Livetweeting Assignment

Livetweeting Assignment

Multiple Deadlines (see below)

Paper Due: Sunday, March 1 (by 8pm)

Using our readings from Week 4 on twitter, television overflow, and digital author/audience interactions, you will experience and analyze watching contemporary television live, considering how participating on social media platforms (or “second screen experiences”) complicate or extends theories of television flow and/or overflow.  Consider, as you tweet and write, how the show’s network or creative team is attempting to build value and/or revenue for their media property, and consider the value for audiences engaging on social media.

Part I (complete before and during your Week 4 lab session):

Before lab…

  • Sign up for a twitter account, if you don’t already have one (or don’t want to use your current account for this assignment). If you are unfamiliar with twitter or livetweeting as a practice, here are a couple of links discussing tips and best practices:
  • Sign up for a Storify account and familiarize yourself with the interface.  The best way to do this is to create a test “story,” importing and curating some tweets with your own commentary to get a sense of how to “narrativize” a twitter stream. Short examples: here and here. NOTE: These examples have minimal text/framing, your paper will require more detailed paragraphs between tweets to engage the readings and build your argument.

During lab (after Storify demo and assignment discussion)…

  • Research and select a television show to live tweet.  The show you select should A. Have an “official” hashtag (e.g. #TheWalkingDead), B. Have a robust twitter presence (in other words, if you search the hashtag on Twitter and nothing/very little pops up, select another show), and C. Be airing a new episode in the time between Week 4 and 5 lab periods.
  • Get a sense of the community around the show BEFORE you live tweet the episode.  Ideally, you should pick a show you are already somewhat familiar with, and have a sense of the types of commentary that circulate around that show, before you live tweet the episode.
  • Research/select the various plug-ins to help you

Part II (complete before your week 5 lab session):

  • Before you begin your livetweeting, it’s strongly recommended that you install the Storify bookmarklet and/or Chrome extension to create “collections” of tweets that you can import directly into your Storify story. Here is a quick instructional video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKlWPuqcp-Y

NOTE: Here are some potential workarounds for finding/importing specific tweets, if you’re finding Storify’s mode of searching/importing tweets problematic or too time-consuming, and you didn’t:

  • Use Topsy, which is a much more robust twitter search tool, that will at the very least allow you to narrow down your search by hashtag and day (though you can’t sort by a specific window of time without a pro account, you can sort by earliest or newest tweets within a given day, and finding the time window of your livetweet should be relatively easy from that point on).
  • If you find it more productive to search through twitter directly, or have a sense of particular tweets you’re looking for, you might want to just hunt them down and add them directly as links via the tweet’s URL (see below):

StorifyURLlink

 

  • Live tweet an episode of the show you’ve selected, ALWAYS including the show’s official #hashtag in your tweets (you can use any additional hashtags you like), and “collecting” tweets as you go.
  • Gather all the raw materials for your paper: Immediately after the episode, pull in your tweet “collection” into Storify, your own tweets along with selected tweets from others using the show’s official hashtag.  Depending on the popularity of the show, and its social media presence, you may have more/less raw material to work with.
  • NOTE: Here are some potential workarounds for finding/importing specific tweets, if you’re finding Storify’s mode of searching/importing tweets problematic or too time-consuming:
    • Use Topsy, which is a much more robust twitter search tool, that will at the very least allow you to narrow down your search by hashtag and day (though you can’t sort by a specific window of time without a pro account, you can sort by earliest or newest tweets within a given day, and finding the time window of your livetweet should be relatively easy from that point on).
    • If you find it more productive to search through twitter directly, or have a sense of particular tweets you’re looking for, you might want to just hunt them down and add them directly as links via the tweet’s URL (see below):

    StorifyURLlink

Part III (during week 5 lab + following week)

  • Write your paper, using the tweets you’ve collected as “evidence” to make an argument about livetweeting as a form of contemporary television flow and/or overflow.
  • Storify is part curation, part commentary, so you should frame and critically comment on the tweets within your story.
  • Your framing text (or the “body” of your paper) MUST critically engage with our course readings and the concepts of television flow and overflow.
  • There is no minimum/maximum number of tweets for your story, but you do want to convey a sense of the dominant discourses around (or reactions to) the show in your Storify story.  Think of this as an annotated narrative of your experience livetweeting, from which you will draw broader conclusions about livetweeting as a spectatorial practice and industrial promotional tool.  The written portion of your “paper” should be approximately 5-6 double-spaced pages in length.
  • Standard academic citations (MLA or Chicago Style) are expected and will be enforced.

Part IV (due 3/1 by 8pm)

Export and email a PDF of your completed paper in Storify with the subject line “RTF 319 LAST NAME livetweet.” Be sure to thoroughly look over and proofread your PDF before sending to make sure no content is missing, Storify can occasionally be buggy during this step.

 

 

 

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