noelradley's blog

Tag Me: Social Tagging and Visual Rhetoric

noelradley — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:53:29 +0000

Screen shot of the Blanton STEVE tagger

We have written before about the STEVE in Action project, which helps art museums incorporate tagging interfaces onto their websites in order to encourage thoughtful interaction between the patrons and the art objects. This semester, we used the Blanton's STEVE interface to get a closer look at how students write about abstract art, and while we have not yet processed all the data, the experience has been very thought-provoking.

Screen shot of the Blanton STEVE tagger

We collected data with the help of several instructors in the Digital Writing and Research Labs. Viz members involved with STEVE went to different undergraduate classes to administer the activity. Students were asked to use the STEVE tagger to create tags for various works of abstract art from the Blanton's collection. They also completed surveys before and after tagging. These surveys attempted to gauge the students' attitudes toward abstract art in order to provide additional context for the tags we received. All of the tagging was anonymous and we emphasized that there were no "right answers" so that students would feel more comfortable writing responses. While we did not explicitly frame the tagging experience as social, students could see the tags that other students had produced in a tag cloud at the bottom of the page.

Close up of Tag Cloud for Filles de Killimanjaro

Our rubric for coding the data is borrowed from Jeff Grabill and Stacey Pigg from the WIDE (Writing in Digital Environments) Initiative at Michigan State. They were gracious enough to share their evaluation methods after a discussion of the Take Two Project at Michigan, where they are also considering the impact of web environments on museum learning. The rubric, which is duplicated below. Our partner researchers at the Blanton will looking at this data through the lens of aesthetic development theory (VTS theory), as one coding pass. But we'll use Pigg and Grabill's rubric in another pass, in order to focus on our approach in the Digital Writing and Research Lab to social tagging as a form of writing, and through the lens of rhetoric.

Rubric for Coding Data (Based on Jeff Grabill and Stacey Pigg's "Coding Instructions")

1. Building Ethos (Invoking Role, Place, Education, Status, Values, Affect)

2. Building an Argument (Toulmin model, using Evidence, naming Experts, Logos)

3. Building Community (Indicating previous ideas, Inviting others to comment, Articulation of Shared experience)

4. Exploring New Ideas (Invention)

5. Building Pathos (Using emotions, or subjective experience)**Added to the WIDE rubric by Visual Rhetoric Workgroup UT-Austin

Screenshot of Prezi Presentation Soon Available from "Social Tagging and Visual Rhetoric, viz."

Most analysis of tagging has been conducted in fields of technical writing and information science. Tagging has been defined an activity where users are better able (collectively) to create shared terms to find and return to important information. So, is tagging writing? Of course, yes. Single words or short phrases might not fit the length or format, of traditional argumentation (such as speeches, print publications, or essays). Yet, these words appear in fonts of varying sizes corresponding to a digital image. This interaction of word and image has potentially a richer affective function beyond the tag's function as meta-data. Moreover, it is also important to note that short word tags often are coordinated with hyperlinks to long-form writing in websites, profiles, and forums.

Tags are writing in the strict sense. It is also obvious that tagging is being used as part of persuading and engaging publics in civic discourse. As we move into coding the data from the study, we have a growing sense about what Visual Rhetoric can say about tagging. In the case of Flickr, social tagging collects images together in galleries, juxtaposing diverse, dynamic media. Events such as the Japan tsunami, for example, occasion the creation of tags with which users make visual arguments about nuclear power, humanitarian aid, or even commercial services. These groupings in Flickr indicate the solidarity, among other psychological experiences, that groups of people create via word tags.

The tagging interface and its functionality can influence the type of discourse that emerges. For example, the image sets in the STEVE tagger delimit the images based on museum collections, and thus, they create a situated and controlled experience, one that attempts not merely to create solidarity between users, but between users and the environments of institutional museums. Finally, the kinds of images in the STEVE sets reflect a variety of art collections, images which imply very different responses and audiences. In our partnership with the Blanton, we are looking forward to closely analyzing how people respond to works of contemporary abstraction and what those works have motivated them to write.

Beyonce: Let's Move Campaign and Inter-cultural Rhetorics

noelradley — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:24:24 +0000

H/T Beverly Mireles

The Beyonce video above was launched this month as a part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move Campaign" on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters. The video mobilizes inter-cultural rhetorics in support of public health, most obviously with the shift mid-video from hip hop to Latino-inflected dance moves and music. The 'flash workout' indicates the need for solidarity among minority populations most affected by the state of food and exercise culture in America. Healthy bodies and race relations, the video communicates, are the same cause. The flag waving at the end of the video underlines a populist appeal.

Of course, it's not so simple as Michelle Obama , Beyonce, or the NAB would have it. The class signals in the main video, such as the cafeteria workers joining the flash dance, seem wishful thinking. The young women in the "Behind the Scenes" video talk about their unhealthy diets with self-reflection, but it doesn't seem the problem gets solved with Beyonce flippantly (petulantly?) taking a bite from an apple in the main vid.

For the most part Beyonce's fully energized and empowered movement authenticates what would otherwise a paradoxical performance as school girl. The school girl costuming becomes a way for Beyonce to occupy and enable--rather than exploit--the nubile teen sexuality of the young people participating. And although for a lot of the video it's hard to see past Beyonce to the young bodies moving behind and beside her, there are some grainy shots of the young subjects taking their own videos with flip cameras. These few shots keep the flash mob from merely becoming Beyonce's glorified back up dancers. All in all, it's not perfect, but I think it's definitely salvageable and interesting cultural work.

Sol Lewitt, #StankyLegg, and the Publics for Conceptual Art

noelradley — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:47:43 +0000

Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt Via UIC

Can the Stanky Legg bring new publics to conceptual art? Perhaps this is arguable. But why don't you make up your own mind about it while Chaz Evans shakes a leg in his Vimeo video. Shots of Evans dancing the Dougie, the Robot, and the Hustle after the break.

The shots of dancing are from the interactive exhibit EDBSL-Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt, and the dancer and creator is a MFA at University of Illinois Chicago, who is working with the 1972 recorded performance of artist, John Baldessari.

As Evans writes on his Vimeo page: "I feel that this is a tribute to [Baldessari] in that I think his vocal stylings have been hidden too long in the walls of art institutions and video art websites. Perhaps by my dancing them to popular moves it will bring his songs to a much larger public." Baldessari's songs range from the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy to arhymthic compositions with no tune at all in the style of 1970s performance art.

