Spring 2026
Instructor: Lee Tusman
Office Hours: By appointment - Mondays and Wednesdays
This independent study introduces research methods used in media studies, cultural studies, and the arts. Rather than learning methods in the abstract, we’ll learn by doing—trying different approaches to see what fits your thinking. You’ll explore methods like ethnography, close reading, critical fabulation, autoethnography, and digital analysis through hands-on exercises and collaborative work.
The goal isn’t to become an expert in all methods, but to discover which approaches help you think more clearly about what you’re curious about. By semester’s end, you’ll have experimented with multiple research approaches, developed a project based on your interests, and reflected critically on your own learning process.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
| Assignment | Percentage of Grade | Occurs |
|---|---|---|
| Participation | 40% | Weekly |
| Presentation | 20% | Weeks 6 - 8 |
| Midterm: Research proposal | 15% | March 16 |
| Final: Experimental Documentary/Podcast(etc) + Methods Reflection | 25% | May 5 |
This is an independent study. If you miss a meeting without communication, we will need to discuss your standing in the course.
You are encouraged to use AI as a thinking partner (clarifying ideas, generating questions). You cannot have AI write your assignments for you. Plagiarism—submitting work that is not your own without proper attribution—will result in disciplinary action.
If you need accommodations, please contact the Office of Disability Resources (ODR). I am committed to making this course accessible and am happy to discuss accommodations. However, please note that there are practical, ethical, and legal limits to the accommodations I can provide. The Office of Disability Resources collaborates directly with students who self-identify as having documented disabilities to create accommodation plans, including testing accommodations, to enable students to access course content and demonstrate learning validity. Students who may require accommodations are encouraged to contact the Office of Disability Resources as soon as possible, 914-251-6035, ODR@purchase.edu (Student Services Building, #316A), www.purchase.edu/odr.
University faculty and staff recognize that mental health and stress can impact college performance and interfere with daily life activities. Purchase, Counseling & Behavioral Health Services can provide support if you’re struggling with feeling overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, lost, stuck, or in a crisis. Please call (914) 251-6390 or visit our website for more information. CBHS services are free and confidential.
We support all students experiencing emergencies. Services include therapy, support groups, stress reduction at the Harbor Center, and other activities. The Counseling Center on the Humanities Lower Level is open M-F from 9:00 a.m.– 5:00p.m. for appointments and walk-in scheduling; call (914) 251-6390. The Harbor Center Sanctuary in Fort Awesome is available for stress reduction, mindfulness and meditation training, free drop-in classes, support groups, and relaxation.
The College is committed to a safe environment. I am a “Responsible Employee,” meaning if you share an instance of sexual misconduct with me, I am required to report it to the Title IX Coordinator to ensure you receive support and resources.
If you will miss class for a religious observance, please notify me within the first two weeks of the semester so we can plan accordingly.
I’m here to think alongside you. Your interests drive the study. Work happens during our meetings and between, when you dive deep into your areas of interest, exploring from the inside out. Try things, engage generously, and let’s make this good.
The goals of our research methodolgy are meant to emphasize process over polish, curiosity over argument, and methodological awareness throughout.
This syllabus may change and adapt based on areas that come up in discussion, from input from students, or adapting to current news media and other input. When this happens, the change will be brought up in our meeting, and updated on the course website and Brightspace.
Weeks 1-2: Foundations & Exploration: Begin by mapping your current interests and questions. What draws you to media, arts, or society? Keep a research journal to track emerging curiosities. Read introductory texts on various research methods to get a lay of the land. Identify methods that initially resonate with you.
Weeks 3-4: Close Reading & Textual Analysis: Practice close reading with media texts—film scenes, advertisements, social media posts, or artworks. Pay attention to details you’d normally overlook. Try different analytical frameworks (semiotics, narrative analysis, visual rhetoric) and see which reveals something interesting about your chosen text. Write short analytical exercises rather than formal papers.
Weeks 5-6: Ethnography & Observation: Observe a media practice or cultural space—a gaming community, Instagram subculture, gallery opening, or streaming chat. Take detailed field notes. What do people actually do versus what they say they do? Experiment with thick description. Consider what this method shows you that close reading couldn’t.
Weeks 7-8: Autoethnography & Critical Fabulation: Turn the lens on yourself. Examine your own media consumption, creative practice, or cultural participation. How does your experience illuminate broader patterns? Try critical fabulation—imagining alternative narratives or speculative scenarios based on gaps in existing research. Get comfortable with creative-critical hybrid approaches.
