For a successful final project, you will be graded on the following dimensions, each contributing in varying degrees to your final grade. They are presented roughly in order of importance, and the four ‘Levels’ of mastery can be thought of as corresponding roughly to ‘95%’, ‘80%’, ‘60%’, and ‘0%’. Your overall grade for the project will be based roughly on your overall level across the categories, adjusting for other factors (unclarity, missing sections, exceptional or low effort, etc).

The Big Thing: Effort Matters

Every year, I get one or two students who submit exceptionally short, shoddy, or last-minute work. These are projects which do not even come close to meeting the length guidelines, just engage with the rubric in a few, token measures, or show little understanding of course material are really frustrating as an instructor, and are a sign that you simply didn’t try very hard, and just feel disrespectful both to me and to the work you did.

So, please, start early, put in effort, and make sure that you’re meeting the standards in the rubric. And if you choose not to do these things, please act with integrity and give yourself the grade you deserve.

Submission Types

Because this is a class on the internet, it seems fitting to allow an internet-first final project. As such, you have the option to submit your final project either as an academic paper, as a website, or as a video essay. Although in all cases, you’ll be focusing in on one area of language use online, the goals will differ slightly:

1. For an academic paper, your goal will be primarily depth, showing the reader that you not only understand the material we covered, but that you’ve taken your analysis further and deeper than what we did in class.
   • The format of this paper can be whatever suits the content best, but consider it like any other academic paper
2. For a website, your goal will be primarily teaching, with the goal of creating a web presence from which somebody could learn about the analysis that you’ve done. Although you may not go much further past what we’ve done in class, you need to make sure that your site provides enough background knowledge to be understood an interested lay person.
   • Again, the format should follow the function, but if you’d like an example, think about a very well resourced and researched Wikipedia page, with a particularly beginner-friendly author.
   • This is a different skillset, and you’re welcome to do anything from a Google Sites or Wix page, to a well-styled static webpage, all the way up to a fully styled interactive web experience. It’s OK if somebody’s chief contribution is technical, so long as they have input in everything. The ‘quality’ or finishing of the site is only going to be graded insofar as it impedes my ability to experience the site.
3. For a video essay, you’re expected to balance both depth and teaching, taking advantage of the flexible format to go deeper into the analysis, while still providing enough background to be clearly understandable to a non-linguist. Please feel free to use humor, illustrations, visual aids, and otherwise to make it sufficiently engaging, and aim for a minimum of 20 minutes, ideally around 3-5 minutes per group member for larger groups.
   • I’ll suggest you make a video essay, along the lines of those provided by Tom Scott or Fredrik Knudsen (links do not constitute endorsement of all content by UCSD or the instructor).
   • You’re also welcome to make a series of short videos (e.g. TikToks), but please make sure that they, considered together, show sufficient depth, and please join them in the requested watching order for your final submission.
   • Again, video editing is a different skillset, and may be the focus of one group member. Please feel free to use any skills you have, and to ‘go the extra mile’, but you won’t be graded on details of editing, sound quality, polish, or otherwise, so long as it doesn’t impede understanding.
   • Not all group members are required to appear on video, but all are encouraged to. VTubers are welcome.

All non-paper submissions should be online at the given link from submission deadline until the start of the next quarter. You will be graded on your linked site or video, and if I can’t access it, you will have twelve hours following my notification to fix it, and failing that, you’ll receive a zero. “Unlisted” YouTube videos are fine, but ‘Private’ are not. Double check your links!

Note, also, that you’re welcome to promote the results of this independently and leave it up online (e.g. as part of your own personal website) if all group members consent, and you are not required to disclose that this was for a class or mention anything about the course by name. So, if you’d like to start your YouTube career with this video essay, feel free.

The Rubric will vary slightly below depending which of these options you choose.

Example Projects

https://sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/lingrizztics

Project Topics

There are many different kinds of project topics, including many I haven’t even thought of yet. So, if you have a passion for a specific research, following that passion is more important than anything else. You’re welcome to meet with me or chat with me before/after class if you have a topic in mind which you’re not sure about, or which you feel might be at the borders of ‘acceptable’. But here are some ideas which can get you started:

