Some visuals you can include

Let's take a look at good digital humanities sites

James Farmer

Mary Baldwin

Timeline JS 

StoryMap

Here is me using the mapping tool right before class.

Thinking about your sections

There should be 7-10 sources in each section.

Societal sections

"Society" is the sum of all the different social groups, social rules, and social interactions we experience in living, working, and playing with our fellow humans, whether we want to or not. 

The "culture" of a society is its own particular stage or level of refinement, especially in intellectual and artistic pursuits.

What is the difference between culture and society?

The first thing Id like to clear up before I begin to look at culture is that my perspective on culture is a lot broader than is normally used in everyday life (kind of anthropological). 

When you say England has a different culture than say, Germany what you are really referring to is ‘society’. 

The society is different, there is a different language, some behaviors are different etc. In other words it fits the following definitions:

• An enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another
• A community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests

Culture is a broader perspective and can be expanded depending on the classifications you use. 

Using the above example England and Germany are both Christian majority countries, they share similar economic and democratic values, they share a common ancestral language…in fact that ancestral language is shared with the Indian subcontinent as well. 

A cultural diffusion took place around 4000 B.C. probably from the north Caucasus region as it went from semi-arid to desert. The tribes from this area spread south, west and north-west. That is why all the cultures that developed in the Mediterranean had a very similar pantheon of gods as the Hindus (for example: both Zeus and Indra throw lightning bolts). Later it was discovered that certain languages share roots and we now know that Greek, Persian, Latin, Hindi and English all originate from the same tribal group millennia ago.  

Each of these groups (Greeks, Hindus etc.) has different societies but they share a cultural heritage.  

1. The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
2. The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time 
3. The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization 
4. The set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic

In other words there can be different cultures within a society.

Some of the questions to ask your artifact for Societal section:

• What was the social scene during the time your artifact came into being?
• Was your artifact dubbed a “classic” by the society in its’ day or was it later?
• What was the reaction by different levels of society when the artifact became popular?
• This is where the Marxism, Feminists, Deconstructive analysis comes in. These theories will also fuel the rest of the project.

The basics of a good interview: 

1. Even if you have a chance to record an interview, back it up with notes in your notebook. You never know when technology will fail you.

2. Learn as much as you can about the subject – time permitting – BEFORE you conduct the interview. Go in prepared.

3. Bring into the interview a list of questions in the general order you want to ask them. You may want to save a tougher question until the end.

4. During the interview, do not be tied to your list of questions. Listen, listen and listen. Let the subject know you are listening by maintaining eye contact, nodding your head, leaning forward and taking notes.

5. Write down in your notebook the key words and phrases you will need for writing your story.

6. If the subject is speaking too fast, don’t be afraid to say “Please give me a second; I want to write that down.” Or, “That sounds important; can you please say it again?”

7. As soon as you can after the interview, look at your notes. Fill them out from memory. Type them out on a data sheet so you can get at them more easily.

8. Annotate your notes. That is, mark them with stars or arrows or marginalia such as “this quote good for end of story.”

9. Don’t just write down what you hear, write down what you see.

10. Be polite and respectful, even to subjects who may be grumpy or difficult to deal with.

11. Arrive early to check out the scene; stay late to gather final thoughts.

12. Call back a source to gather something you missed or to check the accuracy of something you are not sure of.

Three bonus tips:

*Ask one question at a time. This isn’t multiple choice.

*Ask open-ended questions, not ones that can be answered yes or no.

*Be patient. Don’t break the silence with a new question.
Find at least one person per section to interview. (I won't cry over more.)

Go to the Popular Culture/American Culture site to start to look for experts.

You can also try IMBD.

You can also try finding the people who write, podcast, film or anything else about your artifact and the issues surrounding it.

Take a look at some of these videos

And  . . . Just shut up

Brown chicken brown cow

Here is a great site for people working on a dissertation but it works your project, too. 

This is an important way to think about your project.

But don't fall in love with all of your ideas and here is why:

From the site GearFire

Consume relevant content.

The first step is to expose yourself to material related to your subject more regularly. You can do this in a passive way with not much effort by incorporating your topic into your feed reader or listening to the radio.