Weeks 9-10: Digital Methods & Data: Explore digital research tools suited to your interests—basic social media analysis, digital archives, computational text analysis, or network mapping. The goal isn’t technical mastery but understanding what digital methods can and can’t tell you. Compare findings with your earlier ethnographic or textual work.
Weeks 11-12: Project Development: Choose one method (or a combination) that best suits your research question. Design a small-scale project you can actually complete. Develop your research question, methodology, and plan for execution. Share your proposal with your advisor for feedback.
Weeks 13-14: Project Execution & Analysis: Conduct your research. Collect data, make observations, or perform your analysis. Stay flexible—research rarely goes exactly as planned, and adapting your approach is part of the learning.
Week 15: Reflection & Presentation: Complete your project and, importantly, reflect on your research process. What did this method reveal? What did it obscure? How did your question evolve? What would you do differently? Prepare a presentation of both your findings and your methodological insights.
Begin by mapping your current interests and questions. What draws you to media, arts, or society? Keep a research journal to track emerging curiosities.
As you watch Preserving Worlds, take detailed notes as if you’re an ethnographer studying both the virtual worlds AND the people who built them. What do you notice about how people talk about their creations? What seems important to them vs. what the filmmakers emphasize? Pay attention to moments of loss, preservation, memory. What’s visible in these worlds and what’s absent? Don’t analyze yet—just observe and record with as much detail as possible.
The filmmakers made choices about how to tell this story. What research methods are they using? Are they doing ethnography (interviewing, observing)? Archival work (collecting screenshots, code)? Close reading of the worlds themselves? Something else? Write about what you can see of their methodology. What do these choices reveal and what might they obscure?
How do the filmmakers’ methods compare to how Turkle or Rheingold approached studying online communities in the 90s? What’s similar or different about their ways of knowing and documenting digital worlds?
Write about an online space, game, community, or digital artifact from your own past. This could be from the 90s, 2000s, or last year—whenever something felt significant to you. What made it matter? Does it still exist? How would you research it now? What’s been preserved and what’s lost? Let yourself be curious and unsure.
Practice close reading with media texts—film scenes, advertisements, social media posts, or artworks. Pay attention to details you’d normally overlook. Try different analytical frameworks (semiotics, narrative analysis, visual rhetoric) and see which reveals something interesting about your chosen text.
Choose a specific digital artifact to analyze closely. This could be: - A level or scene from a game - A particular social media interface (TikTok’s FYP, Instagram Stories, Discord server) - A virtual world space (even just from screenshots) - A website captured in the Wayback Machine - A meme format or viral moment
Describe it in extreme detail first—interface elements, visual design, interactive possibilities, temporal structures. Then analyze: What assumptions about users/players are built into the design? What behaviors does it encourage or discourage? What narratives or ideologies are embedded in its formal structures? What would someone from 1995 or 2045 make of this?
Don’t aim for a thesis-driven argument. Instead, use close reading as a method of discovery—what becomes visible when you slow down and pay attention?
Observe a media practice or cultural space—a gaming community, Instagram subculture, gallery opening, or streaming chat. Take detailed field notes. What do people actually do versus what they say they do? Experiment with thick description. Consider what this method shows you that close reading couldn’t.
Spend 5-7 days observing (and possibly participating in) an online community or digital space. Options:
Keep detailed field notes: What do people do? What do they talk about? What rules (stated and unstated) govern behavior? What conflicts arise? What gets celebrated? Take screenshots if appropriate and ethical. Pay attention to rituals, inside jokes, hierarchies, and how newbies are treated.
Then write up your observations using “thick description”—not just what happened, but what it might mean in context. What surprised you? What didn’t you understand? Be honest about the limitations of your access and perspective. What would you need to observe longer to understand?
Ethics note: Include a paragraph reflecting on the ethics of your observation. Did you disclose you were researching? Why or why not? What felt appropriate or uncomfortable?
Methodological reflection: How does your approach compare to what you’ve read in Taylor, Nardi, Boellstorff, or Geertz? What ethnographic techniques did you borrow or adapt? What was different about your situation or access? If you were to extend this research, what would you do differently based on what these scholars modeled?
Turn the lens on yourself. Examine your own media consumption, creative practice, or cultural participation. How does your experience illuminate broader patterns? Try critical fabulation—imagining alternative narratives or speculative scenarios based on gaps in existing research. Get comfortable with creative-critical hybrid approaches.
Following Saidiya Hartman’s method, write about a disappeared or barely-documented digital space, community, or moment. This could be:
Use the fragments you can find (screenshots, Wayback Machine captures, others’ memories) as evidence, but allow yourself to imagine and speculate. What might have happened in the gaps? Who might have been there whose stories weren’t recorded? Write in a way that acknowledges you’re imagining while staying grounded in what little evidence exists. Reflect on what this method allows you to say that straight archival work wouldn’t.
