11/16: Dossiers and Draft Projects

During class on 11/16, you’ll all engage in a small group “peer review” — and while that’s happening, I’ll be meeting briefly with each of you to review your dossiers.

What are you “handing in” on the 16th? Your dossier and your draft website. See the “Expectations” section of the website for more information about the draft exhibition and the purpose and format of the dossier.

How “drafty” should this “draft exhibition” be? Think of it as if you’ve completed your first full draft of a paper – or, if you’ve been slow to start, think of this as a fleshed-out outline. Of course there’ll be stuff missing. Of course you could do a little more research on certain topics. Of course there’ll be some awkward transitions. Of course not everything’s formatted perfectly. But I should still get a sense of where you’re going with the exhibition as a whole — and there should be enough “stuff” there to give shape and substance to each section or node or sequence that contributes to your larger argument or narrative. And by this stage of the semester, after you’ve had a full month devoted solely to your own project research, your dossier should reflect a good amount of research and collection activity.

How do you submit this work? Please send me, via email, a link to your exhibition. If you’d prefer to keep your exhibition private for now, while it’s still in development, you’re welcome to password-protect it; just make sure to tell me how to get in!

As for the dossier itself: because it might be difficult for some of you to find a share-able form in which to submit this to me, you’ll be showing your dossier to me in class on the 16th and quickly walking me through it. You’re welcome to present it in whatever form makes most sense for you: you can post a virtual dossier somewhere online, you can bring a printed portfolio or physical scrapbook, you can bring your laptop to class and give me a tour of your files, etc.. Please don’t spend much time formatting and cleaning up your dossier; I’d rather you share it with me in all its glorious chaos (remember, the primary reason you’re sharing this with me is so that I can appreciate all the [potentially messy] background work that went into your exhibition) and that you devote your time instead to the exhibition! I’ll be spending five to ten minutes with each of you to review your dossiers. Because we’ll be reviewing these dossiers together (and because I don’t want to ask you to do any unnecessary “busy work” writing), you NEED NOT compose any explanatory text for the dossier itself. (You might remember that originally, when I imagined each of you submitting a research scrapbook of some sort and me looking through this material independently, I had asked you to write an introductory text and a short text framing each section of the dossier. There’s no need for you to go to this trouble if you’ll be sharing the dossier with me in-person.)

How can you get feedback on your project? You have a couple options; please choose whichever would be more useful to you. (1) I could review your exhibition online and send you an email with feedback. (2) Or we could meet in-person, sometime during the week of the 15th, to explore and discuss your exhibition together. Please sign up for an appointment via Doodle (scan the columns to make sure no one else has already reserved a particular time slot). All meetings will take place in my office, on the 13th floor at 2 West 13th Street (You’ll want to take the east set of elevators (the ones closest to 5th Ave) up to the 12th floor, then take the stairs opposite rooms 1213/1214 up to 13. I’m in the back office.) If none of these times work for you, we could meet somewhere off-campus on the 19th, 20th, or 21st.

One comment

  1. So I’ve been thinking about how we may be able to link between projects. One way may be to draw attention to the physical location at which our projects are hosted by posting links of our various projects on a map. While certainly not 100% accurate, it is an interesting visualization of a material aspect of links that is easily taken for granted and takes our conceptualization of place past the internet suffix.

    I’ve started a map on Google Maps – it is open for collaboration to anyone in the class who is interested in participating. You can find your hosting service’s location using this yougetsignal.com

    I’ve used the link button in the top left hand corner of Google Maps to copy and embed the map on to my web exhibit. Displaying this kind of cross linking may make more sense for some projects (those dealing with maps and transmission) than others.

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