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.

A Working Post: A Best Practices Guide to Citizen Journalism

Main Purpose: to create a guide for citizen journalists who are just entering the field and need information on the ethics of their content, the best outlets for their content, and how to work with media professionals.

Preliminary Exploration: I began by reading Dan Gillmor's We the Media, which gave me a foundation in the beginnings and importance of citizen journalism. Much of my current and relevant information has come through the articles that Google Alerts sends me for my searches (citizen journalism, grassroots journalism, participatory journalism). I've also poked around on websites completely devoted to publishing citizen journalism.

Relevance to Digital Culture and My Audience: With new technology making it easier every day for ordinary citizens to take high-quality photos and videos, as well as share text-based articles online, citizen journalism has come to the forefront of many people's minds, including but not limited to media professionals. People often get their news socially, perhaps through an article shared over Facebook, rather than going to the same professional media source regularly. My audience--the citizen--has had very little formal education in journalism, yet is expected to create content comparable in quality and truthfulness to someone who has been professionally trained in the field. This guide will give information and resources for further learning.

Format: This project will take the form of an ebook.

Final Project Thoughts (Extra Post, Prologue to Post 2 of this week)

Beware! I am posting my prewriting and rough drafts, showing my progressive steps, diving into the second stage of academic blogging, and saying social proof doesn't always work.

This isn't my second post for the week about digital tools with Moby Dick, but I will link to it at the bottom after it's published. This is a prologue for what I'll do in that post and how I got to that idea.

This is a post about my final topic. If you guys can comment, it will help me with my theme and tell me if this is something I can actually do a final project on. Even if you only read the last couple paragraphs under the asterisks, that will really help me. Or comment here on Google+ for an even faster read and respond. Give me social proof, homies and peers!

Spiraling into Academic Blogging

After reading this post on academic blogging and this post on the spiral metaphor, I realized these concepts explained by Dr Burton go hand in hand. I'm just going to liken this to a spiral staircase because I'm visual like that.

The first part of our spiral staircase began in phase one. Each individual step was made up of our individual posts not necessarily consistently focused on one idea or theme. As we continue our climb up these steps to the second level right above the landing, we enter phase two of academic blogging. But we wouldn't have gotten to phase two without those steps in phase one. And we can climb back down the spiral stairs to look at points we made in phase one to carry with us in phase two. We develop our ideas. We use crowdsourcing (an idea we learned about in the first third of class, the first few steps of our spiral) and social proof (an idea we've just learned about) to get feedback and create a feedback loop.

(oops not stairs but you get the idea)

After we get public opinion (whether from our "homies, peers, enthusiasts, or experts") our spiral continues to grow into things phase three and beyond. I think what lies ahead can be daunting. You do get further and further away from the ground level as you climb up those spiral steps. But you can always step back down to refer to earlier notes, posts, links, and ideas to get your footing again.