Anchored in Humanity: Digital Insights in Literature

Studying literature in the traditional way is a key to powerful insights into digital culture. It's because literature and digital culture stem from the same thing: people. The literary tradition has a long history of delving into the human condition through its forms, and it helps people better understand the effects and biases of digital culture in and among humanity. Here are a couple of examples of insights I have seen this semester.

Our classmate Aleesha saw correlations between Pinterest and her literary study of Moby Dick. Her questions about the identity (e.g. genre) of the novel Moby Dick prompted questioning and a project about how the individual and collective pins of a person's Pinterest board reflect (or don't reflect) the identity of the pinner. Kayla pointed out how Captain Ahab deliberately gathered people around him and sought the advice of his peers in going after the whale. With their help, he succeeded. Sure, you could say that that was the way everyone had to do things, back in the day, but - it was effective. 

What literary study helps us discover can and should change digital habits. The amount of information online and in print is overwhelming, like the amount of organisms in a world of ocean. As well as consulting his fellow captains for up-to-date information on Moby Dick, Ahab had on hand with him more traditional aids in his search: "yellowish sea-charts" and "piles of old log-books" (177). These print resources were also invaluable to him in making his "reasonable surmises" (177) about the route of the white whale. Recognizing the limitations of each method, Ahab used both textual information and social research and proof to accomplish his goal. While many Web users might be tempted to favor either a search engine or asking people for help to find what they are looking for, we would do well to follow Ahab's example and use social and mechanical ways to find what we want. 

Aleesha, Kayla, and I are digital natives, but studying Moby Dick gave us valuable insights into our world.

Essay #2: The Advantage of Online Publishing

I propose the department take advantage of and teach the pros (and cons) of online publishing. With digital culture there is an awareness and availability to criticize and create content in new forms unavailable in traditional formats of publishing literature. Traditional publishing happens through submitting a scholarly article to a print journal which takes months, maybe even years to get to publication. There is reviewing, maybe getting accepted, then waiting for publication, and all of this to only have a few libraries hold the journal you have submitted to. Online publishing takes the waiting out of the process and allows for anyone to publish anything, and there are ways to keep it scholarly and academic.

Outlets online have continued traditional scholarly outlets of academic journals, but they are faster because submission is all electronic. It cuts costs. There is a wider availability. Using curation tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, an author can announce their intent to research and publish on a topic. Then they use crowdsourcing and social proofing to gather information from friends, peers, enthusiasts, and scholars to contribute to their research. Then as the author publishes their work and continue to curate their researched content, they get more feedback or information on their topic by comments or reviews or submissions from others interested in the field. Even if someone was publishing something nonacademic, personal blogs or websites can claim authority in a field by amount of views, responses, gatekeepers, and/or following.

Digital culture makes publishing an accessible to anyone, which leaves a lot of room for amateur or unedited publications. In these cases people must be aware of the sources they get their information from as well as where they intend to publish. Websites with .gov or .edu are usually more reliable than .com sites. The more times an item or article has been reviewed, the more chances you have of reading accurate reviews of a piece. Goodreads and Amazon for example has rating systems for book reviews that can help narrow down the academic reviews from the more emotional-based ones. In the end, there are ways to find scholarly and authoritative sources of information from the freelance works.

With online publishing, students can be successful quickly. Fellow students Paul and Greg have proven that social proofing gets their works recognized and/or published (see here and here for their successes in social proof and digital publication, respectively). In a world with digital opportunities to get ideas curated and published, the humanities department should be taking advantage of these opportunities to promote their own work as well as teach students how to enter the digital world with their own writing.

Essay #1: Collaboration and Community of Moby Dick and Digital Culture

When we read literature, it is an individual action. It is between the reader and the text. Sure there are ways to discuss a piece of literature such as publishing an anthology or writing a research paper, but these avenues take time. Digital culture makes it bigger. With literature, we are able to see the world through one book’s perspective and as a critically thinking community, interpret the book’s ideas and either agree or disagree with them. In digital culture we do the same, but now on a massive scale where people from all different backgrounds come together to collaboration and give feedback on literature. It turns an independent reading to a global one.

