Renaissance Creativity: Project
This page explains the assigned research project for J. B. Owens's fall 1998
upper-division undergraduate and graduate-level course Renaissance
Creativity.
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, to formulate hypotheses and use the
acquired information to defend these, and to present both the final thesis and
its defense in a coherent written form. This course should help you further
develop these abilities.
If you have any questions or comments, please mail them to J. B. Owens at
OWENJACK@ISU.EDU or if your system will support sending the message,
you may send a message now.
Please include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.
SKIP AHEAD
Assignments
Project Paper
- Through the use of comparative study, you will test the following
HYPOTHESIS in relation to a specific type of creative work. You will
produce a paper offering the results of your research. This paper must be sent
to my e-mail address OWENJACK@ISU.EDU no later than 2:30 p.m. on
Thursday, 3 December, as an ASCII ("plain text") file with a 2.5 inch right
margin.
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Preliminary Discussion
- This page, and several related ones (on bibliography and citation
style, on plagiarism, and on
essay evaluation
standards, will be the topic of class discussion on Tuesday, 8
September, and this discussion will be more useful to you if you have already
thought about several possible topics. For this preliminary discussion, you
must have read this page and the related material, and you must come with
appropriate questions.
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Project Design and
Bibliography
- A statement about the topic you intend to pursue and your preliminary
research project bibliography must be sent to my e-mail address by 2:30 p.m.
on Thursday, 17 September, as an ASCII ("plain text") file with a 2.5 inch
right margin. Failure to submit this statement and bibliography on time will
give you a failing grade for the project as a whole.
NOTE: Your preliminary research project bibliography must include at least
FIVE relevant articles from scholarly journals. I have provided a list of scholarly
journals in the ISU collection. This bibliography must follow the
bibliographic forms in the Course Style Sheet.
Once you have selected your topics, I will start building a Course Bibliography.
Questions? Please include your name
and e-mail address in the body of your message.
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Project Grade
- Since you may have to use the library's interlibrary loan facilities to get
information, you will need to pick your topic, use appropriate reference tools
to develop a bibliography, and begin work quickly. This project will be worth
approximately 40% of your final grade.
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Hypothesis
In accounting for creative innovation, modification, and adaptation within a
particular human community, there are certain factors that appear to be
necessary, although even the presence of all of them in a specific social
environment may not be sufficient to produce creative endeavors. Some group
of people must have (1) perceived economic, political, social, aesthetic, and/or
spiritual needs that make ACTION important within a particular creative field,
and (2) institutional means should exist for the satisfaction of these needs. At
least some members of the group must have (3) sufficient leisure and the (4)
proper education to become a critical audience able to hold creative producers
to (5) high standards. Both audience and producers must have sufficient
"time, energy, and knowledge" to act in ways that enhance the possibilities for
creativity. Further, there needs to exist means to (6a) reward those who meet
audience expectations [and perhaps to (6b) reprimand those who fail in this
regard]. Both audience and producers, which need not be separate sets,
require adequate (7) means of frequent communication to both shape and apply
high critical standards. The community must be able to (8) tolerate diversity,
at least within the area characterized by creativity, and to permit (9) relative
freedom of expression. Moreover, the examined community should exist in an
(10) environment containing other diverse groups with which it competes in
fields requiring cultural production; such competition is necessary to motivate
the allocation of scarce resources to these types of production.
Questions? Please include your name
and e-mail address in the body of your message.
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Your Task (for the 17 Sept. statement)
As you will have noted in reading the hypothesis paragraph, I have indicated
the existence of ten crucial factors for creative action. Several of these factors
could themselves be further refined into a series of sub-factors. What you
must do is test this hypothesis. To do so you must:
- Select from this list the type of creative action that interests you:
history, imaginative literature [select a particular aspect: drama, narrative,
poetry...], medicine, moral theory, music, natural science [can be more
specific], philosophy, political/legal/social theory, rhetoric, technology,
theology, visual arts [architecture, painting, sculpture...]
- Select a geographic place affected by Renaissance Humanism as a
cultural movement (which can include relevant non-European cases), and select
an appropriate period of time between roughly 1300 and 1700. The place can
be either a kingdom or a republic (e.g., Castile or the Dutch
United Provinces), or it can be some even smaller unit (e.g.,
London or Naples).
- Select a comparative case, which can be non-European and
non-Renaissance. Specify both geographic place and chronological period.
Comparison is necessary so that you can evaluate the relative importance of
particular factors.
Questions? Please include your name
and e-mail address in the body of your message.
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Alternative Project
As part of the Glenn E. Tyler Collection, the ISU Library now 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 course project.
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.
You may also wish to consult the web site of the Laboratorio de Linguística
Informática of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where
the ADMYTE Project was developed.
Questions? Please include your name
and e-mail address in the body of your message.
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Comparison
By design, this assignment involves what is known as an "individualizing
comparison" in which one selects a particular aspect of some community and
compares that aspect to the same thing in one or more other communities (in
this case, in one other). Your work may take on the characteristics of an
"encompassing comparison." This type of comparison may become involved
if both of your cases are part of some larger system, as may occur if both your
cases are European ones from the Renaissance period. This is potentially the
most valuable type of comparative study.
There are two other major types of comparison, neither of them particularly
relevant to your task and both frequently subject to unacknowledged or
unrecognized bias. In a "universalizing comparison," one looks for a
"standard sequence" in various cases. For example, one might use this sort of
comparison to generate a theory of economic development applicable to any
country. In a "variation-finding comparison," one examines a large number of
cases to isolate the crucial variables that account for differences. One might
employ this type of comparison to understand how parliamentary institutions
develop or fail to develop in all nations. Of course, during a particular piece
of research, these four types of comparison can overlap. If you want to read
more about doing comparative history, turn to the following book and works
in its bibliography:
Tilly, Charles. (1984) Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge
Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
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"The soul is pleased by the comparison of one thing with another, since
placing one thing in conjunction with another has an innate affinity with the
way the mind acts."
-- Thomas Aquinas [1225-1274], Summa Theologiae I-II 32:8
Please send any questions or comments about the assigned project to J. B.
Owens at OWENJACK@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 © 1994, 1996, 1998.
J. B. Owens
All rights reserved.
Revised: 9 October 1998
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/rencr/project.html