I’ve managed to read enough of your Field Notes that I feel comfortable creating a general feedback post about them. Many of you did excellently, jotting down all kinds of observations and even beginning to synthesize those observations into potential claims, so good work! While you don’t have to revise and resubmit your field notes (in fact, I’m not accepting revisions), you may want to address these issues before moving onto secondary research practice and Essay 3 Phase 1 work. Remember, some of these field notes will comprise your Results section, in the form of your primary research data. I’ll try to have all the emoji scores posted by tomorrow evening.

In case you need the reminder, “thumbs-up” 👍🏾 means you’ve hit the basic parameters; “check-mark” ✅ means you submitted Late but I accepted it; “thoughtful face” 🤔 means I accepted it but it likely Needs Work. Regardless of your score, the bullet points below might prove insightful.

In no particular order of importance:

  • I can’t stress this one enough: don’t make your primary research about the content of the threads but about patterns in how things get said, how often something gets said, what someone gives away about their identity, and so on. Link your conclusions to concrete evidence and not to your own feelings or knowledge about the topic. For instance, if I’m examining a r/SaintSeiya thread naming multiple generations of saints, I can’t just say “this demonstrates hierarchy because you have to have read 4 different series to understand this”; I have to be able to point to specific quotes that indicate that a social hierarchy is taking shape. So, if someone says, “I’m behind on the Lost Canvas gaidens because I have to wait for scanlations,” and that comment is upvoted, now I have evidence that suggests hierarchy in the form of 1) multilingual readers who don’t have to wait for translation, and 2) knowledge as a kind of social currency that is gained by the ability to read more than one manga spinoff in the franchise. I might then quote all the posts that express something like this in that thread, so that later I can also interpret how users expressed it: i.e., maybe they all use similar punctuation or Internet snark; maybe they’re envious; maybe they’re both complaining about waiting for scanlations and also making small talk about each others’ lives.
  • Remember, this essay is about members of a culture, or how people interact around common ground. Your field notes should ultimately be evidence of people’s interactions. One quote per thread does not demonstrate this.
  • Try to jot down all the user quotes where you see a pattern happening, because when you need to link your claims to evidence (i.e., “how do I know what I know?”), this information will be important.
  • Try to choose threads with a significant number of comments (~50 or higher is best), because the more active threads or most upvoted threads are the ones that indicate that the conversation and everything in it is important to the community
  • Don’t impose your opinions or worldviews onto what you’re observing. You may be interested in the subreddit’s topic, you may be knowledgeable about the topic, but primary research is about what you observe, not what you feel about it or what your own beliefs or opinions about the topic are. You shouldn’t be doing much “I think,” “I suspect,” “I believe” etc. about members of the community at this point; primary research is about what those members are actually, visibly doing and saying.
  • Pay attention to the guiding bullet points listed under the Assignment Guidelines, as these can help you pinpoint verbal/tonal patterns and social dynamics in your community. You don’t have to answer all those questions but I’m noticing that students who do are already brainstorming their way towards a controlling idea for Essay 3 Phase 2.
  • I noticed some students emphasizing images/artifacts, but that’s not the point of this essay. You might use threads that involve images, but the point of the essay isn’t to analyze the images.
  • You must be looking at different threads than you used for your previous essays. This means if you used a thread for your Unit 2 work, you cannot reuse that thread for Unit 3.