draft intro

This project was conducted by the students in Writing in Biology 312 under the instruction of Dr. Steven Brewer. It consisted of each student collecting a series of images and putting together a figure while simultaneously writing a methods section detailing its construction. The objective was to create a replicable set of methods so that another student in the class could recreate the figure prior to seeing the original. Each figure was intended to show a spider web somewhere on the University of Massachusetts campus, its relative location, and a map marking its absolute location. By having another student in the class follow the set of methods detailing the synthesis of the figure, we could infer what portion of the methods needed improvement or more clarity. These inferences were based on observations of dimorphisms between the original figure and the replicate. This paper covers a specific set of methods and the resultant replicate figure.