In the introduction of Moby Dick it reveals that “Melville himself certainly believed that all men are united by the bond of reciprocal dependence, by a community of function and responsibility” (xv). The book itself is an example of this “community of function.” We have discussed in class how the book functions under different genres: epic, fiction, prose, allegory, play. The compilation of all these genres makes it impossible to identify it as one genre. In digital culture, people are represented by the different social media sites they use. As Aleesha demonstrates in her research, Pinterest is a way for pinners to repin a variety of pictures, outfits, recipes, etc. Identifying a person by one pin will not be a full representation of who that person is or their pin board. It would be like identifying Ishmael as only a sailor and ignoring his obvious knowledge of cetology, his background in teaching, and the fact that he is the narrator.

As a community, men “united by the bond of reciprocal dependence” create subcultures in which members mutually depend on one another to not only consume content, but to create and curate it as well. In Lizy’s research on fandom collaboration, crowdsourcing materials such as memes or articles on a particular show or book creates a wider fan base in which content can be remixed and shared to an even larger crowd. Information is shared and spread through curation tools such as Tumblr or Facebook or Twitter. Captain Ahab gathered his crew together, all of them dependent upon finding Moby Dick to complete their whaling mission, and together they sailed in search for the great white whale. Ahab used "every means at his disposal to find and kill the white whale" (30), including sea charts, books, and logs to determine where to find Moby Dick. He was crowdsourcing information when he spoke to fellow captains on the Rachel for example to get spotting information. It was a community effort for one common goal. The subcultures within digital culture come together as a community to read, review, comment, and remix content found in literature. Reading is no longer independent, or at least it doesn't have to be.

Interpreting Texts through Digital Formats and Why It Will Help the Study of Literature

An enormous part of digital culture today comes from user-generated content. We are now in Web 2.0 where audiences are not just passively consuming media that was created by companies or organizations. They now consume media that is constantly created by their friends, neighbors, or complete strangers. Anyone with access to the web can create and share content. Part of becoming literate in the digital age is the ability to consume, create, and connect. There is online content that is superficial and created without much thought, but there is also content that causes us to pause, to reevaluate, and to understand.

In the same way, great works of literature cause us to pause, to reevaluate, and to understand. Epiphanies, ideas, or insights that come from reading literature are traditionally expressed through academic essays. These essays may lead to greater scholarship if they are sent to a journal for peer review and publishing. But are these interesting interpretations of literature and profound examinations of humanity really benefitting the global community when they are housed in a journal under the lock and key of a subscription? How much consuming, creating, and connecting is really happening in this format? There is some, especially among professors, experts, and university students, but in order for the study of literature to stay relevant and warrant funding, it must be practiced in ways that are applicable to wider audiences. The knowledge must be shared with others and improved upon by others. Our digital age has provided wonderful means for this kind of sharing and feedback which leads to greater analyses, insights, and creation.

Literary discussions in an academic format are not the end-all-be-all method of gleaning valuable information from texts. Texts that have been examined and reexamined for decades can receive new life when they are reinterpreted using different genres and mediums. Memes, typography images, illustrations, poems, songs, remixes, big data analyses, and more are ways people find meaning in literature. Many of these mediums are easily accessible digitally and intellectually. Students have already created imaginative and stimulating interpretations of literature through these methods. See Ahab's Poetry: Reformatting the Text of Moby Dick and Prototype Moby Dick Blog and Moby Dick Digitized. These are just a few examples of how using digital mediums and genres to interpret a text can improve our understanding of literature.

Digital technologies can help the Humanities and the study of literature continue to be worthwhile and relevant in this day and age by promoting discussions on literary criticism among a wide audience. When more people understand how accessible and valuable the study of literature is, they will want to engage in it. More interest and engagement in the Humanities and in the literature department is worthy of more funding.

  

Digital Curation: Optimizing Literary Study

I propose that the department increase its usage of online curation tools.

Curation is a staple of the digital experience is a big part of popular online services like Pinterest and Flickr, YouTube’s Playlists, and Diigo. With Google+, one can even curate and organize their friends. For academic purposes, curation can be up-to-the-minute crowdsourced research on a student’s topic of choice. 

Traditional sources for curated content include academic journals and printed books. These resources are invaluable to much literary study and analysis by providing context for the work and to bring people into the conversations surrounding the work. However, an individual must often go to a library, a store, or (more recently) subscribe to an costly online database like JSTOR to access these treasures. If they use a library, they cannot make notes in the book to help themselves process its contents and pick out what parts are useful. Additionally, since these traditional sources and the usual ways of finding them involve few if any human sources to recommend the best titles, what the student does access may be an off-target, barely relevant, or simply incomplete resource for the topic at hand.

