the audience for this scholarly work, and what features of the text reflect its rhetorical purpose? How do you identify the central scholarly claims made and key terminology used? What do you do when you encounter words or proper names you don’t recognize? How do you note the way the author analyzes primary sources, uses information from other scholarly sources, and responds to other scholars’ arguments or interpretations? Which references spark your interest in reading more?
To share your active reading practice with others, make use of visual or audiovisual communication as well as text, and be sure to include a full citation in MLA format.
Length: A HumCore seminar community member should be able to read/view the contents of this page in about 5 minutes.
Digital Archive Activity 6: Traveling Among Worlds
To engage with Prof. Wasserstrom’s lectures, which trace the sometimes surprising ways ideas and cultural works move between contexts and take on new meaning for different worldbuilding projects, find and collect primary sources examples (images, texts, etc.) of an idea, phrase, song, visual symbol, or other cultural work that has traveled in this way.
As we near the end of Winter quarter and look forward to the Spring quarter, when you’ll pursue your own investigation into a primary source of worldbuilding significance, now is a good time to look over what has interested you this quarter and last. What piqued your interest and could serve as an example (or makes you think of an example) of an idea or cultural work that has traveled through space and/or time and taken on new meaning in a worldbuilding project or projects? Think not only about what you learned through the lectures and explored on your Digital Archive but also about the primary sources and resources you encountered by participating in the library Primary Source Workshop or attending a Friday Forum.
To engage in this kind of collection and presentation of primary sources, choose a mode of presenting your topic of interest that takes advantage of the multimodal capacities of your Digital Archive. Consider trying a mode you haven’t used before!
- Create a multimedia timeline and/or map (using StoryMap JS, ArcGIS Story Maps free for UCI users, Google MyMaps, or your own creative choice)
- Collage images/videos in meaningful way on the page of your website
- Tell a story through the medium of video or audio (using your UCI Google Drive to host your video or audio recording*)
However you choose to reflect on and communicate your thoughts, be sure to verify the reliability of your sources and provide clear source citations and information for readers interested in learning more. Conclude your Digital Archive activity by writing a short reflection briefly looking backward and forward: Has your conception of worldbuilding changed since the beginning of Fall quarter? What ideas, insights, or even possible theories about worldbuilding do you sense emerging from your own collection and the websites of your classmates that you have perused? Do you have any ideas for a research path you might pursue in the Spring?
Length: A HumCore seminar community member should be able to read/view/listen to the contents of this page in about 5-7 minutes.
Before submitting this last Winter activity, be sure also to take a look at the homepage of your Digital Archive and update it to frame the expanded collection of activities for site visitors.
*To add a video from your Google Drive, select “Insert” > “Drive,” find the video file you wish to insert, and click “Insert.” To add an audio file from your Google Drive, first get the share link from the audio file, then on the Google Site page, select “Embed,” enter the URL of the share link, and click “Insert.”
Page last updated: 2024-01-11
