viz.

Image credit: My video "reading" of Donald Revell's "Election Year"

Last semester I began to experiment with various programs, particularly iMovie, as I think about how I'd make digital technology part of a course that focuses on poetry. In a brief post, I included a model iMovie file, and speculated as to how such an exercise might be used. Today, as we wrap up National Poetry Month, I'm posting a lesson plan that articulates the possibilities for this exercise more directly.  

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

While conducting research on W.B. Yeats I encountered this fascinating online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland that raised interesting questions for me about the relationship between visual rhetoric and literary archives.  Like many other graduate students teaching rhetoric while writing a dissertation on literature, I often wonder about the interconnections between the two fields and what ideas crossover and what do not.  Yeats, in many ways, seems like the perfect place to start to blur lines between the rhetorical, the literary, the visual and the auditory.  Navigating this website, I was struck by the extent to which the virtual museum brings together these fields and makes visible Yeats’s complicatedly interdisciplinary and multi-sensory career.

Image credit: From YouTube
H/T to A Mutual Respect

Full confession: I just joined Twitter about 30 minutes ago. However, for considerably longer, I've been curious about the significance of Twitter's text-based 140-character format. Although Twitter contains some visuals such as profile pictures and links, it is primarily a print-based medium. The viewer experiences Twitter posts, or tweets, as a wall of sentences. While tweets are themselves primarily textual in nature, two recent videos offer visual interpretations that play with the relationship between image and text.