Hi All,
Please see a draft of my paper attached to this post. I look forward to any feedback anyone can offer. I’d be interested to know if you think my thesis is supported throughout, if the general argument makes sense, and if the case study is clearly explained as well as general thoughts. Looking forward to any feedback!
It’s really exciting to see this paper coming together. I think you have identified a significant topic that has been yet to really be explored in a significant way. The different language wikipedias seem like clearly interesting spaces to explore the development of public memory in different language communities and you do a great job at illustrating that.
On your question about how to approach the inclusion of text in the essay, I think it might be good for you to present the texts from the wikipedia pages as block quotes and then include only the parts of the text that you will then go into some line by line analysis of. A lot of what you are interested in is about framing and how the collectively authored text establishes a way of approaching the history of the site, so it makes sense to use some longer quotes, but if you do that it would be good to build this around block quotes.
The content from the talk pages is really fascinating. It’s powerful to see how clearly users of the sites are establishing and asserting national identities in relation to the different language wikipedias.
At this point, the paper more than meets the requirements for the course. I think you are also well on your way to having something publishable. My primary suggestion at this point would be for you to identify what journal you think you would submit this to and then start working backward from there top tailor the piece to the context of that journal. For example, I could see something like this working for a journal that does new media/digital media studies (like New Media and Society, or First Monday). That said, I could also see this working more as a piece for a journal focused on public memory or public history. Once you pick the journal, you could then work to make sure that you are connecting directly with a lot of the scholarship that has been published in that journal over time and frame the focus of the piece directly in line with their particular focus.