Overview:
Your final project for ENC 3416 is to engage with new media on your own terms. You are to produce a substantial upper-division level work appropriate to a 3000-level English class, but your media, genre, and topic are up to you. What follows is a list of suggestions and a brief reflection or statement of expectations on my part.
Note: This project is Quality Assessed as opposed to your normal labor-based grading. Scores range from 0-60 points with a C average of 45 points.
This project is due during finals week. Note the unusual deadline – this project is not due on a Sunday, like usual, rather, you have more time allotted.
Assignment At-A-Glance: Not Applicable. This is the final – attention to detail is strictly required.
Discussion:
Project Concepts
I’ve informally broken the major projects I’m expecting to see down into three categories. These are not the end-all / be-all of new media writing, but they are at least I hope a good jumping-off point. If you have a different idea, then you should absolutely ask me about it so we can get you started. The three categories I’ve named below are named after their adherents: Practitioners, Theorists, and Historians.
THEORISTS
Theorists might engage in a bit of historical work, but most of their energy is spent on engaging new media in complicated, cross-disciplinary ways. Because theorists will cite a lot of references, they are more likely than the others to write a research paper, though nothing says they have to. Theorists will integrate scholarship from other fields, most notably philosophy, but also communications, sociology, and other social sciences, to manage a coherent argument about new media in the world.
Theorists should start with the reading we’ve done in class (Plato, Benjamin, McLuhan, Lyotard, etc.) but expand their study out to include more contemporary thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Hardt, Negri, Deleuze) and major critical modes (rhetorical theory, feminist criticism, post-colonial theory, etc.). Conversely, they are also likely to engage only one particular mode or genre, e.g. “Gender Tweets – Feminism Post-Butler in the Twitterverse,” or “Capitalism’s Capillaries: A Foucauldian read of Zuckerberg’s mea culpa.”
Requirements:
- One final project, as described above.
- One Brief “author’s statement” – this is REQUIRED for “practical” projects (e.g. building a website for an external company) but is optional for historical and theoretical projects providing those projects adequately engage with the history and theory of media. This ~2-3 page document consists of writing thoughtfully and thoroughly explaining what you did, how you did it, and how it intersects writing and new media.
- NOTE: Because the final project is due at the very end of the semester, it cannot be accepted late, and cannot be remediated. Grading is Quality-Assessed as opposed to Labor-Based.
I have 6 references right now, but need 15 minimum.