Understanding Global Cultures

The "working bibliography" for your project is a simple list of references—sources that you think will be helpful to in putting together your paper and your presentation.
(grading information for working bibliography)

And your sources may include any or all of the following kind of items . . .

• traditional library printed materials (books, journals, magazines, government reports, microformat materials . . .)
  
  
• library AV materials (videos, films, DVDs, audio recordings . . .)
  
  
• talks
  
  
• library and on-online special collections (maps, images, oral history materials . . .)
  
  
• materials from special conferences and events (for e.g., The Nobel Making Food Good Conference Archives . . .)
  
  
• materials from cultural myths and legends . . .
  
  
• personal interviews (including relevant YouTube materials . . .)
  
  
• questionnaires
  
  
• personal journals and diaries . . .
  
  
• personal interviews (you might even want to do something creative, like interview yourself . . .)
  
  
• relevant WebSite materials
  
  
  • for e.g., sites from sections of Countries, Cultures, Regions, Areas, and Territories available on this WebSite
    
    
  • materials on this website listed alphabetically in the A-Z index (on your Home page and on all of the course free-standing WebPages)
    A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
    
    

At the start of your project it is probably a good idea to have 6-10 sources that "look pretty good" and as if they might be useful to your project.

At the beginning, and for the list you turn in during Week 7, you do not have to do anything more than list the resources that you think will be helpful to your project and that you expect to use for your paper and/or your report.

Once you begin looking at these materials, you may want to start annotating them—that is, beginning to make notes about how they might actually be used in your paper and/or presentation.

And you might start noting additional references from your original list of items.

For details on evaluating the items on your initial "working bibliogaphy",
and on the process of annotating your working bibliography (your simple list),
see the resources available from . . .

s2024 Informal Project Statement (up to 20 points)
due by the end of Week 5, Sunday, 11 February 2024

Preparing Your "Informal Proposal"

• Your topic/subject should be something that you, personally, are interested in
  
  
• Your topic/subject can be almost anything you like, but it must be related to the Global Cultures course
  
  
• You may use materials from the textbook, class slides, and class videos--and, in fact, it is often an excellent idea to integrate class materials into your Project.
  
  But the main focus of your project should be on materials that are not required for the class.
  
  
• The informal "proposal" itself can be very straightforward:
  
  

• "What I think will be useful" means that you should include 3 or 4 items like references to materials and activities (such as interviewing someone . . .) that you think would be helpful to your in working on your project. (No, you do not have to do an interview; that's just one possibility.)
  
  
• "Items" can be articles, short videos, photographs, books, interviews, personal experience. . . .
  
  
• If you include a reference to a source on the web, be sure to give its full reference (not just the URL). For a web page your full reference should look something like the one below (include as much of this material as is available for the site[s] you are looking at):
  
  
  • Roufs, Timothy G. and Kathleen Smyth Roufs. Sweet Treats. accessed 8 February 2019. http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anthfood/SweetTreats.html#title.
    
    
  • For this assignment you may turn in the references to other sources of information any way you like, but it is a good idea to use whatever attribution system you plan to use in your final term paper:
    
    
    • APA General Format
    • MLA General Format
    • Chicago-Turabian Manual of Style -- General Format

Upload your file—one file—to your folder)

• In order to upload your file please make sure that you save your Word file as a .docx or a .doc or a .rtf file.*
  
  
• *Details on "Type of Files" are available in the "File Type Information" if you need more information on how to save your files on your computer.
  
  
• Click on "upload assignment" button at the end of the assignment page.
  
  Once you have uploaded the file you can not re-upload the file unless you first remove the one you first uploaded.
  
  For more information regarding how to use the assignment tools, please view the Canvas Student User Guides

Between now and then I will have a look at your informal proposal and give you some feedback on it, including instructions on how to proceed with your Promissory Abstract two weeks hence.)

For the "Promissory Abstract" and "Working Bibliography" (that are due in two weeks) and for the Term Paper itself (due at the end of the semester) you need to use APA or MLA or Chicago/Turabian style or a standard scientific method.  Which of those you use is up to you.