With his get-down-boogie dancing, Evans is mirroring the intention of Baldessari himself who was in 1972 trying to reach out to the public by translating another strange artifact. Baldessari's singing was a delivery of the premises of conceptual art written by Sol Lewitt.

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
Formal art is essentially rational.
Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.

The sentences(there are 35 of them in all) don't seem to be written for a popular audience. But that didn't stop Baldessari and now Evans from bringing them to those who wouldn't engage or understand. Evans not only translates each sentence into a dance move from American popular culture. His exhibit also allows the viewer to use a controller to scroll through and choose which dances/sentences to experience. Evans writes, "It may be the case that after selecting the dances you will experience additional enjoyment brought on through a principle of choice-supportive bias."

It seems to me the exhibit does interesting work. It assumes the value of connecting new people with the historical work of conceptual artists. But this connection is made with a good dose of humor, more familiar parts of American culture, and also through gesture and the body. The disarming, enlivening dancing by Evans mediates a problematic relationship between the American public and the cultural heritages they either ignore or cannot access.

The user-oriented interface of the exhibit is another layer on top of that.

Sol DeWitt, Circle With Towers Via Artnet

Landmarks, our public art program on UT-Austin campus, recently helped to buy a major work of art by Sol LeWitt, "Circle with Towers." But the comments on the Landmarks press release indicate that conceptual art and the public still, at times, remain at an impasse. Those who posted comments against "Circle with Towers" argue that in a tight economy, the money used to purchase art would be better used on salaries, university technology, or anything else. The anti-art comments also question the aesthetic value and meaning of the Landmarks collection, which are mostly contemporary works of abstraction. On the other hand, the comments from art professionals and staff indicate the assumption that contemporary art has enduring value for the public. The whole purpose of the Landmarks program is to give people access (the art pieces are installed across UT campus). In their replies, the Landmarks staff post web links to multi-media support materials such as podcasts, written context, and images.

I believe the mini-controversy at UT shows that there is a bit of work to do in regards to engagement, but I believe personally that this presents a vital opportunity for us to reimagine our relationship to art in America in the new economy. I think Evans with his Stanky Legg is on to something. We need to engage art with our bodies. Also, I think we need to consider that we're not going to survive in a time of scarcity without digging into creative ways of thinking. It isn't going to work anymore to continue the status quo, and who better to show us that than artists like Lewitt who lived to upset it.

Blogging with Images Workshop this Afternoon

noelradley — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:17:57 +0000

We invite faculty, instructors, and staff to a workshop addressing the advantages and challenges of blogging with images.While most blogs are text-based, the integration of images can be an enriching, even vital, part of blogging formats.Viz. bloggers will discuss their own perspectives and techniques. Ashley Squires will share her semester-long assignment, where class members are following a visual theme across historical periods and into contemporary visual culture.

Wednesday, April 20th, at 3:30 pm in FAC 10

The workshop will cover the follow topics and questions:
*How to create a semester-long assignment with visual content

*How to properly cite images and websites.

*How to participate in the discussions of images.

*The etiquette of blogging

*When are images superfluous, and when are they to the point?

*What is the difference between blogging about images, as opposed to using images to illustrate your topic or argument?

Reboot: Bodies of Evidence by Emily Bloom

noelradley — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:22:34 +0000

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate. One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples. Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled“Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats. Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives. The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

These photo collections led me to consider representations of obesity in other media and, particularly, the cropped photographs that feature so regularly on local nightly new programs. Why is it that obesity is so often represented by a headless body? Although the obvious answer is to protect the identity of these individuals, such images paint an eerily dehumanized portrait of obesity. The obesity debate has created a strange visual rhetoric that photographic montages such as The Museum of Fat and “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” may be attempting to reorient.

Image Credit: MSNBC

In a recent article in Slate Magazine, "Glutton Intolerance," Daniel Engber argues that social stigmas against overweight individuals are not only deplorable but may actually cause the health problems associated with obesity. Citing a study by epidemiologist Peter Muennig, Engber writes that weight discrimination contributes to the stress-related illnesses that are generally attributed to obesity. If weight-stigma is itself a public health “epidemic” then perhaps visual evidence for active, well-loved plus-size people may perform an important function in undermining stigmas and, thereby, relieving dangerous stress.

Bloom's Original Post from October 6, 2009.

When Twitter, Kinect, Screen, and Body Meet

noelradley — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:00:46 +0000

Screenshot "Full Body Twitter app" Johndan Johnson-Eilola

I experienced full body twitter this weekend. Just by moving my body, I wrote a text and sent it into the twitter-sphere. The experimental video installation "Bodies of Language" and conference panel with professors Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola was really fun. (You can see a snapshot of my interaction with the exhibit after the break.) The discussion also planted the disrupting thought that multi-media needs to get beyond the visual. What? Get beyond the visual?

Full Body Twitter, Noel Radley

Correcting the commonplace that we are progressively more visual, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola suggested that the point isn't merely to reify the preferred formats of our time but rather to find the edges of these formats, and ourselves. For Johnson-Eilola, who was Skyping into the conference, the edges have to do with the perceptual experience of the hand becoming part of the screen, the kinesthetic experience we have using keyboards for personal computing, or the way we use joysticks with game interfaces. Johnson-Eilola seemed to be thinking about where the body ends and machine starts. Wysocki's point was more about the embodied, affective experience that is at the heart of aesthetic enjoyment. "What an aesthetic experience has been [in the past]...is when you feel your body in connection with the world," Wysocki said. "The intensification of the visual is only one aspect of what's possible with this."

"Ryan-Kincect" by Johndan Johnson-Eilola

Wysocki, who is at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Johnson-Eilola, who is at Clarkson, worked with Ryan Kornheisl, the lead computer programmer on the project, to develop "Full Body Twitter," which was launched this past weekend at CCCC 2011 in Atlanta. The media station they created coordinates Twitter with a video recognition interface (the Kinect gaming console). When you approach the t.v. screen, your body's form appears/moves in pixelated green. Near the top of the screen, words appear and disappear in large white text. You use an orange cursor (a circle), which recognizes and follows the human hand, and with the cursor, you move the words, one by one, into a green box. The system interacts with Twitter at two points: the white floating words are taken in real time from a Twitter feed. When you string together the words and hold send, your phrase appears via the Twitter feed @t3xtile.

