Anthro 3040 Final : Oral Exam and Final Project VideoHaskell

Java Python Anthro 3040

Final Assignment: Oral Exam and Final Project Video

Due Dates:

Oral Exam: 6 & 8 August 2024

Final Project Video: 20 August 2024, 11:59 pm EST

Assignment Details

Conduct digital research on an online community to examine how digital media technologies and social relations are shaped and produced in relation to each other.

You will employ digital ethnographic methods to create a digital ethnography of an online community of your choice. This online community can be on any platform, website, or mobile app. You will utilize the readings and digital ethnographic methods taught in the course to research this community and create a video presentation (power-point or short film, or video lecture) on your research and analysis.

Oral Exam: This is a 10-minute oral exam between you and your TA, scheduled on either 6th or 8th August. You will be tested on your research, your ethnographic methods, and your engagement with the readings of the course towards the development of your final project.

Video Presentation: This is a 7-10-minute video presentation, video lecture, or short film or documentary that presents your research, methods, and analysis using the concepts discussed throughout this course.

Your assignment must include primary research (explained below) as well as an in-depth engagement with any 4-5 texts and concepts from this course. You can use any readings from Modules 1, 2, and 3.

Primary Research Methods:

1.   Digital Ethnographic methods

• Choose a digital/online community.

This can be a multitude of things: forum, a YouTube comments section, a blog, a reddit post and comments, an online gaming community, groups or pages on Twitter, Weibo, Facebook, TikTok, etc. Choose a digital/online community that is dynamic, i.e. users are regularly participating through  posts, comments, livestream attendance and reactions, etc. Ideally, your chosen digital community will be one that you’re familiar with or have some past experience with. You don’t want to choose a digital/online community that you are too close/attached to, because you need the distance to analyse your research.

• Observe the digital/online community’s mediated practices and processes over a period of time. Ideally, you will observe your chosen community over 4-5 weeks.

You can look out for practices of care and support, processes of content/ participant moderation, power struggles and hierarchies, languages of identification and/or representation, gender, racial, and class dynamics, structures of social relations, etc. You want to focus on how digital media technologies (websites, blogs, platforms, etc.) are affording or enabling particular social practices and processes, and how online community

members are engaging digital technologies for social (and/or political) effects.

• Participate in a digital/online community

Engage with the community online (again, it’s helpful if you have some experience with this community already). Comment and post, attend livestreams, virtual sessions, make your own content that relates to the online community and share it with them (if that might be an option). You need to participate in order to meaningfully understand and, perhaps, experience Anthro 3040 Final Assignment: Oral Exam and Final Project VideoHaskell how digital media technologies and social relations shape each other.

• ETHICAL considerations are crucial!

Please introduce yourself and your research project for this course clearly to the community members. Tell them that you’re working on a final assignment on digital communities. You must get community members’ consent to observe their online interactions, and include these interactions in your final project only. Please note: You cannot use their collected data beyond this final project! Please document this consent in a written or oral form. - you can take a screenshot, have it in an email, a Word/PDF document, or take an audio recording. You must also offer to record their participation anonymously (i.e. your research must not include any personal identifiable information about community members,  such as names, age, ethnicity, linguistic or cultural or geographical or any personal background, gender identity, etc.), if they so require.

2.  Semi-structured Interviews

• If you have the opportunity to do so, conduct semi-structured interviews with a few participants (3-5 people). There are a number of ways to conduct semi-structured interviews. You can share a list of questions with the community  members prior to the interview to provide them with a general framework of your conversation - you can also expand on the listed questions, ask follow-up questions, or add more questions during the interview itself. During the interview, you can make notes about non-verbal communication, such as tone of voice, record other behavior. details, such as gestures, pauses, emotions in the interview that are also important for communication.

Structure of the Final video project

-  Topic

Your video will start by talking about your topic, your choice of online community, and what you are studying in this online community.

-  Research methods

You will talk about how you collected your data, including consent from community members. You can specify (or show images of) the accounts or groups or pages you followed, maybe include the amount of time you spent on following them, and the kinds of ways you participated in the online community; i.e. through events (such as livestreams, or real-time video games you played), posts and comments, etc. If you conducted semi-structured interviews, you can also talk about how many people you spoke with and the kinds of questions you asked.

-  Research Data & Findings

Here you will talk about the data you collected and what you learnt from it. The assignment asks you to think about how digital media technologies and social relations are shaped by each other. Your digital research on a particular community will help you to answer this assignment question.

Your video will show your research findings through screenshots, or video or audio clips/ recordings, or interview answers (if available). Remember you need to show visually your research.

-  Research Analysis

Your video will have analysis of the research data. In your research data, how are digital media and social relations shaped by each other? You can analyse your data using 4-5  readings and/or concepts from the course. Here you might look at the reading by Ruha Benjamin on race and technology to talk about racial dynamics, or the reading by Arjun Appadurai to talk about global media cultures, or the reading by Helga Tawil-Souri to talk about digital media and settler-colonial occupation, to name a few examples. You will show examples from your research data and link it to the readings. Readings can be cited by the authors names, such as Ruha Benjamin’s reading on Captivating Technology