For this assignment, you will work in a group of three students to curate three YouTube videos based on a theme that will be assigned to you during class.  Curation is the act of assessing, collecting, and presenting works of interest for an audience.  Careful and intelligent curating is a vital skill for media studies students to develop, particularly in the media rich 21^st Century.

The completed assignment will consist of three parts:

First, you will work together to search for and choose three YouTube videos that engage the theme you have been assigned.  Your group will want to consider choosing videos that all respond to the theme, but in different ways, such as: commercial vs. amateur, cell phone upload vs. high production values, musical vs. silent, narrative vs. non-narrative, &tc.  The total length of your collection should not exceed 10 minutes.

Second, you will work together to write a curatorial assessment that discusses your collection and the way that it exemplifies your theme.  Define the theme and the way that your group approached thinking about what it means as a category for online video.  Make concrete observations about elements (objects, characters, costumes, composition, editing, pacing, sound, framing, &tc) within the videos that respond to the theme. Analyze and discuss the connections and disjunctions that these elements evoke when considered as a curated collection.  The assessment should include a smart and catchy title for your collection.  The completed assessment should be 250-300 words.

Third, prepare six brief but evocative points of commentary that you will share with the class as an introduction when we screen the video collections next week.

Create a word document that includes the URLs of the videos, your curatorial assessment, and the six points of commentary, and save it with your collection’s title as the document name.  Be sure to include your names on the document, and to make copies for yourself.

Prepare all of these items during our regular class time on Thursday, September 2 and post your completed project document to the folder marked “Curation Exercise” by the end of our regular class time.  If you have technical difficulties with Blackboard, email the document to XXX by the end of the class hour.

We will screen the videos and discuss your commentaries next week in class.