TRAVEL the world

TRAVEL the world

Art communicates the long, long story of civilization’s visual accomplishments and one of the best ways to learn about art is to travel.

Societies are typically very proud of the art they produce and preserve it for generations. The purpose of this module is to explore how and work of art is effected by the culture and region that produced it.

For this last assignment you will virtually travel to one city where one work of art was made. As you saw in the MUSEUM module, there are more than 30,000 years of art history on record to explore.

It’s important as you “travel” to gather good research and so the readings in this module will focus on how to do good research.

Reading: Research, Supplements, Definitions, Work Hints, and More

Here are some things to take into consideration when doing research (discussed in terms of “levels”):

Third Level of Research:

• You might speak to an instructor and they make recommendations for you to follow up on
• You might meet/know someone in the field you need to learn about and they get you started
• Or these days, you might do a general search using your favorite search engine. I would call this a “shotgun search” to get started (by “shotgun” I mean that it’s a wide-open, general search that will include a wide range of sources from Encyclopedias to Wikipedia).  This kind of search can give you a lot of directions to go further, but can be confusing and may include unreliable, inaccurate, or just plain wrong information.

Second Level of Research:

• Looking at/taking information found in the third level research and going into it deeper. This means finding the sources: like the author, and checking their “works cited” or bibliography and then corroborating, checking the provenance, and credentials of source(s).We need to check and confirm that our research is accurate and correct. This is a place where your instructor should be able to help. REMINDER: Your instructor is one of your resources.
• Corroboration means finding 2 or more sources that say the same thing and have good credentials for reliability that the information is from someone who has training/expertise/experience and/or is knowledgeable in the subject. Corroborating also means checking these credentials – “Why should I listen to this person or source?” 2nd level sources are also when someone is writing or discussing a subject; an artwork; a book or subject, etc. but they are not the person who wrote the text or painted the painting or whatever.  In the art world, many of these sources are art historians, historians or theorists or art critics (knowledgeable people who write about art).
• Provenance is the history of something, for example who made the artwork, who owned it after that and where has it been all these years. Provenance is important to confirming that a given artwork is not a fake or a copy or stolen. These days the Provenance of an artwork may be checked by chemical and/or scientific analysis.
• NOTE: corroboration and provenance are important aspects and issues in the art world.

First Level of Research:

• Information is referred to as original sources and sometimes called primary sources.  This might be the actual painting, sculpture or artwork being considered. It might be the book, the poem, the drama written; music; dance – it might be an artist’s own writings about their work. In the Arts – it is frequently hard to get to the source materials, as those are the original artworks (or the artist’s writings). Original artworks like you might find in a museum. If one is looking at a reproduction of an artwork (photos, videos, recordings)–that is a second-level source because it is not the actual original and there can be all kinds of color/quality/image degradations in the process of reproduction (these aspects are inherent in the process of reproduction, in fact)

An example:

1. Let’s say we find a video on YouTube fromBob47 about medical illustration, which talks about Leonardo DaVinci’s drawings (this is a third-level source). I watch that and then look for his bibliography or cited sources (probably none).
2. So I do a search for DaVinci and medical illustration. Among other things, I find an article in the Washington Academy of Science journal by Joanne Snow-Smith. This is a good article and I can use it for my project, but it is still only a second-level source because she is talking/writing about DaVinci. She will probably have a bibliography and works cited (her research). I can follow up on that.
3. My first-level source for this example would be to go to DaVinci’s diaries and sketchbooks related to medical illustration. There, I could look at his writings about medical illustration and his drawings – that would be 1st level source material. Now the problem here is that I would only be able to look at reproductions of his sketchbooks, unless I travel to Italy or wherever his original notebooks are preserved. So, in this case, if I studied those reproductions, we might call that advanced 2nd level sourcing.

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

Reading: Writing About Art

Take a look at Writing About Art by Marjorie Munsterberg. It’s a great resource to help you get started on an art-related writing project. Particularly, read Historical Analysis and Appendix I: Writing the paper.

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

Reading: Bibliography

When you write, you will need to cite your source in-text and create a bibliography that lists works cited using MLA standards. It is important to give an accurate citation so that the instructor can track down your sources and look at them when necessary.

Use the Perdue OWL MLA Formatting and Style Guide as your model for citations and how to create a bibliography.

Purdue OWL MLA Formatting style guide

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

TRAVEL: Put it together

This course is particularly focused on helping you develop visual literacy skills, but all the college courses you take are to some degree about information literacy.

Visual literacy is really just a specialized type of information literacy.

The skills you acquire in this course will help you become an effective researcher in other fields, as well.

For this assignment, you are going to study one work of art in depth, by virtually traveling to the city in which your one work of art was made. You will study what the city was like when the work of art was made and what that city is like today. Do NOT confuse the city in which the work was made with the city where the work is located today, which is usually a museum.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine where your work of art was actually made. You may need to research this fact first. If you can’t figure it out, choose a different artwork.

You can choose any artwork from any of the museums linked to in the MUSEUM module, but it should be an artwork you did not include in your Museum and the artwork cannot be made in Houston.

Upload your 2 page Letter to a Friend here.

Remember to include one library book citation at the bottom of your 2-page Letter to a Friend and an image of the artwork.

When you upload your assignment your letter will be checked by the Turnitin system for plagiarism. The system will tell you what your similarity score is, you are aiming for under 15%. If your score is higher than 15% edit your letter to reduce its similarity and upload it again. It can take the system a few minutes to check your paper (and up to 24 hours for resubmissions) so if you don’t receive a score immediately remember to check again before the due date. And don’t wait until the last minute!

IMPORTANT: If your submission has more than 15% similarity, your total possible grade will be reduce by the percent match.  For example, if you have a similarity score of 25%, that means the maximum grade your paper could earn would be 75% or 75/100 points. 

Tip!  Students often report that they have difficulty finding the city in which their artwork was originally made without using a library book for background information on the artist and where he lived and worked during the year the work was made.

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