Guidelines for Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: A Companion Reader

Overview

The final project of this course consists of a collaborative digital project entitled “Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands: A Companion Reader.” Throughout the course, we have gathered repertoire for annotating text and elaborating new forms of textual and data visualization. The idea behind developing a companion reader is to employ the skills developed throughout the former classes to comprehensively assist other students and people interested in the work of Anzaldúa to get immersed into the reading. As a result, the final version of the project can also be part of your portfolio and all students who participated in its development will receive proper credit.

Companion materials serve to facilitate for students, scholars, and general audiences interested in learning in depth about a specific topic. Writing a companion reader can be an exercise to not only improve your own knowledge about a certain topic but also to contribute to the community of scholars and interested people in the field.

Organization

The class will be divided into three groups. Some tasks will be assigned to each of the groups, and some others will be assigned to all groups.

Chapter 1

All students will work on developing a StoryMap of chapter 1, in which their task is to contextualize the role of the places and references mentioned by Alzadúa. Literature review will be essential for this part, as further references are needed for contextualizing the role of each place in Anzaldúa’s writing. We will have one entire class dedicated to discussing and working on this chapter.

For example, in the first chapter of Borderlands, Anzaldúa utilizes many geographical references in her writing, though not necessarily following a chronological order. Furthermore, some of the references are mentioned en passant, that is, without providing the reader with further details. One of the tasks of working on this chapter is reflecting on how we can use maps to serve as a companion material when temporality can not necessarily be used as the only guiding line.

Chapters 2, 3, and 5

Instructions for everyone: All students will read all chapters, though each group will be responsible for one chapter of the production of the companion materials. Students who are not part of the responsible group will contribute to that chapter by adding questions and providing feedback on the parts of the text that could assist the group responsible for the chapter. We will utilize Recogito to annotate each chapter. For example, what things did you struggle with and could benefit from if someone could clarify them to you? Or, on the other hand, what references could you understand that might not be clear to other people and you could share with your peers? The work in Digital Humanities is vastly collaborative, take this opportunity to be generous to your peers!

Remember:

Instructions for each group: Throughout the course, we have utilized different tools and techniques to visualize and explore the meaning from autobiographical writings. In our final project, students are free to select — in consultation with the instructors — what techniques and tools could better serve to explore the topics of each chapter. Keep in mind that this material should facilitate the reading of the text!

When you first read the chapter, pay attention to any passages that you did not understand and references that make you curious.

We will dedicate an entire class for each of the chapters. During the class in which we will discuss your text, be mindful to take notes of the discussion and share your thoughts with your peers.

The final version of your project should enlighten the reading and the reader’s understanding of your assigned chapter. Imagine that someone is going to read that chapter for the first time: