Students will be assessed according to the following breakdown:
Class participation (10%)
I expect active participation from all participants in the course. This course will require experimentation with new digital environments and a willingness to try and fail. Between the course meetings, students may have to investigate a problem to learn how to do it themselves— taking initiative will be rewarded. In addition, we come to the course with different skills and helping out fellow students and fostering a collaborative spirit in the classroom will be rewarded. A laptop will be essential for almost every session. Participation will be assessed by the extent to which the students have prepared for in-class discussion and are ready to address the thought questions found in this syllabus. Attendance policies are described below.
Short assignments (40%)
There will be short writing assignments every three weeks (5 total, i.e. 8% per assignment, I drop one of them). The format for this will be a blog, a key form of 21st-century public writing. Your first writing assignment will be on paper and then you will transform it into a blog–and I will ask you to reflect on the difference. They will be either reflective pieces on a conceptual issue that has arisen in class or a report or review about a project or experiment carried out. The main issue here is to learn to communicate ideas in an open forum and to develop a voice for research blogging. Students will learn how to install an instance of WordPress.org and to choose a theme appropriate to representing embedded digital materials. (Students who are proficient in other blogging platforms or sustainable web development may opt for those). Students choose at the end of the term if you keep your blog or if you delete it. See http://hosting.nyu.edu for more details.
Final project (40%)
Over the course of the term, we will engage in project-based learning. Each student will carry out a small individual projects using the ideas and methods we have covered in class to make a spatial model (25%) and we will work on a collective project together (15%). The collective project will begin about a third of the way into the class and will finish by the beginning of November and we will publish the dataset we create. The individual projects will be experimental and necessarily small in scope, but will require reflective analysis and contextualization. We will begin to work on these around the midterm and continue through the semester. The individual project will be presented in blog format online–there should be a total of about 1000-1500 words of writing across multiple pages in the site in addition to 5 clear visuals that help us understand your project. Detailed instructions will be distributed to students.
Zotero bibliography (10%) Each student will build a bibliography on a topic in spatial humanities of particular interest to them. This bibliography will be hosted in the cloud version of Zotero and will be open to the world. A blog posting should accompany the bibliography at the due date (early November) summarizing major elements of the bibliography.