HIST 300-007: Archival Silences

Introduction

This week you have a two-part assignment, a single essay (800–1000 words) roughly divided into two distinct halves (for the mathematically disinclined, that’s 400–500 words each). This assignment should be posted AS A SEPARATE PAGE on your website, not just as a blog post that we use for reflections.

PART I: Reflecting on Hartman

PART 2: Your photo archive silences

Why?

One point of this exercise is to take a break from the regular reflections! But, like those, it’s also to help you solidify in your mind (and describe in your essay) what you took away from our set of readings for the week. Usually in an archive you can’t know much about what’s not in front of you, but in this exercise, you DO. The hope is that this exercise will help us better appreciate the perspectives on silences from the Carter article and the way of writing about them from the Hartman article.

Basics

Scoring and how these factor in your grade

These assignments get scored as the weekly reflections. As always, I look for genuine engagement with and reflection on the readings for this week, as well as a serious effort to write something interesting about your own archival silences.

You can earn either 5, 10, or 15 points. You can also get up to 3 extra credit points if you put extra work into a post. Extra words do not automatically equate to extra points—they need to be substantive.