Friday, February 11, 2011

Ethnography Proposal - Updated

Project Group Members
Aaron Kirkes
Adam Friedli
Patrick Frith

The Group
An idea we came up with is to study reddit.com.  This site is a general posting site where the postings gain a ranking with a thumbs up or thumbs down given by each user, and this affects how close to the top of the lists of postings the post is.  The posts can range from notable news topics to humorous items from the internet to people being bored and posting that they are staying awake for 72 hours and are asking for people to tell them things to do.  These are a few examples we saw perusing for about 10 minutes.  We have not had any other prior experience with this website.

The Learning
We hope to find out if there is any specific etiquette or behavior people are expected to abide by on the site.  Does breaking news make it to reddit before it makes it to other mediums?  Are there people who post regularly on reddit, and if so, what exactly makes them popular?  How are these people consistently appealing to the general populace?  What is the general behavior in specific categories on the site?  How do people tend to react to comments from a normal account versus a novelty account?

The Studying
Since this is an online website, it should be very easy to observe at least two hours per week.  Each of us plan on making a normal account and a novelty account.  We will also each choose a specific, smaller category to monitor as well.  We can pool our results as well, and try to find trends of midday postings versus late night postings.

Quantitative and Qualitative Data
Quantitative data can be the number of postings of a certain kind, such as newsworthy postings versus humorous postings versus general nonsense postings.  We can also keep track of the rankings of our comments and postings from both the normal and novelty accounts.  Qualitative can fall into the types of postings and what the more successful postings possess that the others do not.  We will keep track of how people react to our comments and postings and how they react in each of our categories of interest.

Interaction
We can comment in the more general areas and in the specific categories of interest we choose.  We could even create posts asking some questions that the readings bring up, such as what people think of Milgram’s shock experiment, or any other ideas that might come to mind.  If these posts are successful, they might even be able to become part of the data for the study.  We will initially stick to commenting on already created posts, but we can certainly make our own posts when it makes sense to do so.

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