Real solutions begin where surveillance ends. Meeting students where they are means treating writing as a situated, social practice rather than a product to be authenticated. Trust in classrooms cannot be rebuilt by better algorithms. It is rebuilt in the work of reading and writing together.
Reconstruct as one sentence up till the final one: "No, it is reubuilt in the hard work of reading and writing together."
Detection tools end up blocking honest writers while failing to catch dishonest ones.
Revise this sentence
CUNY students know this firsthand. On Reddit, they describe receiving false positives for honest work, flagged by algorithms while instructors trust a black box over their own judgment.
As colleges and universities rush to adopt technological solutions to the problem of AI-generated student work, substantial research on these systems reveals they are prone to both generating false accusations and systematically biased against marginalized student populations in their attempt to classify authenticity as itself a construct of human value in written form.
Module Details Name: routing Category: specialized/ Lines: 44 Tokens: ~180 Purpose: Fast intent classification and tool sequence planning You are a routing optimizer for a Discord bot that manages files and creates content. Your job is to analyze user requests and output a JSON routing plan. AVAILABLE TOOLS (ordered by speed): - file_exists: Instant check if path/URL exists - list_files: Instant directory listing...
Weak system prompt requires a more focused and streamlined set of instructions in the first two sentences with the need for tool calling determined by a request for something compared to a conversation or basic information request well within the bounds of a contemporary model.
Issue 1: Spring 2016
Spring/Fall 2016
This post matters because it was written before anyone knew a pandemic would strike
Poorly articulated on a second read
Columbia
Change to r/Columbia
models
models of what?
CUNY’s operating budget declined 19% between 2008-2020 while enrollment increased 11%, creating overcrowded classes, underpaid adjuncts, inadequate mental health services, and decaying physical infrastructure.
Integrate source and add to references
Michael Warner’s theory of publics provides essential grounding for understanding Reddit as more than a collection of posts. Warner argues that “publics have an ongoing life: one doesn’t publish to them once and for all (as one does, say, to a scholarly archive). It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration” (2002, 68). A public exists not through singular acts of communication but through continuous circulation; text must move through time and become part of an “intertextual environment of citation and implication” to constitute public discourse (Warner 2002, 68). This circulation principle distinguishes platforms like Reddit, where posts remain searchable and citeable across years, from ephemeral communication channels where discourse vanishes after immediate consumption.
IMPORTANT: Add a Digital Networks and Public-Sphere Theory section above this paragraph.
Key Revisions from Previous Outline Opening: Now starts with March 2020 crisis moment, not methodological discovery Context Before Method: Institutional context and theory come before explaining data collection Orphan Comments: Moved to Chapter 2 where it makes sense methodologically Evidence Flow: Pre-pandemic baseline consolidated in 1.2.2, referenced elsewhere Narrative Logic: Crisis -> Context -> Theory -> Method -> Preview Implementation Notes Total target: 14,000-15,000 words Each evidence ID appears in ONE primary location Cross-references use section numbers, not repetition Transitions connect sections without redundancy
Move to the very bottom of the page below the works cited and continuously update based on newly explicit directions/protocol
Critically, this methodology captures participation patterns invisible to standard approaches: the one-time crisis posters who seek help then vanish, the late-night support networks operating when institutions close, the tactical knowledge shared across years that conventional sampling misses entirely.
This is exemplary in terms of prose style.
(how CUNY’s digital communities responded to systematic institutional crises, how students constructed educational infrastructure through peer networks, how platform architectures shaped crisis resilience)
WAY too long of a parenthesis. Restructure this sentence so that the examples come after the point.
comment_ljsi5h9
Link to the comment on the site. It should be archived via: Evidence Index
ethnographic supplementation.
Clumsy unclear phrasing. Revise!
call “non-digital-centric” digital ethnography. They trea
rephrase the end of the sentence to connect with the subsequent verb of treating...
Sarah Pink et al.’s principle of “non-digital-centric-ness” (2016) reinforces this approach. Their focus on relationships, social worlds, and localities guides the analysis of March 2020 as an event unfolding simultaneously online and on campus. r/CUNY is read as both networked public and local community, with digital traces embedded in material life.
Fold into the previous paragraph and expand to synthesize.
