Requirements + Assignments

Attendance, Engagement, and Collegiality: 20%
Introductory Slide (January 30): 5%
Local Media Audit (February 13): 20%
Local Media Remediation Strategies (In-Class February 20): 5%
Reading Response (you choose your date): 10%
Field Guide Proposal (Friday, April 5, by 5pm): 15%
Field Guide Contribution + Presentation (April 30): 25%

Via Present & Correct; used with permission

ATTENDANCE, ENGAGEMENT, AND COLLEGIALITY   

Our class is a mix of lecture, seminar, and workshop, and its success depends on your regular attendance and reliable engagement as a constructive colleague. I strive to create an inclusive, accommodating classroom – one that’s responsive to students’ competing demands, disparate backgrounds, varying styles of learning, and particular access needs, etc. –  that should enable (and, I hope, incentivize!) all of you to attend and engage. 

What does it mean to “attend” and “engage collegially”?

  • It means showing up on time to scheduled class, group, and individual meetings;
    • Absences: While I hope you’ll all be able to join us every week, everyone gets two free absences, no questions asked. Again, I simply request that you please notify me of your absence in advance, if you can, via email so I can plan group activities accordingly. Any absences in excess of two will impact your attendance grade. If you miss four or more classes, I’ll advise you to withdraw in order to avoid a failing grade. Please note that absences include missed individual and small group meetings, as well as those days you might miss at the beginning of the semester because of late registration. 
    • Catching Up: If you do need to miss a class, please do your best to catch up via the course documentation on our class website and through your classmates. If these resources prove insufficient, you’re welcome to chat with me during office hours. 
  • It means making your best effort to complete the readings, screenings, and exercises in advance of each class session; please see “About the Readings, Screenings, and Listening Exercises” 
  • It means doing your best to honor assignment deadlines; please see our Deadline Policy; 
  • It means communicating with the instructor about any pedagogical obstacles or personal challenges you’re facing, so we can work collaboratively to design accommodations;
    • Accommodations: While I’m happy to work with you to tailor the class’s content and assignments to your interests, and to help you develop strategies for project planning and time management – and while I aim to be sympathetic to any challenges you might face both inside and outside the classroom – I ask that you please also respect my time and acknowledge my load of responsibilities. I can’t allow expectations for accommodation to compromise my own wellbeing.
  • It means being prepared to engage constructively and respectfully with your colleagues. Your contributions during class can take a number of forms, depending upon your strengths and preferences and the day’s varying demands and stresses [I’m indebted here to Max Liboiron]:
    • You could contribute to our in-class discussions, while also monitoring the power of your voice and ensuring that others have room to contribute, too;
    • You could contribute to collaborative note-taking;
    • You could help with timekeeping by marking our progress through the day’s agenda, or by ensuring that student presentations proceed on pace, leaving no one short-shrifted!;
    • You could write the creators of any of the texts or projects we examine this semester to let them know why you appreciate their work (please cc me!);
    • You could offer some form of mutual aid to your classmates or propose another means of building intellectual camaraderie
  • It means sharing our commitment to Inclusion and Respect. 

Attendance and engagement account for 20% of your final grade. 

INTRODUCTORY SLIDE 

Described below, under Week 2. These slides should be posted before class starts on January 30, and are an easy way to fulfill 5% of your course obligations 😊

LOCAL MEDIA AUDIT

Described below, under Week 4. This project, due by before class on Tuesday, February 13, accounts for 20% of your final grade. 

LOCAL MEDIA REMEDIATION STRATEGIES 

Described below, under Week 5. This work will take place in class on February 20, and it’s another easy way to fulfill 5% of your course obligations. 

READING RESPONSE

The degree of pre-semester and weekly preparation for this class — combined with my broader workload — won’t afford me sufficient time to review weekly reading responses. Plus, some of our weeks involve other activities that invite you to do the reflective, synthetic thinking that traditional reading responses are intended to inspire. I wouldn’t ask you to do work that won’t be appropriately acknowledged, and won’t help to shape our class discussions. So, I invite each of you to share only one reading response this semester; please sign up for a single date here: February 27 (Public Access Television), March 12 (Local Radio), or March 19 (Community Networks). 