Screenshot of 'Whole" by miamercado

"Bodies of Language" was the most suggestive of the CCCCs panels I attended, precisely because it seemed to be on the frontiers of media studies, attuned to the most recent developments in gestural aesthetic psychology, the latest gaming interfaces, as well as social media. However, I was also struck that the media was not an end in itself. Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola, for one, completed the project in a relatively short time (They worked with Kornheisl for about a month implementing the actual application). I think this speaks to the fact that we can do experimental Digital Humanities work that remains a good use of our time. Also, Wysocki's connection of the installation to pedagogy really justified the why and the value of using media in the classroom. These interfaces can be used for students to "represent the experience of having the bodies that they have," Wysocki said. The interactive Flash-based project Whole by a student of Wysocki demonstrated her point quite beautifully.

Bug in the Machine: 3D and Video Art

noelradley — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:28:33 +0000

"Bug and the Machine" Poster, Stephanie Rosen

If you are interested in science, art, video installations, interdisciplinary work, or maybe if you just like bugs, we'd recommend you stop by the following event at the University of Texas at Austin tomorrow evening. Read more about the super-computers at the Texas Advanced Computer Center from a past viz. blog post. Following is the summary description of "Bug in the Machine" by the Vital Arts and Theories Group: "Sixty years ago a small moth flew into a large room on the campus of Harvard University. It fluttered around, disoriented by the artificial light, until it slipped in and got stuck between two of the 700,000 moving parts of the automatic calculating machine MARK II, one of the world's first computers. The moth was removed - debugged - by computer scientist Grace Hopper, only to be stuck between a piece of tape and the page of the lab notes she wrote that day. The one-day exhibition "Bug in the Machine" examines the ways in which organic life gets stuck inside inorganic spaces, codes, technologies and media. Refreshments and hors d'oeuvres served.

Organized by the Vital Arts and Theories Group and inspired by the first bug to get debugged, the exhibition considers the interaction between living things and the things we build. Video, interactive and 3-D art will be exhibited on all seven state-of-the-art displays at the Texas Advanced Computing Center's ACES Visualization Lab( including the highest-resolution tile display in the world). The show features work by artist-turned-entomologist Gracen Brilmyer; Berlin-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Fons Scheidon; professor of Romantic literature and science at Duke University Robert Mitchell; Austin photographer and new-media artist Ben Aqua; and Radio-Television-Film Ph.D. student Daniel Mauro.

BagNewsNotes Salon: Photos from Egypt

noelradley — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:51:31 +0000

Flyer by BagNewsNotes

We wanted to share news about an international webinar hosted by BagNewsNotes forthcoming Sunday March 20th at 12 noon CST. You can register ahead of time for this important online discussion of images from the Egyptian revolution. For more about BagNewNotes, read our first viz. post from the spring semester. See also our previous discussion about how the New York Times represented the early days of the protests in Egypt.

Reboot: Teaching You Tube by Emily Bloom

noelradley — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:09:44 +0000

Youtube is (as self-reflexive as my video book)via MediaPraxisme

H/T Justin Hodgson

Last month, MIT press published Alexandra's Juhasz newest scholarship in what they are terming a video-book format. Vectors Journal has hosted the online work, which collates together a set of videos by Juhasz and her students. The videos work within, as they reflect upon, Youtube. Last year, viz. writer Emily Bloom featured Juhasz's journey into the pedagogy of Youtube. Bloom helps to crystallize Juhasz's arguments about mediocre video, Youtube's popularity versus its radical potential, and the practical difficulties of teaching in the medium. Bloom's original post is rebooted after the break.

Start of "Teaching You Tube" by Emily Bloom:

Image Credit: You Tube

H/T: Noel Radley

In the Fall of 2007 at Pitzer College, Professor Alexandra Juhasz embarked on an adventurous pedagogical experiment in teaching new media through new media. Her course, which focused on You Tube, attempted to provoke critical thinking in her students about You Tube through class assignments in which students composed vlogs and wrote commentary on others’ videos. As she has documented in a series of academic inquiries in the International Journal of Learning and Media, her blog and on You Tube itself, Juhasz concluded that You Tube’s rhetoric of democratization and viewer-empowerment belies the essentially corporate nature of the medium and the mediocrity of its output. Juhasz’s discussions of You Tube and pedagogy also show the challenges for instructors who may find the public spheres of new media to be uncomfortable, exhausting and resistant spaces for pedagogical work.

In her article in the International Journal of Learning and Media, Juhasz writes, “by reifying the distinctions between the amateur and the professional, the personal and the social, in both form and content, YouTube currently maintains (not democratizes) operating distinctions about who
seriously owns culture.” Against proponents of You Tube who argue that it offers the radical potential for punk style DIY interventions into mainstream culture, Juhasz stresses the corporate structure and emphasis on popularity in the website’s search functions as mitigating against radical experimentation or critique.

Image Credit: You Tube

Juhasz is also refreshingly honest about how difficult the class was to teach because You Tube is not designed for academic learning or critical inquiry. In her final You Tube video presentation for the class, it is clear that she is physically and mentally exhausted from the semester. Right now, I’m winding up my own new media assignment in which I asked students to create podcasts. While this is only a fraction of the investment Juhasz made in teaching new media, my three-week unit gave me a glimpse into some of the tensions, frustrations and pedagogical self-questioning that she discusses.

Image Credit: You Tube

Although there are many benefits to teaching new media such as the contemporaneity of the subject, its import for rhetoric, and the empowerment it gives students to comment on their own cultural environment, there are also many difficulties that Juhasz details in her writing. Students may be less familiar with the media and technologies than we assume, they may encounter the topics with less intellectual rigor and the corporate structures of these new media may inhibit the work academics are trained to perform. That said I still believe that sites like You Tube are important subjects of inquiry and tools for teaching public writing but I think it is also useful to consider the challenges and limitations of using sites such as You Tube as pedagogical tools. I am looking forward to continuing to learn innovative ways to incorporate new media into the classroom and would love to hear more from my colleagues about how they have experienced and mastered these challenges.

Original comment by Jim Brown (below):

Thanks for posting this, Emily. I thought I'd share a couple other YouTube assignments.

