Annotations

Through pages linked in the Course Overview, the primary texts for each week will be laid out—either as excerpts, for especially long texts, or in their entirety—for annotation posts to be made with Hypothes.is, an online collaborative annotation tool. Once you enable the Hypothes.is extension on your browser, you will be able to make “Public” annotations that will be visible to anyone who visits the page and also has the extension. Posts should be posted by 6PM the day before our Wednesday class meeting. An annotation might vary in length, but each should be at least the length of a tweet, and fewer than 150 words. You will be asked to write 3-4 annotations on any of the readings for the given week, for at least 8 out of the 14 weeks of the semester. Annotations will begin after the second week of classes, once enrollment has settled.

Annotation posts, which can be done in tandem with your reading for class, are opportunities for you to

• raise questions,
• practice literary analysis and persuasive writing (e.g., in the form of a sentence or two of brief close reading),
• make connections with other texts we have read/topics we have discussed in class,
• bring in relevant materials from sources beyond our class (e.g., linking to a relevant article, resource, other media),
• present central issues that you see at work in the text, and
• respond to other students’ posts.

These annotations, collectively, may be thought of as an open form of scholarship that we are practicing, and an archive of the thinking that we are doing together as a class.