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P2.Worknets

Worknets (20%, 20 points)

Like the literacy narrative, the worknets prompt below matches with the third project in a section of ENGL1105 from Fall 2018. Here, too, I have provided the full prompt to give you a sense of the way the project builds in time, how to create the radial model, and the terms by which the project is evaluated. For ENGL5454, develop a complete worknet (all four phases, including visual and textual elements) that honors all appropriate instructions and criteria below. A half draft of approximately 800 words is due no later than 2:30 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 6. The completed project is due no later than 2:30 p.m. on Wed., Nov. 13.

Overview

Picture1.png
Figure 1: A completed worknet reflects four phases of the article: semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric. Together they present a selection of the article's entanglements. 

Researched academic sources—articles and chapters—are a mainstay of many academic disciplines.They are the way academics account for research activity, posing difficult questions and detailing studies that seek to inform some research question, to share evidence, or to circulate findings. Without articles, how do ideas circulate? Word of mouth is far less reliable. Ideas, arguments, evidence: to survive in the world, to gain traction, build influence, to really matter, they must materialize. They need to be written. Project Three: Worknets introduces you to a method for reading and writing your way across one researched academic source carefully and thereby accounting for its generative connections. Worknets help readers comprehend and remember the important parts of an article, but they also prompt new researchable questions that can lead into emerging research interests for the reader. Importantly, worknets consist of a series of phases—four altogether—each expanding upon the article’s discoverable ties to keywords, sources, authorship, and the world (time and place) in which it was written. We should think of worknets as helping us engage sources visually and in writing so that we are better able to use the source toward rhetorical invention (i.e., toward coming up with what we will say). Worknets also help us grasp the rhetorical situation in which the article was produced—who wrote the article, what their purposes were, who was the audience, and how the article has circulated or been taken up.

How To Make A Worknet

Creating a worknet consists of three steps.

  1. Choose a researched academic article relevant to composition theory and practice published since 1980. In ENGL5454 this semester, you must choose an article from the following:

    Any article published in 1992 in College English
    Any article published in 2005 in Composition Forum
    Any article published in 2010 in College Composition and Communication

  2. Next, open Google Drawing. It might take some time to get familiar with the drawing tools. We will spend time going over this in class. Important: Be sure to save a version of the model after each phase so you can easily show its build-up. Using a hub and spoke model, draw links from the central node (the article author, title, and year of publication) to a series of surrounding nodes. Create 3-5 nodes for each of the following four phases: semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric. The drawings should be done with care. Exceptional drawings will reflect precision insofar as legibility, spacing, color choices, and neatness. These phases are each explained below. 
    semantic.png
    1. Semantic: concerns vocabulary—words and phrases that appear in the article itself and whose reference and meaning can be traced to peripheral ideas suited to further exploration. Whether you seek individual words or two-word phrases, include the total count in parentheses. There are online tools to help with this, such as Tagcrowd.com and the Online NGram Analyzer at http://guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/. In the written account that goes with the semantic phase, discuss what the terms mean, generally and in the context of the article. Why are these terms important? How do they advance the rhetorical goals of the piece? That is, how do the keywords favor a particular audience, showing that audience regard for forms of knowledge that is important to them? 

      bibliographic.png
    2. Bibliographic: traces specific sources cited in the original. For this phase, turn to the works cited or references list at the end of the article. Choose 3-5 sources. Are they available in Newman Library? What are the dates of publication? How do the sources appear in the article? That is, how are they being used? How might tracking down any one source expand your knowledge about the article and its rhetorical context? In what ways do specific sources advance the rhetorical goals of the piece?

      affinitybased.png
    3. Affinity-based: attends to functions of authorship, such as graduate training, collaborations, current position, career arc for publishing activity, and relationship to other specializations. For the affinity-based phase, look up the author. What else has the author written? Do they publish by themselves or with others? What other work have they done? Does it seem to you related to the focus of this article? How so? Where does the author work? How long has she worked there? How does this knowledge give you a deeper sense of the author’s credibility, qualifications, or ethos?

      choric.png
    4. Choric: This phase examines the world in which the article was written, collecting a handful of popular culture references from the time and place it came from. Like the affinity worknet above, a choric worknet is not explicitly identifiable in the text of the article. It sets you up to explore coincident materials and events from popular culture (movies, songs, happenings, local and world news) in the interest of enlarging context and striking juxtaposition. What else, specifically, was happening when the article was written? What was going on in the place where it was written? How do a sample of these time-place associations open up new possibilities for exploring the article or an idea it introduces?
  1. A written account (approximately 350 words) accompanies each visual phase. That’s four phases, four accounts. Each account addresses the choices, responds to questions noted in association with each phase, and brings to light relevant noticings at that phase. Your completed project will also include an opening paragraph that introduces the article, and a concluding paragraph that discusses the article’s purpose, audience, and context using rhetorical terms and concepts we have discussed this semester (e.g., ethos, pathos, logos; kairos; rhetorical situation; audience, exigence, constraints).

Like Projects One and Two, your third project should be highly focused. All throughout, it will adhere to a single researched article. The project forecasts some of the work you will be doing in ENGL1106 next semester—selecting sources, reading them well, drawing upon them to invent and also to serve as evidence informing the positions you take in your writing.

Deadlines and Specifications [N.b., The dates below are from the prompt used in ENGL1105 last fall; the deadlines for ENGL5454 appear above in the opening paragraph.]

Focal Course Outcomes and Key Readings

Project Three addresses all five course objectives. Key readings include "How to Move In and Out of a Text” by Mueller, Clary-Lemon, and Pantelides, and an article of your choosing as the focus for the worknets.

Boost (optional)

Boosts are value-added badges, of sorts. They offer you the incentive of doing something a little extra both to level-up your writing practice and also to gain experience with some aspect of development that will enrich your work. To claim a boost, simply add a note in your project at the location where you have applied the boost, like this [Boost - Additional Worknet Model]. There is one boost available for Project Three. It will bear inflection in your project's evaluation, benefiting the project with a slight increase in credit. 

Boost One - Additional Worknet Model
Develop an additional model of your worknet using either a) materials or b) 3D modeling. If you choose to make a material worknet, it may be helpful to think of it as something like a mobile, and to approach its development just that way, by looking into tutorials for making mobiles. If you want to make a 3D worknet, you will have to learn something about 3D modeling (or find others who can help with this). The purpose is to realize yet more voluminously the network-like structure this project underscores for academic sources. 

Invention Portfolio Contents 
(Note: This list may change as our time on the project unfolds.)

Grading Breakdown and Rubric

Grades for Project Three will be returned to you on a grading worksheet much like Project One and Two. It assigns values to the following criteria:

Contact Information

Derek N. Mueller, PhD
Professor
Department of English
Virginia Tech
Office: 315 Shanks Hall
Phone: +1-734-985-0485 (Google voice)
dmueller@vt.edu
http://derekmueller.net/rc/

"[W]hat we teach our students is a consequence of what we understand writing to be" (215). Mary Lou Odom, Michael Bernard-Donals, and Stephanie Kerschbaum, "Enacting Theory: The Practicum as the Site of Invention," Don't Call It That: The Composition Practicum

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