Additional information that might be helpful:

 
"Understanding Writing Assignments" 

from

APA Sample Papers
Sample APA Paper: Definitions of Online Communication
Sample APA Paper: Adolescent Depression

MLA Sample Papers
MLA Undergraduate Sample Paper: Andrew Carnegie
MLA Sample Papers: Nineteenth Century Farming Handbooks

"Understanding Cultural Metaphors"

from Gannon, Martin J., and Rajnandini Pillai. Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys Through 34 Nations, Clusters of Nations, Contnents, & Diversity, 6^th Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2015, pp. 2 - 22.

(slides)

1. It is fine for you to begin a project by consulting with Wikipedia (and similar on-line sources of encyclopaedic-type information) but you should be aware that the Wikipedia entries are open-source and are not checked and verified in the same manner as other reference materials. And sometimes the entries are confusing (have a look at "Macedonia," for example). And Wikipedia, should you use it, should only be a starting point. Wikipedia more information on using Wikipedia in class A caution before citing Wikipedia Citing Wikipedia APA style MLA style Chicago style CBE/CSE Style Turabian style It is also OK to start out your research by consulting reference works such as encyclopedias, dictionaries and lexica, glosaries, other general reference works, and the like, but this stage should only be a preliminary preparation for more focused and in-depth research work. For a college research paper you should also have a look at other references, either traditional materials from the library, or on-line materials from sources like UMD E-Journal Locator, JSTOR, etc., or books and manuscripts On-Line. That is to say Wikipedia and the other reference-type sources listed should not be your only source of information. And you must add your own evaluations, comparisons, development, criticisms, critiques, and the like to any reference materials used. Simply cutting and pasting information from sources is not sufficient to satisfy the requirements of either a required or extra-credit research paper. Your paper should reflect a synthesis and evaluation of materials researched.

   
   
   
2. Try getting more information by looking at sites on the web:
   
   
   • Try surfing the web by searching with the search engines found by clicking on the Web "Search" button found on the upper righthand corner of the course WebPages. This will take you to the course Search Engines Page.
     
     
   • Hint: When you do a search on an item that has more than one word, like "stone tools," use the "Advanced Search" option and enter the words in the "exact phrase" box -- otherwise it will search out everything with "stone" and everything with "tools," and the list of "hits" could get quite large.
     
     
3. Also try getting more information from JSTORE, elelctronically stored journals, and look for other items from the UMD Library.
   
   
4. For your paper you should also use traditional library materials, and, where appropriate, interviews and videotapes.
   
   
5. On-line Resources which might be helpful include:
   
   
   1. JSTORE©
      
      
   2. LEXIS-NEXIS®
      
      
   3. UMD Library
      
      
   • Data Basis by Subject
     
     
   4. General Reference Works
      
      
   5. Books and Manuscripts On-Line
      
      
6. Due Friday of end of Week 13
   (Unexcused late Case Study papers will result in a loss of 2% of the final course grade.)
   
   

   You might find the  UM Library’s Assignment Calculator helpful to you (especially with scheduling your work). It’s easy to use.

   
   
   
7. Length: 10 - 12 well-written pages
   
   
   • including one title page (see sample title page) and
     
     
   • and at least one separate "Works Cited" (or "References") page (see sample)
     
     
   • that leaves 08-10 pages of text
     
     
     • with one-inch margins all around
       
       
     • with body type font 11 or 12
       
       
     • illustrations, tables, figures, diagrams . . . may be included, but must be properly placed and cited
       
       
8. Criteria for Grading College Writing
   
   
9. When you write anything you should consider audience, purpose, and your personal style. For your case studies, your audience should be your classmates in this class. (Do not write your college papers to the professor as audience.
   
   
10. Information about Handing in Your Paper
    
    
11. See the "Preparing the Final Draft" section of the Sociology-Anthropology Writing Guide to see the details of what your Case Study report should look like when you hand it in. Basically, it should look like the paper which follows.
    
    

[more information on your title]

Norway as a Norwegian Sweater:

A Cultural Metaphor that Fits Perfectly




by Barak Obama




Anthropology 1080

Project Term Paper

Professor Roufs

28 November 2023

[more information on an Introduction]

Put your paragraph(s) summarizing your paper here.

Put a transitional statement here.

Body [Give this section an interesting subtitle, something other than "Body"]

Describe and discuss your chosen topic(s) here. Use some form of organizational structure. The "Journalist's Questions," Who,What, When, Where, How and Why are often helpful. A time sequence is also useful.

Use the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant if you do not have much experience writing college papers.

Conclusions

Put your conclusions here.