Students in my "Anthologics" class just started a YouTube assignment this week:

http://eng3010fall09.pbworks.com/YouTube+and+Detroit+-+The+State+of+the+...

Students will be using Prezi to put together a kind of "anthological map" of a YouTube conversation. I'm asking students to analyze the videos for rhetorical strategies, but more importantly I'm asking them to look carefully at all of the metadata on a given YouTube page (comments, tags, categories, related videos, etc.)

I'd agree that teaching about (or on) YouTube raises some interesting questions. I'm not so much worried about its corporate nature (I'm not sure what website/internet service/web 2.0 technology is not "corporate"), but I do think it takes some extra effort to get students to understand that their project is "research." I've asked them to do some real digging about who has posted videos by examining a YouTube poster's previous posts (and thus their ethos), and I've also asked them to look at the "conversation" in the comments section. (The scare quotes are there because, as I'm sure we all know, YouTube "conversations" are not typically the most useful dialogues: "OMG! You suck!")

Also, Bill Wolff at Rowan University has been doing vlogs and oral histories on YouTube for a while:

http://williamwolff.org/courses/wrt-fall-2009/wrt-assignments-f09/assign...

New Orleans Oral History with Countess Vivian

noelradley — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:03:39 +0000

"In Search of Countess Part 1" Stephen J. Lewis H/T About Face Theatre

Tomorrow is Fat Tuesday, and what better way to celebrate than to listen to stories from a nearly 100-year-old resident of the French Quarter, George Eagerson, AKA Countess Vivian. The untold story here is life as African-American gay man in the south. In Part 1 of the 2010 interview, George recounts social realities of New Orleans, such as his initiation into gay sub-culture. George is given the name Vivian and then Countess by older members of the gay community. More on Part 2 when George tells about surviving Katrina after the break.

"In Search of Countess Part 2" By Stephen J. Lewis H/T About Face Theatre

George was one of the NOLA residents who stayed during the storm. The officials who told him to evacuate didn't give him money or tell him where to go. "So you didn't board up any of your windows?" interviewer E. Patrick Johnson asks. "I didn't have no money for no boards," George answers. "They say, 'The Lord will take care of you.'" George affirms many of his statements, saying "That's right, honey."

The interviewer, E. Patrick Johnson, is a Professor at Northwestern University and the author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. This important work of oral history includes George's story and many others. Johnson reads the stories in a performance called "Pouring Tea."

Image Credit: Book Cover for Sweet Tea UNC Press

Sweet Tea came to my attention when a former colleague, Professor Jennifer Tyburczy, produced Johnson's reading at Rice University. Tyburczy, once a student of Johnson, is now the post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice. I'll leave with excerpt from Tyburczy's spoken remarks at the January 27 production, which she recently shared with viz:

Sweet Tea contains 63 narrators, men who range in age from 19 to 93 and hail from 15 southern states. Professor Johnson will perform some of these men tonight. From Countess Vivian in New Orleans to Chaz/Chastisty who grew up in Professor Johnson’s hometown of Hickory, North Carolina to the men who are no longer with us, men like Curt Blackman, an emerging performance studies scholar who was to join our graduate cohort at Northwestern in 2004 but whose life was brutally cut short by hatred and misunderstanding the summer before…“Pouring Tea” is dedicated to all of these men, and ultimately paints a complex landscape of the region we call the “South” where black gay men every day, and in every state, navigate its terrain with ingenuity.

The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

noelradley — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0000

"Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today? TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways. One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

"Wall of Respect" 1967 Via University of Chicago

The mural Wall of Respect was the beginning of Afri-COBRA activitism. The collaboration was meant to promote African-American heroes and artists while avoiding the physical clash that characterized racial rioting in 1960s Chicago. This begins the film's organization of artistic form (mind) apart from public protest (body). Artists created the positive imagery to change minds and insisted they were transforming their own minds. "We were confrontational in the sense that we were confronting ourselves and our people. We weren't confronting anybody else," said Afri-COBRA artist Napolean Jones Henderson. "We were challenging ourselves to see ourselves as we are."

The film continues a visual divide between politics and aesthetics. Historical marches, speeches, and sit-ins from 1950s America (in grainy black-and-white) appear less vibrant, if only in a visual sense. Against footage from the civil rights movement, Afri-COBRA paintings glow with rich "cool aid" colors and celebratory imagery. Afri-COBRA was a continuation and not a critique of civil rights, but the sets of images do register distinctly: domestic American civic imagery versus Africanist imagery, 1950s versus 1960s, documentary film versus imaginative new iconographies, African-Americans struggling to be seen at all versus African-Americans proactively setting out how they will be seen, often with non-Western forms or motifs.

Screenshot of JET Cover Via Googlebooks

Afri-COBRA art often plays up its own rejection of literal revolution, such as the bullet motif. The 1971 JET cover features one of Jet Jarrell's fashion pieces, a bullet belt. (The mixed media painting "Revolutionary" incorporates real bullets.) In the Jet cover, the model wears the bullets and uses a butcher knife, menancing signals that she has the means defend herself physically. But that's only the first step in the representation here. The idealized 1960s domestic setting, the assured posture of the female figure and her knowing stare communicate that force won't be necessary. Change is inevitable, it says to JET readers, and is happening from within. You don't have to believe in the mind/body split to buy Afri-COBRA project, for the art movement was never truly disembodied. The rhetoric of mind, rather, was about Afri-COBRA members creating life on their terms, avoiding socially proscribed behaviors and ways-of-seeing.

Losing the Iconic Oaks of Auburn University

noelradley — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 19:08:17 +0000

Toomer's Corner-41 by tuxthepenguin84

H/T Greg Rives

When I heard about the Alabama fan who dumped massive amounts of herbicide on oak trees at Auburn University, I was struck with the thought of this being a very unusual iconoclasm. Iconoclasm means the breaking of an image, and historically it referred to the breaking of a religious image. Now, the term is used more generally to refer to an attack on any sort of icon. The attack on the Toomey's Corner oaks, however, is a strange iconoclasm in a few ways. One is that the trees, although they most likely will die, will take several years to do so. The image will fall apart dreadfully, little by little, over time, as the roots absorb the herbicide. The other strange aspect is that the trees are biologically alive, parts of the 'natural' environment of the campus, unlike a statue or some other university totem. This takes the vandalism to a new level.

