Project Overview

From digmovements

[edit] Purpose

The Dig Movements wiki serves the dual purpose of organizing the incremental research products of our learning community members and providing a permanent, comprehensive record of our finished academic work. Our research explores what, for now, is truly uncharted territory: the place of the world wide web and digital media in the history, current circumstances, and futures of social movements.

[edit] Organization

Three main hubs organize the wiki’s academic content, Social Movements, Online Activism, and We The Media. These hubs represent three analytical research areas and reflect the division of program students into three research groups.

• The Social Movements group focuses on uses of the web to organize real events and move real goods by movements and organizations involved in advocacy or relief efforts.

• Online Activism focuses on political outreach, advocacy and education activities of movements and groups with specific causes or constituencies.

• We The Media focuses on media watchdog, fact checking and citizen journalism activities of indy media and political advocacy movements and organizations.

[edit] Work Process

In Week 1, our wiki work begins with the development of an author profile by each program member. These profiles serve the initial purpose of introducing program members to each other. The eventual purpose is to provide students with instruction and practice for developing an online professional presence.

In Week 2, students choose a social movement or cause for individual study, and they choose membership in a research group. These choices determine their research and writing topic, as well their analytical focus, throughout the term. They begin by developing a general historical profile of their topic, which they will build upon and expand with all subsequent work.

Throughout the term, the program blog publishes assignments and next steps for each week in the research and writing process. These steps include assignments in scholarly research, annotation of sources, web searching and analysis, imaging and so on.

[edit] Outcomes

When research data reaches a point of sufficient richness, students turn to the task of writing a twelve-page synthesis paper with a conventional “print medium” structure of thesis statement or argument, evidence from sources, and persuasive conclusion. In the last step, students reformat these papers to provide the main articles of the finished wiki database. Reformatting includes illustration of text with images, linking of research documentation and author profiles, and hyperlinking to the work of colleagues. The result will be a usable, dynamic database of the program's research.