Down to the Wire

I'm meeting with Dawnja tomorrow afternoon, and I'm frantically finishing up both my writing and the social media campaign I just started. I've managed to get most of my content onto the Tumblr site, and am actively looking for ways to present the paper more interactively. As a wiki? Google docs? Hopefully I will have a link to both this site and the paper in an editable form up on the Tumblr site by tomorrow morning. For now, I'm heading to bed.

The Tumblr Page is Live! (and in progress...)

I'm working to migrate all the important content (list of videos, photo galleries, news articles, quotes, blogs, Twitter posts, Facebook invites, etc) over to my newly-established Tumblr account, but the platform is working nicely for me so far. If I can find a way to link to my paper via google docs, I'll have a complete social media campaign project. All my content will be publicly accessible and linkable, illustrating the importance to mastering different uses of social media for activism and education in general.

Solution!

I woke up still trying to figure out the best place to present all my content, and I think I've got a solution: Tumblr! It's a blogging platform that's much more flexible and customizable than Blogger, but still easy to use. I signed up for an account, and will begin migrating all the photos, videos, websites, audio interviews, and other rich media I've collected today.

Delicious Bibliography?

I started working with a researching Delicious a few months back, and I'm realizing as the paper/project come down to their final days, my account will serve better as a storehouse for all the links I want to embed in my paper than as a bibliography of actual scholarly references. The reason is two-fold: 1) not all the scholarly articles I'm working with are available in an easily linked online version (many of them require logins or other password protects to access) and 2) this use is better integrated with the purpose of delicious, which is not only to store but to share online content. It is much more likely that a link to a newspaper article, flickr gallery, or youtube video will foster interaction on delicious than a post to a journal article. I will also post my articles to delicious if possible, and create a web-based bibliography to link to from delicious, but I'm confident this new use will serve my project better than I had originally intended by giving me more flexibility and allowing me to share a greater range of content on my topic in one place.

Progress Update #2

I'm up to 7 pages, and I haven't even really started my analysis (mostly recounting the New School case study and tracing the history of social media/internet activism). The paper will probably shape up to be somewhere between 15 and 20 pages. I've got to set up a meeting with Dawnja to figure out a final meeting date/deadline, but I'm looking to have the writing and pulling together of all my links/files done this weekend, so I have a few days to assemble it in the correct format and present it to her by the end of next week.

Progress Update- Paper

I started writing the paper this morning, and got through about 4 pages of it before I called it quits. A few weeks back, I recruited a certain future librarian to help me find journal articles dealing with the topic of the internet/social media and activism. She provided a whole bunch of relevant content, and right now I'm focusing on two in particular, "Organizing MySpage: Youth Walkouts, Pleasure, Politics, and New Media" by K. Wayne Yang and "The Electronic Republic? Evidence on the Impact of the Internet on Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the U.S." by Phillip Vanfossen.

Alternative Means of Presentation

Less than a month until the end, and I'm exploring different ways to present my final project that will do the rich multimedia content justice. The interactive PDF thing is ok, but I think I can make it even better. I'm exploring different ways to present the paper outside of a traditional full paper/PDF format. One idea I had was creating a modified blog with different sections of the paper being distributed as postings. I did some research, and couldn't find any interesting alternatives for presenting long documents on the web other than in PDF/publication form. I'm going to do a little more digging and hope I find some inspiration, but at this point I'm going to play around with the few ideas I have. Of course, I'd also turn in a regular word doc/pdf version of the paper, but I'd really like to find a more visually engaging way to integrate the rich media content I'm working with than just live hyperlinks.