Attendance and Workshop Participation: 20%
Workshop Dossier: 20%
Project Proposal: 20%
Annotated Bibliography: 20%
Final Project: 20%
ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION
Our class is a mix of modalities: inter-institutional plenary (i.e,. full-group) workshops, lectures, and small-group discussions; intra-institutional small-group workshops; one-on-one tutorials; and independent work. We hope this mix will help to keep you engaged, give you opportunities to explore and apply our course content in different contexts; and allow you to contribute in myriad ways to our collective and individual efforts. That collective work, meanwhile depends on your regular attendance and reliable participation.
What does it mean to “attend” and “participate in” an online class? It means showing up on time to scheduled class, group, and individual meetings; completing the readings, screenings, and design exercises in advance of each class session; contributing to group discussions and workshops; and being prepared to engage constructively and respectfully with one another. See “Policies and Procedures” for more on our commitment to inclusion and respect.
While we hope you’ll all be able to join us every week, everyone gets two free absences – one during the January workshop, and one during the January-March session – no questions asked. We simply request that you please notify your institutional professor (for Aarhus or RMIT, Annette; for The New School, Shannon; for University of Toronto, M.E.) of your absence in advance, if you can, so we can plan group activities accordingly, and that you please aim to catch up on missed material. We’ll be recording our plenary sessions, sharing our lecture materials, and saving the chat transcripts, and we’ll make these resources available through a shared Google Drive folder.
Any absences in excess of two will impact your attendance grade. If you miss five or more sessions, we’ll advise you to withdraw in order to avoid a failing grade. Please note that absences include missed individual and small group meetings, as well as those days you might miss at the beginning of the semester because of late registration.
We’ve sought to create an inclusive, accommodating classroom – one that’s responsive to students in different time zones, students dealing with tech or connectivity issues; students with specific access needs, etc. – that should enable (and, we hope, incentivize!) all of you to attend and engage. If obstacles or personal challenges arise for you over the course of the semester, please feel free to bring them to your institutional professor’s attention; we can work together to discuss alternative means of engagement. While we’re happy to work with you to tailor the class’s content and assignments to your interests, and to help you develop strategies for project planning and time management – and while we aim to be sympathetic to any challenges you might face both inside and outside the classroom – we ask that you please also respect our time and acknowledge our heavy load of responsibilities. Please see our deadline policy here.
WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES + DOSSIER
You’ll be invited to complete a number of exercises – a self-tracking exercise, a media-fast exercise, and a group interview – throughout the intensive January workshop. Because of the pace, intensity, and provisionality of our January work together, we won’t be able to provide formal feedback during the workshop, but you will share your work with your classmates, and we’ll reflect on your collective experiences in class. We hope you’ll regard your completion of these exercises as an obligation not only to your classmates – to ensure what we all have something to bring to the table – but also to yourself, since this collaborative work will inform your independent work in the second portion of the class.
You’ll then be invited to submit a dossier documenting and reflecting upon any two of our three workshop exercises – ideally two that, in your experience, built upon and informed one another (edit, Jan. 30: You’re welcome to address all three exercises if you like! I specified two simply so we could accommodate those of you who weren’t able to join us for the entire workshop!). Your documentation could include visual or textual records (e.g., screenshots, videos, notes, etc., with any potentially privacy-invading material blurred or redacted). Please select a total of five to seven records for inclusion in your dossier. Your reflection, then, should consist of a ~600-word personal statement, structured somewhat like a lab report, in which you think across the various exercises you’ve completed and…
- Very briefly describe the two exercises you’ve chosen to feature;
- Describe your own methods: what procedures you followed and what tools you used. Here, you might refer specifically to some of the records you included in your dossier as evidence of your use of particular methods (e.g., “As you can see with the two included videos, I collected screengrabs that documented how I …);
- Describe and discuss your “results.” What did you discover about your own or others’ online activity, and what did you learn from these discoveries? What was surprising, and what was not? Here, too, you could refer directly to some of the records in your dossier as evidence of your findings (e.g., As you can see in the enclosed photo of my fieldnotes, I observed that my interviewee switched between different apps very frequently…). You’re welcome to incorporate some of our class readings and discussion topics, if you like. This section should constitute the bulk of your statement;
- Discuss the relevance of these exercises for your future work: did these exercises raise any questions you’d like to explore in your independent research for this class, in future classes, or in future professional work or creative projects?