The department and its students would greatly benefit by have students research and curate together using online tools. If two students are studying similar topics, digital curation will help them easily access each other’s research as well as the research and resource recommendations of tens of other amateurs, students, and scholars. With a more efficient and current research system, students will use the curation tools of the digital age to become more knowledgeable scholars and analysts in their fields of interest, leading to lifelong learning and teaching.

Moby Dick as a Guide to Understanding Digital Form, Content, and Curation

The traditional study of great literature is indeed a valid way to understand our world, including the digital world. This semester our class has analyzed and critiqued the classic Moby Dick through a traditional literary lens. One way we have explored the text is through looking at its form. Is Moby Dick a novel, an epic, a treatise about whaling? Melville's work takes on many tones in different chapters. In the beginning, the story is a first person narrative told by Ishmael. Later, in the chapters about whaling and cetology, the story is an information guide to species of whales, to their anatomy, to the art of whaling itself.

The way Melville uses form to convey content and meaning is very helpful in navigating the digital world. Digital culture comprises a list of ever-expanding genres, from remixes to mashups, from videos to gifs, from blogging to online scholarship. Through examining Melville's use of Moby Dick as a multi-genred work, we can understand how important form is when conveying content. We can shape our own writing and content better by choosing a form that best conveys the message we want to send. This makes us better analysts and better creators, allowing us to contribute more meaningfully to discussions in the academic world and in the digital world.

Another application of Moby Dick to digital culture and of literature to digital culture in general is how the elements of Moby Dick are organized or curated. All novels are a curation of an author's thoughts, ideas, or experiences. Moby Dick is a curation of several themes, ideas, and as mentioned genres. Curation is now becoming something of substance in its own right. But as we can see through Moby Dick and through other works of literature and texts including histories, dictionaries, novels, etc., curation is an old art form. The students in the course have a better understanding of curation as an art form and as a practical way to organize and analyze information because of their critique of Moby Dick. 

The following links are examples of how students have used their study of Moby Dick to create content and curate information, showing just how valuable traditional literary study can be in understanding digital culture.

Moby Dick and Metadata
Pop Song Remix Needs a Music Video
The Parts of Whale in Moby Dick

Kayla's Final Essay #2: Revising the English Curriculum Based on Principles of Crowdsourcing

We may not stop often enough to consider the structure of literary study for undergraduates, assuming that any updating of the curriculum based on digital culture should be saved for higher-level study after students build a solid background in traditional studies, but this doesn’t need to be the case. One digital movement in particular—crowdsourcing—allows for the rethinking of literary studies in constructive ways. Crowdsourcing manifests itself in a range of places in the digital world, from starting virtual choirs to solving complex coding problems. Obstacles that seemed insurmountable before become manageable with the wisdom of the crowd.

Literary studies are often characterized in an isolated way, so crowdsourcing seems as though it may be the wrong solution for the lone scholar. These same students could benefit from applying the concepts of crowdsourcing to the English curriculum, however.

As it stands, students take mostly survey-type classes, being allowed to specialize somewhat in upper-level classes by choosing a narrower time period to study, but mainly staying in areas that give only a broad overview without getting into too many deep topics or specifics. While getting a broad literary education is also important, a portion of the major could benefit from allowing for what I will call “cluster classes,” which are similar to having an emphasis in some ways.

These cluster classes could be based around a certain topic but all cover different aspects of that topic. The classes, instead of being the usual isolated studies, would work together to create more of a “crowd” to tap the resources of. The media tools they choose to take advantage of (blogs, social media, etc.) are less important than their decision to collaborate. By working together in this way, students could still get the benefits of smaller class sizes with specialized attention given to certain topics, but their work would be much more beneficial to others and the program as a whole because it would contribute to the creation of more wide-reaching research.

This type of structure is already in existence and can especially be seen in the phenomenon of citizen journalism. Professional reporters can’t be everywhere, especially for unexpected breaking news, but citizens are already spread all over the world and can submit photos, videos, and even articles. Often, professionals and amateurs work together to create better content than either could have produced alone, and it all began with an open call for information about a certain event or topic.

Departments that deal with literary studies would be wise to follow such a model, allowing the professionals to coordinate the crowd, but still allowing the crowd to contribute in meaningful and novel ways. Undergraduates, like common citizens, may not have the training and expertise of professionals, but their zeal and numbers cannot be ignored.