Toomer's Corner by auburnuniversity

Toomer's Corner is also the site of a stunning image created for each Auburn win, as fans "roll" the oaks with toilet paper. The rival fan struck a sacred place of Auburn ritual, a place of massive, communal celebration, and now a place where the community has gathered to mourn. Pouring poison on the roots of 130-year-old trees seems (to me and even many Alabama fans) misanthropy on a grand scale. It arguably signals an attack on southern civility and culture itself, especially since oak trees are the most recognizable visual cue of Deep South environments.

The jury is still out, but my sense is that the tree poisoning may fit within recent events of individual mental illness that have been widely felt by the culture. There are events with dire, life-and-death consequences, such as the University of Texas student who committed suicide on campus this fall, the man who one year ago flew his plane into an Austin, TX IRS building, or even the shooting of Congresswoman Gifford and 12 others in Tucson, Arizona last month. To be clear, there isn't any news yet on whether the arrested fan, Harvey Updyke, has a history of mental illness. Fortunately, he didn't take the life of a human being. But I wonder Updyke's crime is different in degree but not in kind to other public tragedies. Razing the beloved, irreplacable object of a community on the basis of sports fanaticism seems clearly to be a form of madness. The vitroil that characterizes the Auburn/Alabama rivalry, unchecked and unimpeded in this case, shows us that we really do need a tradition of social manners (they used to call it sportmanship) to mediate the worst of our thoughts.

"When I Rise" Tonight on PBS

noelradley — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 23:24:42 +0000

Don't miss the premiere tonight of When I Rise from Independent Lens (PBS). The documentary narrates the experiences of Barbara Smith Conrad, African-American opera singer and alumna of UT-Austin. Produced by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the movie documents the bigotry and discrimination Conrad faced while a music student at the University of Texas in the 1950s. The film is featured Feb. 8 (tonight) at 9 p.m., Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 13 at 3 p.m. CST. For UT's coverage of the story, read here, "The Story of a Voice."

Cairo and Perspective

noelradley — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:44:49 +0000

Lefteris Pitarakis Via New York Times

Since protests began one week ago across Egypt, the media has published many photographs of iconoclasm against images of President Mubarak, or images depicting the scale of the protests in Cairo. I'd like to raise the question of how representative images from this week are using one-point and two-point perspective, and how that perspective informs our sense of the unfolding events.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The three images in this post were included in Saturday's New York Times print edition. All three shots were taken Friday, January 28th in Cairo. In the second image (above) taken from a distance in Tahrir Square, the battle between protestors and riot police is framed within ominous symbolic and literal signs of Mubarak's government. The height of the statues and the architecture of the bridge creates the scale, making the crowds of human actors seem vast, and yet simultaneously diminutive? Two-point perspective furthers the unsettling paradox of an emergent populace protesting within an existing power structure. Our eyes move in two directions: to the left, along with police and protestors, and then also to the right, into the smoky haze and background of imposing government buildings.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The third image (above) uses one-point perpective to capture a row of protestors kneeling for prayer in the streets. The orientation of the shot insinuates the immense number of protestors, while communicating the depth of spiritual quiet. What we see in the closest part of the frame appears to be replicated ad infinitum, with all the optical persuasion of a hall of mirrors. This image works in much the same way as the lead image by Pitarakis (top), which captures civilians standing on the row of army tanks (also in one-point perspective). The image of the tanks is different from the scene in prayer, however. One difference is the vanishing end point: in one, the eye moves toward halos of city lights at night; in the other, the eye finds dark, billowing smoke. Do these images attempt to organize and find order in the protests? Why did the NYT choose so many compositions of this kind? Are these compositions tied to a need to see Egypt through Western eyes?

Launching into our semester with BagNewsNotes

noelradley — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 02:49:35 +0000

Image Via BagNewsNotes

We on the viz. team are researchers & instructors at the University of Texas, interested in all things visual. With the return to blogging for the spring semester, we'd like to begin by introducing BagNewsNotes, a site doing vital work to deconstruct the visuality of contemporary political news.

The image and commentary from Saturday (above) is representative of how BagNewsNotes reads between the lines to find what's really happening with daily media images. The photograph catches U.S. Representative Giffords with her husband on the roof of the Tucson hospital, as Gabby is being transported to Houston for further treatment. BagNewsNotes publisher and contributor, Michael Shaw comments on the virtual intimacy of the photo, created by Giffords' "presence and absence" in the frame. In the weeks since the shooting deaths of six people and the wounding of thirteen others in Tucson, Giffords, writes Shaw, has become "a national icon larger than herself."

Image Via BagNewsNotes

A post earlier in January does a close reading of photographs from the memorial service in Tucson, sensing a "potential" shift towards bipartisanship, evidenced by Obama's meditative posture and by the assemblage of previously embattled political figures, who "line up (respectfully) in a row."

Image Via BagNewsNotes

The commentary and slideshow of images from Sarah Palin's January 12th speech performs a psychoanalytic reading of her non-verbal expressions (Shaw is trained as a clinical psychologist). Palin's "anger, resentment, and exasperation," Shaw notes, belie emotions that would seem more apropos to the circumstances, such as "compassion."

But BagNewsNotes does more than penetrating visual analysis, which indeed it does well and persistently. What ultimately gains the site its authenticity is that while it deconstructs visuals from mainstream contexts, it simultaneously constructs alternative images of the American political landscape. The site does this primarily through documentary photography and audio slideshows, featured in the section called Originals and in the section called Salon, respectively. The growing archive of images are contributed by established photojournalists, such as Nina Berman, Jeremy Lange, and Alan Chin.

We were particularly interested in the coverage of the mountaintop removal controversies ongoing in Applachia (see the Mountaintop Mining Watch series by Antrim Caskey). We were also struck by the slideshow posted in October from New York Times photojournalist Michael Kamber, who speaks about documenting the Iraq war and about what others don't want seen.

Image Credit: "Military Censorship" BagNewsNotes and Michael Kamber

With the various kinds of image work on the site, BagNewsNotes potentially sets up a constrastive schema between mainstream news media coverage and documentary photography, a long-standing and complex question for those in the field. It's a question we will continue in conversations with Shaw and his staff, as we begin collaborating with BagNewsNotes this spring. Thanks for reading as we launch back into our work, and stay tuned for a variety of projects and topoi forthcoming.

