WRD 112 Spring 2019: Writing Jewish Kentucky
Professor Fernheimer
Peer Reviewing Project 1

In the academic world, peer review is the mechanism through which scholars receive feedback from other experts to help improve the overall quality of their research before such research is published to a broader audience.  Since your indexes and summaries will ultimately have a very public audience–they will be available to anyone who has an Internet connection — we want to work together to make sure they are of the highest, most user-friendly quality.

You will be participating in peer review in class today to help a colleague improve his or her work before it is turned in for a final grade in this class and before it is published to a public audience on the Nunn Center’s website.  Since there are three discrete parts to this assignment, you will be giving your peer three different types of feedback—feedback on the index, on the summary of the interview, and on the reflective essay written about the choices made in indexing and summarizing.  Each of you will have a chance to revise your work once you have received your peer’s and my comments.

In order for each of you to create the most usable indexes and summaries, thereby providing the best introduction to the interview for a general audience, and in order for you to do your best work reflecting on the choices you made to create the index and the summary, you must offer constructive criticism to your peers.

Constructive criticism does NOT mean that you just tell each other you did a good job and move on to revising your own work. It means that you do the best you can to offer specific, descriptive feedback to help your peer improve the quality of the work. Below, I offer some tips for offering strong, constructive feedback on each part of this assignment.

Note: To answer some of the questions below, you will need to take time to read through the transcript for the interview your peer indexed.  Please remember that you can download the transcripts from the directory provided on Canvas.

Indexing Feedback
Upon first glance, does looking at the list of segment titles of all the index points give you an overall sense of what the interview is about? If yes, describe what that impression is. If not, why not?  Do the titles do an appropriate job of mapping content to general concepts and subjects?

Is the number of index points appropriate for the length of the interview? (Remember Dr. Boyd and the Nunn Center recommend 12-15 index points per hour of interview time). Do the time stamps reflect appropriate lengths for the segments (no more than 5-7 minutes each)?

Do the titles for the index points follow the Nunn Center’s conventions?

Are each of the requisite fields filled out appropriately for each index point, following the Nunn Center’s conventions?

Do they include an accurate partial transcript, a useful segment synopsis, descriptive

keywords, GPS coordinates?

Is the segment synopsis detailed enough?  (It should be more than one sentence).

If there isn’t a GPS coordinate filled in for a segment, suggest an appropriate way to include one.

Do the keywords seem appropriate?  Are ideas missing that could be provided in the keywords?

Summary
The overall interview summary should be 200-250 words long. Does the summary give you a good sense of what the interview is about? Does it capture the essence of the interview? Is it too detailed? Not detailed enough?  What else did you hope to learn about the interview from the summary? What information is included in the index but not reflected in the summary? Too many details? Provide some feedback to help your peers write a summary that showcases the “forest” through the trees.

Reflective Essay
When you create an index, you become the middle person who creates a way for the interview to be discovered and found by a broader public.  Consequently, you make important interpretive choices when you decide where to create index points and how to summarize interview content.  The reflective essay is an opportunity for you to explain how you became that middle person when you created the index – what choices you had to make and why you made them.  As a peer reviewer of someone else’s reflective essay, you aim to provide constructive feedback on whether they’ve explained this thinking and writing process well.

A strong reflective essay makes an argument about what the student learned from the process of indexing/writing the summary. A very strong essay connects the choices the student made to larger questions about information access. Excellent reflective essays explain and reflect on why you make the choices you do, while also connecting what you’ve learned about information access, scholarly interpretation, and the difficulty of summary to the ethical and research questions a student is exploring in other classes or his or her home discipline.  You read the essay “On Being a Documentarian” by Dr. Moosnick excerpted from her published work Voices of Audacity and Accommodation. Consider this chapter a model for exemplary self-reflection.

Read your peer’s essay.  What do they argue they’ve learned, and why, do they suggest that this learning is important? How is their claim about their own learning supported by the evidence they include? Do they quote from and/or include specific anecdotal examples from their experience of indexing/summarizing to support their claim? If not, suggest how they might do so. Do they connect what they’re learning about interpretation and research through indexing back to what they’re learning about research and interpretation in other classes? Feel free to offer sentence level feedback about syntax, style, and general proofreading, but make sure you answer the larger questions above first.

Where to provide and Turn In Your Feedback on Your Peer’s Work
To ease readability, comments on index summaries should be made in Googledocs, comments on the indexes should be provided on the rubrics and summary end-comments should be  inserted on the first sentence of the summary in Googledocs (200-250 words), comments on the reflective essays should be made on the hard copies of the essay.