The annotation should provide a summary of the major concerns of the text, perhaps with a representative quote or two, and should indicate how the piece contributes to your body of knowledge about its subject. Store your sources in a new Zotero collection (so that they will easily stand out from any existing citations you have gathered in the past).įor each of source, you will write an annotation that is a minimum of 2 paragraphs. For most databases as well as books in the Clemson library, it is very simple to have Zotero “grab” this information. Once you have found your sources, use Zotero to create the bibliographic entry for the text. To find such articles, use the Clemson library databases, such as Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, Project Muse, and others. An online source must come from a peer-reviewed journal. An annotated bibliography requires you to take more time, giving you a chance to see what kinds of conversations go on amongst scholars of contemporary literature.įor each of the 3 units of the course, you will find 2 articles or book chapters that comment or expand on the texts and/or subjects we have been considering. I hope that annotated bibliographies provoke students to read the other sources more carefully: reading for the source’s own argument rather than how it can fit into one’s paper that is due in 12 hours. While I could (and might!) just assign the standard end-of-term research paper, the unintended consequence of doing so often results in students looking around for any quotations they can throw in to meet the arbitrary requirement of sources. Why an Annotated Bibliography?Īnnotated bibliographies get students experience with some of the important steps of literary scholarship: finding secondary criticism and digesting it. This assignment asks you to summarize and critically assess 6 sources and contribute them to a shared, collaborative, online bibliography using the Zotero 2.0 beta plug-in ( for Firefox. My one misgiving is that I hate to have students read articles about House of Leaves before we have finished reading the text. Moreover, I hope it will disincentivize the tendency for rushed students to glom onto each others’ sources. Doing so will allow me to trouble shoot any problems the students are having with the assignment before the crush at the semester’s end. I quite like Bill Wolff‘s suggestion to have students comment on each other’s entries, but I decided I didn’t have the time to implement that twist this semester.įinally, I decided to have 3 due dates for the assignment. Still, getting a little bit of perspective seemed worthwhile. No one needs duplicate entries on multiple sources. This seemed important so that we could honor the concept of what an annotated bibliography is. I also decided to allow only two students to write about each source. Since I’m hoping to let the students use this assignment to pursue an idea that they find interesting in class, it seemed important to not focus as much on the length of the sources (although they will certainly be conscious of length). The last time I taught this class, 95% of the class read the same monograph–primarily due to its length. (I’m still working to figure out how to best acknowledge Creative Commons credit on assignments that create for my classes.)Īs you’ll see, I decided against having my students read a full book for the assignment, opting instead for articles and book chapters. I especially drew ideas from Mark Sample‘s annotated bibliography assignment for his Fall 2009 course. I appreciated all of the comments that I received on the blog and on Twitter about the initial draft. I’ve finished the assignment, which you can see below. I just wanted to post a quick note in a follow-up to last week’s post about my Annotated Zotero Group Bibliography assignment.
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