You can find descriptions for the major components of your course grade below. I will link to more developed sets of instructions for each project as we start working on it. The proposals and drafts are mandatory but ungraded, and are opportunities for you to receive my feedback toward these assignments.
Please note: You must submit and pass all assignments to pass the course.
Writing Responses (35%)
Each week, we will engage with and respond to the course materials as a community, whether by discussion board posts, collective annotations of readings using hypothes.is, or some other kind of guided assignment that may include content-generation, analysis, revision, or reflection. Your participation in these activities, and especially the discussion posts, takes the place of your participation in an on-the-ground discussion-based class. It also provides a large chunk of the “writing-intensive” portion of ENGL 3380, since I’m only asking you to write a few relatively short papers. (If I think folks are not doing the reading, I reserve the right to incorporate reading quizzes as well, but I would rather not and don’t anticipate having to.) This part of your grade will depend on your consistency in completing these response assignments throughout the term and following these guidelines for discussion board posts. To provide evidence for me toward this grade, I will ask you near the end of the term to select what you think are your five best discussion posts and submit them to me, portfolio-style.
Project 1: Writing Data / Watching the Watchers (25%)
Short Proposal Due: Friday, July 10
Final Draft Due: Friday, July 24 (extended to Monday, July 27)
For your first project, I will ask you to take data over an interval of time — or some data already collected about you by a device in your life, and to which you have access — about some aspect of your writing process for exploratory analysis. You will then process and visualize this data: you may use a software visualization package in your scripting language of choice to producing a plot or set of plots; or you may draw some plots by hand and digitize them with a scanner or camera you may have. You will also submit to me an accompanying reflection that explains, in terms of our course readings and discussions on data infrastructure and surveillance, the rhetorical decisions you made in the data’s collection, transformation, and presentation. Your grade for this project will depend on how well what you produce from your visualization process captures what you say it does for viewers, as well as the analysis in your reflection of what it does and doesn’t capture.
Project 2: Ethnographic Integrative Memo (25%)
Short Proposal Due: Friday, July 31
Final Draft Due: Friday, July 24 (extended to Monday, July 27)
For your second project, you will observe an online community of your interest and produce field notes on how that community does or doesn’t grapple with issues surrounding surveillance, mediation, and moderation. You will “code” these notes — which means something different, in this context, than programming! — to compose a memo that starts to find a theme or issue cohere among the notes. You will annotate the memo with marginal comments that describe your choices about what you included when rendering these qualitative data meaningful for your reader. Your grade for this project will depend on your representation of this community and your weaving in of course concepts in the annotations.
Final Project: Collaborative Manifesto (15%)
Document Freezes: Tuesday, August 18
You can read what students produced for this assignment here.
Toward the end of the course, in place of a final paper or exam, we will write a document together that synthesizes some facet of what we’ve learned over the semester into guidelines that we might want to share and recommend for some audience beyond our course. We will develop the precise scope, purpose, and audience for this document together. I hope to make use of Canvas’s integration with Google docs, which will depend on whether there are some students in the class who are unable to access G Suite apps. If that falls through, I’ll explore some other options for us. Your grade, here, will capture the work that you individually put towards this collaborative document — which could include research, brainstorming, writing, suggesting changes, comments — as well as how effectively you worked with your peers, from what I can see, to produce something together in a digital space. You will also submit a short reflection paper about how what you’ve learned in the course may have helped you to navigate this collaborative writing experience, and how it compared to other online interactions in the course. (update 8/6: I removed the reflection portion of this assignment.) Please note that while this assignment makes up 15% of your grade and will hopefully be low-stakes, you must meaningfully engage in this project, barring extenuating circumstances, to pass the course.