Project 3

The Effect of Exhibition Design on a Viewing Space

Workshop Draft (text only): Writing 5 Project 3 Workshop Draft Text

Peer CommentaryWriting 5 Project 3 Workshop Comments

Post-Workshop Revision Plan:

My revision plan consisted of streamlining the website and making information more accessible. It seemed jumbled at first.

Conference Draft (text only): Writing 5 Project 3 Conference Draft Text

General Commentary:

  • Opening does a great job of connecting to a broad audience
  • Could you make this opening gambit more accessible by making it personal?
  • Consider splitting opening Par. at the question. Paragraphing is not as formulaic and conventional in this context
  • Hard question: why should we believe you that this is exceptional? I think you may need to address that question
  • Hard question: why should we think this is better than the alternative? I think you might be able to get away without addressing this question in the introduction, but you likely need to deal with it somewhere in the piece.
  • Section headings take the place of topic sentences; great! Try to aim for that more frequently (see light section)
  • Captions could include credit (or you could create a pulled quote or highlight that tells us all images are yours)
  • Some focused powerful analyses…great idea generation here; solid execution
  • Link to expand citation! (see Dernie on Light page)
  • Intra-site links are interesting
  • Might need to know more about how the contrast fosters intense scrutiny (see end of contrasts)
  • Key claim really emerges in final paragraph. I wonder if that should be somehow present in intro (full sensory exp). That’s a bit diff than, why do people look more closely?

Final Draft: The Effect of Exhibition Design on a Viewing Space

Project Post-Mortem:

Because this project included multiple media, I was able to use the pictures that I had taken to illustrate my points. This made it easier to talk more about the implications of the evidence that I used and allowed me to spend less time discussing what the features of the room actually look like (that would have been tedious and confusing). Seeing as I had already written papers in art history classes that required the use of visual evidence, I was already familiar with the techniques of using non-written evidence.

This project, like the other projects in this class, was based on using evidence to articulate an original claim based on a conceptual lens, as opposed to simply “analyzing” another author’s work and picking apart his or her claim. However, in this project, the conceptual lens that I used only allowed me a very limited set of guidelines or arguments that I could use to inform my project (although the book itself was very long, it was mostly pictures and explanations of other well-designed exhibits). This meant that I had to formulate a claim and gather evidence without much of a text to back me up, which is what I did almost by accident originally. Also, the evidence that I used, instead of finding images or sources on the internet or in a library, were my own photos which was very different from the first two projects..