Campus History Guidelines

This guide provides the instructions for our collaborative campus history assignment. You’ll pick whatever person, place, or theme that interests you. If you want to do a building, you can consult this a list of options.

Our essays will be based primarily from archival sources from the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections in Zimmerman Library. Librarians will help us find stuff, but it will be up to us to make good use of it.

This assignment hopefully:

  • demonstrates what collaborative digital history can be, as we’ll each contribute small articles that are not exactly profound, but collectively add up to something really useful that one person couldn’t really do in a reasonable time.
  • help us critically reflect on the challenges in moving from analog archives to digital essays that take advantage of the medium to tell a compelling story.

Essay Requirements

  • ~1000 words
  • Written in plain text using Markdown for formatting
  • 3 historical photographs (more is better)
  • 2 images of primary sources (more is better, esp if you have a variety of KINDS of sources)
  • 2 modern photographs (via your phone if you can’t find any) of your building/space. It’s very effective to try to replicate a perspective of a historical photo to show change over time.
  • IMAGES IN YOUR ESSAYS MUST BE HIGH QUALITY SCANS/PHOTOS. Of course you can take lots of low quality pics for your own research process.
  • Informative captions on your images that don’t merely describe what the image is, but why it’s significant.
  • Your captions must include a citation to its digital home (via a hyperlink), or the box where you found it.
  • Subheadings to delineate your main topics and make your essay more skimmable.
  • Bibliography at end of essay that outlines the sources you used.

Style

  • Write something you and your friends would want to read
  • Aim for informal sophistication
  • Demonstrate your expertise through description AND analysis

Questions to keep in mind as you write and revise

  • Who is our audience(s)?
  • What do they know?
  • What do we want them to know?
  • How do we want them to think differently about space on campus?
  • How does space and our perception of it and its history effect our perception of UNM and your future degree?
  • How does your space represent larger campus culture or changes generally?

Grading

  • C-, C: Technically the assignment is done, but doesn’t tell a cohesive story, has very limited images, or is just very sloppy and unfinshed.
  • C+, B-: Displays a respectable level of effort, but generally underwhelming
  • B, B+: Shows potential, but falls short in scope or execution. Usually this score represents a solid effort, but with several clear shortcoming. For instance: too few or too many superfluous images, weak captions, too narrowly focused; no overall narrative to follow
  • A-: Well done, but a bit too many rough edges, or a missing critical component
  • A: Carefully and engagingly written; interesting images that give a sense of the archival history of UNM; tells a compelling story with a clear point to it beyond the topic itself