Blog Post 6: Research Paper Prospectus

Revised deadlines:

Assignment Deadline
Blog Post 5: Cluster 2 (four scholarly sources) Monday, May 16th
Blog Post 6: Research Project Prospectus Friday, May 20th
Working Draft of Research Paper Week 9 at scheduled individual conference with Tamara, beginning on Monday, May 23rd
Peer Review of Working Drafts Wednesday, May 25th in section meeting
Final Draft of Research Paper to EEE Dropbox and turnitin.com Friday, June 3rd at midnight

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Details about writing your prospectus:

The prospectus is a concise document in which you delineate your central claims and think through the organizational structure of your research paper.

The first paragraph should introduce your artifact (what) and cultural context(s) (who, where, and when) to your reader, a brief description how you intend to close read your artifact (vivid physical description of an object, rhetorical analysis of language, formal or technical analysis of visual or filmic composition, etc.). This paragraph should also present your preliminary thesis statement. This thesis may be more than one sentence. Ultimately, it must delineate the humanistic significance of this artifact for a particular cultural context. In as sense, you must present a specific, argumentative claim about how and why your artifact generates meaning in a given cultural milieu.

The second paragraph is about how you situate and contextualize your project. You should outline the significance of your project and the central humanistic research questions that motivate your inquiry. You should also define the disciplinary perspectives you will engage in your analysis and explain if and how you intend to take an interdisciplinary (related to more than one branch of knowledge) approach.

In the third paragraph, you will briefly introduce disciplinary approaches that scholars have taken towards this topic and the scholarly conversations that you have located to cluster your secondary sources. This will form the basis of your paper’s literature review, the term we use in university writing to describe a survey of the existing scholarly work on the subject. Possible modes of “clustering” your secondary sources:

  • Sources that provide historical/cultural context for your artifact
  • Sources that present some kind of interpretive/theoretical lens (e.g. philosophy, literary studies, history, visual culture, psychology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, race/ethic studies, etc.) for understanding or interpreting your artifact
  • Sources that present an interpretive debate about what your artifact (or artifacts like it, if scholars have not addressed your object in particular) means in a given cultural context
  • Sources that present an interpretive debate about what artifacts of the same genre or type as yours mean in a given cultural context

If, in your research, you have discovered a gap in the scholarly conversation (i.e., an artifact/type of artifact/context that scholars don’t seem interested in talking about or don’t seem interested in talking about in the way that you think is most apt) you should succinctly delineate what scholars have neglected and why you think that gap exists. If you have discovered that two different scholarly disciplines research this type of artifact or its attendant cultural context but don’t appear to be in conversation with one another, you should delineate why you think a lack of interdisciplinary exchange appears in your research. You will not identify specific scholarly claims in this paragraph, unless one scholar or text looms particularly large in the academic conversation on your topic (i.e., if the conversation is dominated by one particular scholar or text or if your thesis about the artifact extends or contradicts a central reading in the scholarly discussion of this topic), in which case you can engage specifically with that argument or individual.

The final paragraph should identify what you hope to find in your research and how you see your project in relationship to the existing scholarship. Do you see yourself extending or deepening an existing field of inquiry? Illuminating a gap or neglected area of inquiry? Giving voice to a marginalized population? Providing a new way of examining a well-trod historical context? Establishing a possible paradigm for examining other artifacts like the one you have chosen? Bringing together disciplines or fields that aren’t currently in conversation with each other? Your conclusion will need to describe the larger significance of not only your artifact, but also of the research and analysis that you have presented in your paper.

Administrative Details

  • Today in section meeting, you will sign up for a one-on-one meeting with me. Please take careful note of your appointment time. All appointments will take place in my office, HIB 195. We will NOT have section meeting on Wednesday, May 9th. Your only obligation to me this week is to attend your one-on-one consultation and continue your secondary source research (of course you must still attend lecture on Wednesday and complete the assigned readings).
  • While I have given you blog deadlines for each post, you will likely be revising these prewriting components of the research paper as your research continues to take shape. The blog posts will be graded holistically as your “prewriting” for the assignment at the end of the quarter. You should have posts 2-4 (artifact selection, disciplinary orientation/humanistic research questions, cluster 1 of secondary sources) available by the time we meet this week so that I can look at them as we can talk about your progress to date.
  • You must complete the Study Questions on Kenneth Silver’s “Purism: Straightening Up After the Great War” for section meeting on Monday, May 16th. We will discuss Prof. Herbert’s first two lectures and his chapter on “How to Analyze and Write About a Work of Art” in the HCC Writer’s Handbook in conjunction with the Silver reading that day in section meeting.

Events This Week!

This week is action-packed with events that might be of interest to you and your work in HumCore. On Tuesday afternoon, there is a symposium on the clash between the Islamic State and far right radical movements in Europe. The panel includes two big-deal European philosophers, Catherine Malabou (Kingston University) and Marc Crepon (Ecole Normale Superieure), both of whom are Visiting Assistant Professors for this quarter in the Humanities.

May10_ContemporaryEuropeSymposium

Later that evening, Bryan Doerries, a UCI alumnus and founder of the Theatre of War program, will be in conversation with UCI faculty and staff about his work on Greek tragedy and PTSD in military contexts. Any of you who are working on research projects on PTSD or US military issues should strongly consider attending this event.

May10_TheatreofWar

TOW UC Irvine Cast Flyer

Finally (and nearest and dearest to my heart), your classmate Maribel Valentin helped to organize a screening of The Hunting Ground with the Feminist Collective at UCI on Wednesday evening. As you know from class, The Hunting Ground is a documentary by Kirby Dick (who also directed The Invisible War) about the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. From what I understand, the Feminist Collective will also be conducting a discussion after the film to talk about these issues as they effect our campus.

May11_HuntingGroundScreening

Hope to see you at one (or more!) of these events this week!

Blog Posts 4 and 5: Secondary Source Annotations

Amended deadlines:

Cluster 1 (four scholarly sources) due Monday, May 9th

Cluster 2 (four scholarly sources) due Monday, May 16th

For your next two blog posts, you will select a cluster of four related scholarly sources on your topic. You are welcome to begin your posts with reflection on the research process so far: where you are finding sources, where you are having difficulties, how the project has changed through the research process, etc. However, you need to accomplish the following for two clusters of four sources each. First, just as you did in the “Mickey Mouse in Full Metal Jacket” activity, you should first identify the scholarly conversation happening between these four sources (i.e., the way that scholars collectively evaluate, discuss, agree, and disagree about a topic). Then, for each source, you should write a separate paragraph, identifying (1) the author (providing information concerning the identity or professional background of the author as well as remarks on the way the author’s field or disciplinary orientation functions as a lens through which the author examines or illustrates crucial issues), (2) the text’s thesis (the principal argument or thesis of the source, and potentially relevant subordinate claims), (3) types of evidence employed (the kinds of argument and evidence that are employed in the source, and any limitations that you perceive in the source), (4) the purpose of the text (including the intended audience for the source and the purpose behind its composition), and (5) an evaluation of the source’s relevance and usefulness for your particular project.

A bit more information on locating sources:

You should now have selected both a primary artifact and context and done some significant brainstorming about the disciplinary approach(es) you will take to your topic and the humanistic research questions you intend to ask of your artifact. Before you meet with Tamara next week to discuss your progress on the research project thus far, you will need to begin your secondary source research and annotation, that is, your descriptive evaluation of each of the major sources your find on your topic. While you may consult periodical or popular sources, you must consult and reference at least 8 scholarly sources in your final research paper in this section. Scholarly secondary sources are typically journal articles or books published by reputable publishing houses. The distinction between a journal and a magazine is that journals generally require anonymous submission of articles to be “blind” reviewed by a panel of experts in a given field; whereas magazines may agree to publish articles written by those who fund the magazine. In addition, journals are characterized by highly specialized distinctions that correspond to university disciplines. As you pursue your research question, you will begin to get a feeling for what characterizes the best journals in the sub-specialty of your research. For books, university publishers are generally reliable; however, there are many well-established publishing houses worldwide. You should consult your instructor to evaluate the scholarliness of non-university publishing houses. Each field has a reliable series of publishers, and you will learn to tell the difference between well-respected publishers and “vanity presses” that publish for a fee. It is the scholarly quality of the research, as well as the publisher, that determines whether or not a book is considered a scholarly secondary source.

In class, we reviewed methods of locating scholarly secondary sources. Peruse the UC Library page on Databases to get you started, which provides detailed information on how to conduct research in the UCI Library and links to the major databases.

