Skip to content

Assignments

Blog posts#

Each week you’ll write a 300-500 word blog post on your website in response to a prompt. Prompts will invite you to dig deeper into readings, discussion topics, or your own experiences. These posts aren't meant to be busy work, rather they're a chance for you to practice thinking critically and analyzing information. They help me know what you're thinking and how you're thinking. Plus, I know that talking a lot in class isn't for everyone. Think of these posts as an extension of your participation. You don't have to know all the answers, just be thoughtful in your questions!

General specifications:

  • Create a WordPress post, then turn in the URL in Canvas.
  • 300-500 words.
  • Free from grammatical errors, typos.
  • Credit and link out to sources when appropriate. I won't require that you use a certain citation style, but you should be in the habit of crediting sources and using in-text links. If you feel better about using a formal citation style, go for it!

Activity log#

Each week we’ll learn a new skill together in class. The activity log will document the ways you practice and build that skill on your own. Logs will be submitted on your website or as a document in Canvas.

Specifications will be specific to each activity.

Digital essay#

Your big project for this course is the composition of a question-driven digital essay on a topic related to digital culture and information. The digital essay will combine text (2000-3000 words), data visualization, multimedia, and web design. Work on this project will be distributed throughout the course through research, exploratory data visualization, a proposal, process updates, and a final presentation. The subject of your digital essay is up to you provided it is related to digital culture and information and is approved by the instructor. Essays will be posted to your website.

Why an essay? While this might feel like a familiar format to you from high school etc, I'd invite you to put aside what you know about the form. Essay comes from the French to try and that's where you should start your thinking for this assignment. That doesn't mean your standards should be low, but you should think about this assignment as an attempt to do something new. How do you write about digital culture? How do you study it? How do you analyze it? We spend so much of our time on these platforms, but it can be hard to pin down exactly what they're doing. It's hard to analyze something when you don't know how it works! This course is an exploration of the methods for studying digital culture and this assignment should engage at least one of those methods, recognizing that they are new to you and new to other scholars. And recognizing that we have a short time frame to construct these essays!

Digital Essay Components#

Annotated Bibliography#

You are not doing this work in a vacuum! It's important to have a sense of the existing scholarship and research in whatever area you're writing about. We might not have a class in it at W&L, but that does not mean that there's not a scholar out there doing similar work. Knowing where to look and how to look is an essential research skill that will benefit you in college and beyond. We'll have at least one session in class dedicated to finding resources. The sources you find for this assignment will be incorporated into your literature review in your final project.

Specifications:

  • Due October 8 at 12pm.
  • Published to your website, submitted on Canvas.
  • 6-10 sources. 3 must be scholarly sources (books, journal articles, or peer reviewed web sources).
  • Each source should be formatted in an established citation style of your choosing. Use Zotero if it helps!
  • Annotations should be at least two sentences. In the first sentence, summarize the source. In the second sentence, say something about why this source is useful for your project.

Exploratory Data Visualization#

This isn't a Data Science class, but that doesn't mean we can't use the tools of data visualization to learn more about our topic. For this assignment, you'll need to find data, hypothesize about it, and then observe any patterns you find. Per usual, this isn't about finding the right answers but exploring the data available and what it can actually tell you.

Don't overcomplicate this! Your visualizations can, and probably should, be simple. You're not trying to prove a grand theory with this data, you're letting the data speak for itself. You do not have to figure out advanced statistics either, unless you have training in that already, rather rely on basic counts and categorical data, just like we did in class.

Specifications:

  • Due October 22 at 12pm.
  • Published to your website, submitted on Canvas.
  • Include 3 data visualizations from 1 or more data sets.
    • You can use Excel, Google Sheets, or something like Datawrapper or Raw Graphs.
    • Visualizations should have appropriate labels, a title, citation, and a caption.
  • Include 1 paragraph about your data sources, how you found them, whether they are good/reliable sources.
  • Include 1 paragraph about your hypotheses and potential research questions. This can be bullets.
  • Include 1 paragraph about the results. What did you visualizations tell you? What patterns did you observe? Were there outliers in the data that warrant further investigation? What other data sources do you want to find OR what data sources do you wish existed?

Proposal#

Time to commit! What is your digital essay going to be about? What questions are you interested in asking? What methods are you hoping to use? What drew you to this topic? Your final project proposal should be more formal in style.

Specifications:

  • Draft due November 5. Final version due November 12th.
  • Published your website, submitted on Canvas.
  • 300-500 words.
  • Address the following:
    • What is the topic of your project? What led you to this topic?
    • What are some potential research questions (at least two)? What discipline are you situating yourself in?
    • What is your proposed method of analysis? (Think text analysis, data viz, mapping, etc). What is your source of data? Tell me about it!
    • What research have you done on your topic? Cite at least 2-3 scholarly sources and any less-than-scholarly sources that are relevant. These can be from your annotated bib, but they should be relevant to the question/topic you've landed on.
    • What will success look like for you? Is there a skill you want to develop? Do you want to advance your knowledge on a particular method or topic?
  • Include a proposed schedule and list of tasks to complete your project. You should also include a rough outline of the sections of your project and a few sentences on the design of your project. How will you take advantage of the digital medium to display this essay in a creative way?

Digital Essay#

Specifications

  • Due December 6th at noon.
  • Published to the web on your domain. You can choose one of the following:
    • A section of your course WordPress site.
    • A new WordPress installation dedicated to your essay.
    • A subdomain built with hand-coded HTML/CSS or a framework like Bootstrap.
  • 2000-3000 words in the main body of the essay.
  • Your essay should attempt to answer the research questions outlined in your proposal. It's pretty impractical that you're going to end up with THE answer less than 12 weeks. Remember that "essay" means "to try" in French. How can your further the conversation around your topic? What patterns do you notice? What concerns you? Can you apply an existing framework on a new case study?
  • Use at least one of the methods we learned this term (data viz, text analysis, web scraping, mapping). How you incorporate these methods is going to depend a lot on your topic and your questions. You should plan to include at least three visualizations.
  • A clearly defined structure to your essay that takes advantage of the digital medium. Don't just copy and paste a Word doc! Use headings or separate pages. In general, you want sections like: introduction, lit review, methods, results, bibliography. But you're free to be creative with how they come together!
  • Similarly, the design of the website should complement your content. The affordances of your WordPress theme should be in line with the goals of the essay. It should be clear that you made design choices beyond what comes out of the box. This could be color, imagery, hand-coded elements, embedded media, etc.
  • You can re-use content from previous assignments (like your proposal), but you should revise any text based on feedback and to ensure it flows with the entire essay.