Rationale
Our class is about research in digital humanities. To that end, we are engaged in a real research question: understanding the character co-occurrence in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. It’s a question that we don’t know the answer to yet; answering this question is, in other words, research.
But answering this question completely depends on our knowing 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 an important step 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 for how one can fit it into a paper that is due in 12 hours.
Hopefully, this project will also prepare us for our class’s final project, helping us refine the sorts of questions that have (and haven’t!) been asked about Schulz’s strip.
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: character co-occurrence within Peanuts. 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.
This assignment will be completed in two phases: a group phase and an individual phase. The group phase will be due on 26 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 Schulz’s Peanuts in the BYU Library, including its databases such as Art & Architecture Source, Humanities Source, and the others listed in this HBLL Research Guide. You could also look into the record in newspapers using sources like Newspaper Archive and Newspaper Source Plus. Insofar as it is possible, it would be ideal to assemble a complete bibliography about Schulz. In other words, we want to find as many pieces of scholarship as possible.
Please note that I have put some book-length works on Schulz on course reserve in the library. You will absolutely want to include these books in your findings.
2. Cite
Using Zotero, create an entry for each article you find 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 on some website 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 the 25 articles or chapters that you have found that seem most valuable and add them to the Annotated collection in our Zotero library. As much as possible, you will want to choose 1) articles that are scholarly and 2) articles that you collectively believe may have something to say about which characters show up next to each other. Bear in mind that you are not likely to find an article titled, “Character Co-Occurrence in Peanuts.” But articles that discuss a single character may very well provide us with fodder for our inquiry.
If for some strange reason, we cannot find a total of 25 articles to read about Schulz’s work, I have ideas for additional topics we can investigate.
4. Assign
As a group, assign 5 articles to each of the members in the class, including me. Feel free to give me the ones that you don’t want to read. Do try to ensure that everyone has approximately the same number of pages.
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 character co-occurrence within the strip. 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. This is the equivalent of stapling the original article to the 3×5 card. If you read a print article, you are not required to include a scanned copy.
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 an update of the one that I designed for my 2019 DigHT 315 course. That was itself an substantial update of the 2018 version, which was itself based on my 2010 Annotated Zotero Group Bibliography. 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.