Persistence: Solutions remain accessible across years. comment_koxv1co (Baruch, score: 51) preserves campus lore from “a few years ago,” comment_mn6abxk (CUNY, score: 135) shares 20-year-old success story of meeting spouse at Hunter, and comment_mcf39dr documents balance persistence from 2020-2024. comment_ksab2yr promotes CUNY Reconnect program for returning students, showing multi-year institutional memory preservation. Replicability: Tactical knowledge designed for copying and adaptation. comment_ewlyuik’s 5-step shopping cart strategy provides explicit reproduction instructions, comment_itwfhhb (3,756 characters) offers comprehensive financial survival guide, comment_ke4h1ml details step-by-step plagiarism defense using Google Docs version history, and comment_krbu6n9 provides multi-step first-generation college guidance, all structured as copy-paste templates. Scalability: Individual experiences reveal systemic patterns. comment_lo92u7q (CUNY, score: 95) “Everyone and their mother wants to major in computer science” makes individual major choice visible as system-wide pattern, comment_m9mqm92 (score: 183) “majority of CUNY cooked” transforms personal SNAP/Pell dependency into recognized collective condition, and comment_mcdyjks “Alot of people do not graduate ‘on time’” normalizes degree completion delays at population scale. Searchability: Students actively use Reddit search to find past solutions. comment_m9u60o2 describes “trying to find out how to join every club,” comment_jb2lv17 recounts “fought for my life trying to find a bathroom,” and multiple posts document discovering tactical knowledge through subreddit search, creating institutional memory accessible when students need it rather than when administrators schedule information sessions.
Turn these into paragraphs and not bullet-pointed lists and connect the logic across them with a synthesis paragraph that explains the implications and connects it to the project purpose and dissertation research questions and goals.
The CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) for Indigenous data governance (Carroll et al. 2020), while developed for Indigenous contexts, offer framework for community-centered research ethics. Applied to CUNY Reddit: ensuring research benefits communities studied, recognizing community authority over their narratives, researcher responsibility to accuracy, and ethical representation of vulnerable populations.
Delete this paragraph. It adds nothing and interrupts the main intervention of this section.
1.5.2 Dissertation Structure Pre-pandemic “normal” was already crisis (this chapter) Computational patterns reveal systematic inequality (Chapter 2) Lived experiences show survival strategies (Chapter 3) Reddit-participating students create supplementary education networks alongside formal structures 1.5.3 Contributions to Scholarship For platform studies: Architecture shapes crisis response capability For digital humanities: New methods for capturing marginalized voices For higher education: Vernacular infrastructure as functional educational infrastructure: peer tutoring networks (comment_fhdvsyc), resource sharing systems (submission_1my4vi6, score: 585), and 24/7 support mechanisms For public policy: The implications of reduced institutional support patterns
Turn these into paragraphs with stylistically consistent sentence and paragraph structures to them.
full technical treatment in Chapter 2, Section 2.1.2)
Instead of a parenthesis, find another way of expressing the point and bracketing it off for future consideration in the dissertation chapter progression.
Posts capture disclosure, not experience. Food insecurity threads document those prepared to discuss hunger in public view. Silence does not indicate stability; it reflects only that no one posted. Platform data shows discourse patterns rather than the prevalence of conditions. Text-based archives strip away embodied cues. Facial expression, tone, and immediate physical context disappear. In Geertz’s (1973) terms, the record offers thin description. Timestamps, campus identifiers, and community responses supply partial context, but the situated texture of interactions requires ethnographic supplementation.
These paragraphs are unusually terse and short. Interweave the logic and make argumentative links between these punchy individual claims so that the paragraphs read more like the ones before and after them.
Frame research questions emerging from crisis
Remove accordion dropdown and instead make these into a logically argumentative paragraph that expands on one question by asking the other
Reddit preserves 14 years of unsolicited discourse spanning 2011-2025.
Incorrectly framed. Try this instead:
I collected 14 years of unsolicited student discourse across x# of subreddits spanning 2011-2024.
When submission_1ic1a4p about federal aid suspension panic garners 315 upvotes, those votes represent 315+ students confirming “this is my experience too.” Unlike researcher-assigned codes or interview quotes selected for representativeness, Reddit engagement scores show what communities themselves consider important, accurate, and worth amplifying.
Expand on this point in two sentence or under
Focus groups have researchers facilitating. Institutional surveys have administrators framing questions. Reddit threads document peer-to-peer knowledge construction, tactical development, and collective sense-making as they happen.
This is way too terse and punchy. It's also borderline incoherent without any strong verbs, like a child was taking notes. Revise this and update the dissertation writing style guide to reflect the lessons learn with this stylistic edit.
Computational pattern recognition identifies correlations.
Use the first person narrator "I used ___ to identify correlations in ___ "
This scale doesn’t replace ethnographic depth; Chapter 3 provides that.
Too perfunctory. If mentioning another Chapter, make sure to do them together or as part of the more dedicated chapter outlines.
