Today’s Plan:
- Annotation Turn in Activated in Canvas
- Methodology as Recipe
- Reviewing the Homework
- Team Sign Up
- Methodology Brain Storm
- Team Sign-Up and Methodology Development
- The Chaos of Team Collaboration and One-Day a Week Groups
- For Next Class
Annotation Turn-In Activated in Canvas
I got a message this morning asking where to turn in the annotations of the articles I asked you to read last week. I forgot to press the “publish” assignment button-whoops-but you should see the assignment in Canvas now. I copy/pasted the instructions from last week’s course notes into Canvas for your convenience.
Methodology as Recipe
Speaking of those annotations, we’ll be reviewing them in a bit. Our focus will be on their methodologies. As I mentioned last week, when it comes to developing a research methodology, you need to think of two different tasks:
- Explaining to the reader how they put together their sample of texts (in a way that can be replicated–this has to be clear enough that you could replicate their study, which, *wink, wink* might be useful later today/this week)
- Explaining to the reader how they analyzed their sample of texts. This, too, has to be detailed enough that another scholar could attempt to replicate their study (to test its reliability)
To open class, I want us to quickly read this article. We want to break it down into step-by-step recipies. How do I bake a Moyer cake?
Reviewing the Homework
Now that we’ve had some practice, I’d like you to go back over the articles that you read for homework and revise your take on their methodology. We’ve got 6 articles to review:
- Shaw. 2016. Where Is the Queerness in Games? Types of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Content in Digital Games
- Bayeck et al. 2018. Representations of Africans in Popular Video Games
- Utsch. 2017. Queer Identities in Video Games: Data Visualization for a Quantitative Analysis of Representation
- Burgess et al. 2007. Sex, Lies, and Video Games: The Portrayal of Male and Female Characters on Video Game Covers
- Gestos et al. Representation in Video Games: A Systemic Review of Literature in Consideration of Adult Female Well-Being [note–meta analysis, keyword method–focus on findings]
- Burgess et al. 2011. Playing with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences of Racial Stereotypes in Video Games
Methodology Brain Storm: Where and What Might We Collect?
Let’s talk it out. I’ll try and take notes.
Team Sign-Up and Methodology Development
Below are links to three different Google Docs. These will be the workspaces in which you develop your methodology, share your data collection, work out your analysis, and, eventually, draft your report.
Also, as a part of your research methodology, I have made every team a Google Slides presentation and a Google Sheet. These can be used to store/share images and/or links or data analysis.
Say, for instance, that you want to examine video game covers. You will need a way for everyone on the research team to see those covers, and a way for them to enter their analysis (whatever that may be). You might have researchers upload images into the slide presentation, put the name of the image in the spreadsheet, and track researcher evaluations of the image in that spreadsheet.
Say, instead, you were reviewing user ratings of a game on metacritic, and wanted to pay attention to whether user reviews mentioned the presence of an LGBTQ+ character. That wouldn’t require images, but it would require links to the user reviews. Let me show you an example of a team research project I do in my ENG 301 Writing as a Job class using a Google Sheet.
However you develop your methodology, whatever tools you use, I need to be able to track individual artifact contributions so I can reward effort.
Also, as I will touch on more below, working on a team project is often a bit chaotic. That chaos is likely to be intensified with this project, since you are likely going to be on a team with folks with whom you will never meet face-to-face. It is important that we REALLY CLEARLY nail down procedures so everyone is on the same page. It is also important that you tell me right away if you don’t, for instance, know how to grab an image and upload it into a Slides presentation or embed a link in a Google Sheet. I have taught technology long enough to *not* assume that you know how to do these things, but if I get mindless head-nodding when I ask such questions I will move on. Be honest (personally, I loathed all computers and technology until I was 25 and in graduate school; I learned this stuff “later” in life).
Embrace the Chaos
I don’t have time to write this out, so I’ll talk about it in class.
For Next Class
There’s two things you need to do by next week. The first thing is time sensitive.
First you have to spend 30 minutes writing/brainstorming/revising/working in your team document, developing a potential methodology, or tweaking someone else’s.
- If you are in the Tuesday class, then you need to finish this by Wednesday at midnight
- If you are in the Thursday class, then you need to finish this by Friday at 1:00.
These times are non-negotiable. I will sit down on Friday at 1:00, review/refine/revise your methodologies, and send out an email with what you need to complete by your next class meeting. This will be collecting data–but what needs to be collects, and how it needs to be shared/stored will differ according to your developed methodology.
There is an assignment in Canvas that asks you to briefly (two or three sentences) summarize your contributions to the team methodology assignment: tell me what you did in your 30 minutes of contributing. Remember to do this!