Review methods of doing advanced searches, and remember that most systems default to “full text,” meaning that they will yield a variety of unrelated sources. Shift the settings to “title” or “key word,” and remember to re-set the parameters after each search. You can refine searches based on date and a variety of other settings. Feel free to read, quote, and cite articles in any language in which you are fluent. Refine the choice of search terms so that your searches yield between 20 and 50 results each. However, you should be prepared to skim a 100-title result at several points during your research, in order to get a sense of the work other scholars have done.

You should read all of your sources, and you should establish strong ethos as an expert in the range and depth of secondary research on your research paper topic. This kind of knowledge is only available through hands-on exploration of a wide variety of journal articles and books. This means that you should go to the library. Plan to skim books initially to decide whether or not they are useful. If your source is a journal article, look at the intro and final paragraphs to assess usefulness, and read topic sentences of paragraphs. If your source is a book, review introductory and concluding chapters and look at the book chapter index. You may find that only one or two chapters from a book source are relevant for your project.

Just as you should plan to keep a record of all library searches that you have carried out including search terms that you have used, you should also keep a record of all sources that you have reviewed. You may encounter sources that are interesting but only tangentially related to your topic. Save those references in case the direction of your research were to shift slightly.

As you work through your sources, plan to take notes with a view to writing your annotation. Note relevant information about the author, identify the main argument or thesis, evaluate kinds of arguments and evidence used, and take notes on the usefulness of the source for your project. Remember strategies for note taking in Humanities Core: identify key terms, stages of an argument, crucial examples, logical claims, flaws in logic, biases, and trajectories for future research. Although your secondary source annotation blog posts will require only a brief paragraph about each source, your final research paper will require extended analysis of the rhetorical styles of exemplary or paradigmatic secondary sources. For this reason, you should not leave the reading and evaluation of your sources until the last minute. If you take the time to annotate and analyze your scholarly secondary sources as you go, you will steadily build the foundation of your research paper, and you will give yourself a series of antitheses against which you can set an original thesis.

You should have at least the first cluster of secondary source annotations, as well as your artifact and disciplinary orientation/humanistic research question posts up on your website by the time you meet with Tamara one-on-one next week (scheduling on Monday, May 9th during section meeting).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blog Post 3: Brainstorming Disciplinary Approaches and Humanistic Research Questions

As you know from your readings in the Humanities Core Course Writer’s Guide this year, the humanities are fields of study that look at the ways in which humans have created meaning through their thoughts, their actions, and their creations. Humanistic research questions usually ask how or why certain meanings are generated from human activity (that is, interpretive questions). Philosophical research questions, like those asked by Dean van den Abbeele, consider the way human thought works in practice, as well as evaluating the logical and ethical principles that underlie our thinking, our actions, and the world around us. Historians like Professor Alice Fahs seek to understand past human actions and events in terms of their human significance both for the participants and the interpreters. Literary critics (like Professors John Smith, Oren Izenberg, and Carol Burke), and art historians and musicologists (like Professor James Herbert) study the meaning of different artifacts that humans have made and are especially interested in how their “madeness” creates meaning. Those scholar begin with the premise that meaning resides in the formal and rhetorical components of a text, image, or film, in the varying meanings of language and visual form. They, therefore, ask questions about how the language or visual composition of the text or visual object shapes meaning. (HCC Writer’s Handbook 5-12)

The assignment for your research paper asks you to ask how and why your war artifact creates meaning in a cultural context. By now, you have hopefully honed in on a particular artifact (and attending context) that you intend to study. In your third blog post for the quarter, you should brainstorm what disciplinary approaches and humanistic research questions you might pose about your chosen artifact. Your approach can certainly be interdisciplinary, and may even take up questions that are not “proper” to the humanities (like those of social science). Nevertheless, you must ask and attempt to answer explicit humanistic research questions in your project.

It might help to think about how you intend to frame your artifact in the larger context. If your artifact in some way represents a personal or local aspect of a context, how might it represent a larger or global phenomenon? What problems might be related to your primary source, and how might your interpretive offer significant insight into the problem? What neglected problem becomes clearer or comes to light from analyzing this artifact? Does your artifact represent a neglected or silenced voice or series of voices? To what silenced group does the artifact give a voice? How does the artifact indirectly allude to the problem of a group of people being silenced? Perhaps cultures or subcultures interact by way of your artifact. In that case, which cultures or subcultures are related to the artifact, and what kind of relationship exists between them?