By 12 noon on your chosen date (to give me time to review and synthesize your work before class), I ask that you please visit our collaborative Reading Response Slide Deck to share two or three slides that cover the following :

  • Your name.  
  • A 200- to 300-word post (1) synopsizing the overarching themes in the readings / screenings / listening exercises for that week; (2) identifying any particular passages, examples, arguments that struck you, inspired you, troubled you, etc.; and (3) offering a potential discussion question that expands upon those resonant passages and provocative ideas. 
  • A 150-word description of an “elastically” relevant concrete example (this means I welcome productive tangents!) that reflects your own unique interests and experiences. How did the readings make you think differently about something with which you have direct experience, or something that’s long fascinated you? If, say, we’re reading about community networks, tell us about that mutual aid network you helped to organize, or about that secret flashlight signaling system you developed with all the neighborhood kids years ago. Or, if we’re reading about local radio, tell us about specific ambient sounds that provide an unofficial soundtrack for your community, or about the role of word-of-mouth, or gossip, in establishing in-groups and out-groups in your community. This segment of the response is intended to allow you to share what you alone know! 

Feel free to incorporate photos, sketches, videos, links to audio files, etc. if you like. I encourage you to be creative and have fun. 

Why a slide deck? First, because the “pitch deck” is a common form, used across myriad fields of study and practice and a wide range of industries; we can co-opt and creatively re-interpret it. Second, because the constraints of the format not only require concision — they compel us to distill and crystallize — but they can also prove generative: as most artists and designers know, formal limitations create boundaries we can push against. You’re welcome to experiment with the form, if you like! Third, and relatedly, the slide format allows you to incorporate multiple media forms — to design your contribution — if you so choose. You’ll find some examples of inventive/subversive uses of slide decks on this Arena channel.

Your reading response accounts for 10% of your final grade.

FIELD GUIDE PROPOSAL 

We’ll be collaboratively creating a Philadelphia Local Media Field Guide. We’ll talk in class about the field guide as a format or genre, and how we can creatively reinterpret it to suit our purposes. Each of you is invited to contribute, for your final project, one substantial entry to the guide. We want to make sure our collective work is as strong as it can be — and that it does justice to the local venues and communities we’re featuring — so you’ll benefit from multiple rounds of constructive, collegial feedback, including at the conceptualization / proposal stage.  

You’re welcome to chat with me and your classmates at any time throughout the semester about potential topics. I ask each of you to submit a proposal, via Google Docs (create a Doc, “share” it with me, and please make sure to make me an “editor” and to click the box to “notify me!”), by 5pm on Friday, April 5. In lieu of our regular weekly gathering that week, we’ll be meeting one-on one- for a half-hour on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, to discuss your proposed project — and how to make it as compelling, enjoyable, and meaningful as possible.  

Proposal Format: In 900 words or fewer, please outline: 

  • The site, venue, or medium you’ll be focusing on.
  • What does it look, sound, and feel like? How big or small is it? How would you describe your subject if it were a bird or a tree we were featuring in a field guide? What other qualities are salient? 
  • What interests you about your subject? 
  • What’s the “habitat” or site of your chosen item? Does it reside in a particular neighborhood, on a particular rooftop, under the ground, etc.? What’s significant about that area or site? Is your subject stationary, or does it move around — through the air, through the post, through hand-to-hand exchange, etc? What are its “migratory” habits? 
  • What’s the status or condition of your subject? Is it thriving? Has it become an invasive species? Is it endangered? If so, what’s threatening it? 
  • What academic research, criticism, and primary resources — from archival resources to Instagram posts — pertain to your subject?
    • Have any scholars, journalists, or critics, or everyday folks on social media written (or created podcasts, documentaries, photo essays or other descriptive or analytic features) about the specific item you plan to study? Have scholars written about your specific subject, or about the general class of object / site / phenomenon you’re investigating? For example, if you’re writing about a specific interactive kiosk, is there research about interactive displays in general that could be of use to you? 
    • Please list at least five sources — a mix of scholarly and non-scholarly — and briefly describe, in 300 words or fewer, what you’ve learned from them. 
  • Please include a photo (or two… or three) if you can! 
  • What questions or concerns might you have? Are there issues you want to be sure to discuss with me and your classmates? 

