Our second paper (or paper-like-thing, as this is hopefully much more low-impact than a paper per se) is, as I’ve said, an ordered and thought-through arrangement of a series of tweets from our class hashtag.  Because it’s fairly easy and self-explanatory to use, we’ll do this with Storify.  (There’s a guided tour page that you should probably look at before you read on.)

The way this works, as you’ll see, is that you can aggregate posts from various types of social media—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and so on—into a kind of narrative.  On the right-hand side, you’ll pick what medium you want to sift through, and for each medium there will be a variety of ways to search.  Though you’re more than welcome to use things other than Twitter posts for this, I assume that for the most part, the class Twitter feed will be your raw material.  This means that probably the easiest ways to find posts will be a) a hashtag search for #ENGL436 (though unfortunately this will only show you posts in the last 7-9 days), b) the class user list (under Twitter, go to list and enter “noendofneon/english-436”), or c) individual user searches for yourself or anyone whose posts you find particularly good or interesting.  If you’ve been marking as favorites posts you think are particularly good, as I suggested a few times earlier in the class, that will certainly help.  When you find the posts you want to use, drag them into your story on the left.  You can order them however you like, and you can (and should) click to add text between tweets, to add commentary and link together the tweets you’re citing and explain how they connect for you and what thoughts they provoke.

In hopes that it will help you identify the tweets you want to use, thus making it easier to figure out how to find and add them to your Storify story, I’ve created a sort of master archive of [close to] all of the class posts over the last five weeks.  Storify struggles mightily with such huge numbers of tweets, so no doubt some posts didn’t quite make it into that archive, but it’s fairly close to complete, as far as I can tell.  You’ll have to click through at the bottom a number of times to get the whole thing to show, annoyingly, but once it’s there, it’s a useful compilation.  I hope it is, anyway, as it took a stupidly long time to produce.

As I’ve said in class, the guidelines for this are very loose—it’s an experiment of sorts, and mostly I just want to see what you come up with, using each other’s thoughts as the raw material.  I’m thinking of it as something like an annotated bibliography of class Twitter posts instead of books and articles, where you gather a series of tweets that relate to some question or questions you’re interested in (maybe that you’re planning to write about for the final paper) and put them together into a useful, coherent whole, adding commentary to help piece them together.  The basics are as follows:

• Create a Storify story using at least ten (10) tweets from the class, oriented around some question or set of questions (they don’t have to all be about the same text!).
• Ideally you would include tweets from a number of other people, and possibly even yourself.  Don’t just copy one of my multi-tweet rambles; the point here is to engage with a variety of the wonderful, interesting thoughts your classmates have produced in 140-character hashtagged nuggets.
• Feel free (though no obligation whatsoever) to add other types of content if you so desire:  YouTube videos, images, related links, tweets from people outside the class, what have you.
• Add text between all or most of the tweets to explain why you find them useful, how they connect to each other, and so on.  This can by all means be short and sweet, even just a quick sentence or two between each.
• It’s probably easiest if you just log into Storify with your Twitter account, but you’re welcome to create a separate account if for some reason that’s more desirable.
• When you’re done, any time before 11:59pm Monday night, tweet (or email me) a link to your story, and you’re done.

I don’t intend for this to be a huge amount of work, and again, hopefully you’ve been keeping your eyes peeled all along for good tweets to cannibalize for this project.  If you want to write a lot and do a lot of framing and explaining your arrangement of tweets, by all means feel free—and again, I do hope this will turn out to be useful for thinking about your final papers—but there’s a reason we’re doing a low-key second assignment like this rather than a full paper, so don’t feel too much pressure.  Again, I’m just curious to see what you come up with, within the very limited guidelines.

As always, please send me an email if you have any questions.  As usual, I’ll be boarded up in my writing cave all weekend, so I should be able to respond fairly quickly.  Good luck!