definition of the social life of documents

PLEASE READ EVERYTHING BELOW. ESSAY PROMPT (1) Examine the social life of ONE recent (i.e., produced or active within the last three months) document. You will be working within Brown and Duguids definition of the social life of documents and using their article as a lens through which to examine your chosen document. This document may belong to (and serve as a representative example of) a larger category, but you must track a single document, not a pair or a group of documents. You will likely need to narrow down your approach even further and concentrate on a particular aspect of that documents social life. (You must bring Brown and Duguids article into your discussion. It is serving as your lens, and it thus must be a prominent part of your argument. Please bring it up in your introduction and continue to discuss it throughout. I would strongly recommend that the article explicitly inform your thesis statement.) Note: You will be working primarily with the documents online social life (which is much easier to track than its offline social life). You will be expected to do intensive primary research as well as secondary research; in other words, you may not rely on what other people say the social life of the document is. You must track its social life yourself. Provide a working bibliography in MLA or APA format. It should include the following: 1) any primary sources you are analysing. 2) Brown and Duguids The Social Life of Documents. 3) At least three other potential scholarly sources. Below is the link of the social life document by brown and duguid: file:///Users/sav/Downloads/466-5656-1-PB.pdf PLEASE STATE THE RESEARCH QUESTION. BOLD THE THREE STORY THESIS. STATE THE REPRESENTATIVE EXAMPLE for the tweet i would like you to use #momochallenge as the specific representative example READ EVERYTHING BELOW FOR YOU TO GAIN KNOWLEDGE ON HOW THE ESSAY SHOULD BE WRITTEN. THANK YOU. When the prompt tells you to pick a document and track it, it means: pick a document and track it. Find one document that has some sort of online social life (i.e., things have happened to it online). If youre interested in cyberbullying, find a document that relates to it in some way: an anti-bullying hashtag, a viral video, a newspaper article, a tweet, etc. It needs to be a single document, and it needs to be trackable. If you are tracking it simply by reading an article that reads, Hundreds of people shared this tweet on the first day of its life, and most of the comments on it were negative, you are not tracking it; youre relying on what someone else says about it but not finding the primary evidence yourself. You need to do your own detective work. Yes, it will take you some time, but it will also be rewarding. When you are tracking the document, youll have the chance to notice a lot of things about how people are treating it online. Who is sharing it, and where? What kinds of comments are being made? If the document starts in one place (say, as a tweet on Twitter), does it eventually jump to other places (newspaper articles, Reddit threads, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, blog entries, message boards, YouTube videos, news broadcasts, etc.)? How are people treating it? So what? You really do need a document here. Every term, I get who say theyre writing on climate change (not a document), the Black Lives Matter movement (not a document), Donald Trump (not a document), the [fill in the blank] mass shooting (not a document), or the way the alt-right venerates Taylor Swift (not a document). Please choose a document: something that contains information and can be passed on. It could be a tweet or a hashtag or a Facebook post or a photograph or a meme or an article or a study or a film or a book or a YouTube video or a song or a Reddit post or a Wikipedia article or even just an e-mail, but it has to be a document, not a person, a movement, a concept, an event, or an idea. You need something concrete to track. That doesnt mean you cant explore the topics listed above. If youre interested in climate change, maybe someone has tweeted something incendiary about it, and you can follow what happens to the tweet. In the process, youll get to discuss climate change because climate change will be a key concern of the people sharing and commenting on the tweet. Interested in Black Lives Matter? Maybe you could follow #blacklivesmatter for a couple of weeks. Donald Trump tweets incessantly (admittedly, tracking a Trump tweet isnt easy, as every Trump tweet goes viral immediately and becomes almost impossible to track. I would strongly advise against choosing one as your document); there are always articles and social media posts on mass shootings; I am reasonably certain that someone somewhere has started a Reddit thread about Taylor Swift and the alt-right. All the big vague subjects in which youre interested have concrete documents behind them. your body of evidence is everything that happens to one document online (i.e., everything but its content). Your documents content is still importantit will affect and be affected by how people react to and share itbut it is not the focus of your analysis. Neither is its subject matter. If your document is an article on music therapy by Lisa Smith, your subject matter is not music therapy, and it is not how Lisa Smith writes about music therapy. Instead of looking for patterns inside the document, you are looking for patterns in You are treating the document as something called a representative example. Lets just say youre following a celebritys tweet about a mass shooting in the United States. By examining what happens to this tweet online, you will eventually be able to come to some cautious conclusions about one or more of the categories to which the tweet belongs. You are treating the tweet as representative, which means that there are other tweets like it. Your tweet wont be identical to these other tweets, and its social life wont be identical to theirs either, but there will be enough similarities that when you look really closely at what happens to your tweet, you will learn something about how similar tweets function. Maybe examining the tweet will give you insight into how celebrities function online during crises, or how fans think of celebrities and their roles, or how social worlds collide on Twitter in times of turmoil. Maybe you will find some other interesting angle. At any rate, while the whole essay is about this one particular tweet and what happens to it online, your discussion is simultaneously helping you understand something about a larger issue. If you dismiss the tweet and jump straight to the larger issue, your discussion will be broad, vague, and inevitably based on information from secondary sources (i.e., it will depend on the repetition of ideas other people have had about this subject matter), not on the direct exploration of primary material. If the discussion