viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot of a drawing by Katie Butler for my E314J class

Last year at about this time, Emily Bloom offered a thoughtful post in which she cautioned against privileging visual literacy at the expense of what she called “auditory literacy,” a crucial component of both analyzing and creating new media productions in the classroom. After assigning a narrated slideshow project this semester, with decidedly mixed aural results: I consider myself schooled.

Image Credit: "Don't Touch My Flag," Library of Congress  Prints and Photographs

Greetings, all. In my last post for this semester, I'd like to continue on the poetry track down which I've been more or less rambling. Lately, I've noticed the growing frequency with which both poets and larger institutions are using visual media to bring poetry to broader (usually younger) audiences and to augment the form of the reading experience. I've also thought about how some of these techniques can be added to my own pedagogical practices.

Image Credit: Adriana Cervantes, created as final presentation for my RHE 306 class

Particularly in technology-based classrooms like we have here in the DWRL, instructors are always looking for new ways to teach students non-traditional forms of writing. A few weeks back, Ashley wrote a viz. post about the on-line animation program, Xtranormal, whose motto is “if you can type, you can make movies.”  Her post inspired/challenged me to give it a try with my students. It's extremely user-friendly, and we were able to create animations in a single class period. Users enter text, and the program animates the dialogue for them. Above and after the jump are examples of my students' work, and I'll talk more about pedagogical value of the program.

Image Credit: Baba Brinkman

In the spirit of Elizabeth’s “Picturing Poetry” post from a few weeks back, I’ve assembled a few of my favorite DIY science-rap videos. These multimedia productions collectively offer an alternative model for science communication, challenging top-down popularizations by talking-head experts and giving us new images of what it means to learn about and practice science.

The Restoring Honor Rally held on August 28, 2010 and the Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) on October 30th were two media-led rallies with the former appealing to the political right and the latter mainly to the left. The images featured in the SoundSlides presentation above are from both of these rallies. 

Image Credit: Eileen McGinnis

To follow up on this week's review of SoundSlides Plus, here is a brief demo that I made for my "Literature and Biology" students using the software.

Image Credit: Screenshot of my SoundSlides project

Thanks to Alicia Dietrich at the HRC’s Cultural Compass blog, we at viz. learned about this easy-to-use software that allows journalists to create sleek, sophisticated slideshows. But how does SoundSlides translate to the writing classroom? A mixed—but mostly enthusiastic—review after the jump.

Image Credit: Christian Behrens, "Flight & Expulsion"

On the heels of touring the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s visualization lab, I thought I’d highlight a new social-media platform for data visualization. Launched earlier this month by GE and SEED Media Group, visualizing.org is a collaborative space for visualizing complex issues like climate change, human migration, and food insecurity.

Image Credit: Screen capture of Colors of the Web infographic from Colour Lovers by way of Cool Infographics

Lately we've been discussing image production in our viz meetings including slide shows using Sound Slides, Animoto, and other ways of encouraging students to create images while getting beyond the basic slideshow. One of my pet projects for this semester was to learn more about creating infographics and to determine whether it would be reasonable to ask students to create a basic one-layer infographic (no statistics, just visual relationships) of an essay for an English or Rhetoric class. After the jump, I'll give a brief overview of my findings so far. 

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

Click play, and you're smack in the middle of composing, as Jason Dockter, PhD student at Utah State University, creates a digital ethnography of skateboarding sub-culture. His website Going Multi-Modal documents, as Dockter writes, "the process that I went through creating multimodal composition similar to what I might ask students in my first-year composition course to create in a future semester." You can watch the digital iMovie take shape from the beginning, through several...different...stages of production, and through to the end. (The example piece is embedded after the break.)