Looking ahead to projects.

By Thursday April 2 before class each project group should outline its projects and provide a list of participants as a comment to this blog entry.

288 thoughts on “Looking ahead to projects.

  1. Brett Basarab

    Group members: Kaylen Baker, Ben Tabb, Matt Lazarus, Brett Basarab
    Subject: Lermontov
    In order to make good use of technology in are project, we decided to use facebook pages to explore the life of Lermontov and how his life may have influenced and inspired his work. We thought combining Lermontov’s life with modern technology would be an effective way to portray him as a person; the many applications of facebook can cleverly portray many aspects of his life.

    Our main goal is to create Lermontov’s facebook page. It will contain facts and interesting details about Lermontov’s life. Our hope is that these details will connect to “A Hero Our Time” so that it will be easy to see how Lermontov’s life influenced what he wrote. We will also do research on some of Lermontov’s close friends and create facebook pages for them. Through wall to walls and messaging, we will explore Lermontov’s relationships with his friends. Lermontov may gossip about people he dislikes or ignore their friend requests while seeking advice and companionship from his closest friends. We will have personal information and some of Lermontov’s shorter writings posted to portray his personal beliefs, desires, and outlook on life.

    After learning that Lermontov died in a duel, we thought we could use facebook to portray the lead up to this duel. Through wall to walls and other facebook applications, we plan to portray Lermontov’s deteriorating relationship with the man he disliked. Eventually, through angry wall posts the two men will decide to duel. We also hope to create a video depicting a duel which we will then post on facebook. The last post will be from a close friend asking how the duel went, only to have no response from Lermontov.

    To tie in Lermontov’s life with his work, we decided to have Lermontov interact with people similar to characters from “A Hero of Our Time.” Perhaps through interactions with these people, Lermontov will come up with ideas to add to his works. A few specific ideas include having someone similar to Maksim Maksimich friend Lermontov, only to have his friend request ignored. As in the story, this “Maksim Maksimich” believes he and Lermontov are closer friends then they really are. Also, we will have someone similar to Pechorin or even claiming to be Pechorin himself friend Lermontov. He will have many of the same traits and perhaps have mixed feelings over his portrayal in the story.

    Overall, rather than just a straightforward presentation about Lermontov, we thought facebook would be an interesting, interactive and almost satirical way to look at his life. For people from Lermontov’s time, we are accustomed to reading letters and written documents to learn about them. Therefore, using facebook will be a fresh spin on Lermontov’s life. We will take a look at events in his life through wall posts, facebook messages, and other online media.

  2. Elise Hanks

    Anna Karenina:
    Group Members: Hannah Wilson, Elise Hanks, Jennifer Ridder

    Web Page Plans for Tolstoi: Anna Karenina

    *focus: modernizing Anna Karenina*

    Includes:
    A section on Tolstoi,
    A section on Modernizing Anna Karenina
    A section about the book as literary work

    Tolstoi
    -Tolstoi Bio
    -List of works
    -Tolstoi’s place in the canon
    -How his views compare to those of Levin, Marx and other contemporaries

    Modernizing Anna Karenina
    -Anna has her own blog that mirrors the events within the novel
    -Includes links to profiles of people she is dating, her own profile
    -Have other characters post or comment on her blog
    *create a g-chat image to post conversations as characters

    Interactive Element
    -Monkey survey about which character you are
    -Gossip Column
    -links to dating site profiles for Anna and various suitors, facebook or other dating sites

    Page for Book
    -plot summary
    -reader’s guide
    -discussion questions
    -list of characters

  3. Patrick O'Neill

    Gogol Group: Adam Levine, Stewart Moore, Patrick O’Neill, Matthew Rothman, Alicia Wright

    Our project will be a video, much in the style of those that are played on the history channel, the entertaining yet education shows that we all know and have come to love. We especially want to focus on including a variety of multimedia into the video such as PowerPoint slides, photos, our own video dramatizations among other clips, interviews (possibly), etc. Also of crucial importance to our work is preserving the quirkiness often exemplified by the hosts of such shows.

    The breakdown of our video is as follows.

    -LIFE OF NIKOLAI GOGOL
    -SHORT STORIES (The Nose, The Overcoat, The Portrait, The Diary of a Madman)
    -INSPECTOR GENERAL (Play)
    -DEAD SOULS (Opus Magnus)
    -IMPACT ON RUSSIAN SOCIETY AND LITERATURE

    We plan to do around a total of 3 minutes per section making a total of 15 minutes for the entire project.

  4. Alexandra Boillot

    Group Members: myself, Kara Shurmantine, Lisa Eppich, Zach Harris
    We plan to make two MySpace accounts, one for Raskolnikov and one for the Underground Man. We will recreate the identities, thoughts, and beliefs of these two characters in their MySpace pages in addition to their respective statuses at the end of each book. We will also create a Google Earth map of St. Petersburg and take the class through a walking tour, following a specific path that Raskolnikov takes in one of his moments of wandering through Petersburg. Audio clips will be heard at some stops with clips from the text so that the audience knows what Raskolnikov is thinking about at that exact place. Finally we will offer some biographical information on Dostoyevsky and show how his personal experiences influenced his creating these two works and the characters within them.

  5. Team Turgenev

    Group Members: Ashley Quisol, Cathy Ahearn, Sophie Clark, Casey Mahoney

    Our group will be producing a series of podcasts on Turgenev’s life, works, and criticisms. We will post them on a site (our ideas can be seen at http://isturgenev.wordpress.com/ or http://community.middlebury.edu/~cmahoney/turgenev.htm) and submit them to the iTunes podcast directory.

    Each group member has a specific focus (criticisms, historical background, biographical information, etc.) and will lead the discussions on 8-12 episodes that will each look at whatever more indepth topics. The website will also have a number of additional pages with relevent reference material, links, and other user-editable (i.e. wiki-page) articles.

  6. 19th century Russia

    Our plan for 19th century Russia is to have a website with a series of interactive bar scenes (say, 1 for each decade). The bar will have characters from each of the books (in their various ages/states) and other items, such as a picture of Alexander II on the wall, and icon in the corner, a map, forbidden journals under the counter, etc. Clicking on elements of the picture will link to information. I couldn’t figure out how to add a picture of our bar into the blog. Also we lost our wiki page, but it’s somewhere in the internet.

Leave a Reply