does come directly from your brain, it will be subjective and speculative, as you will have no concrete evidence to back it up. This paper is a research paper. Research should be both primary (the direct exploration of a body of evidence and the drawing of conclusions from this exploration; think of this as you doing an experiment and recording the results) and secondary (the application of scholarly material to your primary evidence; this material may back up your assertions or provide you with a bouncing-off point, but it doesnt replace your own ideas about your body of evidence). If the hashtag itself is old, but its still active, it counts as a recent document. However, that doesnt mean its okay for you to track what happened to it in 2012. You need to explore its current incarnation. Hashtags are interesting documents; theyre essentially keywords, and their use can change and evolve over time. If you choose a hashtag, youll almost certainly have to limit your approach to it anyway, so its not a problem if you choose an older hashtag but decide to follow it now. Oh yes. Please dont forget about Brown and Duguid. Their article, The Social Life of Documents, must serve as your main lens (or scholarly concept). In other words, you are examining the social life of your document through Brown and Duguids theory. A good way of approaching your lens is to find an important concept in it that will cast light on your subject. Brown and Duguid published their article in 1996, so its probably not going to apply directly to your document, but some of the concepts they discuss are broadly applicable enough that they can give you insight into the social lives of types of documents that didnt exist in the mid-1990s. Just for instance, Brown and Duguid discuss the simultaneous fixity and fluidity of online documents. What can their ideas tell us about how Twitter works? Is it necessary to modify their ideas a bit in light of the social life of a tweet or a hashtag? Your lens is not your argument. You are not simply plugging your representative example into Brown and Duguids article and going, See? What you are doing is applying some of Brown and Duguids broader ideas to your specific example and seeing what happens. You may find that you ultimately disagree with Brown and Duguid or need to modify their theory in light of what you discover. Thats fine. Youre not bound by what they argue. Do make sure that your essay has something to do with document theory and the social life of documents. Brown and Duguid should not be incidental to your argument; you shouldnt be shoehorning them in (., cramming them uncomfortably into a space into which they dont fit). IN THE INTRODUCTION MAKE SURE TO ADD A THREE STOREY THESIS. USUALLY IS THREE SENTENCES THAT IS PUT AT THE END OF THE INTRO PARAGRAPH. WHICH CONSIST OF: 1. 1st storeyDescribes the topic generally; gives the facts; makes an observation. This level of the thesis makes observations that are non-controversial (., no reasonable person would disagree withthem). A person reading such a thesis immediately thinks: Yes, this is true 2. 2nd storeyAsks a question in order to interpret, give a point of view on, and/or add controversy to the facts of the 1st storey. Adding controversy means taking a position on the factsa position that is not obvious, and with which a reasonable person could disagree. A person reading a 2-storey thesis thinks: Thats an interesting point of view; now prove it to me! By controversial, we do not mean that this thesis has to be absurd or idiosyncratic: youll never be able to persuade your reader of that kind of argument. Rather, we mean that it takes one position out of a number of possible positio 3. 2nd storeyAsks a question in order to interpret, give a point of view on, and/or add controversy to the facts of the 1st storey. Adding controversy means taking a position on the factsa position that is not obvious, and with which a reasonable person could disagree. A person reading a 2-storey thesis thinks: Thats an interesting point of view; now prove it to me! By controversial, we do not mean that this thesis has to be absurd or idiosyncratic: youll never be able to persuade your reader of that kind of argument. Rather, we mean that it takes one position out of a number of possible storeyRelates the 2-storey thesis to the bigger picture, explains its significance, sets it in a new context. This is the most difficult part of the thesis to write because it can take so many forms. We find it helpful to think of this storey as opening outas if through a skylightto a wider view. It is the answer you get when you ask of a 2-storey thesis: sowhat? The reader should say, I see why this argument matters. The danger at this stage of the thesis is that it can get too ambitious, and the author may try to make a broader claim than s/he is reasonably able to substantiate (., my analysis of Heart of Darkness shows that all of western philosophy is morally bankrupt) EVALUATION CRITERIA Comprehension of the assignment instructions and question Comprehension of key concepts, texts, and theorists Scope and originality of research and/or creative work Integration of primary and secondary research (., you must include at least two peer-edited secondary sources besides The Social Life of Documents. There is no upper limit to the number of primary and secondary sources you may use, and there is no problem with you using non-scholarly sources as well as scholarly or peer-edited sources. I would caution you that if you dont have at least two secondary sources, youre probably not really writing a research essay) Analysis (logical, detailed exploration of the representative example) Presentation and structure of argument, including: Does the introduction coherently introduce a controversy that gives rise to the research question and consequently the thesis? Does the thesis contain an interpretive claim? Does this first part of the thesis answer the question clearly? Does the thesis contain a statement of significance? Do the body paragraphs contain strong topic sentences that offer claims? Does each body paragraph contain a clear transition that shows its relationship to the paragraph that comes before it? Do the body paragraphs provide textual support (evidence) for the claims? Does the author explain the quotations, telling the reader not only what is said in each quotation but how the quotation works to support the claim of the paragraph? Does the author provide interesting, engaging readings of the text? Does the conclusion do more than summarize what the paper has already done? Does the conclusion return to the controversy defined in the introduction in order to develop the implications of the essay? Quality of writing (spelling, grammar, diction, style, etc.) Referencing (consistent and proper use of parenthetical citations and reference notes in either APA or MLA style) Formatting (page numbering, spacing, use of italics, etc.)