viz.

Image Credit: xkcd 

I’ve been following the webcomic xkcd for the better part of my adult life, despite its warning that it may contain “strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”  (Clearly, I was always already a liberal arts major, any way you slice it.)  Randall Munroe’s bare-bones aesthetic consistently privileges an idea above the attached illustration; each entry thrives on an invented ethos of the supremacy of text to convey this idea, rather than the illustration itself.  This ethos is also heavily grounded in an empirical interest in physics, mathematics, and programming culture, and this empiricism translates quite cleanly into any comment the comic makes on the condition of being human; that is, that it is always based in lived experience, but that this experience is best crystallized in the juxtaposition of concrete, minimalist illustration and sparse but highly suggestive prose.  Its only flourish is that each comic contains a “hidden” joke in the roll-over text—often one that works to undo the rhetoric of the initial panel.

Screenshot from student project Evolution, Not Revolution by Lacey Teer

Last semester, I wrote my final blog post about using iMovie in the classroom. This semester, I attempted to correct some of the issues that arose when I asked all my students to use multimodal argumentation for their final papers. What follows is an outline of the final project I assigned and information about the changes I made to address various problems. This information will also appear on our "Teaching" page, along with sample student projects.

Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts.  A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy.  But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Image Credit:  Screenshot of viz. 

This past week, I had the privilege of listening to Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Natasha Trethewey, and Kwame Dawes give a reading/ panel at AWP on their work that I have discussed in recent posts (here and here). The panel was moderated by VQR editor Ted Genoways and also included the poet Erika Meitner who is currently collaborating with a photographer on a project involving Detroit. I'm preparing a longer, related post to appear in the coming weeks, but, in the meantime, I've been thinking about issues of representation raised by those pieces and how the combined effect of literary and visual gazes transforms the stakes for subject, viewer, poet, photographer, and editor.  In that frame of mind, I'm re-booting Andi Gustavson's provacative post on the power dynamics of documentary films that feature children.  Writing about Born into Brothels, Andi is concerned with how "the viewer is invited into the film in a position of power." Surely, such a consideration can be extended to the "readers" of these projects. 

Cover image of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Children’s literature is, practically by definition, a multimedia endeavor. The beloved works of Dr. Seuss, Elsa Holmelund Minarik, Roald Dahl, Frank Baum, and countless others have a drawing at least every few pages, if not on every page. But as the audience grows older and gains reading proficiency, the pictures slowly disappear, an indication that all but the simplest of stories can be told in words alone. The multimodal aspects of children’s literature are, then, little more than a helpful scaffold to engage children while building the skills necessary for reading.

In continuing to focus on the intersection of poetry and visual media, I refer back to my post from last fall concerning the "docu-poems" of Susan Somers-Willet and Natasha Trethewey. Similarly, the poet Kwame Dawes is working in this hybrid medium with very moving and memorable results.

Video Credit: "Women of Troy," Susan B.A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally, In Verse

H/T to Noël Radley for introducing me to this project

Last week I posted several video animations of poems read by their authors as part of a recent project by the Poetry Foundation. Today I’d like to draw your attention to In Verse, a series of “documentary poems” put together using the resources of Association of Independents in Radio, Incorporated and Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR).