Alexis' Portfolio

This class taught us about the complexity of arguing on the internet. We discussed and explored many different types of mediums and ways to argue information and viewpoints. Through all the exploration in this class, we learned a lot about problem solving and risk taking. Because the class got so much freedom in the direction we took our projects, we were able to tap into our creativity. When times got hard or stressful in the semester, this class tested our adaptability. Some of the projects built on our collaboration and leadership and every day in class our open discussions help strengthen our communication and critical thinking.

The innovative projects given to us made us critically think about the roles textual, visual, and sonic mediums play in creative arguments specifically on the internet. With textual based media, information is easily absorbed by the audience, and a lot of information can be given and the audience can read it at their own pace. Though with textual based media the information can be a little dull and sometimes wordy if the author isn’t concise with their writing. With visual-based media, information is more up to the interpretation of the audience. This could mean more people are able to relate to the information given and it can be more entertaining for the audience as well. Though with visual-based media the information could be taken in a way that was unintended by the author because people interpret things differently. With sonic based media, information is given to the audience just how the author wants it to be delivered. People can also get the information without having to read a long essay or work to interpret something visual. Though with sonic based media the audience will often miss information if the author talks to fast. The audience also often have a hard time visualizing data points when they are just hearing them. In this class, we were able to work with all these types of mediums and figure out the strengths and weakness of all of them. As well as conclude the appropriate time to use each type.

Many of the activities Professor Anderson had us do made us think critically. For example, he would give us a prompt related to whatever topic we were working on and give us a set amount of time and tell us to just write. We were told to write for the entire time, normally around five minutes, and just try to get everything we wanted to down. Through activities like this, my critical thinking was tested, having to figure out what I wanted to say and how to stay it all in a short amount of time. It's a very helpful tool in life, and really helpful currently for things like taking timed exams.

As we go through all the projects I’ve worked on in class I’m going to continue bringing up all the skills I’ve been able to practice and develop. I hope you enjoy reading through my reflections on this class and the projects.

The first task of the semester was to create a twitter report. We had to take a hashtag, analyze the tweets that used that hashtag, and then write up a report. Before we really got started on the report we talked about the use of hashtags and looked at many different views points regarding how people think of hashtags. I made this comment on an article that the class read on how the hashtag is ruining the English language. I also made this comment on an article that the class read on how people use Twitter. We explored different potential hashtags for our report on our own and created TAGS sheets for different hashtags to get an idea of what hashtag we’d like to research further.

Once I settled on a hashtag that I wanted to use I did a little manipulating in the TAGS google spreadsheet to narrow down the amount of tweets I was going to have to analyze. Here is a comment I made that included the link to my google spreadsheet. I got the number of tweets I analyzed down to 100 by limiting my data to the past seven days, eliminating all retweets, and considering only the tweets that were written in English. I started to create columns to describe each of the 100 tweets like if the tweet was written by a guy or a girl, or if it was showing logos or pathos. I used this information to create graphs that I used to add visualizations to my twitter report. My analysis of the tweets included, males tweeted more on the subject, most of the tweets included a link to other information, the majority of the tweets believed climate change is a serious problem, a good amount of the tweets had bashing tones, and almost all of the tweets used pathos over logos. The focus of the tweets were all over the place and there is no clear majority but a lot of tweets focused on sustainability.

This is the draft of my twitter report. The content is very similar to my final draft though I did do a few revisions. When revising the Twitter Analysis Report I started by just fixing the grammatical errors that professor Anderson gave to me. This included when to have percentage signs and when not to, including figure numbers, and overall tightening my writing up. Next I worked on fixing some coding errors and creating better axis titles for my graphs. I found that I didn’t need to change too much on this project, the draft was basically at a finished level. I just went back and polished it.

