Week 9 Assignment Guide

Journalism/Activism, Part 1

Information. Attention. Imagery. Sound. Data. Clickbait. Ad-tech. Something new is happening around how users leverage different digital media platforms to accomplish positive change in the world. In this module, we'll explore the history of hashtag activism (including any precursors), data-driven journalism, and multimedia/interactive journalism, and think critically about their impact and the possibilities for the future. We'll also create our own digital activist/journalistic projects.

Schedule

For Tuesday (8am)

Put a link and a brief description of what you did for the Digital Polarization unit in the new #journalism channel. (Zach's section has been flooding #general, so if you already put it there, please repost it in #journalism.)

Look over a few of your colleagues' contributions in #journalism and provide positive feedback to at least two of them.

Come prepared to discuss what we did in the Digital Polarization unit, and to show off some of your work to the class.

Tuesday class meeting

In class, we'll recap the digital polarization unit with a discussion of the readings and activities, and show off the work that you did. I'll share a couple data journalism projects to introduce the journalism/activism unit.

For Thursday's class

Read at least four of the articles under Readings below. Leave an annotation in the digitalstudies hypothes.is group on at least two of them, and reply to at least one of your classmates' annotations.

Choose an angle to take for this unit. Since we are combining journalism and activism, you can do one of the following:

digital/multimedia/data-driven journalism
digital/multimedia activism
digital activist journalism
digital journalism about activism
follow-up work on digipo.io
another digital project that engages journalism, activism, and/or digital polarization, as long as it includes a public component

Come up with at least a preliminary project idea that you will work on over the next week or so. It should be something that can have a public component, preferably something that you can post on your domain (or link to from your domain, if it lives somewhere else, like digipo.io or Wikipedia). Share a one- or two-sentence summary of your project idea in the #journalism channel on Slack.

Thursday class meeting

In Thursday's class, we'll discuss the readings and spend time sharing and giving each other feedback on project ideas for the next week.

For Friday (8am)

Read all of your colleagues' project ideas in Slack, and reply to at least one of them. Provide either a specific word of positive encouragement about something specific, or offer a tip about a resource they might find valuable or a direction they might take their research. Reply to someone not at your table, and preferably to someone who has not received a comment yet.

Be sure to do some work on your domain this week. That could involve posting something about the DigiPo contributions you made (or links to them with some explanation) to your domain. Or if that project doesn't fit your site's theme, you can make other additions/changes/deletions on your site.

Complete your self-assessment for Week 9 and add it to the document you created last week. Be sure to comment on the updates you made to your domain, and include links to project work and at least some of your annotations/replies.

For materials due Monday and Tuesday, see the Week 10 Guide.