            

Kayla's Final Essay #1: Moby Dick and Online Communities

A traditional part of the literary canon such as Moby Dick has a lot to teach us about modern digital culture. The way Ishmael, Ahab, and the crew interact in the novel help us to understand the creation of communities in digital culture today, and their teachings affect the way we produce even traditional scholarly research.

When Ahab tells the crew of their true mission and calls out “Death to Moby Dick!” (148), he immediately creates a tight-knit community. The crew looks to him as a leader and holds a common goal of killing Moby Dick, even though Ahab is the only one with a reason for a personal vendetta. We see similar types of online communities forming around specialized topics as well. These communities often create the kind of enthusiasm that gives them the title of “fandoms.” One of my classmates, Victoria, posted a series of blog posts and wrote a paper on the value of fandoms in digital culture, commenting on the need to remove a sense of apathy toward the study of the humanities. The formation of these fandoms may seem to happen over a short period of time, as it does in Moby Dick, but their influence is far reaching, creating interested consumers and content creators who are anything but apathetic.

One of the great contributions of online communities is the way they assist us with research. We are supposed to consult experts in a field of study, but how do we decide who is best? In our current abundance economy, we can find more information than we know how to process. Online communities help to narrow down the most important experts by collaboratively picking them out of the crowd to focus on.

Researchers in the digital age learn to focus on the people instead of simply ideas. Moby Dick focuses on a single whale, but the people involved and obsessed with the whale are much more important than which whale is being singled out. The enthusiasts and experts, who consist of Ahab and others, point us in the right direction. Moby Dick allows us to understand the need and uses for online communities, and more importantly, it helps us to take advantage of them to get to the influential people on certain topics. 

Digital Culture's Subculture: Reflections by Amber

Coming into this class I thought I had a pretty decent understanding of what the internet was. Turns out, it’s more than just a source where people watch youtube videos, look at pictures, blog, and research. It’s an entire culture (digital culture) that’s made up of subcultures where people with specific interests can connect, consume, and create content.

In Lizy’s research and projects on fandoms, I’ve seen how people really dedicated to a show like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Doctor Who will collaborate with various forms of media (Tumblr, Pinterest, even Google Doodles) to share their passion in memes and other remixed content. I think more specifically I’ve seen the subcultures of digital culture with Greg, Heidi, and Paul’s extensive research and analysis of video games. They have a lot more information on how people inside and outside the video game community are grappling with issues such as gender politics and identity both online and offline. Ultimately, entire communities exist in the digital world. Whether it’s with Pinterest, online games, fandoms, Youtube, these are not just people using the internet to share their content. It’s people using the internet as a member of online mini-civilizations.

When I read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, I found that I rather agree with Marshall McLuhan on the idea that the medium is a part of us; it is an extension of who we are as creators and consumers of content. No matter what position on the long tail of interests we pursue, there’s always going to be someone else out there who is using the internet to research and invest their time and energies into something we like too. I honestly really doubted the idea of socialproofing. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in my ideas of authors entering the digital age. Or at least I didn’t think I would hear anything from people who were apart of this subculture. But after investing my time in getting social proof (with Google+ updates, sending tweets or emails, commenting on other blogs, etc) I realized that it actually can work. You just have to ask the right people. Talking with our homies or peers is easy, and finding scholars or activists in the communities you’re interested in becomes easier when you start really reaching for student research and crowdsource information to get your ideas out there. Digital culture, in its subcultures individually and combined, are an extension of ourselves and our ideas with the collaboration of others in the same interests.

In all of this new understanding of subcultures in digital culture, and how we use these subcultures to explore our interests and creativity, there is still a lot that I have to learn and more importantly utilize. I now have a blog account, a google+ account, a twitter account, an lds.org account, and I've never been that active online before because I've never had the desire to be out there that much on the internet. Now I know that it isn't such a bad thing to be active online. It's like being in a second world where I can be out at sea and explore on my own ship, then I can talk with other crew members in my subculture, other ships in other subcultures, and ultimately have my own life online too.

Wikipedia Creative Commons Image
(a clearly very accurate depiction of subcultures on the internet in my journey through digital culture)

Final Digital Culture Blog Post

The concept of social proof has affected my thinking the most about digital culture. Though digital culture is a broad subject, to me the power it has to connect us with others and to exchange information and ideas is the most profound aspect of it. Before this course, I liked social media and used it to communicate with friends, family, or to entertain myself, but I never considered it as way to do academic research. I recently completed a final for my English language empirical methodologies course. Most of the final consisted of the instructor posing research questions and then asking us how we would go about answering the questions. One thing I noticed in many of my responses was a suggestion to search social media sites as one research method. I also suggested communicating with others either face-to-face or online as a valuable research method. I think without the understanding about digital culture that I've gained in this course, I might have restricted my answers to only more traditional academic methods, which can be much more isolated. 

