Trial By Fury: CHAT and Amanda Knox

In Douglas Preston's Trial By Fury, we see an example that's very close to the types of writing research I'm expecting you to do for your projects.  Although Preston doesn't directly reference Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, his work shows the interplay between social media genres such as websites and Wikipedia and the social factors surrounding the writing.  For our discussion, we want to look at the relationships he's found the ways in which he's organized these into a coherent narrative.

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Project 1 Proposal

The discussion for Project 1 is very open. There's no specific research component required - I'm mostly checking to see that you know the difference between writing research and content research in terms of how you'll approach you project. So describe the writing genre you want to research for Project 1, and I'll post replies to let you know if you're on the right track.

Overall: Genre, Topic, Details
The main things I'm looking for are that

1. You've identified a genre of writing you'd like to study.
2. You can talk about the topic where you've seen this genre and why that's important to you.
3. You're able to give some details about how you'd research the genre.

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Emperor's Soul as a Metaphor for Writing

Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul offers one of the best metaphors for the writing process that I've seen.  For today's discussion, we're going to consider how this metaphor works within our differing fields of interest, and then we'll follow-up with research approaches for Project 1.  By the end of this discussion, you should have four posts that provide potential research sources for your Project 1:

1. A Main Post, where you describe your field of interest, and then relate writing in this field to a quote from The Emperor's Soul.  This main post should also include an attached PDF of a scholarly article you found via Milner Library.  (see the next blog post for Videos on Finding Scholarly Sources via Milner.)
2. Three Response Posts.  As in past discussions, each response should refer to a specific point made by one of your classmates (or to my initial post), provide your own thoughts, and then an outside quote or example to support your point (see #3 below).
3. Three quotes for Outside Support.  For each response post, your outside support can be any one of the following: a new quote from Emperor's Soul, a link to a website that you find interesting, or a quote from your Milner article (see #1 above).

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