Due dates:

Stage 1 (Proposal): week 6.
Stage 2 (Monograph draft, 1 illustration, animation treatment and storyboard): week 7
Stage 3 (Monograph final draft with illustrations): week 8
Stage 4 (finished animation): week 9
Stage 5 (Monographs Project Final Presentations): week 10

The goals of the Monograph Project are for you to integrate your learning about optics, how those of various sea creatures have evolved to perceive the world around them, how they move in space and how scientists and artists represent these phenomena with the skills you are developing in writing, drawing and animation. The project will involve working collaboratively, using analog and digital tools to present your creative and scientific work, and presenting your learning to others.

A monograph is a summary of knowledge of a particular thing. It usually includes one or more illustrations. For this project, you are assigned to create one monograph focusing on the program theme of vision or movements of marine organisms. The project has 5 stages that scaffold one on top of another, so it is critically important that you manage your time well in order to be ready for each next project stage, and to present your work in week 10.

Overview of Monograph Guidelines:
Your monograph must have:

1. A title describing the content or concept. If the subject is an organism, the title should include the species or genus name and common name. If the subject is a type of movement, then the movement should be a normal routine behavior, with some specificity (e.g. a type of swimming). If the subject is regarding vision/light perception that title should describe the organs and organisms.
2. A formal essay (2-3 pages, typed, double spaced, using complete sentences with correctly formatted citations):

(2a) A monograph on a single organism should include:

• The common and scientific names of the organism
• The general characteristics of its taxonomic group
• Where in the marine environment it is likely to be found
• Ecological information about the role it plays in its environment and/or its relationships with other organisms or marine processes

(2b) A movement or light sensing anatomy monograph essay should include:

• The common and scientific names of organisms
• The names of major anatomical structures/organs involved in the movements, light sensing
• A brief comparison of the movements between the two organisms, or the relationship between the light sensing anatomy and the light environment of the organism (is it dark? Is it subject to daylight?)
• A relationship between the movements or light sensing and the organism’s ecology
• In addition, consider what you’ve learned about this organism from the literature and your observations, and imagine this organisms’ umwelt. Write a separate paragraph describing this, and add it to the essay with an illustration or diagram of your idea.
• Bibliography and citations: Information on movement, light perception or an organism’s biology should be researched from at least two scientific sources, preferably from the peer-reviewed primary literature. Write a bibliography that includes this information and cite sources in the essay when referencing that information. Format the citations formally using APA guidelines.
• The following images, with written captions, as relevant to your topic:
• If an organism, two drawings of the organism. One drawing should have a size scale to indicate how big the organism is. One drawing should show what the organism might look like in its natural environment.
• Movement monographs should include two drawings that show details of the appendages or body parts (e.g. musculature) involved in the movement for the organisms studied. Include size scales for your drawings.
• Light-sensing behavior should include two drawings, one of the light sensing anatomy, and one of the placement of the light sensing organs on the organism. Include size scales for your drawings.
• All monographs must include an illustration or diagram representing what you imagine of the organisms’ umwelt (see below).
• You may use pen and ink stipple and/or watercolor pencil to create these illustrations. Alternately, you could create digital drawings if you already have the tools and skill set for that.
• At least one animated sequence that shows behavior related to your topic, with caption. Specifications:
• Minimum 12 seconds duration (excluding titles and credits). You may go up to a minute if you are inspired to, and if what you want to express warrants that. If you create a gif, you can loop infinitely.
• Challenge yourself to express what you want to say without sound, knowing that the primary venue for this work is a blog post with accompanying text. If you feel you really want to add sound, consider carefully what you add both in terms of legality (copyright law) and aesthetics (does it enhance or detract from your animation?). Note that the GIF format does not accommodate sound.
• Export to gif or mp4 format, and name it “monograph title_your name.”
• Write a caption for the animation to accompany it in the blog post.

This remainder of this document describes Stages 2 & 3, due week 7 (for #2) and in the Week 8 Animation Workshop (#3). Stage 4, the final presentation of your work will be in Week 10.

