Sunday, October 28, 2012
Project 3 Prposal
I would like to study the discourse community of Wookiepedia and those that use it. I feel that this would be an interesting topic because of my deep connection with said discourse community. It qualifies under Swales 6 characteristics. It has a broadly agreed upon set of public goals; to try and inform people about the Star Wars universe and to organize all of the information therein. It has mechanisms of intercommunication; forums and other online chatting, but also conversations between fellow users face to face. It also uses mechanisms to provide information and feedback; the whole purpose is to provide information, and if you information is wrong it can be removed from the site by other people fixing it, in other words feedback. All kinds of people are present in the discourse community, since Star Wars is such a far stretching audience. This allows for a broader influx of different genres assist in the furtherance of its goals. In no other area of fiction than that of the science variety is there more lexis specific to the community. Since it is all based around fiction, there are alot of events, names, and other such lexis that are unique only to this community. While many people know somethings about Star Wars, there are many things that only someone who used Wookiepedia would know, which then includes them in the discourse community. Finally there are members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise, since it is constantly updated by the administrators of the site to keep everything as factual as possible; factual to the universe that is. My one weak spot is I don't have any idea who to interview. I feel that a face to face interview rather than a chat with a random person online would be better, so I will have to find another person on campus who uses Wookiepedia. A set of texts that could be analyzed would be for one, any article, to show how they make sure that information is being passed, and two, a discussion board to show how all of the information is debated upon to prove it's validity
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Hi Jack,
ReplyDeleteI think you immediately have a kind of niche, here, because you're studying an online community and none of the research we've read so far does this. You're also studying a fan community and so should keep that in mind. Finally, this community is happening within the wiki framework, so that should impact your analysis. It might be interesting to think about how discourse is regulated not only by social roles and discourse communities but also by the technologies those discourse communities are built on. (e.g. wiki)- You could extend the work done by Swales, Gee, Devitt et al, Wardle, etc by arguing that we need to pay attention to more than just social contexts/communities/genres (whatever)-that we also need to pay attention to technologies as agents that influence the discourse. This is exciting. Keep me updated.