Here is a link to the draft

Here is a link to the final

From this project I was able to work on problem solving. Particularly when it came to the coding part of this report. I had to work around embedding tweets that wouldn’t work if there was an emoji and some pictures hand weird squares under them. But figuring out a way around these issues built upon my problem solving skills. I worked hard to make the textual report less dull by breaking the text up with the graphs and inserting horizontal lines. When looking at logic versus emotion as aspects of internet argument I think about the twitter report project, it was the very first one we did in class. We look at about a hundred tweets and analyzed them, one of the things we focused on were if the tweets were showing signs of using logic or emotion. The other portion of this is ethos which is like credibility, which was very hard to come by when looking at tweets. Most tweets would include something that gave off signs of being more based on logic by using facts or numbers, or more based on emotion by giving personal experiences. Though this project really showed me that it wasn't all black and white, there were some cases were a tweet would show signs of using both logic and emotion which shows how complicated internet arguments can be.

The next task was to create an audio essay. We were supposed to explore a topic associated with the themes of our class. I picked to focus on age limits on social media. We were told to conduct research on our topic and find scholarly videos or audio segments to use as evidence in our audio essay. We had to create a script that we would read off of when we started to record. Before we actually started recording we listened to examples of audio essays to get some inspiration. Here is a link to a comment I made on a few audio essays we listened to. While creating a draft of our script we read on article on how to script something that is going to be read out loud. Here is a link to a comment I made on how I was going to create a script. Here I have the first thing I created for my audio essay, the script.

Link to script

The next think we needed to complete for our audio essay was finding scholarly videos or audio recording of information regarding our topics. The topic I choice was if social media was considered and addictive substance and if so, she we have an age restriction on it. Here is a link to a comment I made on the scholarly videos I found for my audio essay. The next thing we did was practice using audacity, which is the program we used to create our audio essays. I’ve included the audio of the practice piece I had made in class. We were taught about the best way to collect sound files online, Professor Anderson gave us a few links to different sites for background music and different sound effects. He also taught us how to rip audio segments, which has come in handy not only in this class but in my other classes as well.

Similar to the Twitter Analysis Report, my Audio Essay project draft was essentially at a finished level. The feedback I had received from my peer was majority positive only leaving a few comments on things that could be changed. My peer said things like, include more notification sounds with the typing at the beginning and make sure the background music doesn’t get too loud. A sample we looked at in class used a lot of dinging and notification sounds at the beginning, so I didn’t want to piggyback off that sample too much so I decided to just include the typing and a singular notification sound. I did take my peers' advice and faded out my background music a little more and raised my voice up slightly. My professor gave feedback as well, saying things like, delete the phrase “that states” and work on polishing transitions. After receiving my professor’s feedback I went back and deleted the phrase to tighten up the essay and I worked on not having such long gaps in between each clip to make those transitions smoother.

We got feedback from not only our Professor but from our peers as well. I was able to get some valuable suggestions from my peers and I was able to give valuable criticism too my peers. Here is a link to the feedback I gave two of my peers. With all the suggestions I was given I was able to create my finished audio essay. In the essay I come to the conclusion that yes social media is addictive and should be taken as serious as other addictive substances. I also mention that there is already an age restriction on social media use, but because it isn’t enforced there is nothing stopping younger people from using social media. I ended it with telling the audience to use social media in moderation and leaving it to the parents to enforce the age restrictions of social media. Reflecting back on the entire audio essay there were a lot of moments when I wasn't sure what do to, specifically technical. I had a few problems with getting the music at the beginning just right and then working on having my voice levels correct. Because I had all these difficulties I was able to work on my problem solving abilities. If I wasn't able to figuring out how to do something, I use the resources available to me to figure out things out, those being YouTube tutorials, my professor, and classmates.

Before going straight into the podcast project I've included a comment I made a few weeks ago on the difference between audio essays and podcasts. Audio essays are simply more like essays than podcasts. They are more scripted with audio clips that act like quotations that would be put into a written essay. You have to figure out how to weave in audio clips and have something to say about them just like you would with a written essay. Podcasts are more like a presentation in a class, where you know your topic and what you're going to say, but it's not memorized or written down anywhere word for word. It's more of a conversation, just like a class presentation is. In a podcast, you're explaining your material in a more relaxed manner. Audio essays also normally have a single person that's speaking and guiding the audience through the material, with only a few seconds of a different voice. Whereas podcasts may have someone that introduces the group, but it is normally made up of a lot of talking from multiple different people, there is no one person guiding us through all the main points.