The City Syllabus

Grades, Assessment, and Assignments

Class participation (30%)

Class participation is critical for this class and it will count for a big chunk of your grade. We will explore various digital tools during class and if you miss class you will need to do more exploration on your own. Class participation will be evaluated on:

• Your participation in discussions of the readings (10%)
• Your preparation for in-class projects (do you show up with the data or information that you need) and your engagement and participation in figuring out which digital projects are worth more points than others (10%)
• Your presentations in the second half of the semester (these will be opportunities for you to show the class how you are working on integrating different tools into your projects (10%)

Final Web Site (60%)

Your work will be public and will be presented on a website that you will build on a subdomain dedicated to this class. Your subdomain should be a part of your domain, which you can get (if you haven’t already) through the Domain of One’s Own program at UMW. DoOO will pay register your domain name and to host the site while you are a student. If you are a graduating senior, your domain will be paid for through December of this year and then you can decide if you want to pay to keep it hosted somewhere else.

The whole website will be worth 60% of your grade, but the final allocation of these points will be determined by us collectively as we explore the different apps.

Website design

I would like your website for this class to be well-designed, attractive, and easy to navigate. Part of your final grade (about 5 percent) will be based on design. We will have to decide what makes a website well-designed as we go and we can debate what is attractive.

Website Introduction and Interpretation

About 10% of your grade will be about how you introduce your city and explain your projects. Some digital projects lend themselves to presenting analysis and others don’t, so you might need more analysis in your text.

Project 1: Critical review of scholarship about the city

About 25-30% of your final grade will be based on an analysis of the research done on your city. This paper should be organized around your argument or thesis regarding the scholarship on your city. This means that you might ask how case studies of your city link to larger trends in national or international history or how studies of the city differ by discipline or how the overall focus of research has changed over time (say 1950s to the present). In other words, this paper is a very specific kind of literature review called a critical or analytical literature review that makes its own argument about the literature, rather than just summarizing and making connections between existing research. (I recommend that you begin by focusing on how urban scholars use your case city to explain broader social trends, but you might branch out from there). You can frame it with a core book and a set of articles that reinforce and challenge that book or as a comparison of two influential books and related articles or you can look at ALL the articles in a single journal (i.e. the Annals of the AAG) and build an argument about what work authors do with the city. You might focus the paper in a different way based on your interests or your discipline.

You must read a lot about your city until you know a lot about the city AND the kinds of studies done about the city so that you can write a paper that makes an argument about what does/has your city mean to scholars?

This will likely be a static webpage (rather than a blog post) and should include at least three distinct digital components. Examples:

• An annotated bibliography produced through Zotero
• A timeline that could present different central events in your city’s history. You could also use this tool to highlight the DIFFERENT events highlighted by different scholars.
• A storyline, which is a simpler and more quantitative timeline tool
• A map, generated through JS Storymap, ArcGIS, or SocialExplorer, each of which allows you to do very different things.
• Some analysis you do with voyant.tools, which is a set of textual analysis tools.
• Something else that seems appropriate. Just let me know.

Project 2: Media Representation/Production of the City

This project (15-20%) should address one of these questions: How is your city represented in art or media OR what art or media is produced in/by your city? You could write an analysis of novels or movies set in the city set in the city (embedding film clips, for example). You could write about songs about the city (using music videos or embedded audio clips). You could write about music from the city (which may or may not be about the city) or you could make a podcast about music. This can be a paper or a video or a podcast -- you can pick a modality that fits the project. That doesn’t mean that you have to sing about music or video movie analyses, however. You could write about murals of the city and include a curated set of images. You could create a storymap of places mentioned in songs, for example and then lay that over a layer of race and if Black artists and white artists sing about the same landmarks. You could write a paper about how much money the city spends to attract movie directors to the area and treat the digital components as ancillary. In other words, this project can either BE a digital project or can INCLUDE different digital projects. (This can include things as simple as embedding video clips of relevant scenes that you discuss, or using the soundcite tool from Knightlab to embed snippets of sound into your website, or making a storymap). There are many things that you could do for this assignment, so make it interesting and attractive, and be ready to read additional material to help you with the analysis part.

If you don’t already know the city, this project might be hard to get started on, so keep your antennae up as you work through other projects for the class. Other sources might give you ideas and you should keep notes on those ideas until the middle of the class when we focus more explicitly on this project. This assignment doesn’t need as many scholarly sources as the other, but you should plan on using sources to help you contextualize your project. You can also use popular media sources for ideas and local newspapers often have lists of “Best Songs that Mention City X.”

Final Reflection/Self-Assessment (10%)

Your final assignment will be a short paper helping me understand your work for the class (some of which is visible and some of which is not) and highlighting what parts of the class were useful for you and which were less so.

THE DKC WILL BE YOUR FRIEND

The Digital Knowledge Center (DKC), located in HCC 408, provides UMW students with peer tutoring on digital projects and assignments. Any student at the University can take advantage of the Center’s services by scheduling an appointment to work one-on-one or in a group with a student tutor. You can schedule a tutorial at http://dkc.umw.edu; while appointments are not required, they are recommended. Tutorials cover a wide-range of topics related to common digital systems, technologies, new media, and tools used in courses at UMW. DKC tutors adhere to the UMW Honor Code during all appointments. They are available to provide guidance and advice, but they cannot create, produce, or edit work on a student’s behalf. You can find out more about what to expect at tutorial at http://dkc.umw.edu/what-to-expect/.