Reddit’s pseudonymity enables what Proferes (2017) calls “context collapse management.” Users
Incorporate Neussanbaum and boyd in this paragraph as well as an important critical counterpoint that builds toward this point on context collapse management
citational infrastructure he theorized as essential
This is too foundationalist / essentialist. Need to connect the citational infrastructure to a more recent response to Warner that helps situate the point.
2.3.2 N-gram Analysis Distinctive linguistic fingerprints CUNY-Specific Trigrams “the financial aid office”: 892 occurrences “constant issues with CUNYfirst”: 147 “take the shuttle then”: 73 “if the express is”: 89 Comparative Trigrams “direct all questions”: 48 (NYU/Columbia) “the admissions office”: 127 (private schools) “feel free to PM”: 89 (leisure for consultation)
For this to keep, it would need to be rendered after the initial framing paragraph for the section where findings from the study are disclosed and analyzed, higher up in Chapter 2.
Schedule validation
Extremely weak language to formulate the subject of the final paragraph here. Revise to keep with the stylistic markers of the previous paragraphs and interweaves them and distills value through the revision of this final paragraph's topic sentence and phrasing in the beginning of the second sentence.
Where institutions maintain industrial-era schedules, students forced into perpetual crisis vigilance embody this sleepless consumer, monitoring deadlines and aid calculations at 2am not from choice but from bureaucratic necessity.
DELETE
fundamental
remove foundationalist diction. I still see "fundamentally" -- we need to update the language across this chapter to avoid such clunky language.
Chapter 2: Macroscopic Computational Analysis
In general, this chapter needs more "I" and less complex and compound subjects that are concepts and methods made into zombified nouns.
CUNY students explaining upvoting conventions to newcomers, directing questions to appropriate subreddits through 614 cross-campus redirections, and providing OP-directed encouragement achieving 21% above-baseline engagement (3.53 vs 2.91 average score) embody this principle.
This is a repulsive complex subject that desperately needs revision.
directly instantiate Warner’s theoretical mechanisms.
Defer not to instantiation or other clunky terms. It informs! It underscores! Theoretical mechanisms is also clunky: change to 'theoretical lens"
—
No em-dashes
finds empirical validation in computational analysis of CUNY Reddit metadiscourse
Rephrase this not to sound tone-deaf and overly complicated, turgid, and stylistically off-putting.
“rate my schedule”
This commentary begins here and awkwardly re-engaged in the Registration Periods section. Let's avoid this redundancy and strive for more paragraph-level coherence and claim progression
January spike: 515 posts (Baruch 2019) Shopping cart discussions: 275 instances
Remove leftover outline materials
This temporal mismatch—crisis operating 24/7 while support operates 40 hours weekly—creates the necessity for peer networks analyzed in this chapter and documented ethnographically in Chapter 3.
Remove adjective 'temporal' and revise sentence structure with theoretical support from Jonathan Crary's 24/7, particularly his commentary on the ends of sleep amid the late capitalist state of constant socioeconomic hardship and compounding austerity conditions.
.
Add commentary from Crary's 24/7 here to close out the paragraph
private navigation of institutional barriers transformed into collective public discourse.
Vacuous string of abstractions
precarity operates continuously, demanding constant vigilance that transforms night into an extension of crisis rather than respite from it.
This is a vague generalization and overuse of austerity as an abstract driver. Let's get more specific with theoretical applications such as these: "As history has shown," writes Crary," war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer" (3).
“Rate my schedule”: 275 CUNY vs 34 NYU
At least 3 paragraphs on this
2.6 Chapter Summary: Key Findings (1,500 words)
Update this section to follow the new outline structure and organization as of Oct 24.
2.2.3 Semester Cycles and Activity Peaks
This section should effectively chart the seasonal patterns of engagement and be placed above the daily and hourly patterns of engagement, subsequently followed by commentary on space and mobility, transit and navigation across the boroughs.
