Assignment Description

For this project, I’d like you to choose an online community, in which you participate, and observe its communication practices. Specifically, I would like you to focus on how the people in this community may display awareness of how what they post or engage with is surveilled, moderated, and mediated as part of a larger networked ecology.

This community could be a social media community like a Facebook group. It could be a hashtag on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, or a subreddit. You are by no means limited to these examples. You are also free to pick something that is not explicitly social media, but has elements of it: say, an email listserv, or a group chat. (Please keep in mind that ethical decisions will emerge here, depending on your choice, should the communication be semi-public or private. For example, can someone reasonably expect that their behavior is being observed here? Will you protect their identity by changing names?)

As you observe this community in action, please take field notes according to our Emerson et al. reading. You will code these field notes, as described in the reading, synthesizing and analyzing them in an integrative memo (p. 162) that you will be handing in. While integrative memos sometimes work from a number of existing memos that have been written throughout a larger ethnographic project, we will be taking another approach for this much smaller project: you will be “coding” the discrete observations in the field notes according to some theme or issue, and your memo will link these together, discussing them for a particular audience.

This integrative memo will be written for a public audience, distinct from the more initial or incremental memos that a researcher might write for themselves. Accordingly, your memo should provide “contextual and background information that a reader who is unfamiliar with the setting would need to know in order to follow the key ideas and claims” (Emerson et al 162). As Emerson et al. write, the goal of such a memo is to “develop theoretical connections between field note excerpts” (164). Please consult, especially, pages 162-166: they provide examples of what this discussion might look like.

Please compose this memo as a Microsoft Word document, using Track Changes to add annotations — comments that explain, to me, your analytic choices in the “focused coding” of your fieldnotes and synthesizing them in the memo. Are there aspects of these choices, that you make as an observer yourself, that remind you of any of our course content? Please draw, in your reflective annotations, from the Emerson et al. reading. In both these annotations and the analysis in the memo itself, please draw from our other course readings.

I expect that the ethnographic memos are not a set of genres likely familiar to most of you. So, don’t worry too much about what it should look like as a document. A footnote in a newer edition of your Emerson et al. text cites a more comprehensive textbook of qualitative research methods to talk about this: “novice researchers,” it says, “often become so concerned with ‘getting it right’ that they lose the generative fluid aspect of memoing. It is not the form of memos that is important, but the actual doing of them” (Corbin and Strauss 118; as cited in Emerson et al. 2011: 264). I want to know, here, how you’re seeing our course concepts at play in the digital community you choose, and also how this process of coding helps you think through our course texts.

Assignment Components

  • Short Proposal (a paragraph or so; Due July 31)
    • Please type me a paragraph or so describing your choice of community, why you’re choosing it, what you plan to take notes on, and what issues, very very provisionally, you are expecting to look for in a “focused coding.”
  • Integrative Memo (1000-1250 words, plus Track Changes annotations; Due August 7)