is required for you to participate, so plan to attend.

Each person brings a unique perspective to any text and to any topic, and you can't share yours if you're not in class. Please think about higher education as a community of which you are a part, not as a product you purchase. Then it becomes easier to understand that your attendance and participation are more for the sake of what you can offer others than for what you'll get from them.

If Gutenberg's press were a new invention it might be useful for you to know how to print your own work. But knowing how to create your own webpage and how to troubleshoot it (even when you use some sort of automated or semi-automated text editor to create it) is undeniably useful, in addition to being the twenty-first century analogue to Gutenberg's fifteenth-century disruption. That's the goal and the rationale for this assignment.

To achieve the goal this assignment will require some instruction in html, and this will happen more or less regularly throughout the course. By the end of November you will have received about five hours of instruction in using html & css, and your work will be graded according to that standard.

For all such instruction you will need to have a powered, functioning computer with you. (It's worth noting that not all the electrical plug-ins work in the class room.)

Build a webpage (or site, if you're adventurous). It must be on the topic of book history, but from there you can do what you like. An obvious path to follow would be to put the annotations you've written based on your reading into a single page. How plain or fancy you want that page to appear is up to you, but do not let fanciness get in the way of function or legibility.

At a minimum, you must submit a .html file and a .css file. Compress whatever files and images you want to submit into a single file (usually called a "zip" file), and submit that single file to Acorn so the professor can uncompress your file and show it to the class where it will be subject to a critique by all class members.

Class Pages

The following excerpt from a longer text by book historian Terry Belanger should enable you to understand what is expected of you for this assignment.

Descriptive Bibliography is "the close physical description of books. How is the book put together? What sort of type is used and what kind of paper? How are the illustrations incorporated into the book? How is it bound? . . . Descriptive bibliographies . . . give full physical descriptions of the books they list, enabling us to tell one edition from another and to identify significant variations within a single edition" < https://bibsocamer.org/publications/bibliography-defined/ >.

On Friday Oct. 4 we will visit the Vaughan Memorial Libraries Special Collections and Kirkconnell Archives at which time you will be introduced by an archivist to working in the Archives and to some of the books in our Special Collections. Subsequent to that you will return to the Archives to choose a book of your own on which to perform a descriptive bibliography. After choosing but before proceeding in your work contact the professor who will confirm the appropriateness of your choice, or send you back to make another choice. For our purposes, choose a book printed before 1700, or hand-pressed book from after 1700.

The key thing to remember is that you are to produce a "close physical description of" the books you chose from Acadia's Special Collections using what you've learned in class and from the course texts. Descriptions of bindings, format, collation, and typography will be expected (50% of the mark for this assignment), but so will be a visual description of the appearance of the title page.(the other 50%).

For more guidance on what's expected of you, see the Resources section above.

For this term-long on-going assignment you are required to read the text assigned for a given day, then write an annotation that will enable you at some future time and anyone else at any time to get a good sense of what the text has to offer.

According to the University of Toronto's "Types of Writing" website's entry on annotated bibliography "an annotated bibliography gives an account of the research that has been done on a given topic. Like any bibliography, an annotated bibliography is an alphabetical list of research sources. In addition to bibliographic data, an annotated bibliography provides a concise summary of each source and some assessment of its value or relevance. Depending on your assignment, an annotated bibliography may be one stage in a larger research project, or it may be an independent project standing on its own."

Following from that, your topic for this assignment is something like "Print Culture and the History of the Book." To assemble your annotated bibliography you are required to submit an entry on every assigned reading for the course.

Each entry will be due via Acorn by 8 AM on the day for the which the text is assigned. Acorn will be set to not accept late submissions, and your grade for this assignment will suffer when you miss any of submission deadline.

Information about the where and the when of your final will be posted here as soon as the professor gets access to it. At the the end of the term the class will work together to compose the final exam.