Signature Assignment
The signature assignment for Reading and Making New Media asks students to design and build a new media artifact that enacts a theoretical argument, alongside a critical paratext that accounts for the formal decisions behind it. The New Media Exhibit is where the course’s theoretical and creative work converges as students analyze and produce media objects.
Project Overview
Throughout this course, students engage with foundational theory about how media shapes perception, culture, and power. They also make things: for instance, a fan zine that reorients critical voice toward a public, passionate form. The New Media Exhibit represents a point where these threads meet as students will design and develop a prototype new media artifact that enacts a theoretical argument.
The artifact must be interactive or procedural in some meaningful sense, such as a Twine narrative, a Bitsy game, a curated social media intervention, a generative text or image system, or a form proposed and discussed with the instructor. Students will additionally submit a critical paratext (1,000–1,500 words) that explains what argument the artifact is making, how its form enacts (not just illustrates) that argument, and what decisions shaped its construction. The paratext, then, is an account of why the form is the message.
The artifact students produce may embedded or linked in an ePortfolio, which also positons this project as a public-facing work.
The course’s three major assignments build sequentially toward this assignment. The term paper develops the analytical vocabulary students need to make arguments about media by identifying how form, platform, and cultural context produce meaning. The fan zine then has students apply that vocabulary in a making context by reorienting their critical instincts toward a public-facing, passion-driven form, and to practice accounting for formal decisions in the paratext at lower stakes. The Exhibit raises those stakes as the form must now do theoretical work, not just express enthusiasm or demonstrate craft.
Pedagogically, the assignment is shaped by the DH educator practice of using the process log as an assessment tool, visible in electronic literature pedagogy where documentation of iteration and failure is treated as evidence of learning.
Formally, my own practice with constraint-based and procedural writing informs the emphasis on constraint as a generative condition. The question the paratext asks of why use any specific form is the question I ask in my own work, and it among the most productive questions a student can learn to answer.
Learning Objectives
The New Media Exhibit is the primary site where the course’s core commitments converge a student complete the following:
- Interacting with various media forms that reflect critical and creative approaches to media
- Creating artistic works that emphasize media criticality
- Identifying the value of different new media environments through showcasing creative-critical works
- Exploring the relationships between born-digital making and media proliferation
AI Protocol
This assignment was designed with AI in mind with the recognition that generative AI presents both a formal opportunity and an epistemological challenge for new media work.
What AI can do here: Twine and Bitsy development, generative text and image systems, and interactive HTML prototypes can all be scaffolded or extended with AI assistance. Students who want to attempt more technically ambitious artifacts are explicitly permitted and encouraged to use Claude as a development collaborator. This mirrors professional creative and technical practice, where AI-assisted authorship is increasingly the norm for procedural and generative work.
The requirement: Any student who uses AI in the development of the artifact must include a process log in the paratext: a brief, honest account of which parts of the artifact were AI-assisted, what prompts or exchanges shaped those parts, and what the student revised, rejected, or built on top of. The process log is itself a site for media-critical reflection: what does it mean that a particular passage of Twine code was generated rather than authored? What affordances and constraints did that introduce? Does it change the argument?
What AI cannot do: The theoretical argument in the paratext must be the student’s own. AI-drafted paratexts will read as AI-drafted paratexts: flat, unspecific, structurally correct but analytically hollow. The work will be assessed accordingly as the paratext asks students to account for their decisions, which requires having made them.
Why this policy: The course’s central claim is that form is not neutral as the medium carries meaning. This claim applies to AI-assisted authorship as much as to any other formal choice. Students who use AI and document it honestly are doing more interesting work than students who either avoid it entirely or pretend they haven’t used it.
Assessment
The assignment is assessed across four dimensions:
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Theoretical grounding (25%) — Does the paratext articulate a legible theoretical argument connected to the course’s readings? A deep engagement with one text is preferable to a shallow tour of many.
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Formal enactment (35%) — Does the artifact’s form do argumentative work, or does it merely illustrate a claim that could have been made in an essay? A Twine narrative that argues for hypertext’s resistance to linear causality by structuring that resistance into the reader’s path is doing something an essay cannot. This criterion rewards formal risk.
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Paratext quality (25%) — Is the paratext analytically precise about the relationship between form and argument? Does it distinguish between what the artifact shows and what it does? Does it account for the constraints the chosen platform imposed?
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Presentation (15%) — Is the artifact functional and navigable? Does the surrounding context — framing text, any ePortfolio integration — contribute to or complicate its reception as a media object?