Digital, Sound, & Experimental Poetries Seminar, Fall 2001

TU 7-9:40 PM, 6 Clemens

Professor Loss Glazier

FINAL PROJECT

Final project may be CREATIVE or DOCUMENTARY. Web-based projects are encouraged. Projects must COLLECT and ANALYZE material presented. Proposals for final projects (one page) are due on Oct. 2.

Your final project should have three parts:

1. An introductory section (2 pages) that defines the context for your project.

(A) Description/Background. Give a brief description of your subject. What particular part of the subject are you going to investigate and why? What to you hope to prove (or explore or investigate)? (Here you might describe what challenges you will face, what additional knowledge you will have to gain, what you must learn or research and how this will relate to your topic.) (B) Context/Sources. Next, what is the relation of this investigation to the content of this seminar? If it has to do with sound then maybe you should summarize a couple of definitions of sound that we have encountered and how your own definition might be different. Or you might give summaries of the arguments of some of the sound poets, poets, or theorists in our class, and how your investigation is based on/differs from their approach to some of their specific arguments. Frame your topic among several ideas we have encountered in class or in our reading. (C) Methodology. You should talk about your proposed methods for realizing your project. How you propose to do your project, whether it is research in journal articles, the use of specific technologies in a creative project (describe the technologies in a sentence and tell how they will be helpful in expressing your ideas), the reading of particular texts to find a specific kind of information, etc.

2. The collection of pages that constitutes your project.

3. Your own conclusions (1 page) about the issues or strategies involved in your work.

What is needed is a bit of narrative on how your understanding of the topic/process grew. What do you know about it now that you didn't before? Not simply additional information you now have but what subtleties or issues have revealed themselves to you that you did not see before? If you were going to expand the paper, what would be adjacent areas of investigation, gray areas, questions that have arisen and now intrigue you? If you had the project to do over again, how might you do it differently? If your understanding has changed, how are the issues in your topic now different than they appeared to you before. Where do we go from here?

CREATIVE TOPIC WEB PAGE

Creative projects may include projects involving Web technology, programming, sound editing, visual work, or other multimedia compositions. Creative projects must have the same three components described above.

DOCUMENTARY TOPIC WEB PAGE

Documentary projects must reflect the results of Web-based AND traditional research. A focused collection of carefully selected sources on a given topic is preferred to a larger number of less focused sources. Projects must have the three components described above. Topics for documentary projects include individual sound poets, poets related to the course content (Spicer, Lorca, Kaufman, Baraka, Mackey, Duncan, Antin, Olson, etc.), jazz musicians related to this course (also specific works studied in class such as Sketches of Spain, et al), technologies (typewriter, xerox, radio, Flash, AcionScript, Photoshop, etc.), or themes (santaria, duende, voodoo, candomble, moors, goddess Legba, flamenco, the kora or other non-standard instruments, Dada, Futurism, Projective Verse, etc.).

PROJECT DUE DATES: Proposal due Oct. 2 (written, 1 page); final project preview (oral) due Oct. 23; final project presentation (oral) due Dec. 4. Final project must be completed by last day of class.