History of Science Online - Course Info - Time tips - Semester Schedule - Weekly Assignments - Timeline - Projects - Week 6: Roman Science

Web Project assignment: Revised Introduction

#	Due Date	Pts	Activity	Time
6	Monday 11:59 p.m.	10	Web Project this is a semester-long project where, little-by-little and step-by-step each week, you create your own web project on an aspect of the history of science of special interest to you	90 min - 2 hours

The rest of this page assumes that you are familiar with the general description of this weekly assignment found on the Web Project assignments page. After reading that description and completing last week's Web Project assignment, you are ready to begin this week's assignment.

Your assignment is...

• to finish planning your episodes and narrow your focus to specific episodes, then
• to decide on one or more writing styles for your Web Project, and
• to revise your Introduction so that in addition to explaining your topic, you also explain the writing style (or styles) that you want to use.

You are not required to choose one of the writing styles that you brainstormed about last week -- but if you want to go with something different, please let me know first.

You may be able to start with your draft Introduction from before, but you might also want to make substantial changes to the whole thing, since your ideas about the topic have probably been changing over the past couple of weeks. If there were corrections you needed to make to your draft Introduction, make sure you take care of those now!

Most of you are still refining your topic a lot, and this week is a good time to spend some time seriously considering the shape of the overall project before you descend into the details of specific episodes. Next week you will begin to write and publish your first episode. So this week I urge you to make sure you have planned your web project so that it will be something specific that is interesting to you, NOT a "magnum opus." This means that you need to narrow down your topic as much as possible. My recommendation for this stage of planning your web projects is to build each episode around a selected primary source.

For example, if you want to do a project on a field of science like "history of medicine," that is way too ambitious! We couldn't cover that in a semester! You need to make each episode something you can do in two weeks, tops.

So you could narrow down your project by focusing each episode on just one particular figure. And if you choose someone who is obscure, an episode on a single person might be do-able. But if you were to choose someone like, say, Hippocrates, well, that is still too broad. There is no way you can cover all of the Hippocratic writings in one episode!

So you need to narrow your focus to a single work by someone. But let's say you want to do an episode on Vesalius, who wrote an important work of anatomy in 1543. Vesalius would be too broad a topic, but so is his work (it's a huge tome!). So sometimes even choosing a single primary source is too much: you would need to choose just one aspect of the work and devote your episode to, say, Vesalius and Female Anatomy; or Vesalius and Midwifery; or Vesalius and Vivisection; or Vesalius and the Circulatory System; or Vesalius and Woodcut Illustrations; or Vesalius and Public Anatomical Demonstrations; etc. Narrow your focus to just one angle on the book that interests you.

The more you narrow your focus, the more do-able your episodes will be. Be sure to browse your textbooks and the assigned readings of future weeks to get some ideas of primary sources, works written by historical figures, that would be interesting to you. Chances are that English translations are available.

You need to cite your textbooks in each of your episodes, but you also need a reliable professional secondary source that goes beyond the textbooks and assigned readings. Be sure to understand the three criteria that determine what counts as a "reliable professional" secondary source.

Many of you have chosen similar topics. This also is not a bad thing, but can be a good thing! Click the "Projects" link at the top of this and other pages to view a list of your web projects as they stand right now. Be sure to visit that Projects page and check these two questions:

1. Is your info correct? Do I have the right version of your name, email address, and web project title? Please send me any corrections, and keep me updated if your web project title changes.

2. Are there other students who plan to do web projects on the same topic? If so, then you will want to communicate together. Check their web projects early on to see what episodes they are planning, and email them if there's a possible overlap. You can divide up the labor so that some people will cover some things, and you can simply link to each other's websites instead of having to establish all the background all by yourself. For example, let's say that six or seven of you want to do web projects on the history of medicine, and all of you want to devote an episode to Vesalius. That means that you will all need to come up with different angles on Vesalius, such as those mentioned above. You can still do Vesalius, for example, but you need to coordinate with each other so that no two of you are doing the same episode in the same way. It is your responsibility to coordinate this, which means linking to each other's projects and making sure that they reinforce or complement one another without much repetition. In many ways it can be a lot more fun when other people are working on the same topics! Also, when it comes time to begin reading and leaving feedback for other people's web projects, be sure to read the projects of those whose topics are most similar to yours!

Now as you revise your Introduction, provide answers to the following questions about your topic AND about your writing style:

• why have you chosen this topic?
• what do you already know about this topic? what have you learned from your research over the past couple of weeks?
• what do you want to learn by doing this project? what are some of the questions you are trying to answer?
• why do you think this topic will be interesting for other people to learn about?
• what episode are you currently planning to include for ancient science?
• what episode are you currently planning to include for medieval science?
• what episode are you currently planning to include for early modern science? (Before the death of Newton; see dates.)
• what are the writing styles you will use for these Episodes, or for the Web Project as a whole?
• what is the overall theme or connection that ties all your Episodes together?
• what are the three primary sources you plan to use for this project? (one for each episode) Provide a bibliographic citation for each primary source (including a url if it is online), and a sentence or two explaining how it might be useful (you can use the same sources as before, or perhaps you will want to change them based on new sources you have found).
• what are the three secondary sources you plan to use for this project? (one for each episode) Provide a bibliographic citation for each secondary source, a sentence or two explaining how it might be useful, and a sentence or two justifying why you think it is a reliable professional secondary source (you can use the same sources as before, providing they meet the required criteria, but perhaps you will want to change them based on new sources you have found).

Do not include these questions verbatim, like a FAQ. Just write a readable introduction to your project that addresses them in an understandable and engaging way. When completed, this assignment should be at least 600-1200 words in length. Please make sure that you have proofread the assignment and run a spellcheck and a word count.

When you are done, send the assignment to the instructor in an email. Please give the email a subject line that says "3013-WebProject-Week6".

Please do not send a Word document attachment. Just cut-and-paste the assignment into the message body of the email.

	HSCI 3013. History of Science to 17th century Kerry Magruder, 2004-08 Report typos or broken links Many thanks to Mythology and Folklore and other online courses developed by Laura Gibbs.	Search course websites:
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