Introduction for Instructors

This assignment sequence is designed to take up roughly the first half of a semester-long project in an upper-division writing course (assuming time will be taken up by various scaffolding assignments not listed here, assigned prior to and during this sequence). The White Paper is presented here as a stage of a larger project sequence, but can be adapted as a standalone project, or as an individual rather than group project.

The following assignments contain student-facing instructions, originally delivered via the Canvas LMS, that lead from the project-forming stage through the final draft of the White Paper.

Assignment 1: Brainstorming possible projects

In what ways are you interested in using data to remake the world?

For this exercise, I want you to brainstorm six real-life issues or problems that could be helped using data, which you might be interested in working on this semester. For each idea, tell me (a) what the issue or problem is, and (b) what specific data you would want in order to address it.

It’s okay to describe data that you don’t have access to, or even data that might not exist – although data that exists is preferred!

Try to make your issues and problems as narrow and specific as possible. Don’t just hit me with “climate change” and “Earth temperature records.” Look for ways to focus on smaller pieces of the challenge. For example, if you’re interested in a society-wide problem like climate change or school shootings or sexual assault, maybe look for ways to investigate the issue on a local scale (the city, the county, the university), or in a particular industry or organization, or as it relates to a particular incident or product.

Examples of ideas (issues + data) include:

Is there a gender pay gap at our university? To find out, I’d need a dataset that includes the gender and salary of all university employees.
Are private ranchers in Colorado destroying Gunnison Sage-Grouse habitat? Maybe I could find out by finding data on recent land use changes, or looking at the list of building permits issued in the relevant counties in recent years, or using before-and-after satellite imagery — or all three.
The university hasn’t divested from fossil fuels. Data: Could we get a list of the endowment’s investments and how much is in each? Could we find out how much ti would cost to move that money elsewhere?
Food waste at the university. Data: how much food is actually wasted in the dining halls each day/week? Total weight in pounds? Breakdown into types of food?

If you are at a loss for ideas, do some internet searching. Look for lists of controversial topics or societal problems. Look for existing datasets and existing data advocacy and data journalism projects. Feel free to put a new or local spin on somebody else’s ideas.

Another thing to think about is whether you know anybody who is connected to a particular issue – whether because their lives have been affected by it, or because they study it, or because they are already working to change it. Leveraging these personal connections could work well down the road. Let me know if you run into trouble.

Assignment 2: Write a Plan A and Plan B for a data advocacy group project

This semester, the main event will be a group project in data advocacy. The goal is to create something – an opinion article, a report, an interactive data visualization, an action campaign – that goes out into the world via publication and does real work for change.

Write a Plan A and a Plan B

For this assignment, I want you to create a Plan A and a Plan B for what group project you would like to work on this semester. I encourage you to build on ideas from the list of possibilities that the class brainstormed. You are 100% free to pick ideas that other people proposed rather than you. You are also free to pick ideas already represented in the submitted homework for this assignment. And if you’ve got a new idea that doesn’t appear on the brainstormed list, go for it!

For each plan, explain:

For Plan A and Plan B, explain the social issue, problem, or question your project would seek to address and the position your project will take on that issue. What data would you want to use in your project and how might you get the data? What kind of deliverables do you think you might want your group to create by the end of the semester?

Be as detailed as you can, especially on the nature of the data and your plan to get it.

Keep in mind

We will be workshopping these proposals and pitching them to the class. To run a group project, we’ll need a critical mass of students to sign on (minimum 3). Shoot me an email if you want to brainstorm or discuss.

Assignment 3: Read the project proposals and pick your top choices

Look over the “Plan A and Plan B” project proposals. Two classes from now, we will form project groups around 4 to 6 of these proposals. Each group will work on their project for the whole semester. We need a critical mass of students (minimum 3) to form a project group.

Which projects, if any, would you be really excited to participate in?
Which other ones would you be fine with working on for the rest of the semester?

List as many projects as you want in each of these two categories, but please give me at least a few to work with. I’m going to look through everyone’s responses to this homework in order to determine which project ideas have sufficient interest to potentially form a group. The projects that are mentioned most frequently will be the “finalists” that you can choose from in class. Shoot me an email if you have any questions!

Assignment 4: Read about requesting and composing interviews

One of the first individual tasks that each of you will complete for your project group is to request and conduct an informational interview with a stakeholder connected to the issue your group chooses to work on. We are not ready to make any interview requests quite yet, but for next class I want you to familiarize yourself with the process of requesting and conducting interviews.

