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Individual Research Projects

Select one community network which has not been covered in class (i.e. not Cleveland, Great Lakes, or Worth County). Examine it thoroughly, obtaining your own account, using it recreationally, collecting some sort of quantitative data, and interviewing its administration and users. Write a 3-10 page paper of publishable quality (i.e. I'd like to put it on the Web) summarizing your observations. Give a 5-minute presentation about what makes this CN different from the others we've studied.

I strongly recommend that before you begin your research in earnest, you look over the suggested readings for March 31 and some existing case studies, Stallings (1996) and Avis (1995). Naturally your paper will be far shorter than most of these works, but you may get some good ideas by reading about how the studies were conducted and what they found.

I also encourage you to find out whether your CN has been studied already and cite the previous studies in your paper. There's no sense collecting quantitative data that has already been collected before.

Keep in mind that your paper's audience is the general public. Try to be fair in your description of the CN, since the users and administration of the CN may end up reading your paper. If I feel that your paper is too negative to publish, I will naturally refrain from publishing it.


Return to the course syllabus.