This page explains the student project for J. B. Owens's spring 2007 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 453/553, Renaissance Creativity. The student project, for which this page suggests possible subjects, is designed to help students develop an understanding of the communications resources that provided European natural scientists and theologians with an critical "audience" for their creative and innovative viewpoints and with the means to influence others from the late 15th to the early 18th century. The emphasis on the production of geo-spatial data sets exists to support the spatial focus of the undergraduate curriculum of the Idaho State University Department of History and ISU's Master's program in geographically-integrated history, which is based on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The sole purpose of this page, and all of the related pages on this server that are linked to it, is to provide an orientation for those students enrolled in History 453/553.

You may return to the course main page or to the syllabus.

Renaissance Creativity: Student Project

The project is due on Thursday, 26 April at 2:30 p.m. You must send it to my e-mail address (owenjack_ at _isu.edu), following carefully the instructions on this page.

By 2:30 p.m. on Friday, 12 January each student must have mailed to Owens the names of three authors, in rank order, on whose publications he or she will concentrate for the course project.

By 2:30 p.m. on Friday, 19 January, each student must have mailed to Owens a preliminary bibliography, which must correspond to the course style sheet.

This page explains the student research project for J. B. Owens's spring 2007 upper-division undergraduate and graduate course Renaissance Creativity. Questions and comments may be sent to me at my e-mail address (owenjack_ at _isu.edu), or if you prefer, you may send me a message now by selecting this button: Mail Now. Be sure to include your name and e-mail address in the text of your message.

HISTORY MAJORS: This is project is designed to promote the goals of the programs for HISTORY MAJORS at Idaho State University. The required courses for the History Major are not tasks to check off until one finally graduates. Instead, they are part of a process intended to enhance both students' knowledge and understanding and their cognitive and expressive skills. The process is thesis-driven in that it culminates in History 491, "Seminar," in which each student must undertake a significant piece of creative research and present the results in writing. To do well in the seminar work, History Majors should have already well developed the abilities to raise important historical questions, to draw from primary and secondary sources the information necessary to answer such questions, and to formulate hypotheses and use the acquired information to defend these. This project should help you further develop these abilities.

SKIP AHEAD

The Renaissance Communications Revolution

This project will allow you to master some aspects of the major communications revolution that resulted with the development of printing with moveable type. Printing quickly became one of the first mass production industries, and the successful marketing of its products over ever-larger areas provided authors with a larger audience of critical authorities in their disciplines than ever before and an enhanced ability to influence the ideas of other experts in their fields and the general cultural environment of Renaissance Europe.

To what factors in the hypothesis on the Viewpoint Page do you feel the printing revolution was most important?

You will first select a natural scientist or theologian on which you would like to do research from the suggested list of authors. Because only one student will be allowed to work on a particular author, we will have a lottery on the first evening of class, 9 January, to determine the order of selection.
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The Dataset

 You will produce a dataset, which describes the early places of publication of your authors important works and the locations of the people who had access to these books. You will prepare this dataset according to the guidelines in a manual, which will be distributed to you on the course's WebCT site. The principal author of this manual, Dean Blarer, is an ISU undergraduate, whom you get a chance to meet during the semester. Blarer based his work in part on the data notation manual created by Dr. T. Matthew Ciolek of The Australian National University; take a look at the Old World Trade Routes (OWTRAD): Notation System.

For your dataset, you will provide adequate metadata (data about data), using the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative standard. The form you will use is explained in the data notation manual, and you can see examples by looking at any of the datasets on Dr. Ciolek's OWTRAD web site. If you wish a quick look at another type of metadata, using the Dublin Core standard, simply view the source page for this text (select View and then Page Source, if you are using a Netscape browser).

Why do you suppose that it is necessary to have metadata as part of a digital dataset?

With your dataset, you will also contribute gazetteer data, which will become part of the overall gazetteer of the datasets for the class. To see what this gazetteer will look like, examine the Gazetteer of georeferenced nodes of long-distance communication routes, prepared by Dr. Ciolek, co-author of the data manual for your course.

Why is it necessary to formulate a gazetteer to accompany your dataset?

Finally, you will produce data to express information about the books of your chosen author and about the locations where potential readers had access to these works.
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ADL Gazetteer Server

To start you on your way, you will use the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) Gazetteer Server to determine the geographic coordinates of the locations you discover in your research. Go to the ADL web site now and play a bit with the gazetteer server. Pick a place in Idaho. Use the world map's zoom tool to focus roughly on Idaho, and indicate that you only want locations within the map. Pick the type of place in the feature thesaurus (I suggest that you start with a town, a populated place).