For next class, please read these three short segments from an online journalism textbook. Although some of you will end up conducting interviews in a slightly more informational (less journalistic) style, almost everything in these three segments applies to the interviews I want you to conduct, including the part about preferred modes and the part about recording the interview. The part about “on the record” vs. “background” vs. “deep background” is less relevant to our class, but it’s still basic stuff you should know about how the news media works, if you didn’t know already.

The three segments are from The American Journalism Handbook by Dr. Rodrigo Zamith:

Section 42: Contacting sources and arranging interviews
Section 43: Generating good interview questions
Section 44: Conducting interviews

When you’re done, write down 1-2 things from the readings that you think will be valuable in your interviews for this class. This can be just a sentence or two.

Assignment 5: Compose and send an interview request for the White Paper

The first major assignment for your project group will take up roughly the first third of the semester. It will be a white paper, a kind of report that will:

summarize the history of the issue,
profile the people or groups involved or affected (the stakeholders),
identify the exact part of the problem you plan to tackle, including its scope, its urgency, and its cause(s),
evaluate potential solutions that have been implemented or proposed.

The purpose of the white paper is to make sure that you have a thorough understanding of the issue and the rhetorical situation before beginning any efforts at advocacy.

There are many ways to gather information, and they are pretty much all fair game for the white paper. However, in addition to your other research, each individual member of your group must request and conduct at least one real-time interview with a different stakeholder. Reading about an issue is great and all, but if you intend to do any advocacy work, then talking to actual people is absolutely critical. If you play your cards right, some of the people you interview may end up becoming allies, collaborators, or network contacts for you later this semester or beyond.

Send an interview request

Before next class, send out at least one request for an interview with someone involved with your issue that you think might have valuable information or the capacity to take action. Coordinate with your groupmates in advance so your group doesn’t request multiple interviews from the same person (or from very similar people). Feel free to invite your groupmates to your interview(s) as well, but ultimately it is each group member’s responsibility to request, schedule, and conduct at least one interview.

Most interview requests will go out via email, in which case please CC me on the email. This is how you’ll turn in your homework. If you send an interview request via a different channel (e.g., by filling out a web form or making a phone call), just send me a quick email explaining who you requested the interview from and how.

Some things to remember:

It’s not uncommon to have to send out 2-3 requests for every interview you get. You might want to send out a few requests at once when you start.
I recommend adding a line to your email that says something like, “If you are not able to help me, do you know of anyone else I might contact?” Asking this question has gotten me some of my best interviews.
Remember to record the audio of your interview (with the interviewee’s permission).
Most groups will probably end up doing more than the minimum number of interviews during this third of the semester. In general, the more networking and information-gathering you can do before beginning advocacy work, the better.

If your group isn’t sure whom to contact, get in touch with me.

Assignment 6: Profile your Assigned Stakeholders (500 words)

We will assemble the White Paper in stages, and at each stage, individuals will contribute text that the group will edit and combine into one cohesive whole. We’re starting with the part of the White Paper that profiles the major players in the debate – the people and groups who are involved with or affected by this issue – in other words, the stakeholders.

Before completing this individual homework, you and your groupmates should have compiled a master list of stakeholders and then split that list up among yourselves so that every stakeholder is assigned to one and only one group member.

To complete this homework, research your assigned stakeholders and their involvement with this issue. Write a brief profile of each stakeholder group that summarizes what you and your classmates need to know about them before engaging in advocacy on the issue. Depending on the stakeholder, you may end up needing to explain:

who they are (if you don’t expect most people to know);
how they are involved with the issue (for example, how it affects them or how they affect it),
what their goals or needs are, on this issue;
a brief history of their involvement;
their relationships with other stakeholder groups. (allies? adversaries? funders? clients? unlikely bedfellows? something more complicated?)

If you have completed an interview with a stakeholder, you can use interview material in your profile. If you haven’t, then put the profile together based on what you are able to find online. Make sure it’s clear where all your information comes from. If you pull information from an online source, I strongly recommend using in-text hyperlinks, like this one, to credit your sources.

Remember, your ultimate goal here is to educate yourself and your groupmates about the issue you are hoping to advocate on, so keep your eye on that prize. Let me know if you have questions.

Assignment 7: History of the issue and attempts to address it (500 words)

For next class, once again, each person will individually research and write 500 words of text that can be edited and incorporated into the group’s White Paper. This time our focus is on the history of the issue and attempts to address it.

Please limit your research and writing to the immediate context of your issue. Thus, if you are writing about the controversy over whether to decommission the Boulder Municipal Airport, only write about the history of attempts to decommission the Boulder Municipal Airport. Don’t talk about airports in other cities, unless they went through similar controversies that are directly relevant to Boulder’s situation. Don’t spend a paragraph discussing the history of air travel unless every word of it is vital for us to know.

Once again, your group should have discussed which parts of the history to assign to which members, so that you don’t end up with duplicate sections. Again, you are welcome to use material from interviews if you’ve completed them, but make sure you mention the source of the information. And please use in-text hyperlinks to credit online sources. Let me know if you have questions.

Assignment 8: Find and Summarize One Dataset, Study, or Report (500 words)

This is the third and last time that individual group members will generate text that can be adapted for the group White Paper. This time around, I want you each to find and summarize one or more datasets, studies, or reports presenting data relevant to your issue. If you have seen any data or studies referenced in your research to date, I recommend making sure someone in your group covers them. Otherwise, check Google Scholar and the university library databases. As before, make sure you have coordinated with your group so that people aren’t duplicating each other’s work.

For this assignment, you don’t have to be quite so narrow in your focus. For example, if you are writing about the controversy over whether to decommission the Boulder Municipal Airport, it is OK to use data about the carbon footprint of small airports in general, or their economic impact. You don’t have to limit yourself to finding studies that mention the Boulder Airport specifically.

Do your best to find actual datasets if you can, but if you can’t, summarize studies or reports that analyze or present data. In all cases, make sure your summary includes the following information (at minimum):

Explain who collected the data and for what purpose, and explain their methodology.
Assess the ethos of the authors. How are they positioned relative to the issue’s stakeholders?
Assess the conclusions, if any, that the data is being used to support. How convincing do you find the data and the claims being made with it?
Assess the ethical implications of the data. For example: Data ethicists often argue “data are people,” meaning that every data point in most datasets represents a human being in some way. This is less true for things like measurements of atmospheric CO2, but even there, the placement of sensors downwind of particular homes, communities, or companies could potentially encode information about those people. For this assignment, assess the ways in which the data might encode people. For example, could it be used to reveal someone’s race or ethnic origins, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, political opinions, organization memberships, or locations; financial or health data; biometric or genetic data; social security numbers; criminal history? Does the dataset raise any ethical concerns around consent? Are there any ways the data should not be used?

Shoot for 500 words once again, but if you fall a little short, don’t worry. Drop me an email if you run into trouble.

Assignment 9: White Paper draft 1

For next class, put together a complete draft of your group’s White Paper. Make sure it flows well and sounds consistent from section to section even though they may have been drafted by different people. This is a group assignment, so only one person needs to upload it from your group, and then it will show up as being submitted from everyone.

Remember, the purpose of this white paper is to make sure that you have a thorough understanding of the issue and the rhetorical situation before beginning any efforts at advocacy. Your white paper should:

summarize the history of the issue,
profile the people or groups involved or affected (the stakeholders),
identify the exact part of the problem you plan to tackle, including its scope, its urgency, and its cause(s),
evaluate potential solutions that have been implemented or proposed.

You do NOT have to keep the information in the order in which you wrote it, and in fact it will likely flow better if you move things around.

You should include information from any interviews you have conducted and hyperlink to online sources. Make sure it’s clear where all the information comes from.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Assignment 10: White Paper final draft

For next class, revise your group’s White Paper in response to the feedback you got from me and from your peers, incorporating any new information you have learned.

As before, make sure it flows well and sounds consistent from section to section even though they may have been drafted by different people. Remember, the purpose of this white paper is to make sure that you have a thorough understanding of the issue and the rhetorical situation before beginning any efforts at advocacy. Your white paper should:

summarize the history of the issue,
profile the people or groups involved or affected (the stakeholders),
identify the exact part of the problem you plan to tackle, including its scope, its urgency, and its cause(s),
evaluate potential solutions that have been implemented or proposed.

You should include information from any interviews you have conducted and hyperlink to online sources. Make sure it’s clear where all the information comes from.

This is a group assignment, so only one person needs to upload it from your group, and then it will show up as being submitted from everyone.

Let me know if you have any questions!