Stage 1: Proposal due Week 6

What kind of organisms and behaviors, including light sensing features and movements, are you interested in investigating? What will you want to dedicate time to observing and animating? Write a paragraph formally proposing what concepts and organism(s) you wish to describe. Include the preliminary sources you are planning to utilize for making your monograph. We recognize that this proposal is due before some of the material is presented by Pauline. In forthcoming weeks, in addition to types of crawling locomotion, she will present on types of movement associated with feeding and breathing behaviors. You may consider these topics for your monograph but you should check with Pauline ahead of time about the topic if she hasn’t lectured about it yet.

Your proposal should consist of: a 400-600 word essay that describes the topic you wish to investigate further; and an annotated list of at least three references, one of which should be an image reference (a source with multiple images or movies) and two of which should be from scientific resources (i.e. not Wikipedia) about the topic. For our purposes, annotation means that you write a sentence about each reference that describes why it will be useful to you in developing  your monograph.

Upload the proposal to Canvas by Wednesday, week 6, 9 am.

Stage 2, due week 7: The ONE COMPLETED DRAWING minimum, ANIMATION TREATMENT PARAGRAPH + STORYBOARD, and ROUGH DRAFT + BIBLIOGRAPHY of your summary essay are due at 8:30 am, Wednesday so that we have time to organize them to share.

Submit all of these elements to a folder with your name on it in the One Drive AS Monograph folder:

• Complete the rough draft, bibliography, and caption for the first illustration on a Word/Google doc (or equivalent) file. Cloud documents (eg Google docs) need to be exported as Word or PDF for ease of sharing via one platform.
• Scan/photograph your illustration if analog, and create a jpeg or png of it labeled with your name and what it is.
• Animation Treatment: A separate Word/Google doc exported as pdf (or equivalent) with paragraph detailing what the sequence will show and what animation technique you will use to produce it.
• Storyboard: Draw a sequence of sketches visualizing what will happen in the animation. Digitize and submit as jpeg or png, titled “your name_storyboard.”

Stage 3, due Tuesday, week 8: a final draft of the monograph (minus animation) with all 3 scanned or photographed illustrations inserted into the Word document. The Word document must be double spaced, with a list of sources cited. This is a formal academic document; all writing should be in complete sentences, proofread and spell checked. Due on Canvas.

Stage 4, Complete animation, WordPress Workshop, Week 9: The animation sequence, with all your illustrations, essay and captions, must be in the One Drive AS Monograph folder by Week 9 1:00 pm, Tuesday May 26th 

WordPress Workshop, Wednesday, May 27th: In this workshop, you’ll begin to create a blog post for your monograph with your illustrations and animation. You decide how to lay these out around your essay. You’ll enter in captions for them. Your completed, published blog post is due 1pm Tuesday, June 2, week 10.

Required minimum elements for blog post:

1. Title that includes the topic (organism name or movement) TIP: If you need to italicize your post’s title, open your post in the Code Editor and add <em> and </em> around the text to italicize.
2. Your name as author. If you prefer not to publish your name you may use your initials instead.
3. Your essay, paragraph about umwelt, and bibliography.
4. Three illustrations. Choose one to be the “featured image” shown on the category pages
5. Your animation, either as a GIF or streamed video.
6. Captions for all illustrations and the animation.
7. Categorize your monograph as vertebrate or invertebrate. During week 9 you will work with others to come up with additional categories to assign your post to.
8. Publish your post.

Options:

1. Include other illustrations, with captions, that you have done for your topic.
2. For the blog header: make a banner image 1440 × 221 pixels. This will cycle randomly through the header with other images each time the blog page is loaded.
3. On your post, include a copyright notice (“copyright 2020 Your Name”) or a Creative Commons license (for information about this, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/. 

Help Resource: WordPress Tutorial for sites.evergreen.edu

Monographs Project Final Stage 5              In class Tuesday, week 10.

Tuesday: Categorization – Collaborate with other students to categorize your monographs, agree on tags, and link blog posts to each other.

Monograph Presentations  in class, Wednesday-Thursday, week 10.