I used a combination of online social proof and face-to-face social proof in my final project. I talked with professors, friends, family, coworkers, and campus departments about my ideas. The main part of my final project was getting feedback/social proof from BYU's international student population via an online survey. It was amazing to get 350 responses to my survey. As I read through what each international student thought, I gained a better understanding of their perspective and felt more of a connection to them.

Though this post is older, I really enjoyed what Paul had to say about digital culture and connection. This ties in well with my thoughts about social media and social proof and how research can and should be done differently in this digital age. He says, "New technologies give us different powers of connection, and thus the powers to alter the meaning of nearly everything in our lives." I too agree that connection gives meaning to life. Even though digital culture technologies are many times used to exchange superficial pop cultural text or images, there is still great meaning in the exchanges because people are connecting with each other like never before. And the digital culture world of connection has the capacity to allow for the exchanging of new research, great ideas, meaningful questions, etc. So my understanding and respect for digital culture has been enhanced through learning about social proof and connection while I strive to practice it myself.

How I (Kayla) Have Come to Understand Digital Culture

As a 21-year-old college student, it's easy to think that I was just born digital (and therefore don't need to make a focused study of digital culture). But while I may be a technology native in some ways, some of the main concepts of our study of digital culture have been new to me, or at least my conscious mind, this semester. I think everything can be tied back to interactivity and Web 2.0.

Now, things on the Internet are a lot less passive. We don't just consume, we also create and connect. My own project on citizen journalism grew out of this concept in a way. Since anyone can create content, I started to wonder how the crowd assigns value. It depends on the way we connect. Does an article shared through a social media platform have more value than one you find through an established news source? Sometimes, it does. You can see this series of blog posts to see the evolution of my thoughts from wondering about how we assign value to considering the pros and cons of assigning high value to citizen journalism to creating my guide to best practices in citizen journalism.

My project wasn't the only one that deals with creating and connecting in digital culture, however. In fact, it's hard to find a project that doesn't do that. In the beginnings of Kelsey's project, she realized how important metadata was and how applying tags really helped in searches. If creators are aware of their connections and users when they make their content, everything ends up being a lot more helpful for everyone. Amber created a blog of Moby Dick that took the static content of Moby Dick (think Web 1.0) and reformed it into something completely different (and with some elements of interactivity at that).

Even topics we highlighted in class all come back to the ideas of Web 2.0. We talked about LDS General Conference and the different ways people connected over the content. The hashtag #ldsconf trended around the world and people collaboratively shared notes in real time. Exploring these new ways of sharing gets people really excited. I remember when I first saw this video on the launch of a homemade spacecraft. My dad showed me and said, "Look, Kayla! You can see the curvature of the earth!" Things that excite people inspire them to create instead of simply consume. They see that even amateurs can make a device that can view the curvature of the earth.

As my fellow classmates and others in the digital world today have noticed, content gets better when more people contribute to it. There really is a wisdom to the crowd. Things that would have been impossibly large before become manageable when crowdsourced.

Web 2.0, besides being the basis for many of the digital culture concepts we covered during the semester, has also led to the improvement of the way the Internet serves us. There is so much we can learn from each other, and online interactivity lets everyone share their expertise (even for free!). Sometimes we criticize new technology and the media, but we shouldn't--if anything, now we are only criticizing ourselves.

Final Paper

Here's the link to my final paper. The title is pretty long: American English Perceptions Among Brigham Young University International Students and Social Media Influence on Language Learning and Dialect. The length of the title and the length of the paper go together well. I learned a lot about writing survey questions, analyzing data, and APA format.

One interesting result that relates nicely to our digital culture class was that the majority of non-native English-speaking international students reported that social media has helped them improve their English. So once again, social media can be a valuable academic tool :)   

Completed Final Project: Guide to Citizen Journalism

I've finished my "Beginner's Guide to Citizen Journalism"! You can see the (more nicely laid out) PDF version here, and you can download the EPUB here.