When you run your search, you will get a report with a bunch of interesting information. What do you suppose some of the technical information is about? Note that for this project we will use the latitude and longitude information in decimal degrees, rather than in feet and minutes. The ADL Gazetteer Server gives you both.

Look through the feature thesaurus and pick some other type of feature that exists in Idaho and whose name you now. Run a search for that feature. In what ways is the resulting report similar to the report you ran for a town?

Now take the world map back to its original extent and run a search for the name of a place in Idaho. I suggest a search for Montpellier. What happened? What did you have to do to get the report for Montpellier, Idaho?

Isn't this fun? You could plan a vacation by using the links to further information provided in the gazetteer reports.

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Short Essay When you submit your dataset, you will also submit a short essay in which you will explain what this evidence about the spatial extent of the distribution of your author's books tells you about the relevant factors listed in the hypothesis paragraph on the Viewpoint Page. You must make explicit references to this hypothesis in your essay. Citations in this essay must correspond to the standards of the bibliography and citation style and plagiarism pages.
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Bibliography

 A preliminary bibliography for your project must be sent to my e-mail address (owenjack_ at _isu.edu) by 2:30 p.m. on Friday, 19 January. You must include at least FIVE relevant articles from scholarly journals. I have provided a partial list of relevant scholarly journals in the ISU collection. The bibliographic form must correspond to the course style sheet. Failure to submit this bibliography on time will give you a GRADE OF "0" for the project as a whole.

You should discuss with a reference librarian at the ISU library what resources are available to compile a bibliography about your chosen author and how you should design an effective bibliographic search strategy.

In addition to using the ISU library catalog, you will also find it useful to do a subject search of major research collections with outstanding holdings related to your chosen author. For example:

If you locate an item, which is not held by ISU but which appears particularly useful for building your dataset (a collection of his or her correspondence in English, for example), carefully note all of the relevant bibliographic information, the call number, and the name of the holding library. You will need this information to request the item through the Interlibrary Loan service of the ISU library. Notice the "Request" button on the upper right side of the ISU library catalog page.

You may also find it useful to consult online archives of historical maps to give you an idea about how Europeans of the Renaissance understood their spatial relationships. For example, see the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. The map images on the covers of my recent book "By My Absolute Royal Authority" and that of Dr. Laura Woodworth-Ney, Mapping Identity are from the Rumsey Collection and are used with his permission.
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Due Dates and Project Reports

 This dataset is due, in digital form, by 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, 26 April. You must send it to my e-mail address (owenjack_ at _isu.edu), following carefully the instructions on this page. This project will be worth roughly 15% of your final grade.

NOTE: Periodically throughout the semester, you will be required to submit partial project reports to me.

We will discuss the project in class on Tuesday, 16 January, by which time you will know on which author you will concentrate for your project. Prior to this class, therefore, you MUST have read carefully this page and the Viewpoint Page.
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Standards

 For this course, there are strict standards, explained in the two pages linked to the next paragraph, for the style of bibliography entries and notes and for the citation of any words or ideas that are not your own. Because failure to observe these standards precisely will lower significantly your grade on the assigned work involved (to "0" in the case of plagiarism), make sure you come to the class on 16 January PREPARED TO SEEK CLARIFICATION of anything on these two pages that you do not understand.

Before the class session on 16 January, read carefully the pages on bibliography and citation style and on plagiarism.
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Alternative Projects

Two alternative projects are possible.

  1. As part of the Glenn E. Tyler Collection, the ISU Library holds the first two CD-ROMs of the ADMYTE (Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Españoles) Project. These contain digital versions of over 60 printed books published between 1471 and 1525, with companion full-text transcriptions, and the transcriptions of over 60 Renaissance era manuscripts. The technology permits key-word searches, which greatly facilitates all sorts of interesting research, and brief discussions and bibliographies are provided with each work. For those students who read Spanish and want to use this material, I can design an alternative project that would involve creating a data set of the printed books organized by both location and time.

    ADMYTE was created by the Laboratorio de Linguística Informática of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

    If any student would like to see a description of the ADMYTE Project with a complete bibliography of the manuscripts and printed books included, send me an e-mail message to that effect, and I will send you the message provided by ADMYTE's developers. In order to understand how to use ADMYTE, you may consult the ADMYTE: A Brief Guide or About ADMYTE.

  2. The ISU Library holds several published collections of scientific correspondence, which merit a companion dataset about the people involved, organized by both location and time. I will provide more about these collections to students who are interested.
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Please send any questions or comments about the assigned project to J. B. Owens at OWENJACK_ at _ISU.EDU, or if your system will support the process, you can mail me NOW. Please include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message. 

All contents copyright © 2004, 2007.
J. B. Owens
All rights reserved.


Revised: 7 January 2007


URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/rencr/BookPub.html