Blog Post #4

For the Seminar Project using the Digital Humanities, I will revise the existing research project, which is the major project, for my HUC117--Introduction to Computer Mediated Communication course.  As it currently exists, the assignment is as follows:

Digital Course Project

In this assignment, you will construct a reader-friendly, content-focused web site that develops and defends an original argument about CMC theory and/or practice discussed in class or in your readings.  In terms of writing, this assignment should be equivalent to a 5-page paper.  This project shall be composed of:

1. an introduction page that states your thesis,
2. a background page that explains key terms and provides a history of your issue
3. an argument page that persuades your reader to accept your thesis, and
4. an implications page that answers questions like, "what does this mean for contemporary public life?" or "what's the next policy step?" or "how will this affect interpersonal communication in the future?"

I strongly suggest you organize your implications around themes such as technology, identity, and/or culture.  You must also provide a references page that provides links, where possible, to your source material (sites are more reliable when they provide references to which readers can link for additional information).  You should also include hyperlinks throughout your web site to engage the reader.
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I instruct students to publish their project either on ePortfolio (which is cumbersome and presents many problems for accomplishing this project) or on Wix (which is user-friendly and a student favorite).  I currently have exemplars from the fall semester linked on my own ePortfolio page under "courses."

I plan to incorporate the Digital Humanities by asking students to create word clouds using either Wordle or Voyant, for which the corpus will be the sites and/or articles that provide the foundational (historical, key terms, issues, etc.) information for their argument.  Students will then incorporate a page between the "Background" and "Argument" pages that provides a discussion of the key terms that this DH tool illuminated (these may be the same or different from the established key terms, or it may be ideas or issues that were previously unexamined).  This should help students focus their argument and the "Argument" page should, as a result, be stronger.

I plan to use this project as the basis for a pedagogical article I plan to submit to Communication Teacher, one of the journals of the National Communication Association and in which I have previously published.  This journal serves as a pedagogical resource for others in the field and as yet has provided no activities or discussions focused on DH.  Also, because it is pedagogically-focused, it will not only enhance my scholarly productivity, but it will embrace my own passion, which is teaching (I love my research, but my passion is teaching), thereby neatly combining the two into one grand project.

For fun, I visited the exemplar I created for the class (I always model what I expect students to do), visited the foundational sites, and created word clouds for them.  The topic I investigated for the exemplar was Internet Censorship.  I specifically used as the corpus the body of text in each of the links I provided on the "Issues" page (the background page was about censorship more generally, while the issues page focused on the internet specifically).  The resulting word cloud was, to me, quite interesting and I will need to go back and explore the items that were highlighted more closely.

I can honestly say that I am truly excited to incorporate this project and to examine the results.  I am even more excited to share the results and to potentially inspire a new method of inquiry for our students.