Group Assignment

The Group Assignment is predominantly a group research assignment. You will be assigned to one of six broad topics. You will research the topic and present the results of your research on the class wiki, Nip-eScrawl.

There will be four people assigned to each topic. You are free to create, delete, and edit any pages that fall under your topic. You will be assigned an anonymous handle for the web site. As such, authorship is anonymous: you will not assign your name to anything you write as part of the group, though the wiki software will keep track of your anonymous handle and the instructor will be able to identify each student. You should feel free to edit, augment, and even remove material that others in your group have contributed (and they are free to do the same with your material). I recommend you do not get together with other members of your group to plan or even discuss the wiki project: I would prefer the whole project be conducted in this “virtual” environment. You are welcome to set up discussions on the wiki site itself with other members of your group.

It is recommended that you visit the wiki site at least a couple of times each week during the assignment. Because of a bug in the wiki software, you cannot receive notifications when pages are updated. There is a communication web site that you can use to send an email to the other three members of your group. Use it to send an email when you have added something significant to the wiki that you would like the others to look at.

The wiki is divided into six namespaces, each representing one of the topics. (Note: the namespace name is the keyword name for the topic preceded by “2013_”.) Only members of a particular group can contribute material to the corresponding namespace. Everyone is welcome to view/read pages of any group/namespace. You can navigate through the namespaces using the menu box in the upper-right part of the screen. Please ask your instructor for help with using the wiki if you are having trouble.

TAPoetry	Digital text analysis: Literature: poetry The advanced study of poetry (as in an English Studies programme).
TAFiction	Digital text analysis: Literature: fiction The advanced study of fiction (as in an English Studies programme).
TATheatre	Digital text analysis: Theatre and Film The advanced study of theatre and film (as in an English Studies or Film Studies programme). Note that the emphasis is on the written components of these media, though you are welcome to consider the spoken component as well.
TAHistory	Digital text analysis: History The advanced study of history.
TAPhilosophy	Digital text analysis: Philosophy The advanced study of philosophy.
TAReligion	Digital text analysis: Religion The advanced study of (world) religion.

For each of the above six areas of study, you are expected to research the various tools and approaches that are most useful to advanced (university) study in these areas. You should probably have an explanation of what the goals are for each area of study (e.g., what do we really need to do when we study poetry?). You should probably have an explanation of the types of information most useful to these goals and how digital text analysis can help retrieve that information. You should include an account of some already existing tools that might help fulfill the goals of study and explain how they can accomplish this. Are there any important studies and/or projects you can point to as being successful in their use of digital text analysis? You should hopefully include an account of tools that perhaps have not been designed yet that might be helpful for the area of study. You are welcome to consider visualizations of textual data.

Feel free to include links to other web sites. As always, do not reproduce words or ideas from others without acknowledging the source (and placing words in quotation marks).

The instructor will assign user names and passwords: do not bother trying to create your own. You are welcome to change your password at any time. The original user name and password that you are given will work for the wiki site, the communication site, and the Cyber Chirps web site. If you change your password on the wiki site, the change will not be reflected on the other two sites.

The assignment ends on the night of March 15th, at which point logins to the wiki will be disabled and evaluation will commence. A grade will be assigned to each group, and all members will share the grade. This grade, however, may be raised or lowered for individual students to reflect the inordinate value of the contributions by individuals within the group. There will also be penalties for students who do not do at least a minimal amount of work, according to the following schedule:

• A student who contributes nothing to his/her assigned namespace pages by the end of February 15th will receive a 5% penalty to his/her individual grade.
• A student who contributes nothing to his/her assigned namespace pages between February 16th and the end of March 1st will receive a 10% penalty to his/her individual grade (in addition to the 5% penalty, if applicable).
• A student who contributes nothing at all to his/her assigned namespace pages will receive a grade of zero for the assignment.

Note that contributions to discussions on the wiki site do not count as contributions to the assigned namespace pages.

Virtual-space research collaboration is the guiding principle of this assignment.