[ Assignments: Details ]

Course Number: Comm. Studies 395, Section 28; CS 395, Section 28
Term: Winter 2005
Class: Tuesday 2pm - 4:50pm
  Room: Searle 1-483

Professor Justine Cassell
justine@northwestern.edu

TA: Yolanda Rankin
yrankin@cs.northwestern.edu

Here are details about each of the assignments

Initial Analysis of an Existing Online Community: You will analyze an online community by describing its purpose, its target audience, the technological tools it relies on, the kind of mediated communication it uses, the kind of activities that comprise it, and something distinctive about the language use in this community . This assignment should be no longer than 5-7 pages. Due January 18th. Remember that you are encouraged to carry out this assignment in groups if the group is composed of a mixture of CS and CS undergrads...

Details:

How do you analyze an online community?  As the quarter goes on, and you learn more about different online communities and so you have points of comparison, and as you learn more about tools to analyze communities, your analyses will become more complicated.  But, in this first assignment, we want you to simply become accustomed to describing a community.  That's not as easy as you think, especially if you're a community member yourself.

Here are the questions you must answer:

(1) why did the community form?  What is the purpose of it?  How do you know that is the purpose - quote from the community documents to prove your point .

(2) Who is supposed to be in the community (the target audience) - and who is not supposed to be in it.  How do you know - describe the people who are there and are made welcome, and the people who are not made welcome.  Use concrete examples.

(3) What kinds of technology allow people to communicate?  Is it a videoblog? IM? E-mail-based?  Do you need a fast connection (would it work if you were in a rural area without a broadband connection)?  Describe everything you know about how the community technologies were built (just to the extent of your knowledge), and how people in the community use these tools.  Be specific .

(4) What kind of language do people use?  Is the language shared in real time, or do people receive messages all day long?  Give concrete examples from the community.

(5) What kinds of things do people do in this community? Do they rank software, or praise their favorite singers?  Is there only one kind of activity or lots?  Give examples of activities that people engage in together.

(6) What differentiates the language in this community from another community? Could you recognize the messages from this community if somebody didn't tell you where they came from - how would you know?  Is lots of slang used? Technical terms? Abbreviations? Emoticons?  Use Pennebaker to think of some questions to ask: do people use "I" a lot? Do they refer to people's names a lot. Give concrete examples
 
So, what will be hard about this assignment is two things: (A) to get enough distance from a community to take a good look at it, and (B) to make sure that you have concrete evidence for each of your claims.

Proposed Design of an Online Community: You will submit a proposal for the design of a new online community (it can be as simple or complex as you like. You will be working in teams with at least one tech-savvy person on each team). Refer to the guidelines presented in Kollock and in Preece for your proposal. Make sure that you describe target audience, purpose, design principles, technological tools, and how this online community fills both a social and technological void. Proposal should be no longer than 5-7 pages. Due February 1st

Proposal for Final Paper:Your proposal only needs to be one-page long, but it should lay out (1) which community you intend to study -- it can be a community that you already studied for Assignment 1, or a brand-new community; (2) which topic you intend to research -- gender, race, international context, identity, or a brand-new topic; (3) why it's interesting to apply this topic/theoretical tools to this particular community; (4) how you are going to apply the tools to the language and behavior in this community; (5) what your initial claim is (your hypothesis). If you can't think of any ideas, ask Justine if you can work on one of her data sets (but ask in advance!)... Due February 8th.

Please note: The final paper can be written in teams, but you need to tell us who will do what (and you need to include a statement about who did what in the final paper). You don't need to keep the same teams for this assignment - feel free to re-organize.

Implement an Online Community : Carry out your proposal. You will show the community to the class, so try to convince some people to use it! Due February 22nd.

Final Paper: See instructions above concerning final paper proposal. For some good examples of papers about online communities, check out the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

The final paper will be graded on both content and form. Content means the originality and interest of the research question, nature of the methodology used to investigate the question, plausibility of your interpretations. Form means the organization, clarity and quality of the writing, and the scholarly use of conventions such as citations and footnotes. An 'A' quality term paper finds an interesting research question, makes use of primary and secondary sources to address the question, and adds interesting and original interpretations of the author's own. It is well-organized and clearly and professionally written.

General Note: You will be encouraged to carry out the community observation, analysis and design assignments in groups. You may also do your final paper in teams. However, if you write a paper together, you must include a paragraph stating which part of the work was done by each member of the team. In order to make sure that your collaboration falls within the Northwestern guidelines of academic integrity, you must read : http://www.northwestern.edu/uacc/ and http://www.northwestern.edu/uacc/plagiar.html.