Assignments

Discussion #1: Research Question Flowchart For the first discussion, consider your research question in light of the Research Question Flowchart. In your post, include a refinement of your question according to the following format: Topic: I want to know: I can find out by: My time frame is: Is it feasible?: In addition, begin some […]

Before completing Discussion #2, make sure to review the readings for this module (as explained in our daily schedule on the syllabus): Navar-Gill, Annemarie, and Mel Stanfill. “‘We Shouldn’t Have to Trend to Make you Listen’: Queer Fan Hashtag Campaigns as Production Interventions.” Journal of Film and Video Steele, Catherine Knight. “Black Bloggers and their Varied Publics: […]

Following your review of Module 1.3: Reddit and GitHub, you should begin familiarizing yourself with your computer’s command line and the GitHub platform by creating and pushing to your own repository. Review the following tutorial video before beginning your repository creation. The full version of the assignment instructions can be found here.

Discussion #3: Creating a Research Community After reading about Moya Bailey’s advisory board, I hope you are thinking about how you might practically incorporate this practice into your own research. So before you get going on your project fully, I want you to consider how you might create a community of support for yourself and […]

Discussion #4: Platform Literacy For our second activity, we will be considering our own media and platform literacy as a barrier to, or gateway into, better and more ethical research. You already spent time in this module thinking about platform affordances. Understanding platform affordances is an important part of using digital platforms to conduct humanistic […]

Discussion #5: Best Practices Utilizing what we have learned through reading, discussion, and previous activities, you are now ready to design your own best practices guidelines for your research project. Using the Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines from the Association of Internet Researchers as our guide, along with Bailey, Florini and Spiro as inspiration. If you […]

Discussion #6: Creating a Research Plan In “What Constitutes Quality in Qualitative Internet Research?” Nancy Baym argues that “making wise research choices has never been about distinguishing right from wrong but about finding the most appropriate path given the specific point in the specific project.” For this discussion, think about the “most appropriate path” at […]

Preliminary Data Collection In Module 3.2, you learned about tools for gathering data from Twitter and YouTube. Keeping your research question in mind, pick at least one tool and start diving into data collection. If you are new to data scraping, we recommend you choose either TAGs or the YouTube data collection tool. Feel free to try out […]

Reddit Scraping For this exercise, we’re going to practice some of the processes that you’ll need to start making use of open source tools. Now that we’ve started getting comfortable with the command line, we’re ready to begin using command line tools, which allow for much more robust data scraping than our Google Sheets examples. […]

Advanced Data Scraping Now it’s time to see the work you’ve done setting up your computer for Python pay off! There are lots of open source scrapers available of varying complexity, and once you have your system configured, it’s a lot easier to pick different tools to try. In this exercise, we’re going to put […]