Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Fordham University/Women in Early Modern Drama (Spring 2017)
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- Course name
- Women in Early Modern Drama
- Institution
- Fordham University
- Instructor
- Boyda Johnstone
- Wikipedia Expert
- Shalor (Wiki Ed)
- Subject
- English literature
- Course dates
- 2017-01-17 00:00:00 UTC – 2017-05-02 23:59:59 UTC
- Approximate number of student editors
- 34
It is the year 2017. We are entering an era where the President-elect of the United States has a shocking history of misogyny, sexual assault, and rape. In the current political climate, it is more urgent than ever that we investigate patterns of misogyny in texts and literature of the past, find models of strong women acting as a counter to patriarchal culture, and strategize ways of resisting continued sexism today. Drama, subject to revision, adaptation, and appropriation, supplies a particularly effective vehicle for exploring such questions of resistance and protest. Plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries written in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries highlight the problems and challenges staged representations of women pose to the dominant patriarchal order, even as women themselves were not allowed to perform on the stage. Depictions of weak and ultimately submissive women will offset our analysis of texts containing powerful women, and along with other questions of historical staging and characterization, we will trace attitudes towards gender and structural possibilities for change.
Our reading list pairs famous plays by Shakespeare with lesser-known dramatic productions that, perhaps, advance more progressive representations of women, though most remain written by men. Videos of modern performances and adaptations will enhance our understanding of the texts, and performance theory and praxis in the classroom will help us incorporate these difficult texts into our modern climate. We will also actively intervene into our modern understanding of textual cultures of the past by editing existing Wikipedia entries for some of the lesser-known plays. Along the way, other textual themes and issues will supply material for course conversation and analysis, such as effective leadership and rule, setting and the environment, love and romance, religion, sexuality, and formal characteristics of the text.
Timeline
Week 6
- Course meetings
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- Friday, 24 February 2017
- Assignment - Introduction to the Wikipedia project
Welcome to your Wikipedia project's course timeline. This page will guide you through the Wikipedia project for your course. Be sure to check with your instructor to see if there are other pages you should be following as well.
Your course has also been assigned a Wikipedia Content Expert. Check your Talk page for notes from them. You can also reach them through the "Get Help" button on this page.
To get started, please review the following handouts:
- Editing Wikipedia pages 1–5
- Evaluating Wikipedia
- Assignment - Practicing the basics
- Create an account and join this course page, using the enrollment link your instructor sent you.
- It's time to dive into Wikipedia. Below, you'll find the first set of online trainings you'll need to take. New modules will appear on this timeline as you get to new milestones. Be sure to check back and complete them! Incomplete trainings will be reflected in your grade.
- When you finish the trainings, practice by introducing yourself to a classmate on that classmate’s Talk page.
Week 7
- Course meetings
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- Tuesday, 28 February 2017 | Friday, 3 March 2017
- Assignment - Critique an article
It's time to think critically about Wikipedia articles. You'll evaluate a Wikipedia article, and leave suggestions for improving it on the article's Talk page.
- Complete the "Evaluating Articles and Sources" training (linked below).
- Choose an article, and consider some questions (but don't feel limited to these):
- Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference?
- Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
- Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
- Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
- Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
- Check a few citations. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article?
- Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
- Choose at least 2 questions relevant to the article you're evaluating. Leave your evaluation on the article's Talk page. Be sure to sign your feedback with four tildes — ~~~~.
Week 8
- Course meetings
-
- Tuesday, 7 March 2017 | Friday, 10 March 2017
- Assignment - Copyedit an article
Choose an article. Read through it, thinking about ways to improve the language, such as fixing grammatical mistakes. Then, make the appropriate changes. While this may draw on the suggested changes you proposed for Week 2, you don’t need to contribute new information to the article.
Week 9
- Course meetings
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- Tuesday, 14 March 2017 | Friday, 17 March 2017
- Assignment - Add to an article!
Now that you have learned the basics, evaluated and copy-edited Wikipedia articles pertaining to our course, you can put your knowledge to use! For this step, you must add at least two sentences of new content to a Wikipedia page. For those of you who have proposed forming entirely new pages (ex. a character page for Katherina), here's your chance to put those proposals into practice and reeeally impress me. You may want to consider collaborating with other students in the class to tackle this step, so that you're not going it alone. And do make sure to screenshot your additions for your final reports, just in case some cranky Wikipedian decides to reject your changes.
Week 10
- Course meetings
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- Tuesday, 21 March 2017 | Friday, 24 March 2017
- Assignment - Adding a citation to an article
For this assignment, you will need to find at least one reliable source for an article, ideally through the Fordham Library Databases (the MLA Bibliography is a good place to start). Remember that blogs and promotional material are not credible sources. You must find a peer-reviewed journal article or a book. (Note: This exercise will be good practice for your Annotated Bibliographies, and indeed you may choose to select a source that might build toward your final papers)
- Add 1-2 sentences to a course-related article, and cite that statement to a reliable source, as you learned in the online training.