Part of Introduction Section

The project undertaken for the Writing in Biology class was designed so students would photograph a durable object and document how the image was taken. They would then be tasked with writing a methods section to a level of certainty that they believed would allow another student to replicate the image. For consistency throughout the project, the subject matter of the photograph was limited to a spider web in relative close proximity to the Biology computer lab on the Umass Amherst Campus.

    In particular, the selection process of this spider web took into consideration the necessity of replicability and to ensure this, the spider web would need to be durable and last a period of, at minimum, several days. Therefore, a spider web inside a building was considered the most durable, as this would not experience any outside disturbances such as weather or movement that could potentially ruin the web that was photographed. In selecting the photo, the building that housed the biology computer lab was searched for a web that was slightly concealed so that any maintenance cleaning or foot traffic would ruin the web. One such web was found in a hole in an air venting system on the ground floor of the Morrill building. The hole in the vent had gathered dust suggesting it was untouched for a long period of time and gave the reassurance that the web would last the allotted time to allow for another student to find it. Furthermore, in writing the actual methods section, it was important to account for as many scenarios as possible and strictly limit them to what was actually performed in the photographing of the web. It sought to control the location of the photographer in conjunction with which photo should be taken, what the scale item would be and how it was located, the height of the camera and what the camera viewed in its lens all had to accurately be described so that the other student would be able to replicate the image as close as possible. The final figure that was made needed to be replicated as well, so the program used to make the multi-panel figure was recorded, as were the sizes of the images, the size of the font and labels, the colors used for the labeling and the overall layout of the figure.