In my research paper, I plan to discuss how the college democrats use their social media to stay active in their community, on campus, and in the political process. For my personal profile I interviewed my friend Brian, and talked to him about a project he’s working on. I also interviewed Nathan Davis. He gave me a lot of good information on how the College Democrats run, and I plan to scatter this info throughout my paper. I feel like it gives some really good and simple explanations on the inner workings of the organization. I’m mostly going to use it in the community profile, to explain the different things the College Democrats advertise on their social media pages, such as the forums and rallies and voting booths and canvassing. My research proposal actually took a really big shift just yesterday, so I have to rework my annotated bibliography. I found one really good article about the impact of social media on activism, and I plan on looking for more sources similar to that one. For my text analysis, I talked with Mat about a really good idea. The College Democrats post a lot of documents discussing new policies under the Trump administration, and the plan is to look at several of those documents, and discuss the ways they are similar and the ways they are different. For example, one text I plan to look at is this document about Trump’s separation policy. The Dems give an outline of the actions, their feelings and their response, and at the end give information for a rally that happened at the Capitol in response to it. I want to look at a few of these types of documents and discuss how the responses are similar and if there’s anything different, like if the response is a little less angry or maybe even more.
For feedback on my personal profile, I’d like to know some ways I could shape it to fit my research proposal a little better. We talked for a while about the way College Democrats use social media and how he uses social media. The answers I got were good, but for some reason it didn’t seem to fit the way the paper was going and I’m not sure how to get back to the original prompt. The paper turned out to be mostly what he does in the College Democrats and a little of what he does outside of it. I also am trying to come up with a good conclusion to tie it all together. I’d really like to talk about how the project he’s working on outside of the Dems is representative of the organizations mission, but I’d also really like to tie it in with the whole social media aspect. It would not be ideal to have to change my whole prompt again. I also would like to find some ways to include more of my personal commentary. I have about 25 minutes of material to work with, and the paper is mostly quotes from him. I thought it came out pretty well, and I feel like even paraphrasing him would change the tone into something I’m not really going for. That’s another thing I’d like to work on.
I’d also like to find some more ways to work my interview with Nathan Davis into the paper. He gave me some really good information and quotes that I would love to include. I asked things like what happens at the average meeting, and he talked to me about what they plan to change next year. The change next year is something I talked about with Brian as well, and I thought it was pretty interesting. I’m not sure if this is something I should include in my paper, because it might be outside information that doesn’t relate to my thesis. But we talked about how we think the way the social media pages should change, so I thought it might be good to include. I’m just not exactly sure where. Back to my interview with Nathan, I also got information on just the way things are run. I don’t know where the quotes would be fitting though, so I would like to discuss that today.
For my community profile, I am questioning whether I have enough commentary. I think I discussed plenty of different types of posts you’ll see on their page. For example, I talked about the Dem Spotlight, events with local politicians, and different rallies the College Democrats encourage their members to attend. I’m wondering, however, if my commentary and observations are too superficial. I definitely don’t want to try to find an in person place to do my community profile about, because this fits way better with my proposal. I’d like to ask if I should write more about events outside the College Democrats, like the article in my bibliography, and relate the Dems back to that. I’m not sure if that would detract from my description if the way the Dems community runs though.
The feedback I’d like on my annotated bibliography is pretty simple. I’d like to know if I went to in depth with my commentary, and if I hit every aspect of what we needed to include that was discusses in BBG chapter 13.
For my text analysis, I think I’d like to discuss where we could start. My plan is to talk about the documents I discussed earlier. I also thought that maybe it was a good idea to talk about how some documents of different formats were related, and how they all convey the same overall plan and goal. However, that might cause my paper to be a little too scattered, so I’m not sure if that’s the best idea. Sticking with my original plan, I plan to talk mostly about the Dems’ responses to policy actions. I would also like to look into the different rallies they attend and how they are similar.
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