Final Circuit of Culture Project, Fall 2020

Fall 2020

Final Circuit of Culture Project

Circuit of Culture for a Website, Service, or App
Topic due Oct 2 on Piazza
Annotated Bibliography due Nov 6
Presentations, Nov 30 and Dec 7
Final webpage due Dec 9

Topic

For the final project, you will be asked to create a webpage to analyze a website or app through all aspects of the circuit of culture: production, consumption, representation, identity, and regulation. Because even the smallest websites and apps have a lot to consider, you are encouraged to narrow your focus to an event, feature, use case, or failure that can drive your discussion. This should not prevent you from considering the full range of issues and concerns surrounding the website, but it can help you discuss them in a pointed way.

Stylistically, while it would make sense to create separate sections to address each of the aspects of the circuit of culture, it might be best to discuss the website holistically and bring up the interrelated areas of culture as they become relevant to your overall analysis. To this end, I’ve created pages to explain each area of the circuit of culture (available in the side menu), which you can link to as a way to highlight the topic and check off that you have met the assignment criteria for addressing each one.

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated bibliographies serve a number of research purposes, from exhaustively documenting a field of study to roughly mapping the early stages of a project. In this case, we’ll use the annotated bibliography as a preliminary resource to help you refine your topic and find the most relevant story for analyzing your site or app through the circuit of culture. In the best case, all the research you include in your annotations will be directly used in your final project, but you should feel no need to include everything from this early effort nor feel constrained to just the papers you find in this first round of work. You are welcome and even encouraged to continue researching up until the final project is due.

Your annotated bibliography should meet the following criteria:

  • Ten sources in total.
  • Adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style’s notes and bibliography style citation, using bibliography-style references (the style with periods rather than commas).
  • At least two peer-reviewed scholarly articles or books. I recommend using Google Scholar and adding the library link to the JHU Library (instructions here).
  • At least three newspaper or magazine articles. This category is considered broadly, but the idea is that you’re finding journalistic coverage of your topic from reputable news sources, whatever their platform or political persuasion. LexisNexis, which we used for the BBS assignment, is a great resource for finding historical articles. Consider checking out the SPJ Code from the Society of Professional Journalists for a stance on what constitutes ethical journalism.
  • And the remaining articles can be other peer-reviewed research, journalistic sources, or any number of web resources relevant to your topic, including blogs, website terms of service, press releases, user content, etc.

A sample bibliography can be viewed here.

Presentations

Final presentations will be 10 minutes apiece and take place on November 30 and December 7. See Blackboard for the complete schedule.

Final Webpage

The final webpage should be around 2,000–2,500 words and include multimedia, such as images, sounds, and videos. Your analysis should engage with each aspect of the circuit of culture. It is up to you how you’d like to organize your page, but I thought one way to create flexibility would be to have explainer pages for each area of production, consumption, identity, representation, and regulation. This way, when you introduce a concept, you can link to the more in-depth explainer, and the link can serve as a way to highlight that you’ve covered that topic. If you choose this approach, you only need to create a link for the first use of the term. Another way to organize your page would be to use headers and have different sections for each circuit-of-culture area. Whatever way you choose to organize your page, it will be important to summarize the approach of the circuit of culture and provide a short definition for each aspect. The more you can integrate this information into your discussion of the app or website, the better.

The weekly schedule for the course provides a basic overview of the different types of content you can build using WordPress’s block editor (example here). If you’d like to venture beyond those constraints (which I’ll admit are real on WordPress outside of a commercial account), I suggest starting a free site on Weebly or another free website builder and host.

Here are a few standout pieces of multimedia journalism that show what’s possible. Although you won’t likely be able to create something so involved, they might still provide some inspiration.

References

There is no need to create a Works Cited section or bibliography for your web page and no need even to include all the references from your annotated bibliography. The annotated bibliography was meant to be your own preliminary research. For the web page, we’ll lean on the resources of the web and simply use hyperlinks. If you want to link to a scholarly article, it’s best to find the journal’s webpage for that article and simply link to it (even if that page doesn’t yet have access to the actual article through JHU’s proxy; that way anyone who follows the link can see the article information and access it through their own means). Same goes for a book, where it’s best to link to the publisher’s page.

Web Design

Here’s a list of links to common designs questions people have had:

Checklist

  1. Introduce your website or app.
  2. Cover each aspect of the circuit of culture and link to the explainer pages when you introduce each aspect: production, consumption, identity, representation, and regulation.
  3. Include links, images, and video where appropriate.
  4. Keep your page to around 2,000–2,500 words.