FYI
The term paper is submitted in two parts; a compete draft of a short research paper (5-6 pages), and the same paper in a revised, expanded, deepened form (15 pages).
Writing a research paper in a new media journalism class is a little different than writing one in an English literature class.
Use scholarly evidence, primary/professional examples, and personal experience to defend a debatable claim about some important issue concerning media and culture.
For example, “Gender in video games” is not a claim, but “Lara Croft may not be a feminist icon, but the fact that so many girls consider her an inspiring figure is far more important than the fact that so many boys objectify her” is a debatable claim, that one would lead a reader expect to follow in the form of statistics, an analysis of scenes in the game, fan pages, testimonials, etc.
Resources
Timeline
Over Break:
1) Think about a new media topic that interests you. (Possible topics: multimedia editing and bias; new media storytelling; how social media has changed youth culture)
2) Look for specific examples (the following section builds on the sample topics above; you are of course free to pick your own topic and come up with your own examples)
- Editing: Time magazine infamously darkened an image of OJ Simpson to make him look more menacing; just recently, MSNBC was caught editing the George Zimmerman 911 call to make it look like he brought up the subject of race, when in fact he only mentioned Trayvon Martin’s race when the 911 dispatcher asked him; how has journalism dealt with similar problems in older media, and what might be on the horizon?
- Storytelling: ”The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” and next week’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” are not only conventional media works (film short; short story), they also resonate in a new media class because of their connection to the technical and creative innovations that enabled new forms of creative storytelling, new forms of information transmission, and new questions that critics can ask about such things.
- Social Media and Youth Culture: The dangers faced by Nancy Drew in the old detective books (lost in a forest, trapped in a basement) would be obliterated if Nancy simply had a cell phone; is the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter still magical when we consider how young people all track each other on Facebook? How does Rowling’s decision to ban technology from Hogwarts affect the way her young readers perceive the magic in the books?
After Break:
- Discuss research paper ideas Apr 12
- New media artifact progress report due Apr 24
- 5-6 page research paper due Apr 26 (this can be mostly exploratory/explanatory)
- Peer review assignment (starts Apr 27)
- 1:1 office consultations to help you develop your ideas (early May)
- 15 page version of research paper due May 8
Due
In class, speak for 5-7 minutes about what you learned as you went through the process of creating an infographic. While your oral component does not have to be scripted, I am not interested in hearing you narrate the contents of your infographic. You are welcome to invite the opinions of the class, and use your time for a discussion, but please prepare talking points that prompt engaged conversation from the class.
The theme of your infographic should demonstrate a connection between some important argument from Cognitive Surplus and either the subject of your own term project, or some tool or process that you will use as you work on your term project.
Evaluation Rubric
For your convenience, I’ve pulled the evaluation criteria out of the discursive passages and into a list. I’ve replaced “Thesis” from the last presentation with “Image,” and since the image pretty much IS the body, I’ve created a separate category for “Sources.”
- Topic (Connects Shirkey & the term project and/or skills you will use in your project)
- Image (Quality and design reflect adequate awareness of genre conventions and evidence of new media creation skills)
- Depth (Content rich; more than just a great list with random images, or great images with random details)
- Sources (Carefully cited — not just a list at the bottom of the page, but footnoted so we know where each fact or detail came from)
- Tone (Professional and academic; humor/snark/personal expression don’t outweigh the journalistic value)
- Form/Delivery (Timing, audience engagement, etc.)
Please have a high-quality, content-rich document to present; yet during the presentation, seek out suggestions from the class for how to improve it. (You will be able to revise and resubmit the graphic.) Read More »
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On the surface, this short story is a spy thriller, in which a subversive protagonist relies on intellect to match wits with a worthy, authority-wielding foe.
Originally published in Spanish in 1941, this story takes the form of a conventional narrative, but its plot features what we would today call a hypertext novel. Read More »
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Respond to chapters 1 and 2.
FYI
The usual routine applies.
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Respond to chapters 3 and 4.
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Respond to chapters 5 and 6.
