Team Online Project: "Cyborg Culture"

The Basic Idea: Students will break into teams of two to four students each. Each team will conceive a concept, research it, and produce a Web site. The Web site will be part of the "Cyborg Culture" section of the Transcriptions Web site. Within this course cyborgs and the gothic monsters are deeply affiliated; cyborgs may even be "descendants" of gothic monsters; thus, the word "cyborg" points toward both. The following are examples of possible topics, though I urge each team to develop topics through dialogue and research. :

• Virtual reality
• Cloning
• Nuclear cyborgs
• Cyborg gender
• Networks
• Infection and contagion
• Gay cyborg
• Cyborg erotics

Components of a "Cyborg Culture" Page: The following are the core elements of the Web page (on "Cyborg Culture ") you will be producing. I will be developing a template you can use to build your cyborg culture web page.

1. Overview statement (the equivalent of just a few pages in print) about your topic. You can create this overview in a word processor or (if you want to try your hand at putting links in your text) in an HTML editor. Prof. Warner or the Transcriptions research assistant assigned to this course, Robert Hamm, can put this online for you on the home page for your project on the Transcriptions site. If you want to experiment, the statement might include as part of its presentation an interesting non-linear graphical or hypertext segment--for example, a juxtaposition of quotations, the staging of a fictitious interview with a cyborg/ gothic monster. (Fancier variants will likely require some Web-authoring knowledge on the part of one of your team.)
2. Linkbase of annotated links to online resources related your topic.
3. Bibliography of works and online sites consulted in creating the above Overview, Timeline, and Linkbase.
4. Critical Issues: suggested questions for discussion. For an example of critical issues on a Transcriptions topics page, see Weaving Webs: Discussion Issues. These questions will also be a springboard for your short-essay assignment (see below).
5. Short essays written by your team members will serve to develop key ideas for your web site.
6. Text and/ or Context pages: each team member should develop the content for one web page directed at developing some issue or dimension of the web site. This may be accomplished by taking a specific film, novel, topic or narrow issue and developing it. The page should be signed by one team member (with initials or full names or aliases). This text/content page will become one part of the final individual essay, which is due the week after the web site (5PM on the 12th). In other words, print out your text and/or context page and include it with your final individual essay.

Distribution of Responsibilities:

• You are free to distribute the work on your project among your team as you like so as to take account of varying interests and skills. For example, one of you might serve as the webmaster, another as the searcher/researcher for the project, a third as the editor developing the final text for the site. Among the three, you might distribute responsibility for on-line links, bibliography, and scanning images to the site. All team members will be contributing a short essay and final paper to the site.
• It is highly recommended that you carve out defined areas of responsibility. That way, everyone on your team will be responsible for something in particular--often a more productive situation than if everyone is responsible for anything and everything. At least one of your team must also exercise editorial control over your work (editing for consistency, quality, typos, etc.). Try to Imagine that you are part of a highly-skilled work team in charge of creating a professional product.
• An outline or organizational chart of the way you have distributed your tasks is due with the prospectus for your project (see below).

Schedule of Project Tasks:

1. Class 3, Authoring Workshop 1 for Team Projects: Break into teams and begin brainstorming about possible projects.
2. Class 4, Workshop 2: Web Authoring Workshop: Learning the Basics of Web editing
   
