Your project has two stages. For the first, you will submit a short proposal for the project you would like to complete (due in week 9). Then, after receiving feedback on your proposal, you will submit your full final project (due finals week). You will also receive a grading rubric for your final project in week 10.
Overall project description:
For your final project, you will be completing a mini ethnography of online culture. Very simply put, an ethnography is a study of culture based on observations; ethnography often involves immersing yourself in the culture you are studying. To do your ethnography, you will choose one small, specific corner of online culture to observe for roughly one week. During your observations, you should take notes, record information, and watch out for patterns, paying attention to things like: how users express themselves or interact, what kinds of content users share, and what tensions arise within online communities. Think of yourself as an anthropologist studying internet culture and/or phenomena.
After completing your observations, you will write a 2,000- to 3,000-word “report” (that is, an essay) describing what you saw in the corner of internet culture that you studied. Your report should explain what subculture you observed, how you completed your observations, and what notable trends you saw there. You should also offer an analysis of the trends you observed, describing what makes them meaningful and how they relate to our course topics. In your analysis, you should discuss at least 2 readings from our course. You can either use these readings to help explain the meaning behind your observations or you can use them to demonstrate how your observations actually complicate what we have discussed.
**Tip**: To give yourself enough time to complete your observations, you should begin observing your internet subculture by the end of week 9, as soon as possible after receiving your proposal feedback.
STAGE 1: Final Project Proposal
How to submit: via Canvas as .doc or .docx
Format/length: 200 to 300 words, written in paragraphs or outline
For the first stage of this assignment, you will write a short proposal that describes the final project you would like to complete. This should be 200 to 300 words long, which is equivalent to one or two paragraphs. You can use some of this length to include bulleted lists or an outline if it fits your proposal, but you should open and close your proposal with a series of full sentences.
Your proposal should explain:
Which online subculture or “place” (e.g. specific corner of social media, specific element of a platform, specific app, etc.) you are hoping to analyze.
How you plan to go about observing this corner of internet culture. For example, will you visit it daily and watch users? Will you record comments? Will you interact with community members?
What makes you think that this will be a particular interesting and/or revealing corner of internet culture to observe? What do you predict you will find through your observations?
What 2 – 3 course readings do you anticipate will be relevant to your analysis of your observations? That is, which course readings seem most related to this topic?