• Experimental Internet Linguistics: One fruitful way to study the meaning, composition, or productive elements of memes is by making memes and seeing how people react. So, you might create a small survey using Google Forms, showing hand-created memes of a certain type and then asking people to tell you about the meanings which they interpret in them.
• Internet Language History and Change: If you’re interested in language change, you might try to chase down where a phenomenon originated, and ‘dive deep’ to see where it may have come from. Note that you’re going to have to provide an order of magnitude more information and investigation than KnowYourMeme to do this right.
• Internet Sociolinguistics: If you’re interested in the social nature of memes, you might consider looking at where given templates/ideas/elements occur (different forums, communities, etc, what people who use these memes think they ‘index’ or say about them as people or in terms of identity, and even conduct short anonymous sociolinguistic interviews or ask questions on forums about the meaning of memes in context, but be respectful of the communities you’re posting in, and talk to me first!
• Cross-Cultural Research: There’s nothing saying you need to focus on the American internet. I’m very open to discussions of how language on the internet differs across national, linguistic, or cultural contexts.
• Comparative Studies: Look at different linguistic phenomena online, and compare/contrast. For instance, work to find the difference between Kaomoji and Emoji and Reaction GIFs in practical use in discourse.
• Corpus Studies: Use natural language processing tools and computational methods to investigate language usage online quantitatively.
• Human vs. Machine Generated Content: Increasingly, the internet is filled with machine-generated content. What are some of the hallmarks of it? How do humans react to it?

Project Proposal Report

Your project proposal, submitted as your field report for week seven, should include:

• Who’s in your group
• What research question you’ll address. Things like…
  • “Is there a link between political affiliation and the use of pepe memes?”
  • “What effect does font choice have on meme meaning?”
• Give an example of what you’re talking about (e.g. share a few memes showing the characteristics you’re interested in)
• Discuss the specific kind(s) of analysis you’re doing, making specific reference to the concepts and ideas from class
• Discuss what will be challenging about this topic
  • “It may be difficult to find people who’ve never seen a trollface meme to test on”
• What medium you’re planning to submit
  • Academic paper, an educational website, or educational video(s)?
• Share the specific conclusions or ‘takeaways’ you’re hoping to get from this paper. Things like…
  • “I hope to get a better sense of when exactly doge memes lost the poor grammar and why”
  • “I hope to understand how the use of papyrus font is understood to change the meaning in memes”
  • “I hope to have more concrete data as to the frequency and nature of pepe memes in different political subcultures”
• Why is this topic interesting to you and your group members?

A Masterful proposal will…

• Discuss all of the elements above, providing concrete examples and deliverables
• Provide clear discussion of how you plan to implement this
• Lay out the steps required to complete this project in a clear outline
• Show evidence of careful consideration of the problems and difficulties involved.
• Show clear understanding of the challenges which may be unique to this project

Project Rubric

Cover Page

Every project submission should include a cover page with…

• Your name(s) and Group Name/Number
• The title of your project
• How I access your project (in the case that it’s not a paper)
  • The URL of your website
  • A Google Drive or YouTube link to your video
  • The account name of your TikToks
  • Any other information (e.g. the order I should watch videos in, or specific and non-intuitive guidance about where I should go and click to get ‘all the content’)
• A description of who did what on the project
  • This is so I know that everybody played an active role, or in the case that one person wasn’t pulling their weight, this is your place to tell me this.
• Whether you want actual written or spoken feedback on the project, or would just prefer to get a grade
  • If you’re never going to look at the paper again, you can save us both some time!
• The Self Grading Information

In the case of the website or video submission, a submitted PDF on Canvas with the above information will suffice.

Scope of Information

Note that academic papers will be necessarily have a larger scope than sites and videos, as the goal is greater depth, at the cost of some explanation and teaching.

• Masterful: Discusses a question which is suitably complex to merit a final course project and to show depth of learning from the course, but also is sufficiently narrow in scope to be able to come to reasonable conclusions within the bounds of the project. In some cases, this might involve expansion (e.g. “Turns out my topic wasn’t that big, but I expanded it slightly and looked at this related question”) or tuning (“Rather than under-doing my original question, I’ve chosen to focus on just this community”).
• Acceptable: Project is able to address the topic well, generally, but has some feeling of ‘running out of space/time’ or ‘fluffing it up’ a bit to make a final project.
• Novice: Project covers a topic which is either so broad as to be impossible to ‘finish’ in this paper, or so narrow that the paper is overly short or ‘light on substance’
• Way Off: Project asks a question which is hopelessly broad (e.g. ‘How do memes work in society?’), or so narrow as to not be a project (e.g “When did the doge meme first start?”)

Demonstration of Knowledge

• Masterful: Student paper shows considerable and nuanced knowledge and attention to the material from the course, making regular reference to concepts from class and homeworks, fully engaging with the material taught in class, and goes beyond it into independent research.
  
