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Digital Essay Project (Assignment Example)

Tina Van Kley has asked her Writing 5 students to re-mediate a research essay as what she calls (borrowing from Dan Cohen) a "digital essay." Students radically reshape and rewrite their projects for a public, online audience. They work toward the early drafts by exploring public writing on the web, noticing how the conventions of academic writing are both harnessed and changed in public online writing.  Students draft and complete the project as a single page on their portfolio sites. You can see an example of student work from winter 2019: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/rayhcrist22/digital-essay/

Tina has shared a copy of the assignment text as it appeared in a recent class:

Project 3: Digital Essay

Your final project is to adapt your topic and research for Project 2 for a new, broad audience and digital medium, using your Dartmouth WordPress site.

Historian and New Media scholar Dan Cohen defines the digital essay (or – more controversially – “blessay”) as “a manifestation of the convergence of journalism and scholarship in mid-length forms online.” He cites the kind of thoughtful, informed writing found at places like The Atlantic’s website (Links to an external site.), Longform.org (Links to an external site.), and The New Yorker (Links to an external site.), or hear on NPR shows and podcasts like the investigative pieces on This American Life (Links to an external site.). We will read and listen to examples of such work to discuss the genre and its features. Some characteristics of the digital essay, as developed by Cohen (Links to an external site.):

      1. Mid-length: more ambitious than a blog post, less comprehensive than an academic article. Written to the length that is necessary, but no more. If we need to put a number on it, generally 1,000-3,000 words.
      2. Informed by academic knowledge and analysis, but doesn’t rub your nose in it.
      3. Uses the apparatus of the web more than the apparatus of the academic journal, e.g., links rather than footnotes. Where helpful, uses supplementary evidence from images, audio, and video—elements that are often missing or flattened in print.
      4. Expresses expertise but also curiosity. Conclusive, but also suggestive.
      5. Written for both specialists and an intelligent general audience. Avoids academic jargon—not to be populist, but rather out of a feeling that avoiding jargon is part of writing well.

Additional characteristics:

      • The writer is often "present" in the piece, via use of first-person pronouns and/or anecdotes.
      • Digital essays look different from traditional academic essays. Rather than titles, they have headlines and sub-headlines that give the motive and/or thesis. Paragraphs are often much shorter, and spacing is used strategically for online consumption, which prioritizes speed, efficiency, and high degree of skim-ability.

As with Projects 1 and 2, Project 3 is argumentative, but the approach taken should be exploratory and questioning, as implied by Cohen’s phrase “conclusive but also suggestive.” The imagined audience is anyone who might find your site in a search related to your topic, i.e., general but willing to read something that would take 45 minutes to an hour to read.

Basic Requirements:

    • Use WordPress site
    • 1,000-3,000 words in length
    • Includes both visual and/or aural content that is integrated with the writing
    • Includes at least 2 primary and at least 3 secondary sources (at least 2 of which should be scholarly)
    • In addition to fulfilling the basic requirements, essays will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
      1.  Is the essay clearly addressed to a broad audience?
      2. Does the essay make appropriate use of the digital medium (e.g., includes a/v content, hyperlinks, etc.), or does it look like a typical academic essay copied and pasted onto a web page?
      3. Are digital elements (such as video, audio, images, etc.) incorporated effectively into the writing, and captioned, cited, or linked to appropriately?
      4. Does the essay identify the most appropriate source materials and methods for researching the topic?
      5. Is the essay’s thesis persuasive? Is it supported with convincing evidence and analysis?
      6. Is the essay organized, and does it include sufficient background for audiences unfamiliar with the topic?