What is a species?
Humans represent other species according to their understanding of the world, and we make sense of the world in a multitude of ways. Aristotle described cuttlefish in his History of Animals and countless biologists have, since the fourth century BCE, created representations in the form of field notes, microscopic analysis, and ecological studies. And, of course, there are cute cuttlefish.
After exploring how a variety of species have been represented by scientists and discussing possibilities in class, our first assignment asks you to find a representation of a particular species (or a representation of the concept of species) that you would like to describe and interpret for future students in this course.
Step 1: Find the representation you want to include and upload a featured image on a draft blog post.
Tip: Your representation can take any form. Media forms include texts, performances, films, images, music, and more. If you select a text, perhaps the image can be the book cover or an image of a page. If it is music, perhaps the album art or an image of musical notation. For a film, a still image would work well–or the promotional poster.
Step 2: Gather information needed for your object label (after making your final decision on the representation and image file you want to use) and begin your blog post. You can see example object labels on my Enceladus post; we will work together in class to learn how to format a table as clearly as possible, with a caption communicating the license for your object label.
Step 3: Decide what you want to encourage your current classmates to notice about the representation you have chosen and compose a blog post that helps them navigate the featured image and any other media you want to include. You can write as much as you would like and you can include as many different types of media as you would like. Make sure that you include citations for information that you quote or paraphrase in your post (we will go over the use of hyperlinks for citations).
A complete blog post should have the following components:
- Title (same as the title of the representation you are using as the featured image)
- Featured Image
- Captions conveying attribution statements (for all images in the post)
- Object label
- Caption for object label communicating license for your label
- Actual post with source material clearly cited