Your dossier should be gathered into a single document / file and submitted via Google Docs / Drive by 5pm ET on Monday, February 1.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
This class is designed to prepare you for, and to support you through, an independent or small-group research project that will allow you to explore personal fascinations, advance your own research agenda, and / or develop insight and skills that would be easily transferable to a range of professional contexts. We ask you to submit a proposal for a number of reasons: (1) so we can ensure that you’re starting off with a feasible plan and heading in a promising direction, (2) so we can support your work as it develops, and (3) so we can connect you with other students who share your interests and methods.
For this proposal, you’re invited to identify a digital ethnographic subject you’d like to explore through independent or collaborative research across the final eight weeks of the semester. You could choose to focus on online culture, as we’ve done in our workshop, or you could explore how people use digital tools in their everyday “analog” lives. Your interest might be delimited by space or platform (e.g., how Pakistani women experiment with their sexual identities on TikTok), community (e.g., how Chinese migrants navigate across a variety of platforms to connect their diasporic community, or how Aboriginal communities use smartphones in making indigenous media), or by phenomenon (e.g., how various digital platforms and tools are used to “mediate” the quinceañera or the college admissions process). Your work could take the form of a multimedia documentary of, or a critical field guide to, a digital environment, community, or phenomenon. If you have another format in mind for your project, I’m happy to discuss with you.
Your 600-word proposal should include the following:
- A description of the digital environments, communities, or phenomena you propose to study – the more specific, the better!
- A discussion of the critical issue(s) and big question(s) you plan to address. What’s at stake here, and why should your academic / professional field, or the communities with whom you want to be in dialogue, care about it? Why do you care about it?
- A description of the format in which you’ll share your work. Will you produce a multimedia documentary incorporating photos, video, audio, and/or interactive features? Will you create a critical field guide to your chosen digital environment or field site? Or will you adopt another format?
- If your work is collaborative, a discussion of how this collaboration will benefit the project, and a description of the specific roles each team member will play
- A list of six potential references, at least half of which should be scholarly sources. We ask for this so you can begin familiarizing yourself with the relevant research that should inform your own work, and so we can help to direct your future reading.
Please note: Your proposal need not be perfect! The whole point is to share your thinking-in-process in order to get feedback! That said, I do hope you’ll invest some time and energy into this document, and that you’ll write as clearly as you can, so I can make the best use of my time in responding. I typically dedicate about an hour to each student’s response; please help me optimize that time, for your own benefit 💐
Your proposal will be due via Google Docs / Drive – in editable form (i.e., no pdfs’s please!) – by 5pm ET on Monday, January 25.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
We want to make sure our fieldwork is informed by the work that others have done before us. While you should read on your research subject as broadly as possible, we’re asking you to annotate a few resources early in your fieldwork period. This assignment serves two functions: to hold you accountable for engaging with relevant prior work early enough that your work can build upon these precedents, and to give me one additional opportunity to weigh in on your critical framework before you immerse yourself in your primary research.
Please choose three scholarly articles that seem relevant, inspiring, and provocative (i.e., your choice should be determined by utility, not by what’s shortest or easiest :)) and provide a ~150-word annotation for each. Briefly describe (in your own words) the source’s subject matter, scope, argument, and methods, and discuss its relevance / value to your project. What you’re creating here are the building blocks for an annotated bibliography, a form that will likely prove useful in future projects.
Please submit your collection of annotated resources via Google Docs / Drive – in editable form (i.e., no pdfs’s please!) – by 5pm ET on Monday, February 8.
FINAL PROJECT
The focus and format of the final project are described above, under Project Proposal.
Your work will be due via email (matterns [at] newschool [dot] edu) or Google Drive by 5pm ET on Monday, March 8. Please consolidate your work into a single file, save all materials to a single Google Drive folder, or add all attachments to a single email. It’s difficult to appreciate and evaluate projects with scattered parts 🙂
We’ll share our work in our final class, either through a digital exhibition or live presentations.