Engl507

University of Victoria
Jentery Sayers
Spring 2015

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Final Presentations for English 507

We've managed to cover a bit of ground this semester. The purpose of your final presentation (which assumes the form of a collaborative panel of three or four people) is to at once reflect on that learning and exhibit what you've done (including how that work relates to your final essay).

The presentation should be professional in character (e.g., as if you are presenting at a conference), well prepared and rehearsed, and simultaneously concrete (e.g., about what you did or made) and conjectural (e.g., what you could have or will do differently). A balance of the concrete and conjectural allows you to manage several things. First, you can point exactly to what you've done but also underscore the trajectories of your research (e.g., your final essay). Second, it allows you to acknowledge what you don't know but could learn or research. Third, it can enact a co-presence of theory and practice.

Learning Outcomes

For you to:

What You Should Include in Your Presentation

Each collaborative panel should:

By “collaborative” panel, I mean its design and implementation should be collaborative in character. Collaborative design may involve working together, as a group, to identify a shared concern or problem and structuring your panel accordingly. Collaborative implementation may involve having two or more people present at once (e.g,. one person speaking, one person navigating a website), or it may involve an approach to delivery that complicates the usual (and predictable) division of labour and delivery (e.g., each person speaking for ten minutes). Point being: be creative, and think seriously about the panel as a form of mediation. How you present (including content, style, and technologies used) is up to you. However, please keep in mind two things: (1) you should reflect on and assess what you learned during the entire seminar (meaning the presentation is not solely about your final essay), and (2) everyone participating in the roundtable will be given the same mark (meaning collaboration and communication are key).

Since your presentation is more or less a mock conference presentation, please assume your audience is not familiar with the particulars of your work. For instance, they may know about modernist literature, but they may not know anything about R or MALLET. Or, they may have heard about distant reading or deformance, but they may need your interpretation of it. Additionally, feel free to assume the hypothetical conference at which you are presenting welcomes panels that do not consist solely of papers read aloud. In fact, assume that the conference welcomes creative and collaborative approaches to issues in a given field. Here, the annual HASTAC conference is a great example.

A few tips (take them or leave them):

Be in touch if you have questions or want to run an idea by me. Please do not be late for the presentations, and please take notes during them (so that you have a question or two prepared). Thanks, everyone! I'm really looking forward to these. And again, let me know how I can help.