Essay 4
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Digital Community Ethnography Essay #4: The So What?
You have spent the semester working on this project in multiple ways. You have reflected on yourself in relation to your community/culture, researched your community/culture multiple times, conducted interviews, dug through secondary research, and now it is time to answer that so what question. It is time to analyze all your data.
You will not be turning in a draft of your analysis, but we will talk about it in your final conference (on the last day of class) of the semester. We have actually been working on the analysis throughout the semester in small ways. The analysis is where you finally give some sort of an answer to that question: what makes this culture a culture; what is their story? You will prove that answer with the evidence you have been gathering all semester long. Here are some guidelines to what your analysis should and shouldn’t be:
Bringing it All Together
After you have thought about and written sections of analysis for the data you collected it is time to bring everything together into one final essay for the semester. What you choose to include from your previous drafts and what you cut out is up to you. Just remember you are trying to answer the question what makes this culture a culture; what is their story? Think about what you wrote about in your analysis and think about what evidence you need to include as data to support that. What secondary sources are helpful? What interview? What observations from primary sources? Your final essay can be written any way you want it. You can use section headings, subheadings, chapters, etc. What you may not do is simply cut and paste together all four essay drafts and call it done. You have been working on this for three months and the final project should reflect that.
Additionally, you need to decide which visuals you need to include that you have collected throughout your research.
Brass Tacks: Your final essay should be 10-12 pages, not including visuals or works cited page.
You have spent the semester working on this project in multiple ways. You have reflected on yourself in relation to your community/culture, researched your community/culture multiple times, conducted interviews, dug through secondary research, and now it is time to answer that so what question. It is time to analyze all your data.
You will not be turning in a draft of your analysis, but we will talk about it in your final conference (on the last day of class) of the semester. We have actually been working on the analysis throughout the semester in small ways. The analysis is where you finally give some sort of an answer to that question: what makes this culture a culture; what is their story? You will prove that answer with the evidence you have been gathering all semester long. Here are some guidelines to what your analysis should and shouldn’t be:
- It should reflect back on what you initially thought about this group you’ve observed in draft one, how that has changed, how that has not changed. It could even reflect back on what you think about yourself- the person you thought you were, and the person you seem to be.
- It should reflect back on your observations and pick up patterns you see, tensions you see. Your analysis should use the observations as evidence for the claims you are making about what makes this culture a culture.
- It does not require you to come up with some cliché and dippy moral such as “even though we are different we are all the same.” You have not spent three months of work to come up with that obvious and uneventful conclusion.
- It does not require you to judge this group-to condemn or to affirm- the things that make this culture a culture.
Bringing it All Together
After you have thought about and written sections of analysis for the data you collected it is time to bring everything together into one final essay for the semester. What you choose to include from your previous drafts and what you cut out is up to you. Just remember you are trying to answer the question what makes this culture a culture; what is their story? Think about what you wrote about in your analysis and think about what evidence you need to include as data to support that. What secondary sources are helpful? What interview? What observations from primary sources? Your final essay can be written any way you want it. You can use section headings, subheadings, chapters, etc. What you may not do is simply cut and paste together all four essay drafts and call it done. You have been working on this for three months and the final project should reflect that.
Additionally, you need to decide which visuals you need to include that you have collected throughout your research.
Brass Tacks: Your final essay should be 10-12 pages, not including visuals or works cited page.
