The digital essay

Please see the handbook for all the details on the ‘digital essay’ assignment.

Submit your digital essay here in Moodle – deadline Monday the 19th of April 2021

You are required to submit a 2000-word digital essay on an aspect of the course content, defined by yourself. We are calling this a ‘digital essay’ because we want you to embrace some of the possibilities that technology provides to augment your writing. Similar to the opportunities for assignment submission for IDEL, this might be a written essay that incorporates different kinds of media, such as images, videos, or animations. In other words, we are looking for assignments that primarily demonstrate your ability to produce academic writing, but also show your creative abilities with digital formats. Note that technical prowess is not formally assessed – we are rather looking for imaginative and rigorous ways of presenting your academic work digitally.

In terms defining the scope of the essay yourself, we encourage you to choose one particular aspect or theme that you have encountered during the course, and use the essay as an opportunity to develop the idea as a more formal academic discussion. For example, you might choose a specific idea from one of the course readings, a particular perspective that has arisen from one developing one of your visualisations, or an issue discussed with your peers during one of the tutorials or in the blog comments.

In the final week of the course you’ll have an opportunity to discuss and agree the topic and form for your essay with your course tutor before embarking on it.