If anything, I've just learned that I have a lot to learn about the EPUB format. After exporting my InDesign file to EPUB, I tried my hand at cracking open the file and editing the CSS. Basically, you have to save it as a .zip file and then unzip it to access the CSS. I fixed it up a bit, but I'd still like to learn more about formatting EPUBs so they look a little nicer.

Coming next is my submission to the outside world.

Initial Draft/Working Outline of International Students' Perceptions of American English and Social Media Influence on Language Learning and Dialect

So the focus of my paper has shifted a little. I was originally going to write about the survey results about smartphones and whether non-American accent speakers can use voice-activated functions on their smartphones effectively. It turns out most of them can. Voice recognition with non-American accents is still an issue but not to the extend that I thought, so I'm focusing my paper on social media influence on non-native speakers learning English and (non American) native speakers maintaining or losing their English dialect. I will also discuss international students perceptions of American English. With social media and all types of communication technology, America has disseminated much of its pop culture and media throughout the world, including its dialects. I wanted to see what foreigners think about American English.

Rough Draft/Outline
Intro

• This project examines native and non-native English speakers’ perceptions about American English through a Qualtrics survey and studies the effect social media has on language learning and dialect.
• This project design was based off a previous study done by Evans and Imai (2011) that examined Japanese university students' perceptions of American English and other Englishes. In their study, they asked open ended questions to elicit the opinions of the students and then divided their responses into five main categories: dynamism, attractiveness, superiority, language learning, and awareness of dialect variation. This study does the same thing, but it only focuses on American English, divides the students’ responses into six categories instead, and also tries to assess the students’ perceptions of American English using a Likert scale question in addition to an open-ended question. This study also examines native English speakers’ attitudes about American English and non-native English speakers’ attitudes rather than just only non-native speakers.  Lastly, there were other perceptual dialectology questions in the survey. One of them asks about the influence of social media on improving or hindering non-native speakers' efforts to learn English. And another question asks native speakers about the influence of social media in helping them maintain their native dialect.

Literature Review

• Previous research on perceptual dialectology has been conducted about non-native English speakers’ perceptions about American and other Englishes. In their study, Evans and Imai (2011) survey Japanese university students using open-ended questions about American English and divide the student responses into five categories. Their findings indicate that the students think very positively of American English and prefer it to British English, which is an atypical result for such a survey. In contrast, Ladegaard and Sachdev (2006) conducted a similar study with Danish students, asking them questions based on dimensions of status, solidarity, and attractiveness but found that Danish students did not think highly of American English and preferred British English. In her thesis, Haeusler (2010) interviewed ESL students at a community college in Northern California about their perceptions of American English. She specifically tested the students to see if they could identify regional American dialects. She discovered novice and intermediate students had difficulty distinguishing different varieties, but they could geographically indicate different American dialect regions, and the students wanted to speak a regional variety of American English. Lastly, Munro, Derwing, and Flege (1999) examined dialect perception in a different way by testing whether adult English speakers could pick up features of a new dialect. Their study dealt with Canadians who had moved to Alabama and lived there for a number of years. They played recordings of their speech for Canadian and Alabamian participants who then rated the features of their speech as more Canadian or American. Their research reveals that adults can in fact replicate features of a dialect different from their native one to a noticeable degree.
• Relation to my study: based on Evans and Imai, conclusion the same in terms of non-American students generally thinking positively about American English. A few contradictions between written response and the Likert scale. 
• Danish students from Ladegaard and Sachdev: Some negative feedback about American English. Even though not asked, some students opened wrote they preferred British English to American, but overall non-native English speakers thought American English was prestigious, attractive, etc.
• Haeusler's questions: I differed in that I did not ask specifically about regions, but a lot of commentary about regional dialects was recorded. Overall, the majority of participants recognized there was great diversity in American dialects. Some of them openly preferred one regional dialect to another. I directly asked students if they would like to sound more American. Some of them indicated yes, but most said no.
• Munro, Derwing, and Flege: Some of the students addressed wanting to improve their accents and have their accent sound more American. Some made comments about understanding American accents and the difficulty of pronunciation.
• Social Media: the majority of non-native speaker participants indicated that social media had helped them improve their English. The majority of native speaker participants indicated they thought social media had no difference on their dialect.    

Methodology

• The general methodology used in this study was two versions of a Qualtrics survey (one for native English speakers and one for non-native English speakers) that were sent out to BYU international students through the International Student Association on campus. The non-native speaker survey was also sent to a specific ESL class of UVU students taught by Dr. Turley. The survey offered an incentive of a $25 BYU Bookstore gift card to be awarded to a random participant who completed the survey. This methodology was chosen in order to get a large sampling of responses and for its ability to collect qualitative and quantitative data about questions focused on dialect perception and social media. 