Your proposals are due by 5pm on Friday, April 5, and account for 15% of your final grade. 

FIELD GUIDE CONTRIBUTION + PRESENTATION  

One of our collective projects for the semester is to create a field guide to Philadelphia’s local media. I’m sure you’ve seen field guides for trees and birds, but what might it mean to create a field guide for media? For all the street signs and newspapers and antennae and surveillance camera networks and community radio collectives and idiosyncratic libraries and billboards and tacked-up “lost pet” signs and interactive kiosks and other media — big and small, official and guerilla — that populate our city? What are their morphological characteristics and habitats and characteristic behaviors? What other qualities distinguish how media function as media? 

In class, we’ll explore some examples of traditional and experimental field guides, and we’ll collaboratively design a structure for the collection as a whole as well as a format for our individual entries. Please feel free to share inspiration, compelling precedent projects, etc., here!

Each of you will then be invited to contribute one substantial entry — 1500 to 2000 words of “body copy” (i.e., excluding footnotes, captions, etc), illustrated with various captioned media. 

The current plan is to have you submit your work before our final class on April 30 – but if we choose to produce a designed, edited, publicly distributed publication, we’ll have to work in at least one round of editorial review and copyediting 🚧📝 Your contribution is worth 25% of your grade. 

Drafts will be due before class on April 23; these drafts needn’t be absolutely perfect, but they should be sufficiently well developed and edited — with at least sketches / prototypes of all media, captions for all media, and 80% of all body copy — so Shannon can make the best use of her time in providing a substantial, detailed edit 🙂 You’ll receive your edits within two days, at which point you can revise, refine and submit your final material on April 30. 

To facilitate our design process, we ask that your submissions all adhere to the following format, please: 

Submission 

  • Please add all material to your folder on our Shared Drive.
  • Google Doc: LastName_FieldGuideSubmission
    • A title of no more than 100 characters
    • Your name as you would like it to appear
    • Body Copy 
      • We agreed that we want to foster formal experimentation and individualization, but that we also want some structural consistency across all entries. So, we ask that all entries start with these two sections, modeled after biological field guide categories:
        • Species or Site: here’s where you simply identify the thing / entity / place you’re focusing on!
        • Phenotype (here’s what it means): here’s where you describe the observable traits of your thing / entity / place: what does it look like, what are its components, how does it behave? And if other sensory categories are relevant, what does it sound, smell, taste like, too? This section can be very short if you’d rather save more detailed discussion for later sections!
        • Ideally, you’ll then include a few other headings that evoke conventional field guide categories, like “habitat,” “condition,” etc., and other dimensions you were asked to address in your proposal! 
        • If there are passages of text (e.g., quotations) you’d like to be rendered in larger text, as “pull quotes,” and mark [PULL QUOTE STARTS HERE] at the beginning of the passage and [PULL QUOTE ENDS HERE] at the end. Make sure to credit appropriately! 
      • Copy should be edited and proofread
      • Please indicate where, within your text, you’d ideally like particular graphics to appear (e.g., “Mattern_Image1 about here”), and provide a descriptive caption and credit line of no more than 100 words (e.g., “Architectural letting above the entrance to the Oak Park Library. Photo by the author” or “A promotional poster from the Pennsylvania Works Progress Administration, no date, via the Free Library of Philadelphia Digital Collections, https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/64247). For more on how to credit images, check out this Penn Libraries Guide.
      • Citations should be provided as footnotes in Chicago Style. 
  • Image Files 
    • 4 images minimum, 8 images maximum 
    • Can be photographs, maps, diagrams, charts, etc. Other ideas? Let’s talk! 
    • Please ensure that photos are a minimum of 300 DPI
    • Please label each image with your last name and figure #, in the order in which you want it to appear in your text – e.g., “Mattern_Figure1.jpg” would be my first image. 
    • Horizontal 5000 x 3333px, JPEG; Vertical 5000 x 3333px, JPEG
    • Vector preferred for diagrams (.eps, .svg)