• Acceptable: The paper shows attention and engagement with the class materials, but occasionally neglects some important facts or discussions from the course, or occasionally shows confusion with the nature, functioning or limitations of some of the analysis discussed.
• Novice: The paper makes occasional reference to the concepts discussed in class, but repeatedly shows failures of understanding of the concepts discussed or their applicability to the questions at hand.
• Way Off: Writeup largely fails to demonstrate attention to or knowledge of the material from the course, instead giving explanations so superficial as to be available even to those who haven’t taken LIGN 42.

Richness

• Masterful: Project engages with the question with depth and nuance, considering not just the main question, but related issues, and show clear consideration of the best analytical ways to address those questions. Masterful projects also ‘go a step beyond’, addressing, considering, or at least showing consideration towards additional questions which arise as a result of the research being done.
• Acceptable: Project engages well with the main question, addressing it (nearly) completely, but without any additional depth or sophistication.
• Novice: Project engages with the main question in only a basic, ‘watered down’ sense, perhaps answering it only in a specific context (without justification for doing so) or answering it in an incomplete manner.
• Way Off: The project is exceedingly shallow, barely engaging with the research question, or only discussing it at a superficial level.

Teaching

Your final projects are expected to teach the world something, particularly if you’re making a website or video. For conventional essays, you can target a linguistic audience, but you should probably be clear about that in your coversheet/evaluation.

• Masterful: Project shows awareness of the understanding of the audience, explaining all jargon, properly explaining linguistic concepts, making nuanced points clear, and where applicable, ensuring that even a layperson can understand the points being made. Additionally, any details about the community which may not be understandable to outsiders (e.g. League of Legends terminology) are explained to a sufficient degree.
• Acceptable: Project is largely understandable to the intended audience, with only a few areas which would likely cause difficulty for the audience.
• Novice: Project doesn’t properly explain many important elements of the analysis, phenomena, or jargon, and is largely understandable only to those with existing background in linguistics or the community in question.
• Way Off: The project does a poor job teaching both the background and the main points to be communicated, and is very difficult to learn anything from.

Formatting and Length

To do this assignment well as a paper, expect to write 3500 words or so in addition to any examples used. Note that students with strong command of the material might be able to excel in a bit less, and students who are struggling could easily provide 10,000 words without showing their knowledge. Note that papers submitted by groups will be expected to have a greater scope and detail than individual papers, so a 3500 word paper from five people would be considered ‘suspiciously short’, but it’d be fine from a single person. Additionally, feel free to use APA or MLA formatting as a baseline, particularly for citations, and you should use hierarchical formatting (e.g. labeled sections, subsections, subsubsections), but I will not be grading on deviations from an arbitrary set of formatting laws, because we both have better things to do with our lives.

For a website, this is meant to be a longer read, and you’ll probably have an equivalent 3500 words. Whether this is done across several pages, or one page with interactivity, doesn’t matter so much. In terms of formatting, please feel free to be creative or memey, but please keep it readable.

For a video or series of videos, I’m expecting a minimum of 15-20 minutes, ideally with 3-5 minutes of content per group member, showing clear evidence of the entire group’s involvement.

• Masterful: The project is sufficiently long to demonstrate knowledge, richness of the question, and show proper scope, but without dragging or feeling like words are being added for the sake of talking. Formatting is reasonable, readable, and enhances the text. Citations, where given, are reasonably formatted and contain the information needed to be followable (e.g. URLs).
• Acceptable: Project length is sufficient, although perhaps a bit too brief or too wordy. Formatting is acceptable, if occasionally distracting or adding difficulties.
• Novice: Project is ‘a bit too short’ to accomplish the needed demonstration of knowledge and address the question, or buries lack of knowledge in a mountain of text. This could also apply if the formatting is distracting, problematic, or hurtful to the argumentation.
• Way Off: The project is so short as to be unable to address the appear ‘last minute’ or ‘low effort’, and not given enough space to demonstrate knowledge. Or is presented without formatting or sectioning, or citations are missing crucial information

Structure and Organization

Please structure your project with numbered sections, subsections, and subsubsections (where needed), to make things easier both in reference and readability. Don’t worry about ‘transitions’, just as long as the organization is OK.

For sites and videos, remember that the structure tells a story. Links, page divisions, and more should be in service of the content.

• Masterful: The project is well organized, with the introduction discussing the structure of the paper to guide the reader. Sections are clear and cross-referenced throughout the paper where needed. Transitions between sections are clear, and the sections make sense.
• Acceptable: Structure of the project is acceptable, if somewhat difficult to understand or poorly explained. The reader has a rough understanding what’s going on, even if it’s never explained.
• Novice: The project’s structure is counterintuitive and not understandable, with the structure (or lack thereof) hurting the argumentation considerably.
• Way Off: The project has no discernible structure nor organization, or student does not use basic structural elements like sentences, paragraphs, or sections/subsections.

