Unit 1-2 Assignment Sheet

Annotated Bibliography + Content Analysis Essay

Annotated Bibliography
You might remember from grade school those dreaded index cards that your 5th grade teacher made you use to keep track of your research. For our purposes in this class, I encourage you to use any organized method for keeping track of all your notes—but whatever that method is, you must have one. For this mini-unit, you will do initial research and choose a topic surrounding social networking software, and find 5 textual (print or electronic) sources that discuss your chosen focus.

For each source you find, you’ll need to 1) write a brief, accurate summary and 2) boil down that summary into a 3-4 sentence annotation, which you will include with your Annotated Bibliography.

Neither the summary nor the annotation should include many, if any, direct quotations from the text unless you deem it absolutely necessary and/or you expect to use a particular quotation in your own work. If you do select quotes to include in the summary or annotation, make sure you apply the proper citation techniques (ie, follow a quote with the page number) so that you can find the quote later on if you need to.

We’ll work on specific formatting in class, but the final product of the Annotated Bibliography should look like a conventional MLA Works Cited page, with the addition of the brief annotation following each entry:

Rice, Jeff. “Networks and New Media.” College English 69.2 (2006): 127-133.

Rice argues that the field of English studies should more fully take on the project of new media; that, in fact, with the advent of hypertext, media convergence, revisions of authorship, and visual rhetoric, the English classroom is a function and product of networked new media. He argues that college English should be the moment where the connections between vast interdisciplinary fields find convergence, since all fields, both scholarly and popular, find existence in textual, mediated spaces.

Your Annotated Bibliography must have 5 sources and include thoughtful annotations that indicated you have engaged carefully with the text to pull out the most salient features and arguments the author(s) make(s). I am emphasizing attention to detail here, so any Bibliography that contains any error, whether it be typographic, grammatical, or otherwise, cannot receive an A. The Annotated Bibliograph is DUE on January 31.

Content Analysis
“Content analysis is a research methodology that utilizes a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text. These inferences are about the sender(s) of message the message itself or the audience of the message” (Weber 9). The purposes of content analysis are many, but we’ll focus our energies here on the following objectives:
• To reflect cultural patterns of groups
• To reveal the focus of individual or group attention
• To describe trends in communication content (Weber 9).
We will subject the texts you find during your initial work with the Bibliography to content analysis. Content analysis that requires close reading and coding of selected texts to understand more clearly intextual meaning and to construct knowledge based on what the patterns reveal. We’ll work specifically in class to prepare you for this work, and we have two readings that lend themselves to this method. For my purposes here, I’ll simply give you the particulars of the assignment.

The essay itself will be 5-7 double-spaced pages in length and use the sources from your Annotated Bibliography to discuss what emerges when you subject them to your careful reading. You may also want to include analysis of the actual SNS your work focuses on, but we’ll discuss that in class. The essay, to include a properly formatted Works Cited page, will follow MLA formatting for layout and pagination. It is DUE on February 12.