• Find and follow relevant blogs and podcasts. New material will be delivered straight to your feed reader or iTunes. This is an easy and non-intrusive way to begin filtering the subject matter into your life. (Aspiring maths students, for example, might enjoy Vi Hart’s blog, The Math Dude, or Tim Harford’s podcast More or Less.)
• Keep up to date. It’s easy to set up a Google Alert to keep on top of recent developments. Tracking tags on popular blogging and bookmarking sites like WordPress or Delicious can also lead to some interesting discoveries. (Try tracking geology or programming, for example.)
• Find and use small pockets of time. The ten minutes before class or the bus ride to work may as well be useful: keep your iPod or Kindle stocked up with podcasts, e-books, and articles to read during your free moments. You could also try borrowing books or magazines from friends, teachers, or your library.

Repurpose “time-wasting” sites and make them work for you.

BLABLA

As students, we are constantly trying to spend less time on Facebook, Twitter, forums, and blogs. Tools like LeechBlock and Chrome Nanny help us curb those habits, but what if we could use them to our advantage?

• Create a Tumblr blog centered around a subject. Keep your eyes peeled for new and interesting content—you never know what you might find! A project like this allows you to view the subject through other people’s eyes—and no post is too silly! (This is particularly good for music students. Searching for content for my own flute-related Tumblr, F Yeah, Flute! has inspired me to practice and introduced me to heaps of new and amazing pieces.)
• Use Twitter creatively. Of course, you can follow professionals and leaders in your field, and interact with classmates, but what about practicing your conversational foreign language skills in small, manageable chunks (the Esperanto community is especially friendly); or tweeting from the persona of a character (like Hamlet) or historical figure (like Edgar Allan Poe)?
• Participate in relevant forums. Two of the most effective ways to learn are by teaching somebody else or by participating in a discussion. Australian students completing their HSC or VCE can use the Bored of Studies forums to help other students with their questions and solidify their understanding of a topic, and students in other areas may be able to find similar online mediums.

Find ways to confront yourself with material.

The more often you see that formula, the more likely you are to remember it! Plaster your life with constant reminders, facts, and figures.

• Put up posters in the places you frequent or see often. The poster on the toilet wall is a tried-and-tested approach—and the entire household can learn together! Other places you could consider include your bedroom wall (or even roof), the front of your planner, or the fridge door. 

Exposing yourself to a wider range of material has the potential to deepen your appreciation, passion, and understanding of and for your subject—and is an easy, quick and unobtrusive way of utilizing the tools you already use. I hope it helps you look at your studies in a new and unique way!

Thinking about Critical Analysis

Thinking about Critical Analysis

• The steps below are only in a suggested order.  Prepare by reading/watching/listening to all material thoroughly. Understanding what you have to analyze is crucial. As you read, make notes of the following:

• Identify the author’s thesis. What is she arguing for/against?
• Identify the context of the argument. Why is he arguing this?
• Do they offer a solution to the problem(s) they raise? Does it seem plausible?
• Note any supporting evidence and all of the main ideas. How does the author support her argument?
• What kind of appeals does the author make in order to persuade the reader? For example, does he use: pathos (appeal to emotion), logos (appeal to reason/logic), and/or ethos (appeal to credibility)?
• Note your responses to the reading. Do any questions arise? How effective does the artifact appear?

Essential Questions for Each Specific Critical Perspective

When viewing a text through a specific critical lens, use these questions to guide your analysis. 

 Deconstruction Essential Questions:

• What is the relationship of the title to the rest of the work?
• What words need to be defined?
• What relationships or patterns do you see among any words in the text?
• What are the various connotative meanings words in the text may have?
• What allusions, if any, are in the text?
• What symbols, images, and figures of speech are used?
• What is the tone of the work and from what point of view is it being told?
• What tensions, ambiguities, or paradoxes arise within the text?
• How do all the elements of the text support and develop the overall theme?

Social Class Essential Questions:

• Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed, etc.?
• What is the social class of the author?
• Which class does the work claim to represent?
• What values does it reinforce?
• What values does it subvert?
• What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?
• What social classes do the characters represent?
• How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

Cultural Criticism Questions:

• How are events' interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
• How does the text function as part of a continuum with other cultural texts from the same period?
• How can we use a literary work to "map" the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or the cultures in which the work has been interpreted?
• How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?

Gender Conflict Essential Questions:

• How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
• What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?
• How are male and female roles defined?
• What constitutes masculinity and femininity?
• How do characters embody these traits?
• Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this change others’ reactions to them?
• What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
• What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of resisting patriarchy?
• What does the work say about women's creativity? Men’s ambition? The androgynous dichotomy?
• What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
• What role does the work play in terms of gender literary history and literary tradition?