Fall 2010 Digest for the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup (AKA viz.)

noelradley — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:35:06 +0000

Web Infographic from Colour Lovers by way of Cool Infographics

Screenshot from Youtube Screenshot from barbie.com

QR code (links to Viz) created through Kaywa's free QR code generator

Check out the latest from viz. in our Fall 2010 digest on the DWRL website. There's a lot going on! Please let us know what you are thinking by comments on the blog, or by sending feedback through the "Contact us" link. Also, we invite you to follow us on Twitter @vizblog.

Multi-Media New Orleans

noelradley — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:07:45 +0000

"Hey Cafe Magazine St. Uptown NOLA Jan. 2010" by Infrogmation

Via Flickr

This weekend, I visited a friend in New Orleans. On Sunday, we sat in plastic chairs outside a coffee shop along Magazine Street, with my friend sipping a Diet Dr. Pepper (her addiction) and me indulging a tall glass of latte (my addiction). Let's not mention the almond-butter infused croissant. As my host surveyed the Times Picayune, I took in the people passing and the variety of businesses and signs. George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" was echoing from a restaurant across the way, and the morning air was mildly warm and a little smelly. We chatted with some NOLA locals sitting at the table nearby: a mother and toddler, who was dressed adorably in an orange jack-o-lantern hoodie. We talked about the Saints game (the toddler could cheer "Who Dat") and about Halloween festivities the coming evening. When the toddler threw down the plastic lid from his chocolate milk, his mother coached him to one of the over-flowing trash cans on the sidewalk.

Upon returning to Austin, I have been thinking how New Orleans is more than just an image, although you should check out fotogail, JustUptown, and Editor B for some Flickr users whose streams of photos give a sense of the visuality of NOLA. By "more than an image," I mean that there is something about New Orleans that engages all the senses simultaneously: a kind of multi-media experience, if you will. The city streets are a mixing of trash and human landscape, sound and sight, young and old, taste and touch, local and tourist. Add in the alcohol, and you feel like you're in a new state of existence. Maybe that's why New Orleans seems to have the effect of either waking you up(making you feel life's vitality), or delivering you to what feels like a surreal dream state (you might be eager to go home from at the end of a weekend of taking in too many "spirits"). I'll end with an interesting Youtube montage from earlier this year by The Economist Magazine. Watch how Economist Magazine shifts from images of New Orleans' deep loss, experienced during the events of Katrina, to the regaining of life in the years since the storm. Next, the montage adds the next chapter of the New Orleans' saga by depicting the events of the BP Oil Spill. Long live New Orleans. Bless those who were lost, and those who continue to try to thrive there.

Writing with Sound

noelradley — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:18:11 +0000

The latest Currents CFP says that "Currents invites—along with traditional academic submissions—audio essays, podcasts, oral histories, interviews, and other audio recorded genres, as well as webpages, videos, animations, slide presentations, etc.,that address sound-related issues." What does it mean to have a piece that theoretically and practically advances ideas about sound, retaining a focus on the auditory sense, while incorporating video or imagery? Some pieces to inspire you follow after the break. The deadline for the CFP is January 10, 2011.

Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' by Clark Baxtresser & Avni Mehta from The JUMP v1.2

Danny and Annie by StoryCorps

Footsteps Animation by Artist Chihiro Sasaki

"What Exactly is Mediated Content?"

noelradley — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:48:55 +0000

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.)

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

I recently came across the skateboarding project while trying to answer--"What exactly is mediated content?"-- a question raised (for me) by compositionist Cynthia Selfe.Last year, Selfe came to UT-Austin campus to give a talk "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives & Digital Archives."At a morning coffee with graduate students, she offered some advice about publishing, New Media, and composition. She said that a key to getting hired in today's market was working in "mediated content." To explain what what she meant, she talked about the digital press she had recently founded, and she commended the work of Cheryl Ball of Illinois State University.

Selfe, speaking to graduate students about publication, was talking about mediated scholarship. She was indicating that our work should be crafted in digital formats with critical reflection on media available to communicate our arguments. But as a influential scholar in composition and literacy, I assumed that Selfe also meant that we should be teaching students to produce mediated content. The continuum between the work of our teaching and the work of publication, I inferred, should foster these same skills and concepts. And it's the work of Cheryl Ball that perhaps best illustrates the connection between research and pedagogy (see her teaching philosophy). In a 2007 interview below, Ball argues for greater attention to scholarly publication in online formats, and she also discusses student New Media work in her English classes.

Video Credit: Ben McCorkle

I won't attempt to summarize the extensive contributions Cheryl Ball has made to Computers and Writing, but the Kairos online journal she edits, along with Doug Eyman, is possibly the site for sorting out what mediated content means in our field.And it was Ball's online tenure application that led me to (among other productions) the skateboard-ethnographizing by Jason Dockter. Dockter produced the website for Ball's online graduate class Multi-Modal Composition in the Spring of 2009. The meme continues forward from here.

On viz. this year, we'll continue to ask: "What exactly is mediated content?"Although a seeming commonplace in Computers and Writing, defining mediated content is not simple. The skills, aesthetics, and ethics of this kind of production are not readily apparent, although these modes are in existence and better known to some of us than others of us. For those of us whose scholarship still seems framed by residual print concepts, we're eager to learn more about what the shift to "mediated scholarship" means for our thinking and our teaching. In the Visual Rhetoric project this year, we're hoping to answer the questions of mediation through action: producing mediated content with our students and, as well,producing research for digital formats. We'll document these activities on the viz. blog, so stay connected. Please send your comments our way, as well, as we attempt to tap in to discourses others of you are so intrepidly trailblazing.

Happy Flash Friday

noelradley — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:46:30 +0000

Image Credit: Noel Radley, "Butterfly Flash Movie"

H / T to Scott Nelson

I wrote yesterday about the DWRL Flash workshop, which was great! I wanted to post my results for your enjoyment.

DWRL Flash Workshop Friday, September 24

noelradley — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:11:29 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles

Computing and New Media Technologies UWSP

For those of us wondering what it means to compose in New Media, one answer appears to be Flash. Visit Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles for a seriously funny example of a student Flash project. Fellow Flash neophytes should also know about Anthony Ellertson 's "New Media Rhetorics in the Attention Economy" from C & C Online. Ellertson discusses the advantages of Flash and showcases student Flash "essays." And yes, as the title of this blog entry indicates, the DWRL UT-Austin is sponsoring a Flash workshop this Friday. The workshop announcement is after the break...Stay tuned for more on Flash and New Media composing in the coming weeks on viz.

