Assignments
Field Notes
Instructions for the field note assignment can be found here.
Mini-Projects + Substantive Revision
Instructions for the mini-projects can be found here.
Final Project
This semester your project group will develop a user guide for a federal dataset. You will complete a series of exercises to support you in writing the guide.
These exercises are not graded; they are meant to frame your research and help you generate material for the project.
Because each group is working on a different dataset, there will likely be components of each exercise that are not relevant to your group; I only expect you to complete about 70% of each exercise. Skip the parts that aren’t relevant to you.
You should be meeting with your groups at least one hour each week outside of class to coordinate your work and plan to work an additional hour independently to make progress towards your research.
While these exercises will include both qualitative and computational exercises, the point of this project is not to perform a statistical analysis on this dataset. Instead, you will study the dataset ethnographically and strive to effectively communicate how the dataset came to be, how it has disseminated, how it can be used, and what some of its limitations are.
Reading Annotations
Each week a selection of course readings will be posted as a single assignment on Perusall - a system for students to collaboratively annotate course readings. To earn this credit, you will be expected to post 3 quality annotations per assignment to Perusall. (Note that a single assignment can have multiple readings, but you need only submit 3 annotations total. You do not need to annotate every reading in the assignment.) A quality annotation is one in which you synthesize concepts, ask thought-provoking questions, or connect ideas to external issues. I have found that students get the most out of Perusall when they respond to each other’s annotations. Annotations must be completed before class to receive credit.
Community Labor
Ethnography is at its best when it involves collaborative inquiry and interpretation. Because of this, I want to encourage us to foster a cooperative community in our classroom. Ethnographers know that building and sustaining strong communities are important and often invisible forms of labor. In an effort to foreground and reward that labor, I’ve built opportunities to contribute to the course community into our grading contract. There are four opportunities for earning community labor points in this course. It will be your responsibility to keep track of your community labor via our course labor log.
Contributing on Slack
The first opportunity for earning community labor points is through posting in the #sds-237-discussions Slack channel. For every conversation that you initiate in this channel, you will earn 1 community labor point. For every conversation that you respond to in this channel with substantive summary, critique, or reflection, you will earn 1 community labor point. Finally, for every question that you answer in the #sds-237-questions channel, you will earn 1 community labor point.
Completing Group Evaluations
Mid-way through the semester you will have an opportunity to evaluate your own contributions to your group work, along with that of your peers. Your feedback will be shared with members of your group. Completing group evaluations will count for 1 community labor point.
Participating in Peer Review Workshops
Throughout the semester, I will set up workshops where students may submit their written work for peer review in preparation for assignment submissions. Each peer review workshop that you participate in will count for 2 community labor points.
Contributing Class Notes
Following a class period, up to two students may type up a 1-page outline of what was covered in that class period and post a link to that outline in #sds-237-class-notes. You can sign-up to serve as the notetaker for a certain class here. These notes should be a full, single-space page, and should make sense to someone that was not present in class. Each class note outline that you contribute will count for 2 community labor points.
Note that throughout the semester, I may offer additional opportunities to earn community labor points as unexpected forms of course labor arise.
Enrichment
Instructions for enrichment assignments can be found here.