Digital Essay Proposal
The topic of my project is understanding and analyzing the benefits of DeepFake technology. As I browsed articles discussing DeepFakes, their content was overwhelmingly negative. Authors consistently wrote about its harm to society, citing that the technology was abused by people interested in impersonation, blackmail, etc. While this reality is likely true, I wanted to address its underrated benefits as well. To further focus my topic, I want to ask the following research questions: what are some positive use cases of this technology and how can we influence its continued development so it evolves into a technology that is used positively?
My methods of research will include text analysis and data visualization. I will explore scholarly sources for information on positive use cases of DeepFakes. I will use extensive text analysis during this process as I will need to derive detailed, relevant examples of its uses from these texts. To prepare and collect data for the visualizations, I will also need to find numerical and categorical data sources that support the narrative that DeepFakes are good for society. These visualizations will include, but may not be limited to, pie charts, scatterplots, and bar graphs.
I envision this project’s success as identifying, explaining, and detailing 5-10 positive use cases of DeepFake technology and supporting these examples with 2-5 data visualizations that show their impacts on society. Because I plan on going into an industry post-graduation that uses visualizations often, I would like to develop the hard skill of collecting, wrangling, and using data for visualizations.
I have already completed research on my topic, as I have gathered information from scholarly sources including the Library of Medicine and The New York Times.
Finally, I have included a proposed schedule and list of tasks I need to complete my project below:
- Identify at least 5-10 unique examples of positive DeepFake use cases and detail their importance with 200+ words each
- Identify potential at least 5 data sources (either numeric or categorical in nature) that address the benefits of DeepFakes in society
- Create visualizations based off of at least 2 of these data sources
- Organize the 5-10 positive use cases and their descriptions into a narrative and use the data visualizations to support my claims
- Upon completion of my project’s content, I plan on including images to illustrate my claims as a design feature. These will be integrated into the project by wrapping text around relevant content sections. I hope to discuss ways to further use digital medium features in my project during my meeting with Professor Abdoney
