Urban Diaries Assignment

Baltimore Urban Diary

The City in Life and Letters

Spring 2014

One of the key components of our City in Life and Letters class will be the Urban Diaries that we assemble during the course of the semester.  We will, on a regular basis, be heading into different parts of the city.  Each time we take a trip, you will have a reading in advance that will give you a glimpse into the neighborhood we’ll be visiting.  You will be responsible for reading the article, developing a list of questions it has raised for you and formulating a plan for how you will use your time in the neighborhood to “answer” your questions.  Will you interview residents of the neighborhood?  Will you focus your observations on particular aspects of the neighborhood?  Which of the fiction and non-fiction readings we’ve done will you connect to what you see in this neighborhood?  Will you document your study with pictures, video, sketches?

Your homework following each trip is to complete an Urban Diary entry, which includes;

• The list of questions you had generated in advance of the trip

• The results of your explorations, in the form of notes and impressions, video, photos, sketches, interviews, observations, etc. 

• Connections between issues and ideas we’ve read and talked about in class and your experience in the neighborhood.

You will upload your entry to our “CILL – Urban Diaries” folder on Google Docs.  We’ll spend time during the following class reading each others’ Urban Diary entries and we’ll then choose some of the most relevant and powerful passages, pictures, videos, etc. to publish on our Baltimore Urban Diaries Blog.    You will have the opportunity to earn extra credit by choosing to be one of the architects, curators, editors, or publicists for the blog.  We will be trying to create buzz and readership for the blog so that it can lead to genuine dialogue around urban issues and experiences in Baltimore.

We have come across several examples of websites that might inspire your thinking around how you capture the essence of a city.  Here are a few for your perusal:

http://www.humansofnewyork.com/tagged/featured

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/reading-the-city/

http://crosscut.com/urban/

Our hope is that this blog will be a way for you to process your experiences in the city and to provide an authentic audience beyond your teachers and classmates for the discussion of what you find there.  Exactly how – and how effectively – we achieve those goals will be largely in your hands.