Your overall project grade will count for 25% of your final grade in the course. The project grade will be determined by the following rubric:
For your final project you will work in small groups to annotate a passage from one of the course texts for the purpose of making your audience more aware of the ways in which black writers reference; invoke; play with; and think through the material in the otherwise abstract or seemingly immaterial form of written words. These annotation are part of a digital project, and as such in addition to using traditional scripted annotations (i.e. what you’d find in a footnote), your annotations will also include images and sounds.
Your annotations must be well researched, ethically acquired, and properly cited. Most groups will have five people in the group. As such I am requiring that the group’s annotation as a whole should include:
25 % – pre-project assignments: A quarter of your project grade is based on the timely and thorough completion of all pre-project assignments (i.e. project check-ins 1 and 2; the group meeting with the professor; and the final in-class project presentation).
25 % – project execution: All members of the group will share this grade.
10- Well-Researched Scripted Annotations that Provide Relevant Historical Information about Some Overt and/or Implied Material Object or Material Experience in the Text. Scripted annotations should be drawn from at least three reputable sources, one of which must be from a peer-reviewed scholarly source. See: “Toolbox” page for information about what constitutes a “reputable” source and what a “peer-reviewed scholarly source” is. There is no strict word limit for these annotations, but ultimately they will be short but densely informative. You might aim roughly for about 50-150 words for each annotation.
5- Visual and/or Sonic Annotations Drawn from a Ppre-existing Visual and/or Sonic Files. For example if the text references a Broadway performance, your group might find a visual of the program or an advertisement for the show or maybe even an image of the opening night actors. Your image and/or sound file should help the reader move into the material context already at play in the text. It should not be a distraction or ask the reader to move away from the text, as such even if something about the image of Henry Box Brown’s escape reminds you of the “sunken place” in the movie Get Out, you should not annotate the lines about Henry’s resurrection from the box with an image or clip or sound bite from Get Out. If making such a connection feels really important to you, there are other ways to at least suggest it, but those connections will take more work than putting the two temporally distant texts side by side and asking your reader to do all the interpretive work.
3- Visual, Textual, and/or Sonic Annotations of Your Group’s Own creation. (i.e. perhaps someone makes one of the recipes in Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo, and the group takes photos of the process of cooking and/or the final product, so as to include that with the text). Or perhaps your group builds a box of the precise dimensions as Box Brown’s box and the group takes pictures of a group member who is roughly around Brown’s size folded in the box, and perhaps you make a recording of the breathing or the sounds from within the box, and perhaps even that group member in the box writes a haiku about the experience of being in the box. Again the point is not to take readers away from the text, but rather to find ways to help them move more deeply into the importance of matter and the material in the text.
Please know that I thoroughly expect you to draw upon the research you do for your material history paper. While your group may need to do some additional research because perhaps as a group you decide that there is some material object that no one wrote about in their paper that is integral to your passage or perhaps you feel that as a group you could extend the research someone began in one of their papers for ma more thorough annotation. Or perhaps you need to do some more research in order to find the kind of information that might help illuminate the various connections between your otherwise individual research projects.
2- Wild Card Annotations of your choosing. You can choose to do two more scripted annotations. OR perhaps you choose to do one more scripted annotation and one more original annotation.
I will grade the “project execution” based on:
25%–Number and Type of Annotations Included. You will be graded on whether or not your group’s annotation includes the minimum requirement of 10 scripted; 5 non-scripted; 3 original annotations; and 2 Wild Card annotations (A total of 20 annotations).
25%–How well your Annotations Work with the Text. I will assess your annotations based on how well your annotations individually and collectively function as a potential resource to help bring audiences into (rather than away from) the text. (i.e. how relevant, thorough, clear, and accurate the annotations are.)
25%–How Accurate and Well-Cited Your Annotations Are. I will grade you partly on how thorough, clear, accurate your citations for all your annotations are.
25% —The strength of your contextualizing blurb. Since you will not be annotating an entire novel or story, you will need to provide your reader with some context to appreciate where the passage you are annotating comes from. You should provide a solid overview of the main elements of the text as a whole, and then a clear explanation of what’s going on and what’s important in the part of the text from which the passage is drawn.
25 % – project write-up: A 1- 2 page group-authored write-up [double spaced, 12 point Times New Roman Font with 1 inch margins]. The write-up should provide a rationale for some of the choices made in your project by discussing how those choices relate to the group’s goals and organizing principle(s). The write-up should also make clear how the group’s goals, content, and formal choices connect to or make some significant contribution to at least one of our primary course discussions.
25 % – self and group evaluation: I will pass out a questionnaire the last week of classes, which you should thoughtfully and thoroughly complete by the date listed on the syllabus.
Black Matter 