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Guidelines for the Assignment
You should choose a section of text that is roughly three pages long, slightly longer if you are working with The Merchant of Venice. The goal of this project, ultimately, is to help your reader to understand the text more fully, to create a “deeper” text through your annotations and notes. It is possible that some of the texts are available in e-text format through Project Gutenberg, but if not, you will have to type or scan in the text you want to use as well as turn in a xerox of the text with your links highlighted.
You will need to create 15 links, of which at least two (but no more than five) should be graphics files that you find on the web (this could include maps, author photographs, diagrams, and so on). The first link should be your rationale for a) choosing this particular passage and b) your rationale, the implicit argument behind the links you’ve chosen to create: how do this links contribute to a richer reading experience? This rationale should be about 500 words in its final version; you should turn in hard copy of this in addition to the xeroxed text pages.
The additional links are up to you: they can be a combination of your own annotations (explaining references and allusions to other texts, for instance, or explaining etymologies of words, or giving definitions of words—although not too many of your links should be merely definitions), links to other websites and references (although you should explain why you have chosen these links), links to graphics files, and so on. You should provide proper bibliographic material where necessary (ie, where you found the references, or where you read a particular critical viewpoint). One of the things you might do, for instance, is to create a link of your own that gives a brief overview of what critics have said about a particular passage.
There should be a reasonable balance between links that you create on your own and links to other web sorts; if you are in doubt about “reasonable balance,” ask me or err always on the side of fewer links to other web sources.
When this project is completed, you should have: the xerox of the text
you are using, with your link-to passages highlighted; a printout of your
rationale; a printout of the addresses of the websites that you are linking
to, including graphics files; and a disk on which the text and the links
have been formatted. As a precautionary measure, you should include
on the disk a separate file that contains regular “Word” documents of all
the annotations you have created, so that if need be, I can
re-format them in order to upload them to our website.