Hi! We’re almost there! If any of you are going to read my paper, I would be very grateful for any feedback. I plan on extensively editing it.
HIST 477/677 American University
HIST 477/677 American University
Hi! We’re almost there! If any of you are going to read my paper, I would be very grateful for any feedback. I plan on extensively editing it.
Really impressed with the draft you have worked up. This is a great topic. You have identified significant source material and you have situated the study in a good bit of existing literature.
It would be good to hear a bit more about how you selected the images that you focus your analysis on. That is, is this a representative sample? Did you review all the images avaliable for a given period? Are these the images that came up most directly in searching and viewing information from the site and thus they are the most likely for people looking at the site to come across? Whatever way you went about selection, it would be good to hear a bit about that and for you to express the potential limitations that come from that. That is, are we looking at typical ways that users interact with the site or at exemplary ways that these interactions vary?
The paper has a great deal of good examples from the different media platforms and you do a nice job explicating some of the complexity of the ways that different users are interacting with the site. So the good news there is you have a great body of material that you have gathered together and you are doing some really smart interpretive work with it.
I would say that you’ve more than demonstrated a great understanding of concepts from the course and you’ve engaged in a significant research project that has demonstrated that there is good resulting material here. If you decide to take this work forward, I think you are well on your way to something that could be a publishable piece of scholarship.
If you want to invest time and energy in getting this work prepared for submission to a journal I would suggest that you step back and think a bit about which kind of journal you would want to publish this in. I think you could go to a public history journal, to a journal focused on memory and the holocaust, or to a journal focused on digital media studies (new media and society, or First Monday for example.) Once you decide on where to try and publish it, I would suggest taking a pass at reframing the essay into the specific lens that journal would approach the topic from. My other suggestion at that point would be to take a pass at reviewing the full scope of what you cover in the piece and clarifying what your thesis will be. At this point, you have a fascinating survey of content across multiple sites and you document a lot of different trends and issues. At some points that becomes a bit overwhelming. It strikes me that you could go in two directions with this. One would be to focus on instagram (that is where the bulk of your analysis is focused) the other would be to focus on cross site analysis (in which case you would probably want to do less instagram to even out your coverage of the sites).
You have a series of interesting ideas coming out in the conclusion. With that noted, it would be good to make sure that you (either in the conclusion or in a discussion section before the conclusion) return to the three areas from your literature review up front. As it stands, it’s not entirely clear to me as a reader how what you’ve engaged with in your analysis results in a new understanding or a deeper understanding of the three areas you outlined in the literature review section. I know the connections are there, I just need more help as a reader for you to close the loop on those.