Paper Reflections

Here's the link to what I would call my final paper, but I know I'll be editing, changing focus, and taking it in new directions before April comes around.

My writing process: 

With this paper, in contrast to so many others I've written in college, I wrote slowly. A lot of the information I gathered while writing blog posts ended up in my final paper (some of it word-for-word from my blog). I wrote in hour or two hour chunks, because that's all that was afforded to me with little Bracken needing my attention. I ended up really enjoying writing this way. I was not to worn out from sitting down and writing an entire day and a half and staying up all night the day the paper is due, which is how I usually write. I feel like I really benefited from being able to roll my topic around in my head for so long and articulate my thesis to so many people during social proof. My thesis changed over and over, and I foresee it changing again.

Some things Dr. Burton commented on while reading my paper:

I didn't really ground my paper in a good, solid close reading of the text. My focus was on contextual evidence, and my paper may have benefited from a good character or thematic analysis. But as it is, I believe my argument really does center around context, so I may not go back and add this in.

This has a lot to do with my intended audience for the paper, which was another thing Dr. Burton asked about. He said my paper seemed divided in its function and purpose: was this a Shakespeare paper with a little application to modern times or an argument focusing on its audience as academics with a little history to back it up. I'm thinking, ironically I know since we're in a Shakespeare course, that it is actually more of the latter.


Where to go from here: 


I have a couple different directions I can go and I'm excited about all of them. I'm afraid of turning my paper into quite a monster because of all the purposes, functions, and directions it can include. I'm excited about all of these directions but I may have to settle down and pick just one or a few:

In my paper, I didn't really elaborate, but I believe I am the one working against the traditional definition of folklore as face-to-face interactions. Even my former folklore professor, whom I quote at length in my paper (and adore!), was not terribly interested in discussing the transmission of folklore online and said we were welcome to include it in our end of semester projects, but that he preferred we collect folklore face-to-face. (The bulk of the folklore I collected was from online interactions). It would be interesting to see how correct I am in my assumption that folklorists are resistant to breaking from tradition. I know one of the people I contacted who was involved in folklore studies was incredibly resistant to being involved in anything online. But is he representative of the greater population of folklorists? It'd be interesting to see what research outside of folkloric studies has been done of folklore online: other fields I could look into include anthropology and sociology. Reaching out for social proof in these fields might garner me more of an audience as well.

Another direction I might entertain is aiming at an audience of graduate students and the "rising generation" of academics in convincing them to embrace new media in education and sharing research.

I could definitely stand to include more research on why collaborative work and social proof are better than researching in an individual centered environment.

And one possibility Dr. Burton mentioned is somehow incorporating my research or lending my hand to projects going on in a Digital Civilizations course that I am a former student of, though just how my paper might fit into their work is fuzzy to me.

Well, judging by how much I wrote, I'd definitely say I'm most interested in that first proposition. :)