Results

For the charts with countries, I used the top 15 countries by response numbers and the top 7 countries for the social media influence. I will probably have some more graphs and direct examples from the responses. 

Conclusion/Connections

• American English overall: native, non-native
• social media influence: social media affecting perceptions of American English? Social media and dialects, does it really have no effect? How can its effect be measured?
• Even though respondents generally like American English, do they want to sound more American?
• American English's influence through social media and technology, ubiquitous, does it have prestige and qualities where non-native speakers want to learn American English?

Further Research Possibilities

Social Media and Perceptions of American English

Main Purpose
To find out what students without American accents do to make their voice-activated smartphone technology successful. To find out if social media has helped improve their English or helped them maintain their native dialect. To find out their perceptions about American English and if they want to sound more American or keep their dialect.

Preliminary Exploration

wiki

survey results- 350 responses, still analyzing

Relevance
A. This research is very relevant to digital culture. Communication technologies and social media interaction raise questions all the time about what we think about languages and dialects. Technology has expanded our communication possibilities, and developers of phones and websites have to consider different languages and dialects to make their products useful for as many people as possible. Also with increased communication American media has spread to so many countries. What do citizens of other countries think about American English? Is American English prestigious, standard, attractive, etc.?
B. Useful for linguists who study perceptual dialectology, language, and technology

Format

Research paper/academic article: the article will be in the format of a traditional linguistics research article

Venue
I will submit my paper to the Young Researchers Workshop which accepts papers from international graduate and junior researchers on communication, including the field of linguistics.

Curation

A. Survey responses

B. Scholarly journal articles

C. International students, professors, peers

Social Proof

I have received feedback from international students, friends, family, classmates, coworkers, professors. I have gotten sufficient feedback from the actual survey respondents (international students).

Next Steps
I've already analyzed a lot of the data, and now it's just writing and explaining the trends and what they mean.

Final Paper and Project

It's all done! Here is a link to my prototype Moby Dick blog which I did as a mini project, and then a link to my paper in a Google Doc for those interested in reading it. It's about how format changes context, a comparison of literal and digital formats, and Moby Dick. Hope you guys are doing well on your final paper/projects! This was fun to explore.

**this has been edited on 12/12/2013 to update the link to the proper doc on Google Docs

Working Outline

Sorry this is super late. I forgot about making this post in the midst of working on my project and final paper (not to mention all the other stuff going on for other classes - crazy end of semester blues!). Here is the rough draft outline I used to help write my paper. Not exactly the order I went in and my paper includes a lot more detail than this (obviously and hopefully). Also check out my project prototype blog of reformatting Moby Dick which in part helped me in writing this paper. I had fun with it. Please leave comments there (for now comments will be approved by me in an email it sends to me before being published, but I can change that later).

Learning about EPUB

As I've been moving forward with my final project (the draft is being updated via the link given in this blog post), I'm starting to move into dealing with the actual format in which my project will be distributed.

I'm comfortable with Adobe InDesign, so that is where I'll be laying out my ebook. From there, there are several options for formats. I can export to PDF, the easiest thing to do. All of my formatting will get pretty much perfectly preserved, and if people just read my book on their computers, there's no issue with that method. E-readers, however, often deal with different formats.

Kindle vs. Nook: the format matters.
Photo by James Britton (creative commons)

InDesign can also export to EPUB, a format gaining popularity and read by iBooks (so iPhones, iPads, and iTouches), the Barnes and Noble Nook, Adobe Digital Editions, and many more. Kindles are more difficult. They are only really meant to read .mobi formats, though they can now read PDFs (though often with some difficulty).

My decision for now is to make a PDF and EPUB version, with a possible .mobi version to come. In this process, I've learned a lot more about how to make EPUBs work layout-wise. You see, you can place elements wherever you want in InDesign and they'll show up just fine in the PDF. EPUBs, however, don't have a concept of side-by-side. They just take things in whatever order and put them right after another. So you have to make sure you format things in a way that will (1) translate well to a vertical layout and (2) be marked with anchors so EPUB will know what order things should go in.

This tutorial from Adobe was very helpful to me.

As you can see from this little prototype gem I made with some draft text, I still need to apply some serious formatting. It's all starting to come together though.