Our first two class sessions have be so invigorating for me. I was on research leave last semester, and I’ve really missed being in the classroom — especially when I’m surrounded by smart grad students. (Spoiler alert: that’s you.) As we discovered today, it’s likely that we will always have more to discuss than time in which to discuss it, but I hope you’ll continue to bring the same level of energy and focus that you’ve shown so far. (And I’ll work on managing our time better!)
Here’s a quick overview of where we’re headed during Week 2 and what you need to do to prepare for each class session:
- On Tuesday, we’ll make time to discuss our experiences following #SOTU, then we’ll dive in to our first book, From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup. Before you come to class, please read the introduction by Dilger and Rice, along with the chapters by Rickert, Arroyo, Reilly, and Rice (pp. xi–66).
- On Thursday, I’ll introduce the Book Review assignment, and I’ll share a long list of potential titles you might want to read. Then we’ll turn our attention back to the Hashtag Analysis project. You should come to class ready to share your chosen hashtag (or ask us to help you select between two good options) and discuss several models for studying social media. In preparation for that conversation, please read the following articles: “Gender Identity and Lexical Variation in Social Media,” by Bamman, et al.; “Tweeting the Meeting: An In-Depth Analysis of Twitter Activity at Kidney Week 2011,” by Tejas Desai, et al.; “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like: Twitter Analytics Report,” by Devin Gaffney, et al.; “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter,” by danah boyd, et al.; and “Informal Communication, Sustainability, and the Public Writing Work of Organizations,” by Brian J. McNely. (Note: if you aren’t on the VT network, you may need to login through the library’s proxy server to access some of those articles.) That’s a long list of articles, so I expect that you’ll need to scan them quickly. Remember: our goal is to get a sense of the various methodological approaches that can be used for researching a hashtag.
If you have any questions about our plans for next week, please send me an email or contact me on Twitter. Otherwise, I’ll see you in class on Tuesday!