Assignment
Through three activities over the course of the quarter, expand your personal academic website to communicate your creative and critical reactions to the course material, including your own applications of concepts and interpretive methods you learned.
Before starting your online writing for the Winter, review the reflection you wrote at the end of Fall quarter. Think about what opportunities for the evolving appearance, thematic consistency, personal writing voice, and other rhetorical strategies you would like to pursue. (If you are new to HumCore this quarter, read the Fall Website Project prompt.) This quarter, consider especially: What do the topics, concepts, texts, and artworks mean to you? Do you notice connections between your own intellectual or creative interests and the critical ideas and history explored in the course? What sparks your own interest and makes you curious to investigate further? And how would you like to develop your multimodal communication skills and creativity in order to convey your own perspective and contribute to the production of new knowledge on these topics?
Building on the technical skills and interpretive methods you started to develop last quarter, you can use your website as a space for exploring and documenting your own humanistic research interests as you progress toward more independent research and writing in the Spring. The reflection you will add to your website at the end of this quarter will help you focus your interests and refine your rhetorical purpose as you articulate your aims to your audience.
The three activities in the Winter Website Project, as well as the reflection at the end of the quarter, will be worth 20% of your writing grade this quarter.
Learning Goals
- Demonstrate awareness of purpose, audience, and context in choices of style, multimedia, and textual and visual organization
- Produce accurate, rhetorically effective, multimodal communication using the appropriate genres, stance, and citational practices of scholarly digital media
- Demonstrate information literacy skills by locating, evaluating and integrating scholarly secondary sources (academic books or journal articles) and primary sources from digital archives or institutional websites
- Practice active revision of form and content and demonstrate the development of flexible and ethically responsible strategies for generating and editing online writing
- Develop digital literacy and transferable technical skills through the design of a personal academic website
- Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing, and multimodal communication
Your instructor may adjust these activity instructions for the particular emphases of your seminar.
Activity 4: Engaged Reading of Historical Analysis
How do you read scholarly work in history? Taking advantage of the opportunities for multimodal presentation on a webpage, show and explain to your audience how to read one assigned excerpt from a scholarly work in history (Norton, Restall, or Johnson) or one of the other scholarly articles or book chapters provided in the clusters for Essay 3: Scholarly Conversations and Animal Histories. Share your best strategies and show through examples: How do you make annotations? 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? What do you annotate? What do you do when you encounter words or proper names you don’t recognize? What aspects of the article or chapter are most important to identify in order to understand the historian’s argument or interpretation?
Think about how you can demonstrate a targeted reading for argument, including main claims, kinds of primary sources used, key terminology or concepts applied, and engagement in larger scholarly debates (is this historian explicitly responding to or arguing against another scholar’s interpretations?). In this demonstration, make use of visual communication as well as text, and be sure to include a full citation, in MLA format, of the excerpt. Keep in mind that posting an entire book chapter online would violate the author’s copyright! Be respectful of other scholars’ work, and select only short passages as illustrations.
Activity 5: Engaged Viewing of Visual Media
What potentially uncanny or surrealist effects do you now notice in illustrations or animation in works meant for children or a general audience including children? And how can you convince your audience to see what you see? Using the multimedia capacities of a webpage, strategically present and explain significant visual details in the images of one work you’ve studied (Where the Wild Things Are, Calvin and Hobbes, Winnie the Pooh, A Book of Nonsense, or Destino) or a memorable illustrated or animated work from your childhood that includes animal representations. Be sure to provide full and accurate bibliographic information for the primary source as well as source citations/links for any included images that are not your original work.
To call your readers’ attention to particular visual elements and their interaction with story or language, you might use enlarged details, embed video clips, or insert annotated screenshots. If you are interpreting an animation, explore how moving images differ from still images and what sound contributes. Having learned from the lectures, do you view the illustrations or animation differently than you might have before? What role does the visual representation of animals play in the creation of uncanny or surrealist effects?
Activity 6: Drawing Connections: Colonial and Neocolonial Categorization of Humans as Non-Human Animals
Expanding your website with another page, express your own response to Professor Imada’s lectures and assigned readings or viewings having to do with historical or contemporary representations of humans as non-human. What passage, scene, image, theme, or interpretive concept did you find most interesting, shocking, inspiring, or thought-provoking? What connections can you draw to other works you studied or concepts you learned this quarter or this year so far–in this course, in another course, or outside of classes? What topic would you like to learn more about? Do you see a potential for pursuing this topic or a related topic in your research project next quarter?
Final Reflection: As you adjust the look, organization, or titling of your site to present its final, more unified form for this quarter, compose and add a reflection examining your experience of composing these webtexts on visual and historical topics. What strategies of multimodal communication did you employ, how, and why? What kind of ethos or persuasive voice did you develop in the activities this quarter? What differences (or similarities) did you notice between the writing most effective for your website audience and the writing you have developed in your essays?
Did you know? UCI students can currently use Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Acrobat DC Professional for free. Learn more on OIT’s website.
