Digital Discourse Community Ethnography

Subject
Your task is to produce a piece of communication that describes and analyzes the communication practices of a digital discourse community of which you are a part or are interested in.

The final digital discourse community ethnography calls you to examine how communication occurs in an online discourse community of your choosing. Throughout the semester, you will collect pieces of communication generated within an online community you are a part of, and your task is to examine the elements and factors that impact communication. On the surface, you know what you do when you interact in online communities, but your task is to examine the community in sophisticated ways to reveal hidden insights and overlooked intricacies that shape the way communication happens in this environment.

Process
The authors from our fourth unit put forth the idea that discourse communities constitute who we are and what we become as writers, both intellectually and scholarly. Start by identifying the online community you are investigating and contextualize your role within that community. How should members behave within the online community? What are the sources of conflict within the community? What allows certain users to have more social capital than others? If some members have trouble conforming to conventions, why does this happen? How have the purposes of communicating within the community shifted over time? How do language practices enhance individual goals of users and how do language practices impact community goals? How are members encouraged to participate and contribute content?

Answering these questions and examining the data you collect throughout the term should lead you to some insights or potential research questions. For example, you might notice that there appear to be a few different rhetorical purposes for posting status updates on Facebook. You might then pose a research question: How do users of Facebook imagine the rhetorical function of status updates and what accounts for divergences of rhetorical purpose in producing status updates? In order to further investigate this, you might design some interview questions for some of your friends asking them to consider what factors shape their sense of purpose in producing Facebook status updates. You might also ask them to elaborate on some specific audiences they want to reach. In particular, are there certain friends that a general posting is geared towards?

Whatever direction you decide to take, you should come to a point (about midway through the semester), where you have a working research question that you can use to guide your research project. We will read many articles about interesting aspects of new media and communication, and as we read these, pay close attention to aspects of certain readings that grab your interest. Though you obviously cannot simply repeat a study from one of the readings we cover, the web-based communities we participate in are constantly evolving, so there are many gaps that researchers have yet to consider. Those gaps are a great place to insert your own study and add something to the conversation.   

Format
There isn't a set format for how you deliver your final project, but you must actively consider an audience you are trying to reach, your purpose, and a genre you can use to deliver the message and influence the audience in some way. The decision of how to deliver your project should demonstrate a strong understanding of rhetorical awareness.

Evaluation Criteria
*  Consistent focus on an interesting research question about an online discourse community
*  Organized, accurate, and sufficient analysis of the online community's communication practices
*  Appropriate and sufficient support for central claim is evident
*  Demonstrates an accurate understanding of rhetoric

What Makes it Good?
The best digital discourse community ethnography projects will reveal new insights about the dynamism of communication that occurs in an online community. These projects will leave the reader with new insights and contextualizations of how communication happens in a digital community.