Predictable patterns of precarity Registration Periods January spike: 515 posts (Baruch 2019) Shopping cart discussions: 275 instances The “rate my schedule” phenomenon reveals distinctively CUNY coordination practices absent from private university discourse. Students post screenshots of their planned course schedules requesting peer review before finalizing registration—275 such posts appear across CUNY subreddits compared to 34 at NYU and negligible activity at Columbia. This differential signals more than preference; it reflects structural necessity. CUNY students navigate complex constraints simultaneously: course availability limited by budget cuts and adjunct hiring, work schedules requiring specific class times, inter-campus commutes demanding transit-compatible timetables, and prerequisite confusion from inadequate advising documented throughout Chapter 1. Private university students selecting from abundant course sections with minimal scheduling conflicts face no comparable coordination burden, rendering peer schedule validation superfluous. The practice intensified dramatically during the pandemic transition and persisted afterward, despite initial privacy concerns. Pre-pandemic schedule posts occasionally prompted warnings about doxxing risks—unique course combinations could identify students to administrators or professors—but crisis overwhelmed caution. Students recognized that the risk of selecting an unmanageable schedule, missing a required course only offered once annually, or creating impossible commute patterns exceeded the abstract threat of identification. Posts evolved to include strategic anonymization: cropping professor names, obscuring course numbers while preserving time blocks, describing course types without titles. This vernacular privacy protocol demonstrates sophisticated risk calculation where students collectively developed protective practices enabling necessary coordination without institutional guidance on digital safety. The discourse reveals schedule validation functioning as distributed infrastructural work replacing absent institutional support. Comments analyze schedule feasibility across multiple dimensions: “That’s way too many writing-intensive courses in one semester” warns against cognitive overload; “You’ll never make the Baruch-Hunter commute in 45 minutes” provides transit realism; “Take Professor X’s section not Y’s for that course” transmits institutional knowledge about instructor quality that official sources won’t document; “That’s doable but you won’t have time for a job” acknowledges economic constraints shaping enrollment. This multi-factor analysis mirrors professional academic advising but operates peer-to-peer because CUNY’s 1:1000+ advisor-to-student ratios make individual schedule consultation effectively impossible. NYU’s robust advising apparatus—one advisor per 200-300 students—renders peer schedule validation redundant, explaining the 8-fold differential. The pattern exemplifies how institutional abandonment transforms into student infrastructural labor, with Reddit enabling coordination that universities should provide but don’t. Finals and Aid Deadlines December: 578 posts peak AI detection anxiety: 70 posts May/December Food pantry mentions: 420% increase during finals Summer Gaps Reduced activity but increased desperation Work-study ended, aid suspended Housing insecurity peaks
Scale back this expanded edit to only one longer paragraph and make sure to recalibrate the section with an awareness of the Section header's organizing principle being temporal, seasonal patterns of activity. Revise the prose to help frame this from the start and move some the discourse analysis work being done here to the linguistic analysis section, effectively coordinate the transition to highlight CUNY discourse conventions as part of the local public sphere of these subreddits
—all building from this foundational understanding that
Change to:
"responses dating to the 290% activity increase during the university-wide educational recess. [Cut the rest.]
The temporal lag between student advocacy and institutional response
Clarify exactly what is being claimed here.
This chapter analyzes March 2020 as the ONLY primary treatment of the pandemic spike, with other chapters referencing this analysis rather than duplicating it.
Remove this sentence
Platform mechanics references (0.54% of comments, 406 instances) demonstrate
This is unclear from the reader's perspective, likely because of the compound noun "platform mechanics references" -- break it up: "Student references to reddit or subreddit mechanics demonstrate..."
The monthly progression reveals the crisis arc: January’s 584 posts reflected normal academic stress, February’s 470 showed typical mid-semester decline, but March’s spike to 1,063 preceded May’s peak of 1,466 as the pandemic’s implications became inescapable.
Transition is hard to follow from one idea to the next. The flow of content and expressions needs to be more methodical and progressive with throughlines that bind together content, expression, or the argumentative progression of the chapter.
This wasn’t simply platform adoption—the CUNY main subreddit grew from 929 pre-2020 posts to 91,505 post-pandemic (98x increase), but as Chapter 1’s validation analysis demonstrated, this represented genuine intensification with 34% more posts-per-user rather than merely more users discovering Reddit
Consider revising the structure of this sentence to make it more economical and clearly constructed.
2.3 Linguistic Patterns: Comparative Discourse Analysis (4,000 words)
Add priority to the computational analysis of metadiscourse across the CUNY Reddit Hub, chronicled in the two most recent blog post entries. Pull from those feed items to write paragraph-level content framing the two posts on metadiscourse, situated within the literature of public-sphere theory in digital spaces, arguing for these subreddit communities as constitutive of local networked publics for their reflexive circulation of discourse, among other factors discussed in Warner's "Publics and Counterpublics" paper.
it provides prophetic baseline evidence
Change to:
it provide prefigurative evidence
Make sure to highlight the institutional shortcomings that preceded the pandemic and were perhaps exacerbated by it more dramatically, making these faultlines hypervisible upon breakdown of university facilities and services during the early days of the pandemic in Spring 2020.