Workshop Announcement:

You could have the slickest presentation at the conference! All you need to do is mark your calendar cause Scott Nelson continues his workshop-series on *Flash* this *Friday, September 24th, at 2 pm in FAC 7*. Last week, Scott showed us how to use some of Flash's basic tools for drawing. This week, he will cover the basics of movie clips and graphic symbols, and how to nest them to create animations. If you weren't able to make it last week, no problem, as no prior knowledge is necessary for this week's workshop. Don't miss this opportunity to make your pretty pictures move!

Reboot: Visual Tweets by Emily Bloom

noelradley — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:18:23 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of viz.

Elizabeth's post earlier this week on visual representations of Twitter reminded me of a blog entry from about a year ago by Emily Bloom, who often highlighted New Media pedagogy in her blog posts, and who contributed a wonderful New Media Pedagogy and Visual Rhetoric page. You can see Emily's "Visual Tweets" entry reposted after the break, or you can link to the original Visual Tweets post and the comments from September 2009.

Start of Emily's original post:

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.

The first, by http://markfullmer.com/ ">Mark Fullmer, uses the 140-character constraint of tweets to take on the most iconic of American genres-- the road odyssey. In the video for Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey, Fullmer voices these micropoetic tweets over black and white footage of the passing scenery. The video begins with the image of a twitter feed, but most of the subsequent imagery focuses on the western landscape. Once on the road, Fullmer shows himself jotting his words onto a pad of paper as he drives. In the sense that Fullmer writes rather than texts his words on the journey, tweets become a poetic constraint rather than a new media per se.

Image credit: From The Washington Post on YouTube
H/T to Kevin Bourque

A very different visual interpretation of tweets is the Washington Post satire of celebrity tweets called “Twits." In this series of visual/text juxtapositions, actors read celebrity tweets with all the pomp of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Emphasizing the grammatical mistakes, bizarre punctuation and tonal oddity of these tweets, the actors illustrate not only the strangeness of celebrity but also, the absurdity of our interest in them.

Together, these videos led me to think about the nature of the tweet and the kinds of restraints, opportunities and follies it engenders. As Fullmer says in Tweet Tweet, “A tweet is not a text, not haiku, not a telegraph. Stop. A tweet is.” I’d be interested to see what other kinds of visual rhetoric and poetry the tweet may inspire. Is there any way to visually capture the back-and-forth quality of tweets? Can a visualized tweet recreate the immediacy of the ever-changing updates?

DJ Spooky Poster

noelradley — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:15:07 +0000

Image Credit: Rob Mack for the DWRL

H/T Stephanie Stickney

We are really digging the poster for the upcoming DJ Spooky event! The artist who did the poster for the event is named Rob Mack. His new collection of art is displayed here at Philistine Workshop, and his more commercial portfolio is Eternal Return. For more on DJ Spooky, see my post from last week on Spooky's Art.

"Cinematic Sound" and "Acoustic Portraits": DJ Spooky's Art

noelradley — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:58:17 +0000

Image Credit: DJ Spooky, "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," 2008

Via Robert Miller Gallery H/T Sean McCarthy

Last year, at about this time, I was writing my very first viz. blog post. In 2009, the series of photographs that had caught my attention were about ice fishing in the northern United States. The ice of the northern lakes, it seemed, had begun to diminish. New York-based photographer Maureen Drennan had been featured in the Times DotEarth Blog for the work of photos she called Thin Ice. I loved Maureen's shots of the fishing shacks and the people there, because they seemed potentially transformative, depicting the intimate textures of human life affected by climate change. My first post this year again returns to imagery of ice. Over dinner this weekend, one of my friends described DJ Spooky's latest performances on Antarctica, replete, he said, with stunning images. (The penguins above do have a point, after all. See after the break).

Image Credit: Screenshot of DJ Spooky performing Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

The iconic, militarized penguins with bomber planes above them in formation are part of a series of ink jet posters by Spooky, who visited Antarctica in 2007 and returned to create rich multi-media formats about the world's largest, and most threatened, mass of ice. One part of the project was recording and then remixing the sounds of ice, penguins, artic waves, etc. Other parts of the project included creating original art work, collaging Getty images of Antarctica, sampling 'ephemera' of Artic explorers, and revisiting a 20th century symphony on Antarctica, complete with a collaboration with a pianist, cellist, and violinist. Many who have heard of D.J. Spooky (aka Paul Miller) associate him with innovative, genre-bending turn-tabling, much of which he creates in collaboration with heavy hitters in a variety of musical fields, such as jazz and hip hop. Spooky has been performing, writing, and recording music since the 1990’s. But increasingly Spooky has become known for creations that stretch beyond the work of acoustics (his initial emphasis and the origin of the first part of his moniker“DJ”); he also becoming more widely recognized for his artistic multi-media formats and, as well, for scholarly writings.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

In October—sponsored by the Digital Writing and Research Lab and others here at UT-Austin—Spooky will be giving one of the large scale performances he has become known for as of late. The DWRL and Spooky have dubbed it a “Rip, Mix, Burn” event, a lecture that will highlight Spooky’s multi-media work, as well as his latest academic writing. Sound UnBound, a 2008 imprint of MIT features Spooky as editor with multitude of voices on sound, intellectual property, and the economics of 21st century media. The themes of Spooky's late work resonate with those of us invested in theorizing media, and also in those of us invested in crossing disciplines. Like us, Spooky wants the disciplines to start talking to each other.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

'DJ Spooky on Secret Song

Spooky's work attempts to blur the supposed boundaries between art and economics, for example. As he says in the interview below on Secret Song, an album that was a work of film and music, "The album was inspired by philosophers, economists, and, above all, a will to bring them all together.” Spooky's art itself is premised on the "juxtaposition of radically different materials." I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from the Secret Song interview, a quote that justifies writing about a musician on my first viz. post of the year: “Art and music are compellingly connected," Spooky said."There is nothing that separates them. Nothing[...]The world is a complex and compellingly linked place.” '

Challenging a Youtube Video Take Down

noelradley — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:58:31 +0000

Image Credit: Know Your Meme H/T Hampton Finger

This youtube video explains the difference between fair use and copyright infringement involving Youtube videos. It also shows how to dispute the take-down of your video on Youtube, if you have created a fair use work.

