Overview
Summary: Students aiming for a C, B, or A will complete aspects of a visual research project (paper or media project) based on an analysis of a visual media object of their choice. Students will base their analysis on a research practice covered during the course. For this section of the assignment, you'll be producing one component of the lit review focused on the sites and modalities you want to study.
Details:
Your full Lit Review will include at least three (3) sources related to the visual artifact, three (3) related to the site or modality, and three (3) related to the method. In other words, this paper should have at least nine (9) outside sources for this project, plus at least one from within the course (10 total). For this section of the assignment, you'll be focusing on just the second of the three groups of sources: sources related to the sites and modality/modalities that you are interested in studying.
As a reminder, this resource on how to do a Literature Reviews is very useful: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/conducting_research/writing_a_literature_review.html
Steps
1. Create a Google doc and add me as an Editor.
2. Using one of the library tools learned during our library day, find 4-6 sources that you think might be useful for this project. More so than when you completed this for the artifacts, for the site and modality/modalities you'll focus on, you are probably going to have to do some work to make it relevant for your project. On the one hand, doing a google search for "circulation and technological" is going to get you a lot of sources that won't be that useful because they are too general. On the other hand, trying to find sources about the site and modality/modalities or your specific artifact is probably not going to get you anything as it'll be too narrow. You'll need to play around with search terms to find something in the middle. List the 4-6 sources that you end up finding in the first section of your google doc under the heading "Search Results."
3. Read the abstracts of these sources or skim through the text. Identify three that you think will be the most useful for your project and read them. Underline important parts of the readings and takes notes in the margins, either on a hard copy or on a pdf, whichever you prefer. You will turn these in (if a hardcopy, I'll get them back to you ASAP so you can keep using them).
4. In the second section of your Google doc, under the heading Introduction, you will start by writing an explanation of why this area of research is important for your project (answer, I'm going to be studying this site and modality/modalities, so understanding the prior research on this site and modality/modalities is important). This will probably be a little more involved for this section than the prior one, since your sources are a little less obviously relevant, and you have to do some connecting for your reader.
5. Next, under a headline titled after your sites and modality/modalities (e.g. The Technology of Circulating Newspapers or How Comic Composition Impacts Audiences) you will get into reviewing what these three articles have to say about site and modality/modalities you are studying. For example, if you are interested in looking at the technological modality of the site of circulation for a Calvin Klein underwear advertisement that appeared only in print copies of GQ magazine in 2020, you would maybe be able to find some articles about magazines as a technology for circulating content, about GQ as a magazine, or about print advertisements as a medium. Your summary of the sources needs to focus on the research about the the site and modality/modalities, again focusing on describing the current state of the research, rather than the thing itself. As written in the previous assignment, I have noticed that this is challenging for students, so I recommend starting with something like, "Current research on X agrees on the following three points, a, b, and c, but there is some disagreement on d and e." Use the specific sources to fill in those points, noting where they agree on the topic and where they disagree. There are two key points here. First, you are focused on the research about the topic, not the topic (i.e. discuss research the circulation of print images, not the circulation of print images). Second, you are looking at these three sources as a group--a body of literature--not individually. Don't give a list of three summaries of three articles. Instead focus on characterizing what they have to say together, where they agree, where they disagree, and pull from them specifically (quotes, citations, etc.) to provide evidence for your points. Again, I recommend reviewing the Purdue link above for strategies on how to organize your Lit Review (Chronologically, Thematically, etc.) and how to synthesize the material.
6. Finally, under the heading Conclusion, you will explain where this leaves you for your project. This if often only a couple of sentences, but you want to say why this prior research is relevant for you and if there are any gaps in that research that you think your own project might help to fill in (even if only a little).
While a lit review is a lot of work as a process (reading and understanding each article and then analyzing them as a group to see where they are similar and different), the product is actually rather short. As with the prior section, this one will probably be about a page or two.
Submit the google doc and pdfs of the three sources (unless turning in hardcopies) via this assignment. No "Chatbot" or "AI" use in this assignment.