Digital Assignment 1

UPDATE: You can get started on your final report by clicking on the "Start Report" link in upper right box on this page.

Digital Assignment 1 is a collaborative research project focused on the observation of community in an online site. The assignment is divided into two parts. In Part I, your group will research a site of your group's choice. In Part II, you will write up an individual report based on your research. Specific details of each part are as follows:

Part I: Collaborative Research

This part we jump started in class on Thursday, January 29th. The lecture for that day contains the information we went over in class.

  • Work as a team to find information on the topics listed here.
  • Create bookmarks using the Diigo account created for you. The link to the Diigo Group for this class is here. Be sure to install on of the Diigo tools on your browser to more efficiently conduct research. As described in class, Diigo can be used to bookmark, tag, and highlight web pages.
  • In saving bookmarks, use tags to classify your content. Use @sitename to associate your bookmark with a specific site (e.g. @youtube), and #topic to associate your bookmark with a specific topic (e.g. #socialcontrol).
  • Each person is responsible for at least five bookmarks, but you are encouraged to create more.

Part II: Individual Reports

  • Each student will be responsible for filing a final report. The final report will be a web form on this site whose parts will loosely match the areas listed in the Research Questions page.
  • Each student will submit their own report. However, students may discuss with each other, and ideally as a group, their views on the various research questions. Conversation is encouraged. However, the final repoart itself will be protected by the Honor Code.
  • Reports should liberally include evidence from the Diigo collection. References included quoted passages where necessary, along with links to the bookmarks themselves. You may include any bookmarks, include those from other groups.
  • The report is due before class at 5:00 PM on Tuesday, February 17th.The report will not be a conventional paper; instead, it will produce submitted to this web site as a database entry. Instructions for this process will be available next Tuesday, the 10th of February. The report will require approximately 1500 words to complete, or the equivalent of a six page paper.

Research Questions

Does the site pass the "Tonnies Test"?

When researching your site, orient your observations to answering the following questions.

  1. Why are people part of the group in the first place? Toward what end?
    1. Do people just "hang out" or are they there for a purpose and gone once done?
  2. How is social order maintained? Are there mechanisms for including and excluding people? Are there customs for behavior?
    1. Do people monitor each other and given evidence of shared norms?
    2. How are trolls handled?
  3. Do people in the group think of themselves as a community?
    1. Do they explicitly talk about it?
    2. Do they create symbols of their identity?
  4. Do people in the group care for each other?
    1. Are they aware of the deaths of group members?
    2. Do they memorialize members of the group?
    3. Is there evidence of their helping each other?
  5. Does the group share a world view?
    1. Do people share ideas about the nature of life, justice, history, the universe, God?
  6. Does the group prefer certain forms of communication and media forms?
    1. Are there specific ways they communicate?
    2. What does the space of communication look like?
  7. What is the structure of communication?
    1. Is it 1 to 1, many to 1, or many to many?
    2. Are there conversations or just comments?
  8. How are relationships between participants structured?
    1. Symmetric (Friending)? Asymmetric (Following)?
  9. Is anonymity present?
    1. Is it encouraged or actively discouraged?
    2. Do people often adopt pseudonyms and personas?

Forms of Evidence

In answering the questions listed above, use the following as forms of evidence to support your claims. For example, to prove that members of a community exert social control, find passages of text where one member admonishes or advises another with respect to proper behavior on the site.

  1. Language use
    1. Use Diigo to highlight specific uses of language that provide evidence to the questions
  2. Site design
    1. Use Diigo to take notes on how pages are laid out
  3. News Reports
    1. Feel free to read news and blog posts on the web about the site

Diigo Results

Tag Cloud

Tag Graph

Final Report Questions

If you are having trouble filling out the online form for your report, you may respond to the following requests using a word processor and then send the final product to the professor ([email protected]). NOTE: If you feel you must use this option, please contact the professor first.

1. Describe why people are members of the site (250 words)

Give both official and unofficial answers.

2. Describe how social order is maintained on the site (250 words)

Is user behavior on the site monitored in any way? What forms of control is provided by the site itself? What forms of control do the members exercise?

3. Describe the content of communication on the site (250 words)

Are people focused primarily on the overt reason for the site’s existence? Have users developed a jargon or vernacular language for the site that they consider distinctive?

4. Describe the structure of communication on the site (250 words)

Do people engage in back-and-forth conversations? Or do they have some other form of communication, such as reblogging or commenting?

5. Determine if the site can be considered a community (500 words)

Using your understanding of the concept of community as defined by Tonnies and modified by Anderson and Rheingold, give your determination of whether the site is a community.