Collected Sites:
By Location
By Theme
Student Projects
Galleries
Contact / Impressum:
Mark R. Hatlie (ViSdM)
Im Feuerhägle 1
D-72072 Tübingen
Germany
+49-7071-792696
www.hatlie.de
sitesofmemory @ hatlie.de
Here are the complete instructions for submitting a memorial to this webpage for students in Mark Hatlie's classes who are assigned to do so. These instructions are required for my students. Others who wish to submit material may do so informally and contact me.
Note that this assignment is a two-step process. First, you visit a site, take pictures and write a description for submission. Then, later in the class, you write an analysis of the site for discussion in the classroom.
Consult other interpretation resources as desired, for example, this list by James Loewen. There will also be a lecture on modern war memorials and possibly other texts posted to the classroom.
These texts should give you a good idea of how to approach the assignment. If you can, maybe you can find background information specific to your memorial in a local library. Ask me, the university librarian, the librarian in the public library near the site, or people at the local tourist information office. For large, popular, famous memorials, you may also find resources online. You can use this information in your discussion of the memorial, if you cite it properly.
Go through the thematic section or surf by location. Look at how memorials there are photographed and described, especially the ones done by Mark Hatlie. Note that very few of the memorials there are analyzed. If you are submittig this work for one of Mark Hatlie's classes, your submission will eventually also analyze the memorial, not just describe it.
Borrow a digital camera if you do not already have one. Photograph a local memorial thoroughly: from a distance, from close up, detail shots of text elements and important artistic elements, etc. If the memorial is spatially spread out, like a memorial complex or a cemetery, you do not have to photograph every gravestone, but only some of them. Try to give the person looking at your photos a thorough tour of the site. Again, look at how Mark Hatlie does the sites at the webpage.
You may not simply copy photographs from the web. We will be publishing your original work here! You are producing original historical research!
Note: You are strongly discouraged from choosing to use photographs you already made before taking the class, snapshots made while visiting some memorial as a tourist. They are almost never suited for the assignment, since they are rarely taken with care for detail.
Note that for this assignment you may NOT choose a memorial that has already been published here at sites-of-memory.de.
The Memorial Worksheet - Description provides a template for you to submit the first part of your assignment, the description of the memorial. Fill out the form and submit it to the classroom or to the instructor by e-mail. At this time, also submit the photos. Do NOT imbed the photos into the worksheet, but keep them as separate files. You may crop the photos for aesthetic reasons, but do not make the photos small versions. They should be at least 800 pixels along the longest side.
Based on this submission, the instructor will post your submission to the webpage. If you would prefer to stay anonymous on the public webpage, simply request this with the instructor. That is not a problem.
All work submitted here remains the copyright of the author. All requests made to sites-of-memory.de to purchase images or text for publication elsewhere will be forwarded to the author.
To help you with the analysis, the Memorial Worksheet-Analysis is availble for you to use. You do not submit the analysis worksheet, however. Instead, you compose a text of several paragraph analyzing your memorial. The worksheet helps you organize your observations and your thoughts. Use it as a guide.
Draw specific connections to the pictures where appropriate. Your analysis should be about 500 words in length at least. This is where the background reading linked in step 1 helps. It will also help if you have looked at other memorials in step 2 as well, because then you have more of an idea of what is typical or what might make useful points of comparison. Do not simply accept and regurgitate the standard interpretation of the memorial. You may talk about that standard interpretation, but do not take it as a given. Discuss why it might be so, whether it is ambiguous, whether it is disputed, possible alternatives, whether it may have changed over time, etc.
The primary purpose here is to figure out how the memorial site creates meaning.
If you are interested in how the instructor has struggled with this assignment over time, check out his articles on teaching about collective memory at his blog, especially this artilce.
Note: The descriptive part of the assignment will be published at the webpage, the analysis will not be. After class, I may approach some students and ask about publishing the analysis at the site or at the blog, but I usually do not.
The instructor will create a discussion board or conference in the online classroom for the discussion of students' memorial projects. For each submission, the instructor will create a thread with a link to the webpage publication. Go to the thread dedicated to your submission and "respond" to that thread with your analysis text. Do not submit your text to the gradebook, simply submit it to the discussion board or conference.
Contact / Impressum:
Mark R. Hatlie (ViSdM)
Im Feuerhägle 1
D-72072 Tübingen
Germany
+49-7071-792696
www.hatlie.de
sitesofmemory @ hatlie.de