Language and Argumentation

Note that things like your language proficiency and register (e.g. ‘how academic you sound’) are graded here only to the extent that they hinder your ability to be understood. Particularly if you’re newer to English, I get that you may have typos or grammatical issues, but I won’t mark you off for them unless it’s to the point where I cannot understand what you’re trying to say or where it introduces massive ambiguity.

For websites and video content, please make sure that you’re teaching, not just telling. So, explain linguistic terms, go a step further to make things clear, and much like both the Backstreet Boys and Math professors, tell me why. A website which is understandable only to people who have taken the class will be Novice at best.

• Masterful: Student language use is consistently clear and understandable, with a reasonable level of formality for academic writing. Additionally, the project was clearly proofread, with typoes and English language issues relatively rare and not considerably affecting the argumentation.
• Acceptable: Student language use is largely understandable, but in places unclear, or with a sufficient number of typoes or English language grammar issues as to start to hinder my understanding of the argumentation.
• Novice: The argumentation is regularly unclear, and my ability to understand the content of the project is considerably hindered by typoes, difficult to understand argumentation, or English language grammar issues which substantially interfere with my ability to read the paper.
• Way Off: The project is not written in English, is largely incomprehensible, or shows evidence of automatic machine translation.

Academic Integrity and Citation

Note that plagiarism or other academic integrity issues will result in an automatic ‘0’ on the paper.

Also note that I understand that ‘citing’ a meme is very difficult, as these are necessarily viral, emergent, and there’s no ‘canonical surprised pikachu’ to cite. So long as you make references to specific concepts as clear as you can, and I can click links to find websites that you’re discussing, that’s fine.

Note as well that some of your data may come from private communities. These are difficult to cite, in some cases problematic to link to, and may involve logins or paywalls. I’m happy to have something like (UCSD’s LingUA Discord Server, Private Server on Discord.com, Accessed March 19 2022) as a citation. Make sure that you have consent before sharing information from private spaces, and remove identifying information.

For websites, you’ll still want to cite your sources, but you can use [1] style citations instead. And formatting should follow web conventions.

[1] John’s house of Iguana Memes <iguanamemes.com>

• Masterful: All direct quotes or external references are cited, with the source given clearly in a ‘Works Cited’ section or elsewhere, in the format of your choice (APA is a fine default) including the necessary information to track down the resource. All other words are your own.
• Acceptable: All direct quotes or external references are cited, but the citations do not include enough information for the reader to locate the original resource.
• Novice: All direct quotes or external references are cited, but the citations do not include additional information (e.g. ‘Harlow 2002’ with no more details)
• Way Off: Sources are not cited, or there is evidence of academic dishonesty. Be careful to cite all your sources and quotes (outside of the class material).

Respect

Remember, you’re working with real language from real humans here, and you need to show those populations respect. In order for your paper to be acceptable, all of the following must be true. There are no ‘intermediate levels of success’ here, if you have not done these things, you have failed as a researcher.

• All language users discussed or quoted must be discussed respectfully
  • If you’re planning to discuss language use which is itself problematic (e.g. you’re studying toxic rhetoric in online gaming lobbies), please talk with me first, so we can brainstorm ways to discuss abhorrent language use while simultaneously being kind to both the users in question, and readers of your paper
  • The best vibe for this is ‘Let’s celebrate this really interesting and unique phenomenon I’d found by talking about this!’
  • Please think about writing your final project in a way that you would happily share with the community whose language is being discussed, and feel free to do so.
  • As with field reports, generally, if you can’t speak respectfully about a group, you probably shouldn’t write about them
• You are simply not allowed to mock populations, no matter who they are
  • Reproducing other people’s mockery as part of quotes which are relevant to the phenomena in play can be acceptable, but the ‘use/mention’ distinction should be quite clear
• All examples from obscure communities or dealing with anything sensitive must be de-identified, redacting usernames, names, cities, with labels (e.g. A and B, following the participants through the conversation, or replacing ‘San Diego’ and ‘Escondido’ with $US_CITY_1 and $US_CITY_2)
  • Remember that people can be identified without their name. Talking about ‘a professor of linguistics at a school in california with a penchant for watchmaking who you met in a Linux discord’ doesn’t need to include ‘Will Styler’ to be clear.’
• No private conversations are to be ‘leaked’ without consent of all parties
  • Reproducing a keysmash received in a DM is likely innocuous, but I don’t want to see screenshots of entire converstions in a private server without clear discussions about you obtained consent