Questions you should be able to answer include:

  1. What is to be gained by studying my primary source in a specific historical and cultural context?
  1. Which fields of the humanities would study a primary source like mine?
  1. How would those fields analyze my primary source differently?
  1. Which features of my primary source illuminate or highlight controversy?
  1. Does my primary source give a voice to a silenced element of a population?
  1. How does my primary source relate to the major themes explored this year?
  1. What are the ethos, logos, and pathos of my primary source?

As you begin to research secondary sources on your topic next week, the way you intend to frame your artifact might change and the humanistic research questions you intend to ask might shift. As you reevaluate the framing of your artifact, your disciplinary approaches, or humanistic research questions, please update this post so that I can see how your thinking develops.

Please upload the third blog post to your websites by Sunday, May 1st.

 

Blog Post 2: Brainstorming on Research Topic and Possible Primary Sources (Artifacts)

As we discussed in section meeting, the research paper you will write this quarter will ask you to analyze the humanistic significance of a cultural artifact related to war. A cultural artifact is some form of primary source (original records/object created at the time historical events occurred or well after events as a kind of creative or memorial response to an event). These can include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, newspapers, speeches, interviews, memoirs, documents produced by government agencies, photographs, audio recordings, moving pictures or video recordings, research data, and objects or artifacts such as works of art, maps, buildings, tools, and weapons. These sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous interpretations by humanities scholars, they provide the resources necessary for research. Yale University maintains a wonderful page with more information about primary sources if you need more information.

For your second blog post of the quarter, please write reflectively about possible research topics that you have been thinking about pursuing and brainstorm three possible artifacts that you could use as the basis of your research paper. Why do these artifacts interest you? What facets of a particular war or context might they help to illuminate? This will require some preliminary research and investigation. The UCI Library Databases to Get You Started: Primary Sources page is a great place to begin looking for possible artifacts. After you have located three possible artifacts, please evaluate them using this checklist on the American Library Association and include some reflection on this process in your blog post.

Please upload your second blog post to your websites by the time we meet for section meeting on Monday, April 25th.

 

Administrative Updates

Our class blogroll has been constructed and you can now use that page as a way of navigating to your fellow classmate’s websites. I have tried to respect varying degrees of privacy by using only your first name to identify your site to your classmates. In some cases, however, I have also had to use the first letter of your last name in cases where two people have the same first name. Please let me know if you have any issues with how I have linked to your website. Some of you have not sent me the URLs for your websites to be added to this blogroll, others have not yet posted their prewriting for the literary journalism assignment (the first blog post of the quarter). If either of those statements applies to you, please remedy this as soon as possible. A few reminders about deadlines this week (deviating from the schedule on the original syllabus):

Monday, April 18

  • I will be available for drop-in meetings during my regularly scheduled office hours from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. in HIB 195
  • Make sure you have watched Invisible War for lecture and section meeting

Wednesday, April 20

  • I will have extra drop-in office hours from 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. in HIB 195
  • Submit peer editing documentation in section meeting for participation credit (or upload to “LitJ Peer Review” EEE Dropbox)

Friday, April 22

  • Submit final draft of Literary Journalism essay to “LitJ Final Draft” EEE Dropbox and turnitin.com

Remember: Humanities Core Course has Peer Tutors available for scheduled appointments. If you are struggling with this assignment, think about visiting with a tutor once you have had a chance to try and address your peers’ comments on your essay. Make sure to bring the assignment prompt, a current draft of your essay, and any transcribed material you have compiled.

Blog Post 1: Prewriting and Research for Literary Journalism Assignment

130121_cn-flu-7_p465-2Hello everyone! My apologies for not making it to class today — my lingering cold took a turn for the worse and I apparently have bronchitis. I spoke with Professor Garceau about what you went over in section and I believe that he introduced the general framework of the Literary Journalism assignment. For your first blog post, I want you to do some prewriting and research in preparation for your interviews.

After you have read Carol Burke’s chapter “Literary Journalism” in the Humanities Core Writer’s Guide, and set up an interview, you should describe how you locate your interview subject and what event or idea will you be interviewing him or her about. Why do you want to do this interview? What interests you about this person or event? What kinds of questions do you plan to ask your interview subject? What kinds of responses do you expect to hear to these questions?

