Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Helen Skura, Romeo and Juliet: A Facebook Tragedy

1.  Fletcher, Thomas. "Friend Wheel." Facebook.com

          http://www.facebook.com/applications/Friend_Wheel/2415325843.

Thomas Fletcher's "Friend Wheel" is a Facebook programming application that can be added on to user profiles. The "Friend Wheel" visually represents the connections between the friends of the user who creates it--in other words, their extended social network. Names of the user's friends are placed around the edges of a circle and different colored lines are drawn between those who have added each other as friends on the Facebook social networking site. The "Friend Wheel" also has a feature called the "Interactive Flash Wheel" which allows users to zoom in on portions of their wheel and also to highlight the connections between selected friends. This makes the wheel much easier to interpret by making the names and connections far more visible, as well as bold. Names of friends can be dragged out of formation to further emphasize those that are of particular interest; the names can be put into new formations that may better suit the intended purpose of the data shown through their connections. The wheel can be regenerated an unlimited number of times, and screen shots allow for comparisons to be drawn between the makeup and scope of social networks over time. Its limitations lie in the fact that it does not show frequency of interaction between the friends, making it a representation of relationships but not how strong they are. 

2.  Hager, Alan. Understanding Romeo and Juilet: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.

          London: Greenwood Press, 1999.

From the Greenwood Press "Literature in Context" series, Understanding Romeo and Juliet: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents is a manual for understanding William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. The book was compiled by editor Alan Hager and offers essays by a variety of authors. These essays are based around analysis of the story, its narrative background and sources, its historical context, and its performance history. The book also offers an array of essays and articles (most of which are contemporary) that try to demonstrate the kind of impact Romeo and Juliet has had on world society. Many of these essays and articles deal with the subject of imitation and the extent to which exposure to suicide, particularly in films, affects suicidal tendencies of teenagers in a population. Others somewhat jokingly detail the play's overwhelming presence in literature, film, theater, and everyday life. Several discuss the renowned Baz Luhrmann film remake, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the strategies it used in successfully marketing the play's story to a teenage audience.  The book also includes a "Glossary of Critical Terms and Names," which can be helpful in understanding historical and stylistic aspects mentioned in the essays, and an "Index," which can be used to cross-reference themes and concepts throughout the different essays and articles.

3.  O'Hanlon, Charlene. "If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em." T.H.E. Journal.

          34.8 (2007): 38-42.

Charlene O'Hanlon's article, "If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em," appeared in the August 2007 edition of T.H.E. Journal (Technological Horizons in Education). The article talks about school-oriented social networks that have been launched by United States school districts at elementary, middle, and high school levels. These school-oriented sites aim to target an increasing number of web-savvy students in a medium to which they will be able to both easily navigate and easily relate. O'Hanlon offers statistics and evidence to support her claim that, since a majority of U.S. children are familiar with and spend a significant amount of time online and on online social networking sites, such sites offer a unique educational opportunity if they are utilized for teaching purposes. O'Hanlon's article argues that school-oriented social networking websites have the potential to teach students about different technologies that are available to them, as well as to foster community among student groups and to provide platforms for in-depth multimedia projects. Such projects may include blogging and webcasting. The article focuses mainly on student-teacher and student-student interaction on these sites and how such interaction has raised test scores. However, the article also brings up interesting topics surrounding the validity and benefits of web-based educational projects. 

4.  Shakespeare, William. The Pelican Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Peter Holland.

          Middlesex: Penguin Books, 2000.

One of playwright William Shakespeare's best known plays, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy in five acts. The classic tells the story of the "star-crossed lovers" Romeo and Juliet, two young people in Verona, Italy. Romeo's family, the Montagues, and Juliet's family, the Capulets, are embroiled in an old and bitter feud that has increasingly resulted in violence in the streets. Romeo and Juliet should be mortal enemies. However, when they meet by chance at a Capulet ball, they fall deeply in love and must then contend with their families' hatred for each other, as well as a series of ill-fated events throughout the course of the play. Ultimately, both main characters take their own lives. The families, both having lost their only child, reconcile for a bitter sweet resolution. The Pelican Shakespeare edition of the play, edited by Peter Holland, includes extensive footnotes that expand on words and sayings used within the text. The edition also includes the supplementary essays "The Theatrical World," "The Texts of Shakespeare," "Introduction," and "Note on the Text." All of these essays work to expand on the characters and themes explored throughout the play. Such themes include kinship, allegiance, social forces, time, fate, secrecy, and miscommunication. The essays also give historical context for the play and describe the convention of Elizabethan theater as it existed in the time of Shakespeare.

5.  Zuckerberg, Mark. Facebook. 2004.

          12 February 2008 www.facebook.com.

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook is a social networking website that boasts "simplified navigation." Users are offered a wealth of applications, the core ones being "Profile," "Friends," "Networks," and "Inbox," in order to interact socially with friends, family, and coworkers in an online environment. Users create personalized "Profile" pages and "Photos," "Notes," "Groups," and "Events" allow for sharing of photographs, interests, and even real-world social gatherings, while the "Wall" and "Inbox" allow users to trade messages in either a public or private setting. "Networks" groups users in terms of geographic and/or educational areas. The Facebook company claims to "develop technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mappings of people's real-world social connections." The site is available to everyone and reports 64 million active users, with "active user" defined as being one that has logged on in the past thirty days. The site claims to be "the second most-trafficked PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] in the world, and one of the largest MySQL [multithreaded, multi-user Structured English Query Language] installations anywhere, running thousands of databases." Its "lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC [Remote Procedure Call] framework" makes Facebook able to "seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform." The site is designed and functions around social interaction and is, therefore, optimal for use in tracking and exploring the scope of social networks.