Annotation and Bibliography

TUT 100.32 - Virtue in Animal and Machine - Professor Weinman

Summary:: You will find and annotate potential sources for a paper.
Purposes:: Our goals will be to

increase your information literacy
gain practice analyzing sources
communicate interesting ideas to one another
practice brief presentation skills

Due:: 11:59 PM, Monday 4 October
Turn In:: You must do two things to submit this assignment

Please e-mail me a copy of your paper the night before (so I can create slides)
Turn in one hard copy at the beginning of class Tuesday.

Background

Bibliographies serve many purposes. They ground your work in a broader community. They tell your readers that you've read widely on your subject matter. They remind you to read widely on a subject matter. They can even provide reading lists for those interested in a subject.

Those who use bibliographies as reading lists appreciate more than a simple citation as they decide where to read further. In particular, they benefit from your comments. When you add short comments to a bibliography, you produce a work we might call an annotated bibliography.

Read Deborah Knott's "Writing an Annotated Bibliography"
Read the next writing assignment

Assignment

Your next writing assignment is to apply (or refute) the same general argument that Bekoff and Pierce give in Chapter 3 "Cooperation" when applied to (ro)bots. In the same fashion, you will need some supporting evidence. The basis of this assignment is to explore scholarly resources and find some evidential basis for your eventual argument.

Written Product

Create a bibliography containing at least four sources. You must annotate at least two of them. Typically, it is not necessary to study an article completely in-depth in order to annotate it. You merely need to understand its contents well enough to accomplish the goals outlined by Knott:

summarize the argument (question, hypothesis, contribution, etc.)
evaluate its potential relevance to your own purpose

In addition to the annotation, you must generate a citation for each work in APA format.

Sources

Your sources may be any of the following types:

scholarly journal articles
articles from peer-reviewed conference proceedings (an important part of the scholarly literature in Computer Science)
scholarly books
chapters from edited scholarly book collections
other important primary sources, (for example, congressional testimony transcripts)

In class on the class after this is due, we will study and discuss two scholarly articles so that you can get some practice reading and critiquing these directly.

Content

In writing your annotations (but also in evaluating potential sources), should should pay particular attention to

The item's relevance to your task (e.g., potential thesis)
How issues are highlighted in the work
The item's role in a potential argument

Audience

Since this is yet another type of writing, it remains important to consider your audience. In many cases, you are your own audience. Remember, the context you provide is often to help you in some way remember and understand how the work affects your understanding of a question or issue. In addition, since your peers may in fact be using this as a reading list or resource for building additional evidence into their own arguments, you should consider them part of your audience as well.

Format

Your submission should be as long as it needs to be to accomplish the goals outlined above. Please use the standard one inch margins, twelve point font and double spacing.

In Class Presentation

In class the day (momentarily after) your bibliographies are due, you will each make a brief presentation of your findings. Each of you will have up to four minutes (but at least two minutes) to make a brief oral presentation of the two works you have annotated. You should communicate to your peers the three major issues noted above under "Content." Add something else that lets your own voice come through the content as well. For example, you may wish to share why you selected this work (was something particularly interesting?) or how you found it.

I will project the citations of your two works while you stand up to present; therefore, you do not need to read the bibliographic information in any detail. Four minutes is not much time, but it can feel like an eternity (for both audience and speaker) if you are not prepared. You should construct an outline of the things you wish to say; do not simply read your written annotations.

Things I will be looking for include:

Preparation: Are you adequately versed in the material and ready to speak about it?
Organization and Signposting: Is it clear at all times what content issue (e.g., argument role) you are speaking about for each paper?
Oral Skills: Do you make eye contact with the audience, enunciate, and avoid distracting mannerisms?

Acknowledgments

The introductory text is used by permission from Samuel A. Rebelsky, "Writing Assignment 4: Annotated Bibliography" (2010).