Some resources that might help you make sense of Patchwork Girl
Resources for Cryptonomicon
- This chapter explores ownership. If you control wealth — whether in the form of gold or information — what good is that control if you cannot access it? (Think of buying a DVD, but not being able to purchase a DVD player that will play it, or not having power in your house.) If you can access wealth, what good is that access if you can’t control it?
- How does a simplified computer interface — which gives you a limited set of choices — exist on the access-control scale? What about a complex interface, such as that required by coding HTML by hand? What good is access to HTML code if you don’t actually know how to use it?
- There are passing references to an Enigma Machine, which is a real encoding device used by the Nazis in World War II. It was a mechanical device with a complicated set of gears; if you set the gears a certain way, you would get a letter-for-letter encrypted version of the message. A person with an identical machine set up in the identical way could input the encrypted message and get the original message. The only way to break the code was by rote trial and error. Once the Allied forces managed to capture an Enigma machine, they used computers to break the code. (This was one of the first heavy duty uses for these very primitive electronic computers.)
- Hayles refers to In the Beginning Was the Command Line, an essay in which Neal Stephenson advocates taking control of the technology before it takes control of you. Excerpt: “It follows that if Microsoft sells goods that are aesthetically unappealing, or that don’t work very well, it does not mean that they are (respectively) philistines or half-wits. It is because Microsoft’s excellent management has figured out that they can make more money for their stockholders by releasing stuff with obvious, known imperfections than they can by making it beautiful or bug-free. This is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself.”
- “Through the complex enactment of linking structures, both within the text and within the distributed cognitive environment in which the text is read, Patchwork Girl brings into view what was suppressed in eighteenth-century debates over copyright.” (Hayles sees those debates as profoundly gendered, with the assumption that a male author would privilege texts that aim for lofty, abstract goals, while such mundane things as making money or touching the emotions would be the realm of the feminine… thus, a masculine form of writing aims to erase the body, while a feminine form would emphasize the limitations and possibilities of the body.)
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Respond to chapter 7.
Stanislaw Lem’s “The Mask” (written in Polish in the 1970s) explores the fractured consciousness of an artificial entity, brought into being in the form of a beautiful woman, in order to first seduce and then assassinate its target.
Some discussion prompts:
- What can we, as new media scholars, learn from Lem’s use of “translation” (as Hayles describes it in the beginning of the chapter)?
- Broadly paraphrased, Henri Bergson wrote that a machine that acts like a person is comic; the tragic hero, who has so much “anxiety over the body” and “does not eat or drink or warm himself” is tragic, and thus aims to forget about the world of the body. How does the body of Shelley’s monster and the body of Lem’s assassin support or challenge Bergon’s observations?
- Hayles asks us to use Lem’s story to explore different kinds of freedom; the evolving consciousness that provides the narrative in “The Mask” takes on an identity as female in order to carry out a role, then suddenly removes “her” skin in order to reveal a programmed robot inside the body; the consciousness performing the narrative tries to avoid seducing her target, but finds that everything she says ends up further ensnaring the target; is this “programming” literally code that programs a robot, or is Lem also using computer programming as a metaphor for the programming that “codes” our gendered behaviors in society, as we interact with each other? To what extent are any of us fully in control of our actions? (The question reminds us of Stephenson’s questions about the difference between ownership of and accesss to wealth/information/our own code.)
- As Hayles puts it, “We are no longer the featherless biped that can think, but the hybrid creature that enfolds within itself the rationality of the conscious mind and the encoding operations of the machine. Who then is the agent that acts?” (last page of Chapter 7, location 2749 of 4149 in my Kindle.)
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What topic are you thinking of for your term paper?
What scholarly research has been published recently on that topic?
- Can you use the library research skills you learned in STW to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles that present cutting-edge research, analysis, and interpretation?
- Your paper must demonstrate your ability to engage directly and significantly with recent peer-revieweed scholarly work. A general-interest search engine such as Google will not help you find those sources. (Use the library’s “Find Articles” link to access EBSCOhost, using databases such as Academic Search Elite and the MLA International Bibliography; limit your search to “peer reviewed” sources.)
How does your topic mesh with your plans for the “Digital Artifact” component of the final project?