Assignment 3: Annotated BibliographyΒΆ

You will be writing a report on ‘Big Data’ and its impact on something. You get to pick that something.

Remember, the topic must tie into Big Data. The most common grade-killing mistake with this paper is to write a paper that has nothing to do with Big Data, or only have the smallest link to Big Data.

Here are some prior paper titles students have written:

  • Big Data Baseball: Defensive Sabermetrics
  • Big Data + Fantasy Football = Success
  • How Big Data is Changing Sports
  • How Big Data is a Plus to Our Society
  • Big Data in Football
  • Big Data in Nike Sales
  • Big Data and Insurance
  • Amazon and Big Data
  • Big Data and Personal Data Privacy
  • What is Data Mining?
  • Big Data Increasing Concert Ticket Prices?
  • Big Data in Shopping
  • Big Data in Computers
  • Big Data and the Economy
  • Fitbits and More - Personal Big Data

To get started, find some facts. Do some research and gather ideas. A great way to do this is to create an annotated bibliography for your report.

The bibliography must have:

  • Five or more sources.
    • One source must be a book. You must identify in your annotated bibliography which of these is a book.
    • One source must be an article that isn’t exclusively for the web.
    • One source must come from the web.
  • Use MLA style to create a bibliographical entry.
  • Annotate each entry. That is, write about:
    • What the resource says.
    • Talk about the relevance of the article to your paper. That is, how would you use it? What does it have to do with Big Data? You might have one source that doesn’t have to do with Big Data, and just give background information, but if you don’t see the tie-in of the source to Big Data, you need to keep looking.
    • Talk about the accuracy.
    • Talk about the bias of the article. People often forget this part. Don’t. And remember, just because a paper has only numbers of facts does not make it unbiased. Just because a paper comes from a .org website doesn’t mean it is unbiased. If you are unsure about this part, ask.
    • Talk about the quality of the source. The Washington Post is a higher quality source than BuzzFeed. Why?

Thursday will be “library day” to work on this.

  • Meet at the library.
  • Bring a notebook or notebook computer.
  • Pick your topic. Pick a back-up topic. Pick a third topic if the first two fail.
  • Spend time “prepping” so that you have the format of the bibliography all ready. That is, make sure your file is ready to start entering info, so you don’t spend the time messing about with formatting rather than doing research.
  • See the example annotated bibliography on Scholar.
  • Try finding a few starter resources before you even get to class. This will give you more time to ask questions in class and get feedback. Otherwise you might be stuck with questions when you don’t have anyone to answer them.
  • Have you done enough prep-work to make sure that you’ve got questions? Great! then you are ready for Thursday’s class.
  • While at class on Thursday use Maddy, Christopher, Dr. Craven, and the library staff to help you in your research.
  • Finish the bibliography outside of class, and upload to Scholar.

Next assignment will be to create an outline, then we will write the paper.

Grading rubric:

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