I think this is the last blog post before the final one where we defend our contract. This week I have to say has been quiet, especially since we turned in the first draft of our project sites this past Monday. Next week we will be talking about ways to revise and I am eager to see what ideas our classmates have. After that we are just editing and then preparing for our presentation! I can’t believe the end of the semester is here already.
We are currently peer-reviewing, which I think is going to be useful. I peer-reviewed Max and Robert’s USAO site about the case they found in the 80s involving Catcher in the Rye. They have a ton of great information and I can tell they worked really hard collecting it and interviewing people. I made so many notes. (I am really sorry guys). I took this as an opportunity to make a lot of suggestions about how to share the content and I hope they were helpful. (Please do not feel obligated to do every single one of them.) Annotating another team’s site reminded me of how you would workshop and essay or any piece of writing. I live in a constant state of workshop with all the creative writing and english classes I am taking (seriously we are workshopping or being workshopped every single day in my poetry seminar this past semester) and this was really different because I got to look at it not just at word and piece level, but how the website functioned. I had to critically think about how the site was set up and how appealing it is to the reader. Is it too cluttered or should there be more information here? Does this page belong here or there? What would make this easier to access? It was a refreshing way to workshop another student’s work. I wish I had the opportunity to do other workshops like it in other classes.
The only thing that is lingering that I wish we could have as part of our site is the interview with Charles Knitter. He was the one who I was able to get in contact with first and seemed really eager to revisit the issue and join our conversation, but he has never gotten back to us with answers to the questions we sent him. I sent him an email letting him know that we were finishing up the project this past Monday, but it is Saturday and I still haven’t heard back. Maybe we will hear back last minute, but I am not holding my breath. We are most likely going to have to beef up that page or see about combining it with the page about the petition.
I am looking forward to revising next week and making this website ready for the world to see and explore.