lol I remember when someone asked if they should report someone that cheated and everyone ganged up on them 😭 Ig it’s really an ethical predicament, you’ll face the consequences eventually whether you’re ratted out or you eventually realize you’re just plain dumb and didn’t learn anything
this is a test
Annotations
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uses the Hypothesis plugin
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expand the sidebar
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To invite people to this event, you can email them, send them a Facebook message, or just direct them to https://www.when2meet.com/?23688374-55bm7
feb 20 | 3-5:30 feb 21 | 4-5:30 feb 26 | 10-10:30 feb 29 | 4-5:30
A TIME report indicated that OpenAI outsourced tasks to Kenyan workers who were paid less than $2 per hour to help make ChatGPT less toxic. These workers reported being mentally scarred by the disturbing content they had to process, and the problematic work environment led to the early termination of the contract with Sama, the firm that employed these workers, in February 2022. These revelations highlight important ethical considerations in the AI development process, particularly regarding labor practices and the psychological wellbeing of those involved in content moderation and model training.
classify
Worthwhile to consider this trend in terms of the classification schemes that Bowker and Star critique in Sorting Things Out.
While publishers may justify collecting this information for the purposes of improving educational outcomes, there are also serious questions about the potential risks.
Related in theory to Zuboff's notion of behavioral surplus
gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired.
so strange... i was searching 'gold' and came across this phrase inverted as one of Leopold's musings. then i realized a version of this phrase — gold by bronze, or bronze by gold — recurs throughout the novel.
Polytechnic, which enlists many different modes of technology, providing a complex framework to solve human problems. Monotechnic, which is technology only for its own sake, which oppresses humanity as it moves along its own trajectory.
a way for us to compare, restore, and merge changes to our stuff.
Boehmer, Elleke, and Dominic Davies. Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Cite
Some individuals maintain that it is in the best interests of individuals and of humanity as a whole that all people adhere to a specific model for society or specific aspects of such a model.
The author of this sentence draws attention to the generalized claims of "Some individuals" but fails to explicitly name or cite those who indeed hold such views, which are themselves too vague to be informative on the topic.
Ironically, this contributor also makes vague reference to "a specific model or specific aspects of such a model" but does not present any clear examples of what such models or aspects might entail in the context of cultural diversity.
Speakback/Feedback
Postdigital
Article needs updating...
The incipient pedagogical message in these sessions seems to be that teachers ought to adapt their approach to fit the technologies,
the next step is to design discussion board prompts or questions to reflect thatgoal.
I'm curious how instructors might facilitate constructivist learning through productive digression via in-text social reading prompts, where asynchronous conversation is seeded in context. Perhaps instructors could turn this tension between anchored conversations and productive digression into a reciprocal advantage by encouraging students to annotate with intertextuality in mind, or better yet, have students free-associate on a word/phrase and let their responders go from there. Doing so might foster rhetorical patterns and opportunities for reflexive inquiry if developed in the mid-range composing acts (e.g. blog/discussion posts) that Ugoretz discusses here. That process would also work with a variety of digital artifacts situated in new media discourse.
Praxis intervention makes research, creative expression or technology development into a bottom-up process. It democratizes making of art, science, technology and critical conscience. The praxis intervention method aims at provoking members to unsettle their settled mindsets and to have a fresh look at the world around and intervene.
clear goals
I find this to be particularly important, in part because if you have clear goals then you're usually less susceptible to distractions.
Twitter threads gave illness a name and a face, grounding the dread in particular bodies and disparate — if often overlapping — experiences. They placed these experiences in history, creating an archive of disease, fear, rage, and hope that will persist even as these feelings — and some of these people — have passed.
Archives are only worth their weight in water if interested parties can find what they're looking for. When artifacts aren't gathered and curated into public-facing unities or collections, then history elides them until further notice. These threads are still floating in the sprawl of the Twitterverse, placed into history and drowned out by an ocean of pure, frantic noise. What this piece makes evident to me is the need for restoration: that they need to be resurfaced, preserved, made visible again.
A new genre of writing emerged in early 2020: the Covid-19 symptoms thread.
It was the language we conjured to bear the unbearable, to speak the present without the future.
cybernetic ecology
First comes the cybernetic meadow, then the cybernetic forest, and ultimately the cybernetic ecology. Brautigan profiles this expansion in third line of each stanza. i wonder where else we might find correspondences of the sort.
All Watched Over by Machines
I spy a double entendre.
How might this double meaning introduce thematic tension into the poem? What other literary devices does Brautigan employ to underscore this tension? Annotate your findings and explain your reasoning.
Utterly encapsulating gapless dark ambient experience.
Now there's a touchstone for the ages
Terrifying in its bleakness, Elegy is a record dedicated to its portrayal of loneliness, telling a story with firm roots in tension contextualised by the title’s disheartening implications.
A dedicated sponge in the blank countenance of empty space and flat time, I'd say.