Your work in BookLab will unfold through these major assignments:

1. Discussion Prep

Assignment Overview

Assignment Details

For each week of class there are readings listed under Core and Penumbra. The core readings are just that: central to the week’s discussion and lab. Everyone should read these closely and prepare to discuss them. The penumbral readings try to capture a broader spectrum of scholarship pertinent to each week’s theme, which I could not require because time is, sadly, finite. Each week you should choose one of the penumbral readings, based on your own interests, to read and be prepared to reference as a means of expanding our conversation together.

To prepare for our discussions, each week you should draft 2-3 substantial questions or critical observations that highlight details of interest from the core (and your chosen penubral) readings, connect ideas across the week’s readings (or even across different weeks), or probe the boundaries or limitations of the assigned texts. The goal of this assignment is not to test your knowledge of our readings, but to prompt dialog, so I try not to be prescriptive. In general, however, your discussion prep should:

  1. Get beyond basic questions or observations of fact and instead work toward questions or observations of significance.
  2. Demonstrate close thought about the frameworks of our texts, as well as about the relationships among them.
  3. Emerge from (and refer to) specific ideas, pages, quotations, scenes, &c. from our specific assigned texts rather than broad or generic concepts.
  4. Genuinely open toward discussion and debate during class (i.e. no leading the witness, your honor).
  5. I would add to these one more, which I do not require but which I always encourage: Engage with our texts through a spirit of [generous thinking](https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/1-introduction/critique-and-competition/). I try to include a range of perspectives in our readings, and you will certainly disagree with some ideas in some of them. I assign a number of articles with which I disagree, because they articulate ideas I believe worthy of serious consideration! As we read and discuss together, we will find many opportunities for critique, so I would encourage you to work first toward understanding and contextualization—to pause, just a moment, when you feel that first impulse toward deconstruction to consider whether you are reading generously or suspiciously, and whether the mode you have chosen is in fact the right one for the rhetorical moment. Class discussion is not the same as social media, and our in-class takes need not always be the hottest possible.

Particularly in a graduate class, students are often tempted to write 3 lengthy paragraphs, but I strongly urge you to stick to 3 well-developed sentences, either declarative (an observation) or interrogative (a question).

I will not collect your discussion prep each week. This does not mean, however, that you should keep your discussion prep in your mind or try to wing it—I do expect you to write your prep down before class, in either a physical or digital notebook. You should be prepared to reference your prep directly when asked during discussion or when it is pertinent to in-class group work, or to show your prep notebook to me on request.

2. Book Reports

Assignment Overview

Assignment Details

As the semester progresses, you will use our readings, class discussions, archival visits, labs, and other activities to develop an understanding of the book as a synecdoche for larger structures of information and media. You will reflect on these connections in a series of four “book reports”—one for each chapter/unit of the class (save the Coda).

Book reports should aim for more substance and detail than a typical class forum response, but they are not full-fledged academic essays. Think instead of smart, critical writing you might encounter online: a blog entry or a sharp opinion piece. You can choose your focus for each, drawing on the readings and activities of the relevant chapter/unit of the class. Reports should synthesize and bring unit readings into conversation, and focus on developing an argument around a few core themes or ideas. You should not spend words summarizing readings or recounting discussions from class, but instead choosing details that help illustrate your own ideas.

Remember what Judge John Hodgman frequently reminds his listeners, “specificity is the soul of narrative.” Avoid broad generalizations and instead use these book reports to delve into your own corners of intellectual interest. You might cite a specific idea raised by one of your colleagues as evidence, and you should absolutely cite specific insights from our readings—your reports should quote and cite regularly. You should highlight specific ways that our activities brought our readings into relief, or exposed disjunctures between theory and praxis. And you should connect some of our readings, activities, and course themes to texts and ideas you encounter in other classes and contexts.

Each report is due 1 week following the close of the relevant unit. I consider Friday the end of our week, even through we meet Mondays. So the posts will be due:

3. Final Book Project

Assignment Overview

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Matthew Kirschenbaum for sharing materials from his BookLab course’s final project assignment, which substantially shaped this one.

Assignment Details

Your final project in BookLab will be an original bookish object—as a shorthand for the purposes of this assignment writeup, “a book”—of your own design and making. As we will see in our readings, labs, and other investigations, the word “book” can mean many things and your projects can likewise take many forms and include a range of media: e.g. a letterpress chapbook, a zine, an altered book, an interactive digital book, a book “kit,” or something else. As we move through our activities, you should be thinking about which media, technologies, and techniques you might wish to incorporate into your project.

You may work individually or collaboratively on these projects, with the understanding that collaborative projects should reflect more work in proportion to the size of their respective teams. You will also submit an artist’s statement (~1000 words) to accompany your project, which will describe its concept and ambitions, its influences, your process, and challenges.

