Unit 1: Using Twitter to Understand Culture

new_clean_tweets_silentsam

Unit 1 Project:

For Your Unit Project: You will prepare a 8-10 minute presentation (800-1000) words and 5-6 slides) for a mock DH conference. To gain some better perspective on what a conference presentation looks like, you will want to look at this presentation as an example or you can watch this video from the Memorializing Migration Project.

I will be grading your presentation using this Rubric

Since we do not have time for everyone to present in class, everyone will record their presentations on 2/8/19 and review them with me on a later date.

Think about how your slides will work with your paper. Here is an example of a paper with numbers for slide transitions.

Feeder 1 Assignment:

You will do a literature review of this article or another academic article using twitter like this one.You will be using Nathan Kelber’s Review of Disrupting Digital Humanities as a model, your review should be between 300-600 words. 

Use the following structure:

Introduction: Placing your review in a framework that makes sense to your audience alerts readers to your “take” on the article. The thesis of the article.

Summary of content : This should be brief, as analysis takes priority. In the course of making your assessment, you’ll hopefully be backing up your assertions with concrete evidence from the article, so some summary will be dispersed throughout other parts of the review.

Analysis and evaluation of the article: Your analysis and evaluation should be organized into paragraphs that deal with single aspects of your argument. Given the argument you want to make, you can organize your paragraphs more usefully by themes, methods, or other elements of the article.

Conclusion: Sum up or restate your thesis or make the final judgment regarding the article. This paragraph needs to balance the article’s strengths and weaknesses in order to unify your evaluation. What do they all add up to?

You should have at least these four paragraphs in your Feeder. 

Feeder 1 Due Friday, January 18th at Midnight

Feeder 2 Assignment:

For Your Feeder 2 Assignment: You will be using Tableau or another visualization tool to create 2-3 visualizations based on our #silentsam database.

You will send me powerpoint, jpgs, or pdfs of at least 2 visualizations and any other images you want to use for your presentation. Please give me a guide to what order you want the visualizations and images to go in. It is ok if you change the order or what images you are using for the final project.

Word Frequency:

https://voyant-tools.org/

Tableau Video : if you need help with creating some visualizations.

Feeder 2 Due at Midnight Wednesday , January 30th. 

Scenario

This unit is designed to help you develop the skills any digital humanist will need, how to balance qualitative and qualitative information. No matter what field you eventually pursue, you’ll be able to use these modes to convey important information. Since digital humanists often share their results in a conference, you will compose short 4-5 slide presentation on your findings and post it to our course website. Last but not least, if you want to use this unit in the CDRM Symposium, you will prepare for and participate in an academic conference using the work in this unit.

Background:

On August 20 2018, protesters tore down Silent Sam, a Confederate monument that was located at McCorkle Place on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill. The protest began around 7:00PM at the Peace and Justice Plaza and later moved to McCorkle Place. Protestors used ropes to pull the statue down at approximately 8:24PM. Silent Sam was erected in 1913 as a tribute to “the sons of the University who died for their beloved Southland 1861-1865.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy asserted that the statue would be “in memory of Chapel Hill boys, who left college, 1861-1865 and joined our Southern Army in defense of our State.” As with Confederate monuments across the US, however, contextual analysis reveals that Silent Sam represents more than a simple memorial to fallen students. In a dedication speech on June 2 1913, Confederate veteran Julian Carr stated, “the present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are, that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South – When ‘the bottom rail was on top’ all over the Southern states, and today, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States – Praise God.” A number of resources are available to learn more about the history and controversies surrounding the statue.

For this project, you will be using tweets collected starting February 4th, 2016. We will be  using the TAGS approach for collecting the tweets associated with #silentsam.  Original Spreadsheet available here

Unit 1 Project Breakdown:

Step 1 (Friday, January 11th):

Clean-up and analysis of tweets: Subset of 08/20/18-08/21/18

We will be working on the same spreadsheet as a class.

First, as a class we will filter the tweets in order to avoid duplicates like retweets and spam.

Watch Videos of Protest 1

2

Step 2 (Wednesday, January 16th):

We will work collaboratively to develop categories for understanding the tweets, and then proceeded to read and code the tweets using our categories.

For this work, we will use insights and methods taken from other quantitative data projects related to tweets.

For Your Feeder 1 Assignment You will do a literature review of this article or another academic article using twitter like this one.You will be using Nathan Kelber’s Review of Disrupting Digital Humanities as a model, your review should be between 300-400 words. 

Feeder 1 Due Friday, January 18th at Midnight

Step 3 (Wednesday, January 23rd):

As a class, we will develop metadata for the tweets based on their type, any suggested positions on Silent Sam, the rationale behind any positions, and any suggested attitudes toward the monument. We will also examine any media used within the tweets. The different subcategories for communication type might include: reporting, educational, provoking, and commenting.We might also consider whether tweets indicated a possible position on the future of the Silent Sam monument.

After we code and develop the metadata tags for the tweets, we will use Tableau to find patterns in our coding.

Step 4 (Friday, January 25th):

Dayna Durbin will help us think about how to do research in the humanities and find articles to help support our arguments about #silentsam using library pages like this one.

Step 5 (Monday, January 28th):

For Your Feeder 2 Assignment: You will be using Tableau or another visualization tool to create 2-3 visualizations based on our #silentsam database.

Feeder 2 Due at Midnight Wednesday, January 30th. 

Step 6 (Friday, February 1st):

As a class, I will present some of our preliminary findings to the Migrations Lab at Duke University to help you think about how you can argue with the Twitter Data.

Step 7 (Friday, February 8th):

For Your Unit Project: You will prepare a 10 minute presentation (800-1000 words and 5-6 slides) for a mock DH conference. To gain some better perspective on what a conference presentation looks like, you will want to look at this presentation as an example or you can watch this video from the Memorializing Migration Project.

I will be grading your presentation using this Rubric

Sign Up for Times to Present to me (you will only need to present to me, not the whole class): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N2YgP013L8-QObh4epA7edXMtI_eLBU33EhS7IotCVA/edit?usp=sharing