Final Exam:
Curating/Presenting Your Archive
About the Exam
Short version:
We started with archives (theirs); we’re ending with archives (yours). Here’s where you drop yours.
Long version:
We began our semester by looking at archives and considering how published scientist authors’ writing processes “showed up” in their published texts. The point, of course, was to help us think through what writing processes are and can be, to help us consider how our own practices—and the various documents and materials we generate along the way to creating texts for others to read—affect our “finished” drafts.
If you go to the Beinecke Library at Yale to look at Rachel Carson’s collection in person, you’ll discover that her papers are collected in 120 boxes+. You’ll have to read the box descriptions and request them 1 at a time. To help you, the curators have put together a Guide to the Rachel Carson Collection.
By now, of course, you’ve spend the majority of this semester on your own writing process, partially guided but also fairly independent—exploring ideas of your own, conducting mixed-methods research, making notes, drafting, working through workshop comments, revising. You’ve also been doing writing that might seem “unrelated” in your journals, and possibly through other private formats (emails, Instagram, TikTok, whatever). As I hope you saw in Unit 1, all those “unrelated” notes also influence our writing, so ANYTHING you have gathered or produced this term is on the table as a possibility for creating your final archive.
What You’ll Do
Take a little time on your own to think:
What have you learned about yourself as a writer (or researcher, or scholar, or however you’d like to define your academic self) over the course of this term?
How can you show us your development through an archival collection?
Gather whatever you can and curate a collection. What you submit is up to you—include anywhere from 10-30 artifacts. In more typical times, we’d do this in person, and you’d submit a physical archive. But here we are, embracing the digital! So:
Take pictures of physical items you wish to include.
Select the artifacts you’d like readers to see (presumably, notes, journal entries, working essay drafts, and highlighted specific passages or elements you’re really proud of in the final drafts, etc.) and COLLATE THEM ALL INTO A SINGLE PDF. (You can use this website to convert files into PDF, combine them into one file, and compress the file down as needed: smallpdf.com.)
Type up a Guide to the YOUR NAME Papers (here’s the template you should use), highlighting key points
Drop both the Guide and the curated archive PDF into this folder prior to your exam period.
Please title your 2 files:
(a) LastName_Guide and
(b) LastName_archives
Come to your exam period ready to talk us through your collection; feel free to also bring other questions or final items you want to discuss before the course ends.
Here’s a link to the exam schedule, for signing up and later reference.
How You’ll Be Graded
As a reminder, the final exam counts for 10/100 points of your overall course grade (10%).
Here’s the breakdown of how I will grade these:
Part I—The Archival Guide [2 points]
*completion only
If you submit 80% of the word count, you’ll receive an 80% on this portion of the assignment;
if you complete the first half of the guide but not the second half, you’ll receive a 50%; etc.
Part II—The Archive (10-30 artifacts, submitted in a single PDF) [5 points]
*completion only
If you submit 7 of the minimum 10 artifacts, you’ll receive a 70 percent on this portion of the assignment, etc.
Part III—The Presentation [2 points]
*completion only
In other words, show up for your meeting ready to talk to me about what you did. An informal approach is completely fine, but you take the lead and walk me through your archival materials; I’ll ask questions along the way, but I shouldn’t have to drag your ideas out of you. :) Be conscious of your time; you want to be talking for about 7-10 minutes, so have examples ready to show me and some kind of larger reflection or takeaway to end on. (I.e., yes, you can just show up and talk, but prepare enough that you have things to say and a conclusion for when your time is almost up.)
Part IV—Going Above and Beyond [1 point]
If you’re doing the math, you’ll see that it is quite easy to get 9/10 points on this exam, which is an A-. This is my way of offering a sort of pass/pass with distinction option. I expect most students to meet the minimum requirements above and pass with a 9/10. To get the extra point and move from A- to A, you can demonstrate that you’ve gone above and beyond in a few ways (select 1 or 2 of these, not all of them!):
Include more artifacts WITH PURPOSE—don’t just throw a bunch of stuff in (which will make a big jumble for both of us to sort through), but put in more than the minimum of 10 artifacts and annotate them clearly to show how they’re connected; justify why they belong in your archive and what I should see in them.
Prepare a more polished final presentation—you might set up a multimedia presentation with slides and/or audio/video to show me via Share Screen, or write up your presentation script in a creative way (maybe a speech introducing and describing your archive as if you were a library curator showing it to visiting scholars), or do some kind of demonstration? Be creative.
Create a new text that somehow shows your development or identity as a writer, something not yet assigned/completed in the class. Include draft work and a somewhat final product and talk about how this new process work/final piece fits with the earlier archival material.
Create some sort of visual representation of some writing concept you learned about during this term—maybe you’re visualizing your OWN writing process (in a flowchart or just some sort of interpretative piece); maybe you’re creating an infographic that profiles major types of writers you saw among your peers this semester; maybe you’re mapping out different functions of writing and affordances/drawbacks of each. Feel free to be artsy and freeform about this option or to use Canva.com or another simple data visualization platform.