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Final Thinking Text (Enoch and Keaton)

For the final project, we want to create a Museum of Everyday Writing. We intend
this museum to be used like the FSU Post Card Archive, as (predominantly) a
pedagogical and research tool. Teachers can use the artifacts in the museum as examples
for particular kinds of writing or they can assign exhibit projects. The exhibit assignments
can be used in ENC 1145 classes that focus on everyday writing (like Joes class), in
ENC 1101/2 classes that follow the Genre or Community strands, and in WEPO classes.
Furthermore, Research Methods instructors can use the museum to teach their students
about archival research. The museum will also be visible to and searchable for the
public. To maintain their privacy, students can choose whether to make their exhibits
public. Users will need request permission to submit items and/or exhibits to the
museum; this will help us maintain the ethos of the museum.
We intend to use Lillis definition of everyday writing as a barometer for including
items in the museum (76). We like Lillis because her definition is clear, simple, and
relatively capacious. We interpret Lillis definition in the following ways:
ordinary: Ordinary means mundane. Mundane writing can be inspired by
ordinary events. Also, though the circumstances surrounding the production of
writing may be extraordinary, but the documents produced in response to those
circumstances may be mundane. Also, like Weber and Rivers suggest, a particular
document might be extraordinary, but the supporting documents are not; the
supporting documents, then, are mundane.
part of everyday life and routines: What counts as routine is context specific.
For instance, managers of production companies routinely write pick lists that
detail equipment needed for a production. These pick lists are everyday writing
for the managers even if they arent everyday writing for most other people.
ubiquitous: A genre that most people have intellectual, social, and physical
access to.
transitory in the sense of discardable: A piece of writing that is discardable to
most people. So, while a specific letter may be incredibly important to a particular
person, most people will consider it discardable.
invisible even whilst it may be central to everyday life: Like routine, this is
context specific.
We also include performances in our definition of everyday writing if the
performance is essential to the genre of the artifact. For instance, the performance
of spoken word poetry counts as everyday because, without the performance, the
text ceases to be spoken word poetry.
The museum will include five sections: a homepage, the artifacts, exhibits, a links
archive, and a bibliography.
The homepage, in addition to a welcome message, will include a definition of
everyday writing and an explanation of the museums purpose.
The artifacts themselves will be organized very much like the postcard
archive. In addition to scans and in some cases transcriptions of each
artifact, each entry will include contextual information about its authors,
audience, and purpose. We are still discussing what specific categories would
be included. The entries will be searchable using a system of tags based on

Final Thinking Text (Enoch and Keaton)

genre, content, purpose, and location. For example, the letter that Megan
discussed in her case study would be tagged according to genre (letter, deed,
and narrative), content (music, family, religion), purpose (gift) and location
(Charlotte, NC). We are also still working on creating a list of tags.
The exhibits section like the postcard archive will showcase academic
work done with the artifacts in the archive. To begin, we will post our own
case studies as exhibits (and perhaps ask if anyone in the class is willing to do
the same).
The links archive will consist of links to other sites, blogs, and online archives
that showcase everyday writing although they might night showcase
everyday writing exclusively. For example, we can link Ephemeral New
York, a blog that showcases receipts, letters, signs and other historical
documents, the flickr feed for the New York Historical Society, Intergraff, a
graffiti archive holds photos of graffiti from around the world, and Jeffs
ephemera archive. Our goal in the links archive is to provide as many
resources as possible without duplicating or re-archiving items already
available online. If they are representative of items missing in our museum,
we may (depending upon your answer to the questions at the end of this
document) include one or two examples from these other archives and provide
a link to the external archive on that items page. The inclusion of these items
in our museum might make people more likely to go to the other archives than
only including the links archive.
The final section of the site will be a bibliography of academic work on
everyday writing, again to provide resources to students and instructors using
the site.

The museum will be created using Omeka, allowing us to use software with
which we have some familiarity from our admittedly small experience with the
postcard archive and that we know is well suited to the task. Our plan for the final project
is to create the shell of the site and experiment with some content, knowing that we can
continue to add and refine in the future. So, for the final project we would create the
site, compose the intro page, archive 20-30 pieces of everyday writing (and compose the
categorization and tagging systems to go with it), create 2-3 exhibits, begin the links
archive (may a dozen or so links), and create the bibliography based on our syllabus and
the sources used in our case studies.
We have a few questions that we need to address before moving forward. We
need to discuss the ethics of gaining access to material. Can we only use things that are
personal or things that we own? Can we, for example, take pictures of graffiti or posters
that we find on campus? For the postcard archive, everything included was donated or
purchased. Do we need a similar system for our museum? We also need to do some
additional experimentation with Omeka. Does Omeka allow audio or video? If so, what
are the ethics of including video - say of performance art or protests - in the museum?

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