Assignment Title:
Research as a Mode of Creative Production


Course:
GRAD 5124 - Research Skills for Graduate Students
English Section


Target Audience:
Graduate students in English or Creative Writing at a college or research university


Last Updated:
2018


License for Reuse:
  

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


Suggested Attribution Statement:
“Research as a Mode of Creative Production.” 2018. Course Assignment. Reused / adapted from an openly licensed (Attribution 4.0 International, CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) document created for the GRAD 5124 - Library Research Skills course, University Libraries, Virginia Tech. In Supplementary Materials for "Sustaining Graduate Information Literacy Instruction: A Case Study of Best Practices" Book Chapter. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/89332  




Assignment Description and Implementation Notes:


This assignment is from the English section of Grad 5124. It is implemented as an ‘Assignment’ (in the Canvas learning management system). This assignment provides students with a choice of tasks to meet the interests of different types of students in this section. It engages students in thinking about how creative people, particularly writers, use information in their work. The options allow for students to do this by looking at the creative work of a writer and how they use information and research or by creating their own work utilizing information/research as part of the writing process. Be sure to enable upload capabilities for this assignment for many file types (.txt, .doc, .pdf, etc.), and/or provide an open text field for students to paste in their submission.

[See assignment text on page 2-3.]
Assignment Title: 


Research as a Mode of Creative Production




Assignment Text:


This assignment has two options. Depending on your disposition, you might choose one option over the other. Feel free to choose. The point of this assignment is to think about how creative people, particularly writers, use information in their work. This can be accomplished in two ways by looking at the creative work of a writer and how they use information and research or by creating your own work utilizing information/research as part of the writing process. 


Option 1: Research as a Mode of Creative Production 

Step 1: Choose three reference sources and choose three unrelated topics from three different reference sources. You can find reference sources in a variety of ways including our discovery search or Oxford Reference to (encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, gazetteers, handbooks, etc...) or feel free to use one of the databases form 5.2 if you want to go explore what is available to you. If you are feeling uninspired to choose your own reference sources, here are four examples. 
* The Encyclopedia of Mammals
* A Dictionary of Creation Myths
* Visual English Dictionary
* The Oxford Companion to Cosmology


Step2: Combine these three topics into a single story, character sketch, or poem (should be short less than 500 words of the sake of your time. You can go longer if you desire, but it is not required).


Step 3: When you turn in this assignment, please include first the piece of creative writing, the 3 topics, and the 3 sources.  


Option 2 (Finding Examples of Research as a Mode of Creative Production)

Caveat: In the discussion of Research & Creative production, I gave several examples of writers, mostly poets, who use information or what one might call research in their work. Terrance Hayes, Robin Coste Lewis, Natasha Trethewey, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil are all named and discussed to various degrees and therefore you can not use any of their work for this assignment. Also, you must choose a living author/writer.

Step 1: Identify a piece of contemporary creative writing that you believe is using research. Include a citation. Include at least one quoted selection that showcases the use of research.


Step 2: Create an argument for why you believe this piece of writing uses research. Use evidence. This evidence can be an analysis of the text with a source, an interview with the author, or citations given by the author in the work.


Step 3: Identify what information sources the author is using. Cite them. Find them if you can. 


Step 4: When you turn in this assignment, please include a full citation to the contemporary creative writing work you analyzed, your argument with evidence, and citations to the information sources the author used. 


(This assignment may be difficult, but remember that we are talking about a wide range of authors and a wide range of information. All you have to do is dig around and try to see what you can find.)