Write about your own relationship to a digital platform, practice, or community. Make your personal experience the subject of analysis. How does your specific experience illuminate broader patterns about digital culture, media consumption, identity, or community?
Use “I” freely, but also step back: What cultural forces shaped your experience? What assumptions did you bring? How has your relationship to this space/practice changed over time? Connect your story to broader questions about media, memory, identity, or community.
This isn’t memoir—it’s using your experience as data to understand something larger.
Explore digital research tools suited to your interests—basic social media analysis, digital archives, computational text analysis, or network mapping. The goal isn’t technical mastery but understanding what digital methods can and can’t tell you. Compare findings with your earlier ethnographic or textual work.
Use digital tools to investigate the history or current state of something. Options:
Then write about your findings AND your method. What did this approach reveal? What patterns emerged? But also: What didn’t you find? What questions can’t these methods answer? What would ethnography or close reading show that data collection misses?
Compare your digital findings with one of your earlier exercises (close reading or ethnography). What does each method make visible or invisible?
Engage with boyd and Crawford’s “Critical Questions for Big Data.” What are the limitations and assumptions of the digital methods you used? What context is missing from your data? How might the tools themselves shape what you found? Even if you’re working on a small scale, what cautions do they raise that apply to your work?
Choose one method (or a combination) that best suits your research question. Design a small-scale documentary/podcast project you can actually complete. Develop your research question, methodology, and plan for execution.
Write a proposal for your final documentary/podcast project. Include:
1. Research Question/Curiosity: What are you investigating? Frame this as genuine curiosity, not a predetermined argument. What do you want to understand better?
2. Methodology: Which research method(s) will you use? Why are these appropriate for your question? Will you do interviews (ethnography)? Analyze texts or platforms (close reading)? Work with archives or memory? Use your own experience (autoethnography)? Combine approaches?
3. Media Form: Why documentary, podcast, video essay, or audio piece? What can this form do that a written essay can’t? What aesthetic or structural choices will you make?
4. Failed Experiments: What have you tried that didn’t work? What dead ends taught you something? This is crucial—research is messy.
5. Prototype Description: Describe your 2-3 minute sample. What will it show about your approach?
6. Timeline & Next Steps: What do you need to do in the next few weeks?
Be specific but stay flexible. The point is to articulate your thinking so far, not lock yourself into something that might not work.
Presentation: Present your proposal in class (5 minutes) along with your brief prototype or proof-of-concept.
Conduct your research. Collect data, make observations, perform your analysis, and create your documentary/podcast/multimedia piece. Stay flexible—research rarely goes exactly as planned, and adapting your approach is part of the learning.
Complete your project and, importantly, reflect on your research process. What did this method reveal? What did it obscure? How did your question evolve? What would you do differently?
An experimental documentary, podcast, audio essay, video essay, or similar multimedia piece that uses one or more research methods explored in the course. This should demonstrate your methodology in practice—whether that’s ethnographic observation, critical fabulation, archival investigation, or hybrid approaches.
This accompanies your creative project. Reflect on:
1. Evolution: How did your question, approach, and project change from proposal to completion? What caused those changes?
2. Method in Practice: How did your chosen research method shape what you discovered? What did it let you see? What did it obscure or leave out? Would a different method have produced different insights?
3. Form & Content: How did the creative/documentary form shape your research? What could you express through audio/video/multimedia that you couldn’t in writing? What challenges did the form present?
4. Failures & Surprises: What didn’t work? What surprised you? What would you do differently if you started over?
5. Epistemological Reflection: What does this process teach you about how we know things? About the relationship between method and knowledge? About your own way of thinking and investigating?
Avoid generic reflection (“I learned a lot”). Be specific about methodological insights. Quote from your own field notes, failed drafts, or earlier exercises. Show your thinking process.
Participation & In-Class Work (40%): Weekly exercises, writing prompts, discussions, and collaborative experimentation with different methods. Consistent engagement matters more than the performance of a particular style.
Student-Led Presentation + Exercise (20%): Present 1-2 readings and lead a 15-minute methodological exercise for the group.
Midterm: Research Proposal + Prototype (15%): 3-4 page proposal with brief prototype (2-3 minutes) and 5-minute presentation.
Final: Experimental Documentary/Podcast + Methods Reflection (25%): 10-15 minute creative piece + 4-5 page reflection essay.
Thanks to Shaka McGlotten for syllabus suggestions.