So what are we building here?  In short: an online “extra-illustrated” Arrivants.

General Overview:  The Arrivants treats the experience of Africans in the New World: their ancestral past, the Middle Passage into slavery, the era of Jim Crow and the great northern migrations, and the West Indian diaspora in Britain and the Americas.  Densely intertextual, it is both intensely “aural” (one of the foremost exponents of what he calls “Nation Language”—a/k/a West Indian creole—as a language of literary expression, Brathwaite drew hundreds to his readings in late-1960s England, and his performances there led to a celebrated series of LP recordings of the trilogy) and intensely musical, built around extended references to New Orleans funeral marches; spirituals and hymns; minstrel songs and vaudeville numbers; early blues and “race” records; bebop, post-bop, and avant-garde jazz; popular song and rhythm & blues; Akan talking drums and praise songs; Caribbean children’s rhymes; calypsos and steel pan.  The Internet lets us make The Arrivants’ web of connections with other works of art, music, myth, literature, pop culture, religion, and history, especially those in the public domain, more accessible and more appreciable to a new generation of readers, students, and scholars.

Our emphasis, then, will be on annotation—on identifying and explaining some of those intertextual allusions.  But I have a particular kind of annotation in mind, which is rooted in something called the “extra-illustrated” book.  (Here’s novelist Caleb Crain’s explanation—and his own crude online example. Plus one of mine. You can see other, more “authentic” examples courtesy of Los Angeles public television station KCET.)

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Where to Go From Here: I have furnished you with three basic components: poem text, corresponding audio from the LPs of Brathwaite’s recording, and relevant commentary from Pathfinder, Gordon Rohlehr’s comprehensive study of The Arrivants.  

It’s with Rohlehr’s commentary that you’ll start to exercise some judgment. Because here’s the deal: it wouldn’t be practical to include everything Rohlehr says about your poem(s), and it would be asking quite a lot of your readers, too. You’ll want to selectively incorporate his commentary: include a few striking quotations, maybe, but paraphrase or summarize where appropriate, too.  Maybe you can use a bigger chunk of his text as a kind of “headnote” to your poem, and then limit yourself to short snippets later on.  (Maybe you’ll even decide his text is finally more useful as “deep background” to guide your research.) However you do it, it’s bound to involve a lot of triage.

But—and here’s where it gets creative—while Rohlehr is an important source, he’s not your sole source.  Sometimes you’ll use him to identify things you want to investigate further (or things you want to reference or include in other ways—with visuals, sound, links to other texts or web pages or Wikipedia articles, whatever.)  But if he is your “pathfinder,” you still need to do some bushwhacking of your own.  Scour the text of your poem(s), line by line, marking whatever Rohlehr doesn’t explain that you think (or suspect) needs explaining: words or phrases that seem allusive or evocative or obscure or otherwise non-obvious. Do whatever you need to do to figure out whether those things are in fact as referential or as opaque as you think they are—and if so, how you might go about acting upon that.  Where and how would you look for more information, and how you would represent what you find? 

In some instances, you may decide just to link some text—to an image or a Wikipedia page or a YouTube video, say—and let the resulting hyperlinked juxtaposition speak for itself, leaving it to your readers to connect the dots and, if necessary, figure out the relevance.  Other times, you will want to “extra-illustrate” some text with an image or audio or video file (or even more text), which you will bring into the exhibit as an “item” (and/or perhaps as a pop-up window, whatever seems more appropriate). And if your item requires further comment or contextualization, well then … you provide it, in the form of a footnote or a “hover” textbox or a caption.

If there are three people in your group, then you’re shooting for 20-30 meaningful links and “extra-illustrations” for your entire text, approximately 7-10 per person. “Extra-illustrations” should far outweigh simple links.  Don’t do something just because you can.  (E.g., if a line in your poem mentions a cat, that doesn’t call for a link to a cat video.) The web is a huge place. You’re the curators of this exhibit.  Be smart.  Be judicious.  Be selective.

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Playing Nicely:  This is a group project, but how you break down the work within your group is up to you.  You might simply decide to distribute all the responsibilities evenly, then get together periodically to edit and combine the results collectively.  You might choose to elect one unusually capable person to the position of "editor-in-chief":  s/he would be responsible not just for proofreading, but for establishing consistency of quality, style and tone. (You woud all agree in advance that s/he would also have the power to tell you when your work isn't up to snuff and to tell you to go back to the drawing board. As a last resort, s/he might also have final editorial control, including the power to reshape or rewrite your work.) Someone else--or maybe that same person?--might pull sole or primary "Omeka tech guru" duties--and believe me, that work is liable to take a lot of time. In that case, the other group member(s) would do the lion's share of the research.

Be flexible.  If, once you get under way, it emerges that your original division of labor isn't equitable—then be prepared to negotiate and to merge or reshuffle job assignments accordingly.

Agree upon a timetable and a division of labor as soon as possible  Set some meetings and deadlines along the way where you can periodically present your individual work to the rest of the group for friendly, collective review, feedback and critique.  Since you're all sharing a grade, you'll want to work cooperatively to set and maintain standards of quality control, and you'll want to agree in advance on how to deal with slackers.

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Deadlines and details.  A full rough draft of your page is due no later than Tuesday, December 2nd--but sooner would be better.  Anyone who has "Administrator" status in Omeka can see any page of the exhibit at any time along the way. But be careful: Administrators can also edit any page at any time, and in order to see how someone has done something, you actually do have to switch to "edit" mode. Excercise extreme caution when "editing" someone else's page! (You may also compare notes and exchange ideas with others on Moodle forum that I've opened for that purpose.) 

You should be ready to unveil the final version no later than our exam day (Tuesday, December 15th), but one or two groups should be prepared to remove the wraps as early as the final regular day of class (December 10th).  It would be nice if everyone in the group had some role to play in the presentation.

I'll ask for a short self- and group assessment from each member of the group when you're done. If, heaven forfend, there seems to be a consensus that one or more members of a team have not pulled their weight, then I reserve the right to adjust individual grades accordingly.

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Evaluation Criteria:

Content

1. Diligence (scope, ambition, thoroughness): have you shown good judgment in identifying things to annotate and "extra-illustrate"? Have you done all you can to find accurate, reliable, high-quality resources and information? Have you been as meticulous as you can about documenting your resources via "Dublin Core" metadata?

2. Imagination: have you conceived of appropriate and/or surprising ways—without getting too contrived about it—to "extra-illustrate" various things, to elucidate their role(s) and significance(s) within your poem?

Style & Mechanics

3. Coherence: this is a group project whose end result should be unified in substance and uniform in style. Superior projects will present a relatively seamless final product that features a consistent level of writing and reflects the sum of everyone’s work.

4. Technical & Editorial Quality: these pages won't be visible to the world--but let's imagine they are, and that they're meant to serve as a reliable reference source. Don't embarrass yourselves or me or Kamau Brathwaite or HSU, then: demonstrate the excellence of Humboldt student writing! Be clear, direct, cogent and coherent.  (That your work should be free of egregious mechanical errors should go without saying.) Match that sentence-level excellence with good design sense, sound editorial decisions, and Omeka technical skill.