Rationale
Our class is about research in digital humanities. To that end, we are engaged in a real research question: understanding the degree of difference between Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and her previous four books of poetry. It’s a question that I don’t know the answer to yet (although I must admit that I have suspicions at this point), and one that we are going to try to answer once and for all.
Answering this question is research. But doing that research depends on our being aware of what others may have said on the subject prior to us. This means reading and synthesizing their work so we can be thoughtful in our own. Annotated bibliographies provide students experience with some of the important steps of scholarship: finding secondary criticism and digesting it. An annotated bibliography should provoke students to read such sources more carefully: reading for its own argument rather than how it can fit into a paper that is due in 12 hours.
Finally, this project will prepare us for our class’s final writing project, giving us what we need to produce a literature review of what’s been said about Duffy’s first five volumes of poetry to this point.
Nitty Gritty
Over the course of the semester, we will each read five articles and/or book chapters (hereafter referred to as “articles” for convenience’s sake) that relate to our class’s research project: investigating the degree to which the first four volumes of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry relate to the fifth, The World’s Wife. After reading your article, you will write an annotation for it, summarizing its key points and especially any relevant information related to our research project. Before you can read the articles, of course, you will need to find them.
This assignment will be completed in two phases: a group phase and an individual phase. The group phase will be due on 25 February before class begins. The individual phase will be due on 25 March before class begins.
Group Phase
1. Find
Working as a group, you will identify articles, book chapters, and books about Carol Ann Duffy in the BYU Library, including its databases such as the MLA International Bibliography. Insofar as it is possible, it would be ideal to assemble a complete bibliography about her. In other words, we want to find as many pieces of scholarship as possible.
Please note that I have put three book-length works on Duffy on course reserve. You will absolutely want to include these books in your finding.
2. Cite
Using Zotero, create an entry for each article in our shared Zotero library. This is the equivalent of creating a 3×5 card for that 6th-grade research project on pandas. If you have found the article online, there’s a good chance that Zotero can simply grab all the metadata like author and title. If you’ve found an article in a print book or in some instance where Zotero can’t get the metadata, you’ll just have to type it up yourself. It shouldn’t take too long though.
3. Assess
As a group, identify 20 articles or chapters that seem most valuable and add them to the Annotated collection in our Zotero library. As much as possible, you will want to choose articles that you collectively believe may have something to say about the similarities and differences among her different volumes of poetry. Bear in mind that you are not likely to find an article titled, “The Similarities and Differences between SFN and TWW.” But articles about the representation of women or the use of varying poetic forms in her work, for example, will likely
If for some reason, we cannot find a total of 20 articles to read about Carol Ann Duffy’s work, I have ideas for other topics we can investigate.
4. Assign
As a group, assign 5 articles to each of the members in the class, including
Individual Phase
1. Read
Read the article. Quelle surprise!
2. Annotate
Write an annotation for the article. The annotation should provide a summary of the major arguments of the text as a whole. In addition, indicate what (if anything) the text has to say about the relationship between any of Duffy’s first five volumes. Each annotation should be a minimum of two paragraphs. Once you’ve written your annotation, you will add it to your Zotero entry as a Note. Please conclude each note with your name on its own line, so we can tell who authored each annotation.
3. Attach
If you read the article as a PDF, attach a copy of the PDF to the entry in the Zotero bibliography. If you read a print article, you are not required to include a scanned copy. This is the equivalent of stapling the original article to the 3×5 card.
4. Check
Double-check that all of the information in your article’s citation is correct.
Grading
This assignment is worth a total of 150 points. The group phase will be worth 50 points, with points being distributed based on the quality of the group’s findings.
The individual phase is worth 100 points. Each of the articles is worth 20 points, with 5 points allotted to whether the citation is completely correct and the other 15 points allotted to the quality of the annotation.
Credits
This assignment is a substantial update of the one I designed for last year’s “Research in Digital Humanities” course. That 2018 version was a serious revision of the Annotated Zotero Group Bibliography that I created in 2010. The original assignment took inspiration from Mark Sample’s Fall 2009 assignment, and I received feedback from a number of people on the first draft of the assignment via Twitter.