Psychoanalytic Criticism Essential Questions:

• How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?
• Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - at work here?
• How can characters' behavior, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind (for example...fear or fascination with death, sexuality - which includes love and romance as well as sexual behavior - as a primary indicator of psychological identity or the operations of ego-id-superego)?
• What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its author?
• What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the psychological motives of the reader?
• Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author using these "problem words"? 

Project details

The project must have the following contents:

• The Introduction 
• Historical section
• Social section 
• Cultural  section   
• Political section  
• Economics section
• The Conclusion 

An introductory page

·      It is similar to the proposal and outlines your givens and your questions. 

•  Include an introduction to the sections
• Includes some introductory background like what might be found on the back of a movie or a summary from the web. This, of course, is your own work.
• Start with the iconography of the artifact for your graphics
• This is where you can link to most well-known of your sources that discusses your artifact as important
• This is where you will pose the questions you want to ask of the artifact. 

Pages/Chapters

• 1 page per section
• Break your sections into topics for each and create new pages as needed
• Each section needs to have a minimum of five external links that will give more depth to your particular discussion without you going into too much external detail. This is where you don’t have to do all of the writing but explain why this link is important to your questions and givens.

How to figure out what to link to:

Don’t just link to others’ work situate it so people know why you think this is important. You are also “curating” this site. Content curating is a skill that shows up in a lot of comm job descriptions these days and a cool word to through around in job interviews.

• Fan sites and fan fic
• Academic work
• News articles
• Interviews (appropriately categorized)
• Pop culture references (This shows up in your cultural section)
• Artistic work based on the artifact (remakes, art work, operas, books)
• Books about the artifact (link to reviews and the Amazon site)

You will also include your bibliography and link everything in the bib as best you can.

If you have done any ORIGINAL research make it a separate page and call it “original sources” It would be smart to photograph the person if this happens in person or ask for a photo you can use if you are doing a “phoner”.  Include the transcript (if interviewing through any chat this is easy) and if you are doing the phoner record the interview and make it available on the site. Even if you don’t use everything in the writing someone else might find the conversation useful and you could be cited next!

Getting to work on your document

The Project Proposal

2-3 pages (Think of this as notes towards your introduction)

Double space Times New Roman 12

1.     Explain the artifact you are choosing to research

2.     Explain your interest/personal background about the artifact

3.     Explain some of the general issues you want to know about this artifact

a.     The historical time period

b.     The cultural webs of significance

c.      Why is this particular artifact is important

d.     Why it is it still important

e. What is your question based on the given from your research

One of the requirements of this project is an annotated bib of 40-50 sources.

That means you will look at 80-100 sources to see what works for you based on your givens and you central questions.

Take a look at Purdue's OWL. It is a great resource and will give you some background.

The bib is not for me it is a tool for you to use. When you are working with this much material you need to be able to keep track of it. Let me give you an example.

My project is the movie Inherit the Wind.

There are several themes working at once in this project

• McCarthyism
• Darwinism
• Cold War 
• Change of medium from play to movie
• Intentions of the author 
• Interpretations of the audience
• The fictionalization of real people
• The fictionalization of a real event

My central questions are:

 "What happens when we exchange one historical moment to explain another? Is it ethical to fictionalize a historic moment like the Scope Monkey Trial to make a completely different political point 30 years after the fact? Does the author "owe" anything to the truth of history?"

So I watched the movie three times. Read the play before and after each viewing. Read reviews of the movie from the time period. Watched remakes of the movie. Read interviews by the playwrights. Read about McCarthyism (because that is what the play was about) Read about Darwinism and the Scope Monkey Trial (because that is the historical moment the play is based on) and THEN I started to write the paper. Get it? Before then I had nothing to say. I didn't know enough to say anything but puke out what other people have said before. You want to do something that only you can do because this is your interpretation. This time I am also going to add some interviews to my updated paper. 

So when I come across a source I can't just puke it down and say "There is my source!" You need to make a note (an annotation) about:

What is an Annotated Bibliography? from Kimbel Library on Vimeo.

• What the source says
• How and where you plan to use this information in the project
• Make note of the direct quote and your summary information of it
• Where to look (very important) inside the document.   Tell yourself the quote is on page three of 10 second paragraph. Trust me. You will be happier when you know where to find the things you have worked so hard to unearth. When the numbers get this high I guarantee you that you will not remember why you wanted to use something or what way important about it.
• If it is not an electronic source (gasp) then you will have to write it all down and make sure you get everything that you need. 
• When you start to interview people you will do the same to create the annotation. Add whatever notes you need to make it as complete as possible.