Several researchers (to name a few: David R. Brake, Jen Schradie, Eszter Hargittai, Gina Walejko, Phlip M. Napoli, Jonathan A. Obar, Katy E. Pearce, Ronald E. Rice) have found that digital content is more likely to be created by, according to Julia Voss, “young, White, male, wealthy, and educated individuals” and that “more generally, non-White, female, poor, less educated, and older users tend to engage in more passive activities (such as browsing) rather than production and agentive practices like composing written or multimedia content, participating in discussion fora, or developing games and apps” (60). Especially, according to Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw, women “underestimate their technical expertise compare to me, which…makes women less likely to compose online digital texts” (60).
Voss highlights that there are “long-standing traditions of multimodal and digital composing by people of color (see Baca; Banks; Haas; Medina), women (see Blair, Gajjala, and Tulley; DeLuca), and other groups” (74).
Baca: Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing | SpringerLink
Banks: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology | Searching for Higher Ground | Adam J. (taylorfrancis.com)
Blair, Gajjala, and Tulley: Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action (Kristine Blair, Radhika: Hampton Press
DeLuca: Kairos 19.3: DeLuca, Can We Block these Political Thingys? – Index (technorhetoric.net)
Medina: In this book in chapter “Tweeting Collaborative Identity”: Communicating Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in Technical Communication (routledge.com)
So: what influences your choices? What do you want to do and learn about?
Don’t get too caught up in what you feel you should do, or what you are comfortable with, or what you think is easy. Go with your gut on what might be a good investment of your time learning about and doing.
See reference list that has entries for each of these researchers on the digital participation gap and other scholarship in Julia Voss’s 2018 research article, ““Who Learns from Collaborative Digital Projects? Cultivating Critical C” by Julia Voss (scu.edu)”
What you want and your role/group
So, how can you choose something that *you* want to do? Who might you want to work with? What kind of topic do you want to work on?
Research suggests most effective group projects have an element of self-selection and teacher-selection (see page 1787), so grouping by pairs and then the teacher combining groups has been found to be very effective. Consider both content but most important consider role.