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 (1500-2000 words) and a multimedia/digital component using at least one of the analysis methods we learn in class. Work on this project will be distributed throughout the course through research, 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, 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!

Useful Tools

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.

Specifications:

  • Due Wednesday, Feb 15
  • 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.

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 ______; Final version due _______.
  • 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 by the end of finals week, Friday April 14, 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.
  • 1500-2000 words in the main body of the essay.
  • Your essay should attempt to answer the research questions outlined in your proposal.
  • 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!
  • Similiarly, 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.
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