Digital Ethnography Evaluation

These are the questions I will ask myself as I evaluate the effectiveness of your project:

Your argument

• Do you demonstrate an advanced and mature level of engagement with the community you studied? Does your work present findings that suggest you understand the complex issues surrounding how the community interacts, communicates, and works; what the community values; and what it means to community members to belong to this group?
• Are your descriptions and conclusions based solidly on the data you collected? Do you avoid making conclusions that your data cannot persuasively support? This means having not only the right kinds of data to support your conclusions, but enough of it.
• Do you cultivate the ethos of an ethical researcher? Do you avoid misrepresentation, deception, prejudice, exploitation, and bias?
• Do you introduce and describe your community in an appropriate manner for an uninitiated audience?

The production

Your project should also reflect a sense of craft, and work to establish it's ethos as a consciously designed artifact.

• Is the text in your project readable, the audio comprehensible, and/or the visuals clear? I do not expect everyone to be a production expert, but your project should work to clearly communicate your argument and what you would want that argument to look like if, say, you had a team of production experts at your command.
• Is your use of digital effects in service to your larger argument, or does it just stand in the way or come across as gimmickry? Do your effects have a rhetorical impact, or are you using them just because you can?