Digital Democracy, Digital Anti-Democracy

In each of the six remaining weeks of our course you will be doing ongoing work to develop and complete your 10pp. final paper for our Crit B together. For Week Ten, on our meeting October 29 {Topic Workshop}: We will do a brief workshop in which you discuss with colleagues what sort of Paper Topic you mean to pursue: (one) a close interpretive reading of one of the theoretical pieces assigned on the syllabus; (two) researching a question introduced as a topic in one or more of the pieces assigned on our syllabus; or (three) an engagement with an artist, art work, art exhibit, or art movement either through the theoretical lens of an assigned piece or connected to a topic discussed in assigned pieces. For Week Eleven, on our meeting November 5 {Paper Workshop}: We will spend the entire meeting time on a series of workshops, to develop a thesis, opposition, and basic outline for your Final Paper. You will hand in this workshop worksheet with your final on the last day of class.

According to our syllabus, you are expected to hand in a 2-3pp. precis with an attached Toulmin schema (hence, the assignment will likely be 3-4pp. total) at the beginning of class, week nine, Monday, October 22 (a week after this Monday's class).  As we discussed in class last Monday, a precis is simply the concise recapitulation of a complex argument. You are expected to summarize what you take to be the argument and its essential elements for any one of the texts assigned in class from the first day to the day on which the precis is handed in. The purpose of the precis is not to argue for an interpretation of the work you choose, but to capture what you take to be the argument of the work you choose. (Needless to say, this too requires a form of interpretation, but I do hope the distinction still makes sense as far as it goes.) Reproducing your chosen text's argument will involve identifying what you take to be its thesis, any qualification or exceptions to that