top of page
This site was designed with the
.com
website builder. Create your website today.Start Now

Unit 1 Project 

Context: With Net Neutrality taking legal effect in the United States, many citizens and political leaders believe this will usher in a new era of fair access on the internet; however, though Net Neutrality moves us in the right direction, we still must negotiate the influences of the various filter bubbles we interact with. The information you’re given on sites like Google and Facebook depend greatly on the nature of your previous searches, delivering you to not the always the best and most accurate information available, but the information the sites’ algorithms think you’ll like/agree with.

 

Assignment Description: Find a partner in class who you feel comfortable working with. To complete the assignment,

·         Find a topic that you have both researched extensively—whether it be politics, social issues, religion, etc.—but have (to some degree) varying opinions on;

·         Agree on a general word or phrase to search on Google that has a presence in your agreed upon topic;

·         Use AntWordProfiler on both your and your partner’s search results;

·         Write a 2-4 page cluster criticism analysis comparing your results and your partner’s;

·         Create a visual of your choice, either using word-to-image software (like a Word Cloud), or InDesign to compose your own, to visually demonstrate the differences in word frequency and treatment between search results;

·         Post both your analysis and your visual on the class blog.

 

Unit 2 Project

Context: As you surf the web—whether you’re checking Facebook, shopping on Amazon, or doing research for a class project—your actions are being tracked by various government agencies and major corporations for close monitoring. In Pasquale’s The Black Box Society, he discusses the ways in which credit scores are established and how they can affect the livelihood of the individual, though these agencies often rely on different information and construct their profiles differently.

 

Assignment Description: To better understand how someone’s identity is constructed by a third party, you will situate yourself as a member of such a third party. All class members will conduct research on the same individual and individually create a Facebook profile for them based on the information gathered.

 

To successfully complete the assignment, you will need to:

 

  • Use a popular search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to gather as much information on the individual as possible—consider playing with different keywords to best expand your understandings

  • Based on the information you find and value, create a Facebook profile for this individual, including the information you deem important for constructing that person’s identity

  • After you’ve completed your profile, get into groups of 3-4 and share the information you found and your rationale for constructing the profile in the way you did

  • Compose a four page analysis discussing the differences between the profile you created and the profiles of your classmates—consider addressing the various values held by each individual creating the profile, as well as what information they found important for constructing someone’s identify based on secondary information. Consider pulling from Pasquale to support your analysis.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

Unit 3 Project

Context: Everyone interacts with digital technologies differently, whether it’s because of race-, gender-, or class-based constructs, or because of a physical limitation. We as a culture, though, often view the designs of technology as objective, not constructed to service or exclude a specific group of people.  However, the readings we’ve discussed certainly challenge those ideas by demonstrating how technology and culture have a balanced relationship of influence.

 

Assignment Description: Choose one digital device or software and unpack the cultural assumptions its design makes. You may choose the lens you analyze your artifact from the frameworks we’ve discussed in class—race, class, gender, or disability studies. Create a multimodal analysis exploring the following questions:

 

  • Who is the piece of digital technology marketed for?

  • In what ways does it exclude certain groups within culture?

  • How might we critically redesign the technology to be more inclusive?

  • Does the technology’s original design reflect technological instrumentalism, technological essentialism, or technological refletionism?

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

bottom of page