The content of your book will be entirely up to you. You might draw on a favorite topic of research, a hobby, or a cultural interest, among other possibilities. Your book can be informational, scholarly, experimental, artistic, entertaining, or—most likely—some combination of those. Your book may be a singular object or a multiple, and some mediums—like zines—will dictate the latter. Your book can contain original content or remediate existing material (though if you choose the latter, we will need to work together to ensure we follow intellectual property laws). What is essential, however, is that your book demonstrates—through its form, content, or a combination of the two—your critical engagement with the themes and media of our course.

Below are some general design models you could consider adopting, but other models are possible, and hybrid approaches that blend media are encouraged:

Project Milestones

This project will be your cultimating intellectual contribution to BookLab. In order to ensure you fully develop your idea, we will observe several milestones throughout the semester. The due dates listed here are the latest possible dates for each milestone, but you are free to submit each earlier, particularly if you anticipate revisions.

1. Proposal: Friday, March 22

By Friday, March 22 you will submit a proposal outlining the book project you hope to complete, as well as the steps required to do so. Each proposal should describe:

  1. The content of your book. What will it be about?
  2. The format of your book. Will it be printed and bound? A zine? An ebook? A hybrid? Something else?
  3. The skills you will need in order to execute your project, as well as a plan for acquiring those skills, particularly if they are not skills we will formally study together.
  4. The materials you will need to complete your project, as well as a plan for acquiring these materials. Skeuomorph may be able to help with acquring some equipment, but I will have to assess the feasibility of this funding on a case-by-case basis.
  5. The equipment you will need in order to complete your project, as well as a plan for accessing that equipment.
  6. The team working on your book. Is this an individual or group project? If the latter, what does each member bring to the group?
  7. A plan for evaluating the project. What are your goals for this book, and how will we know whether and to what extent those goals have been met?

We will discuss your proposals together in order to ensure they are well defined and scoped appropriately. All proposals need to be accepted before you move on to the next stage of development.

2. Prototype: Friday, April 12

By Friday, April 12 you will submit a prototype demonstrating the viability of your project proposal. What you will submit during the prototype stage will vary widely by project, but it should essentially be a proof of concept: evidence that the plan you outlined in your proposal is feasible and that you are on track toward completion. Among other possibilities, you might submit:

  1. A few pages from a longer analog project in process
  2. A set of conceptual drawings or wireframes illustrating your progress
  3. A stylesheet and sample page(s) from a digital project

The prototype is due at the mid-point of the project’s development from proposal to showcase. The primary goal for the prototype stage is demonstrating steady progress, and ensuring that your plans remain feasible. If your project has significantly shifted from what was proposed and accepted at the proposal stage, the prototype stage will also be the point at which you will submit a revised project proposal.

3. Professor Meeting: Between March 21 and April 22

Sometime during your work on the project, you (and your collaborators, if relevant) must meet with me individually to discuss your project and progress. You are certainly invited to meet with me more than once, but at least one meeting is required.

4. Final Project: Monday, April 29

Your project should result in a final object, set of objects, or digital artifact, as well as an artist(s) statement describing what you have accomplished in your project. These will be due a little before the end of the semester, in time for the final project showcase during the last two days of class.

Artist(s) Statement

Your final project must include an artist(s) statement—a reflection, essentially—of approximately 1000 words which outlines your book’s concept and ambitions, its influences, your process, and challenges. Be sure to address what you learned in the process of making the book, and describe what your book means to you in the end.

Like the projects themselves, these statements will vary widely, but they should help readers/users understand the ideas about media/bookishness your project seeks to instantiate, the methods and materials you used in producing your book, and any habits of reading required to fully understand your book project. In short, your statement should summarize the intellectual work of your semester so that the labor of your project—both physical and mental—is clear. Depending on the form and media of your book, your statement may be direclty incorporated into your book, or it may be a separate document.

Finally, please be sure to include the following specific information:

Your book ultimately belongs, but I will ask permission to exhibit it—at least temporarily—at Skeuomorph, as well as present photos/video online for other interested scholars and students. Essentially, in my experience these projects tend to be pretty cool. Since I know I’ll be asking for this permission at some point, this semester I’m doing it preemptively!

To let me know whether you are comfortable with this kind of sharing, please include the following permission statement with your artist’s statement. You can just copy and paste, making sure to choose one where multiple options are possible, as indicated in all caps:

I, _____________, GIVE / PREFER NOT TO GIVE Ryan Cordell permission to publicly reproduce images and/or video of my final IS583BL project online and in print for non-commercial purposes related to the BookLab course and Skeuomorph Press. The work will be appropriately credited and attributed to the fullest extent possible. He may share THE FULL BOOK / THE BOOK EXTERIOR ONLY

—————————————————— Signature/ Date

BookLab Exhibit

On the last day of class you will share your projects with each other and interested members of the campus community. We will discuss this event in more detail as the end of the semester approaches, but it will take the rough form of a poster presentation