KMP Assignment * Spring 2020
Option A: Encyclopedia entry
You’ll research and write a 300-500 word encyclopedia entry on the topic of your choice. Your entry will include permalinks to relevant materials, and any images you include will have alt-text that also contains citation information.
Option B: Page/post Revision
In lieu of the encyclopedia entry, you may choose to edit an existing page. The Conspiracies and Anti-Conspiracies pages both need work, as does the Espionage page. I’m also open to augmenting the social networks page and adding exhibit pages. We can collaborate one-on-one. Of, if you want to work with a partner, I’ll collaborate with you both.
Both options require you to conduct rigorous research, write concisely and engagingly for new media, and learn how to use WordPress to create, categorize, and tag your post. Additionally you’ll learn how to add media and alt text to images. Time permitting, you will create posts for your bibliography entries.
Schedule (see syllabus for your individual dates)
1. Plan of Attack Due in GoogleDocs.
Your plan of attack will include an annotated bibliography of at least five resources. You may use any of the Digital Resources listed here on The Kit Marlowe Project website, but you must also include at least two scholarly sources dated no earlier than 2008.
2. Rough Draft Due for Peer-review.
Please also share your rough draft with me in GoogleDocs so that I can give you editorial and research suggestions.
3. Revised Draft Due for Site Build.
We’ll spend this class building out the site. I imagine much screen sharing as we troubleshoot the inevitable complications that arise whenever one uses technology in the classroom. Don’t stress! We’ll roll with it!
4. All materials due on LMS.
Submit a document containing the text you posted, any bibliography entries, your initial plan of attack, and a link to your private page on the site.
Where to start? Class Commonplace Book!
Our goal this semester has been to learn via exploration, by researching a topic related to a given day’s readings to develop context for our readings across a wide range of literature. You have become adept digital spelunkers and will now have the opportunity to develop a line of inquiry that you wish to learn more about.
Review our shared class commonplace books and find a topic that interests you! Please feel free to choose a sub-topic from whatever you may be planning your Synthesis: CPB Essay. Please do not think of any of these assignments as mutually exclusive! Our goal here and throughout this semester has been to practice divergent approaches to thinking critically and creatively in the context of reading, researching, and writing about early modern literature.
Possible Topics
Your class has been provided with a list of suggested topics and a sign-up sheet in GoogleDocs. Please use this list to generate some brain-rain about a topic and approach that deeply interests you.
Audience
The Kit Marlowe Project is an internationally recognized, public digital humanities resource. Your primary audience is comprised of undergraduate and graduate students looking for reliable information about Christopher Marlowe’s life, times, and colleagues.
Professors also use the site’s teaching resources and look to your entries as examples of work their students might also be able to do!
You are the experts setting the example!
Writing Resources
Rams Write. Students in first-year writing courses at Framingham State University have created this open-source guide that can help you write a strong thesis statement, choose active over passive voice, and fix common grammar problems. You can also learn how to use Voyant Tools to revise your essay and avoid the kiss of death: repetition. (By the time you write this essay, we may also have a handy citation guide!)
Revising Prose, by Richard Lanham. This blockbuster film will help you condense your prose to write concisely and clearly in YOUR voice. It is dated and has some pretty hokey music, but there is no better resource out there – yet.
Please note that all of the foregoing teaching resources have been authored and should be cited accordingly. The Kit Marlowe Project by Kristen Abbott Bennett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.