Research Review

Rationale

This semester, we’re engaging in original, computationally enhanced and humanities-driven research on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. But it’s a poor researcher who isn’t aware of work that has come before on their topic. Our own work will be improved as we learn what others have said about these topics. And we’ll get acquainted with this scholarship faster if we share the burden.

Nitty Gritty

For this assignment, you will read one scholarly article and give a 5-minute presentation about it during class. The presentation will take place on Thursday, 14 March.

Pick Your Article

Your article will come from The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life, edited by Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon. The chapters in the books are listed below. Please email me to let me know which chapter you would like to claim. Since only one person can present on each chapter, please send me a first and second choice.

  1. Peppermint Patty’s Desire: Charles Schulz and the Queer Comics of Failure
  2. “There Has to Be Something Deeply Symbolic in That”: Peanuts and the Sublime
  3. Saying, Showing, and Schulz: The Typography and Notation of Peanuts
  4. Consuming Childhood: Peanuts and Children’s Consumer Culture in the Postwar Era (Emily)
  5. “How Can We Lose When We’re So Sincere?”: Varieties of Sincerity in Peanuts (Elijah)
  6. “I Thought I Was Winning in the Game of Life…But There Was a Flag on the Play”: Sport in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts
  7. Football and Ottim Liffs: Charlie Brown in Coconino
  8. Schulz and the Late Sixties: Snoopy’s Signs of the Times
  9. Franklin and the Early 1970s
  10. Making A World for All of God’s Children: A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Aesthetics of Doubt and Faith (Scout)
  11. Charles Schulz, Comic Art, and Personal Value
  12. Charlie Brown Cafés and the Marketing of Peanuts in Asia
  13. Chips Off the Ol’ Blockhead: Evidence of Influence in Peanuts Parodies

Read Your Article

I will email you a PDF of your article. Read it with an eye to presenting it (see below).

Present Your Article

You will give a 5-minute presentation on your article in class. You should discuss the following:

  1. What is the problem that the authors have identified or the question that they want to answer? In a science project, this would be called the “research problem” or “research question.”
  2. Do the authors have a hypothesis? In a science project, this would be called the “hypothesis”; weird, huh?
  3. How do the authors go about resolving this problem or answering this question? In a science project, this would be called “method” or “procedure.”
  4. What evidence do they present or gather? In a science project, this would be the “observations” or “results.”
  5. What is the solution to their problem or what answers do they get? In a science project, this would be the “conclusion.”

As is the case with all presentations, you should prepare what you’re going to say. Depending on what you prefer, this could mean a series of bullet points, an outline, or even a fully written talk.

While you are not required to have slides for this presentation, having them will be an effective way for you to organize your thoughts and to ensure that you cover everything that you need to.

Grading

This assignment is worth 50 points. Your presentations will be graded based on how well you discuss the five points of each article, as well as your clarity, organization, and how well you adhere to the time limit. I will be using this rubric.

Credits

I created this assignment in Winter 2022, but it has its roots in annotated bibliography assignments that I have created in the past. In 2023, I made some significant changes. Like all of my assignments, it carries a CC BY 4.0 license.