   1. starting web page composition
   2. entering your content (bring your wordprocessing file with questions and links)
   3. making a link to a URL (=universal resource locator) somewhere on the Web
   4. adding an image
   5. uploading your page to the server
3. By Class 7: Your team must post to the class e-mail list (engl122tg@humanitas.ucsb.edu) a prospectus of your intended project. The prospectus need be only a page or so. It should describe your idea and the areas of research you intend to pursue. Also each team must e-mail to Prof. Warner a statement about how you have distributed responsibilities for your project (see above). From this point on, every member of your team must at the end of each week submit an online weekly project log form that records roughly what you have been doing on the project that week. (This is to protect teams from bad situations in which one of its members never does anything at all and lets everyone else carry the burden.)
4. Workshop 3: This optional session of web editing, will allow you to get help posting preliminary ideas to your web site for presentation in class the next day.
5. Class 8, Worshop 4: Team Projects: This class will be devoted to a show-and-tell about what the class teams have been thinking and doing.
6. Class 10: Short individual essay relevant to your project is due on this date (see below). These mini-essays will be put online as part of the "critical issues" part of your project Web site.
7. Classes 18-19: Each team will be assigned one other team's project to critique. First look at every page of the web-site, as well as to its links. Evaluate as to legibility (can you read the print, see the images); conceptual clarity of the site; ease of navigation; quality of writing and images used; etc. Please use email to send your detailed response to the members of the team you are critiquing. This is a chance to help your classmates. For a guide to evaluating Web pages, see here.
8. By Sunday June 4th please email critiques to the team members you are advising/ critiquing: Assignments: AI critiques Cyborg Technology critiques Vampirism critiques Cyborg Youth critiques Hybridity and the Cyborg critiques Cyborg Relations/Emotions critiques Technophobia critiques AI. You can send the critiques through our alias:
   engl122tg@humanitas.ucsb.edu
9. Class 20: Formal but fast paces presentation of your team web projects to the rest of the class. Each team will have about 7 minutes to present their page. To help teams get their web site "perfected," Robert and I will be helping team members in the Transcriptions Studio all afternoon (1-5PM) on Tuesday June 6th.

Short Individual Online Essay

A 600-800 word essay (about two to three pages in print) that gives a perspective on some issue relating to the topic your team is working on. The essay may take off from, or contribute to, one of the "critical issues" you will be mentioning on your site. The idea is to find a provocative, interesting, tightly-conceived issue. Think about that issue carefully, define it and what is at stake clearly, and point toward possible theses or solutions. This essay must be submitted in digital form (on a diskette, by e-mail attachment, or in some other way) so that it can be put online as part of the Web page your team is building. (If you have some Web-authoring skills, you can include links or create a hypertext essay.) For a guide on how to cite Web pages in a paper, see here.

Final Individual Essay

This essay must be 8-10 pages. It should develop out of your team contribution to the team web site, include the individual page you develop for the texts and/or context section of the web-site, and it should discuss some of the course readings or films, as they relate to your topic.
Your individual essay should have 3 inter-related parts:
1) It should include a print-out of the the text and/or context page you have developed, including a 1 or 2 paragraph overview, with images and briefly annotated links. You can put this at the beginning of end of your final essay.
2) Additionally, it should have a 3-4 page essay developing your text and/or context page. The page can focus on one of the texts or films in the course. (For example, members of the Vampirism team may choose to write on Dracula). Like all good essays, this one will have a clearly defined thesis, the development of that thesis with specific examples, and full citations for any books, articles or web-sites you have used in your essay.
3) Finally, your essay should have a "cyborg genealogies" discussion (of from 2-3 typed pages in length). Here is where you link your essay to the course materials. In your discussion develop the connections between your essay and the texts and films we have discussed in the class:
Hoffman's "The Sandman"; Freud's essay "The Uncanny";
Philip Dick's definition of s/f;
Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto";
Jonathan Goldberg's essay on Schwarzenegger";
Shelley's Frankenstein,
Stoker's Dracula,
One or more of the 5 films we discussed in class: Blade Runner, Terminator, Robocop, Alien, The Matrix.
You DO NOT need to discuss all of these texts and films, but you should be able to relate your essay topic to at least several of these texts or films.

You must submit the paper in hard-copy; however, you can also submit it in html (with links) and put it on your team website. For a guide on how to cite Web pages in a paper, see here.

Reading and Discussion Participation: Quizzes to start class discussion

Everything in this class begins with the reading assignment. Each reading and film in the class will offer primary ideas for thinking about cyborg culture, and thus your team project. For each new reading, I will start with a question upon which I will ask you to write a short paragraph. This will be both a test for reading and a way to start discussion. Active participation in class discussion or e-mail discussion will be a definite plus for the final grade. See Assessment: Grading Policy.

Attendance

Regular attendance is required (see Assessment: Grading Policy). Because the success of this class will depend upon the effective integration of reading, film viewing, and using the communications and web technology in the class, it is particularly crucial that you not miss any classes.

There is no mid-term or final exam in this course.