What do you know about this event or idea already? What kinds of research will you need to do to broaden your understanding of it? In researching background materials, you will want to move beyond general searches on search engines and into academic and periodical databases. Try researching the event or idea on Academic Search Complete, American History Life, and Google Scholar (links on the sidebar at right). Once you have located academic and periodical sources on your topic, identify and (if possible) hyperlink to three of the sources you found most useful and explain why. What are the main conversations surrounding your event/idea? Is your topic contentious in any way? What important terms/events/concepts did these sources introduce that you will include in your interview? How has your research helped you revise your initial questions? How would you now formulate those questions, and why? What additional questions will you pose to interview subject that driven by your research? What kinds of additional research will you need to do in order to prepare yourself for your interview?

This first blog post addressing these questions should be approximately 500 words, and should be posted once you have completed your necessary speculation, planning, and research. Ideally, I would like to see these posts up on Monday, April 4th, though I also understand that it may take into mid-week to locate interview subjects and conduct the necessary secondary research.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and I hope to be back on track health-wise with you on Monday.

Revisiting Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl” and Thinking about Primary Sources as Artifacts

Nick Ut, “Napalm Girl” (1972)

Today in lecture, Dr. Thuy Vo Dang from UCI’s Southeast Asian Archive encouraged you to think about the iconic photography of the Vietnam War and how these images shape our narrative imagination of that conflict. These photographs are one type of primary source, the term that historians use to describe objects, documents, recordings, or other sources of information that were created at the time under study. Primary sources serve as an original source of information about a given topic or context. Your research paper this spring will be based around one such primary source, which we will call an artifact, borrowing from the language of Professor Izenberg from the fall. You will remember that to understand an artifact, you must think about and explore how and why it made (what Izenberg called the process of artifactualization).

Nick Ut holding "Napalm Girl" (Photograph from Vice)

Nick Ut holding “Napalm Girl” (Photograph from Vice)

There is perhaps no more infamous photograph of the Vietnam War than Nick Ut’s “Napalm Girl,” which appeared on the front page of every major newspaper in June 1972 and won Ut the Pulitzer Prize. Vice (which hosts lively blogs that might be a great model for your own online writing) recently featured a short interview with Ut, reflecting on how he came to take that photograph. Ut didn’t merely document this traumatic event; he in fact intervened:

The press almost didn’t use the photo because its subject, Kim Phuc, is completely naked. I was certain I was going to lose my job for a picture that wouldn’t even make it to print. But the real achievement in my career is that Kim survived.

Did you have a hand in saving her?
Yes, but I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t tell anyone at first because you’re really not supposed to get involved with your subjects when you’re reporting a war. I was shot at all the time, because I mostly traveled with soldiers. I never interfered or got involved with what the soldiers were doing, but that doesn’t stop anyone from shooting at you.

But when I saw what happened to the children, things changed for me. I had been focusing my camera on the South Vietnamese airplane when it dropped four bombs of napalm. I saw a young boy, about a year old, lose his leg and die right in front of me. I kept telling myself that all I was allowed to do was take pictures and that’s it.

Then a girl runs past me, naked and crying. She was covered in napalm; I could see it on her left arm as she passed. I heard her screaming, “It’s too hot, I think I’m dying.”

I gave her my water. I watched her for about an hour, consoling her, telling her that we’d be out soon. But I was just trying to calm her. There wasn’t help to be seen anywhere. I took her to the hospital. It was full, until I showed them my press pass, which got her inside.

Ironically, Ut is now a well-known paparazzi photographer, perhaps best known for an image of Paris Hilton as she was arrested for a DUI in 2006. Read more about the strange career journey, as well as the aftermath of his intervention into Kim Phuc’s life here.

Welcome to Spring Quarter of Humanities Core!

Textile of Hmong migration from Laos

Welcome back to Humanities Core, and to those of you whom I haven’t met, welcome to my sections! This section website supplements the general Humanities Core site with announcements, section-specific syllabi, assignments and writing prompts, blogrolls of your peers, and study materials. Please poke around and familiarize yourself with the format. I will update the blog on this homepage with pragmatic announcements about deadlines, events on campus, and interesting links on the web about war and the humanities, so it might be beneficial to bookmark this page or add it to your RSS feed so you can stay up to date.

Please email me the URL of your website as well as any tagline that you would like to appear with your link on the class blogroll by Monday, April 4th. That date is also the deadline for your first blogpost of the quarter, in which you will prewrite and summarize the research you have located as you work toward your literary journalism project.

I look forward to working together this quarter.

warmly,

Tamara Beauchamp