Week 3, Day 4

As we move toward the culmination of your contributions to the Digital Polarization Initiative, it's time to think about your work within its rhetorical situation: the context in which you are attempting to persuade an audience. It's time to embrace the collaborative nature of encyclopedic writing.

Goals:

• Complete the research for your claim and add your findings to your digipo.io article
• Copyedit your article for stylistic consistency and best practice
• Continue working on your Second Module (Digital Culture)

Building your Article

By now, you've had experience with three of the primary skills: checking for previous work, going upstream, and reading laterally. The fourth "move", "Circle Back," is basically to repeat the previous steps until you're satisfied. As a group, it's time to move toward a consensus about your claim and flesh out the sections of the article, according to the Digipo Style Guide.

To summarize:

• The title of your article should match the claim, and should be in the form of a question
• The answer assigns a specific truth value to your claim.
• The origin and prevelance section discusses the origin of your claim, its distribution, and its popularity. This is where you can discuss the number of facebook shares or retweets it may have received in its different cycles of virality.
• The issues and analysis section digs into the claim, unpacks its implications, and justifies your choice for the truth value assignment. In a good article, this may be several paragraphs with deep links to source material and analysis of quotes within their context.
• Optionally, a timeline section can be useful to convey the sequence of events in your stories life cycle.

Work with your team to coordinate your research on this claim, and remember to be bold and precise in your assertions. Make your status designation as close to True or False as possible.

Editing your article

Finally, you should edit your article clarity and style. This should be a continual process as you work, especially as you approach completion. Remember, don't be shy about rewriting something that someone else wrote. If you think you have a better way of expressing something, then by all means change it.

If you really aren't sure about something, you can made the edit in "suggestion mode" so others can review it, or you can add comments on your edits explaining your changes.

Stylistically, your prose should be clear and neutral, following the example Wikipedia describes in their style guide about maintaining a Neutral Point of View.

Working on your Second Module

By now, your group has chosen a module for this second round, so continue to work on your independent project for that module. Remember, these are self-guided, self-selected projects, but you have a team working on similar projects that you can use as a resource for feedback, help, and encouragement, and the suggestions on the module descriptions pages are just that: suggestions. You can do any, all, or none of them, so long as you explain your choice in that first blog entry.

As you'll recall, you should eventually have at least two blog entries and a short video about the module project:

• an intial blog entry introducing the module, explaining why that topic matters, and laying out what you plan to do
• a 90-second video explaining what you learned, what you built, and why that matters.
• And a concluding blog entry wrapping things up and linking to or embedding your video.

Have fun!