Fill out the report by answering the questions based on the assigned instruction file. PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS AND GRADING RUBRIC CAREFULLY AND FOLLOW THEM CLOSELY!!! Thanks!
There will be a question asking to choose a concept and list all related readings, I will provide all readings in the files, please do not make up things and be really careful answering the questions.
Also please do not skip any files provided, thank you.
Here is the full text
Fill out this report: Data and Analysis Report.docx
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Short Instructions: Data and Analysis Report Short InstructionsLinks to an external site.
Citations should be in a consistent, in-text parenthetical format (MLA and ASA both work). Refer to this guide for help: citation guide.pdf. If you have further questions, Purdue OWLLinks to an external site. is a good reference for citation advice. If you cite lecture, just do a simple in-text parenthetical citation for it: (Lin, “Title of Lecture,” lecture date). For our purposes, this is fine.
If you cite course content, then in-text parenthetical citations are good enough (no full bibliography or works cited needed for this assignment), but if you cite anything that is not part of course content, you WILL need a full citation so that we know what this source is.
IMPORTANT: Please check your submission after uploading to make sure 1) it was the correct file and 2) the format of your file was readable. You are responsible for submitting the correct and readable file before the due date.
Preparation to Write the Paper: Throughout this semester, spend approximately 5 hours a week engaging and initiating with a virtual community. Your goal is to immerse yourself as much as possible in a virtual community (either one that you already have some experience with or a new one) to investigate what being a part of such a community is like. This is like doing ethnography and participant observation in a virtual space. Take notes about people’s reactions to you and the social interactions that occur in such a community. Reflect on your own experiences, feelings, and interactions.
You may create social experiments (without harming anyone) or observe other people’s interaction in the virtual community. You may even conduct interviews (virtually) with people that you meet. And look for connections from your experience to the readings, lectures, and themes from the course.
NOTE: Please follow basic ethical guidelines when conducting research, especially if you decide to do some social experiments or conduct interviews. If you have any questions, please ask me.
Your final paper will be an argumentative paper that connects what you observed/experienced in the virtual community to at least 2 readings from course content. This report is to help build towards that final paper.
Assignment:
As a way to guide you towards that final product, this assignment is a report that will help you gather interesting observations and help you connect them to course content.
You will be observing patterns and writing about them (in general, and providing specific examples from your virtual ethnography)
You will then be brainstorming what course content might be relevant to your observations and explaining their connection
Grading Rubric
In the first section, please be sure to use some of the characteristics of social media (Baym, 2010) in describing your virtual community. In the second section, your descriiptions should be detailed and clear–easy to picture and understand. In the third section, your listing of course content should be relatively complete and your explanations and connections of the course content should be accurate.
The reader should be able to see not only how much time you have spent exploring and interacting with the virtual community, but also how well you are able to start seeing connections to course material.
FAQ:
What kind of virtual community works for this paper?
A virtual community that has a visible, discernible boundary where you can identify members clearly is generally the kind of virtual community that will work for this. So that means saying “Facebook” might be simply too large, but identifying a subgroup on Facebook (like a Facebook Group) would likely work better. For Twitter or Instagram, this could be a hashtag or communities that revolve around a specific person, theme, etc. Look for subgroups rather than overly large communities with unidentifiable boundaries.
Blended communities (communities that are partially virtual and partially offline/face-to-face) work as well, as long as a relatively large portion of interaction takes place online. This would include things like dating apps, Meet Ups, and other communities that have a predominately online interaction space but has a significant physical component as well.
You are welcome to do a virtual community that you have been a part of for awhile–my only concern is that if you are too close to the community, it could blind you to interesting things to notice, simply because you are too close to the culture of that community. You should pick something that interests you, but something new could also be beneficial for this assignment.
One suggestion is to look for niche virtual communities. These are sometimes on random websites, fan pages, forum spaces, reddit subgroups, etc. and are not always found on massively popular and mainstream social media websites. Some of the most interesting virtual communities are more specific and more hidden. These communities can be relatively small, as long as there is daily engagement so that you can plug yourself in and really get to know people.
The virtual community should also have a social media space that allows you relatively meaningful engagements. In other words, if you did some kind of gaming community, look for specific spaces to engage with a set group of people. This could be a guild, discord site, fan page, resource guide/community, etc. Just playing the game will not work as you probably have fairly limited access to engagements and gathering data.
How do I fill out this report? Are we allowed to write more than the text box? Or what happens if we run out of room to answer the question?
Try to stay within the confines of the text box. In my opinion, the boxes give you plenty of room to answer each question. I would really assess the need for going beyond that. If you felt you needed to elongate one text box (by shortening another), you can do so (I am not instructing readers to take points off if you do), but again, I’m not sure why you would need to–it should be enough room.
Do we need citations in this report?
If you are only citing readings from course material, you just need the parenthetical, in-text citations. If you are citing anything outside of course material, you need to provide the full citation in a works cited page at the end of the report. You do not need citations outside of course material to do well on this report. I assume you will likely have some citations from readings or lectures to answer part 2 of the report.
Can we use screenshots for this report? Can we gather data via surveys on our virtual community for this report?
Yes, I think screenshots can be used for this report if they are helpful in describing the virtual community–however they are NOT necessary to get a perfect grade on this assignment. They can be helpful if you find it difficult to describe something about your virtual community or about the social media platform.
This would not count towards the box or report limit and you can attach them at the end of the paper as an appendix. Please label your screenshots with a simple caption so that your reader knows what they are looking at. In general, keep all identifiers anonymous, which might mean blacking out some names of people–this is to respect anonymity and concerns of privacy.
You may also gather some data informally through a survey, but at this point, I do not think this is necessary for this assignment. You might consider doing it for the final paper, especially if you find it essential or incredibly relevant for your analysis and the argument you will eventually make. For this assignment though, you can certainly do it, but I do not really think it is necessary and your personal observations should be enough for you to answer every question with relative confidence.
If you do gather data through an informal survey of the virtual community members, you can display this data as a chart or graph at the end of the report or embedded in the text of the report–whatever makes more sense from the perspective of someone reading your report. Again, this would not be part of the report or box limits.
I don’t see a reading that really fits with what I want to talk about in my paper/this report. Can I draw on readings I find on my own?
The short answer is no. This is NOT a real research paper. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources or guidance to feel comfortable unleashing several hundred students online to go do independent research. Instead, I think of this project more as an introduction to virtual community research that uses simple, flexible research methods as a way to introduce you to the field–perhaps in the future, you can build off of what you do in this class.
As a result, you are only graded on readings that are found on the syllabus. This MAY limit the scope of what you can talk about (see above suggestions on how to approach gathering data for this paper). If there is a course concept that appeared in lecture but I did not assign on the syllabus, you ABSOLUTELY can use this reading if you get approval. Please come talk to me as soon as possible to get permission and a copy of the reading that pertains to the course concept and you can use that in your paper and it will count towards your usage of two readings.