Using Creative Commons Images

noelradley — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:20:49 +0000

Image Credit: "Hospitality II" by Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

For this entry, I want to point out two online texts that model best practices in the use of images. Both texts also make powerful arguments. The first is Clinamen, an academic blog by James J. Brown, formerly of UT-Austin and the Digital Writing and Research Lab, who now teaches in Detroit at Wayne State. The image above is from Brown's March 16 post. Indeed, all of Brown's entries are organized by a compelling, and beautiful, image (see screenshot after the break).

Image Credit: Screenshot of Clinamen Blog by James J. Brown

Many of the images Brown uses have a Creative Commons license, published via Flickr by various users. "Hospitality II" is published by a user called Arriving at the Horizon with an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. The caption tells about "desert hospitality" the photographer experienced. Arriving at the Horizon (on a fellowship to document nomadic cultures) describes how the Malian woman was putting up the nicest tent for her guests.

Arriving at the Horizon documents traditional, person-to-person, place-based hospitality, and this kind of hospitality becomes the foil for Brown's blog entry. Brown wants to think about hospitality and software. Yes, software is concerned about the other (the visitor, the user), but also, as Brown says, hospitality can be used to talk about the "predicament" of networked environments (the hacker, the unknown, unpredictable visitor, etc). Brown 'borrows' the documentary photograph, not solely to do rhetorical analysis, not to uncover the original context of the photo, but instead to illuminate his own theories of ethics and rhetoric in digital environments. At the same time, Brown does quote and discuss Arriving at the Horizon's text, and he hyperlinks to the Flickr stream. I think having students use Creative Commons images for their blog writing as a jumping off point, but also referring to the initial context of the photo would be great. Certainly,Brown's publication of these networked, free-use images on his blog underscores the positions he is working out about networked information and how it gets found, used, remixed, and repurposed by the other in ways that violate the expectations of the original creator.

"Writing Technologies" by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo

Another really nice use of Creative Commons licensed photos, and the second text I want to highlight, is the video above by Alex Reid at the University of Buffalo. The video compares different writing media: from pens, to typewriters, to software, to video. The thing I liked so much was the way Reid proactively and elegantly cited the images. The piece is basically a narrated slideshow, created using a software called Voicethread. Reid uses the caption feature to attribute the photos (This is hard to see on the embed). Reid also verbally narrates the context of the image with the audio feature. Reid tells us where he got the image, the time period of the image, and, as well, he describes what we can see in the picture. I especially like that we are reminded when the media (photo...screenshot) changes. If part of visual literacy is drawing attention to the very processes of cultural production, then this video is on point. This would be a great text to model for students with a narrated slideshow assignment. On a side note, check out how the Voicethread platform allows you to skip through the different images and to post your own comments with audio.

To conclude, I'd like to invite you to check out some of the resources we have been building on the Viz. page under the main link 'Practice.' We're hoping the upcoming 2010-2011 year will flesh out these pages to provide more samples and information about how to produce with images. Please feel comment on this post with any other uses of Creative Commons images you find exciting, or "Contact Us," and we will continue building these resources for everyone.

African-American visual culture

noelradley — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:56:16 +0000

Image Credit: John H. White (1973) Image NWDNS-412-DA-13759

Portrait of Black Chicago for National Archives

John H. White's image of a sidewalk vendor in the South of Chicago in 1973 reminds me of Coye's and Laura's recent posts on the visuality of food culture. Looking closely, one gleans an untold story of race, urban food markets, and of the style of life in Chicago in the 1970s. White's series (Portrait of Black Chicago) was part of a program called Documerica, where the Environmental Protection Agency paid photographers to document environmental problems across America. I really like White's photos for how they conveyed everything from emotionally saturating pictures of the Black Muslim community to pictures of abandoned housing in the ghettos to pictures of the lake and skyline. White records narratives of race, which are intertwined with Chicago's political and religious history, but he also gives room to images of people's daily material lives in their environments, such as the initial photo above. I used this photo as part of the Best Practices for Digital images workshop, where we featured images archives that can enrich our teaching and scholarship.

Image Credit: John H. White (1973) Image NWDNS-412-DA-13800

Portrait of Black Chicago for National Archives

It would be an interesting lesson to contrast the images of White, who is by the way a Pulitzer-prize winner now teaching at Columbia, to the Calvin Littlejohn Archive, which is housed here at UT-Austin. The visuality of the Fort Worth, Texas black culture in the 1960's versus Chicago in the 1970's offers a way to understand the contrastive experiences of blacks across the nation, the specificity of lives across cities in the north and south, and across the time of a decade. Note that using the online images from the Calvin Littlejohn archive means you will be looking at the institutional watermark. However, I think the images are still interesting and powerful.You could follow up with a third discussion of contemporary African-American photographic narratives (see video below).

The video was published this February here on the UT-Austin site, along with the article "Photographer Eli Reed discusses being black in America." The video itself is a montage of Eli Reed's photos, along with a conversation between Reed (who has been at UT since 2005), Roxanne Evans, Michael Hurd, and St. Edward's student Adam Semien. For more of Reed's work, look on the Magnum photos site, and on the Digital Journalist blog.To range more of this kind of content, you could look as well at the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery on Africana and Black History

Viz. Workshop on March 26

noelradley — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:10:25 +0000

Viz. will be hosting a workshop at the end of March, here at the University of Texas. Click through to the DWRL page to read more.

Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan

noelradley — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:28:16 +0000

Image Credit: Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty

H/T Seeing and Writing 3

For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above. Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present. I have a heart for this image. The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992). Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo: "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."

View Larger Map

The search results in the map above, which I think shows some potential uses for Googlemaps streetview function as a way for students to connect to documentary photography. Does this help us locate the documentary photo? Does it give a greater sense of the place's materiality? Does this complicate or compound Sternfeld's original message about urban decay and social injustice? In what ways is the place the same, and how it is different?

Interview with Photographer Maureen R. Drennan

noelradley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:10:27 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

On the Viz. blog September 2009, I discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming. I recently had an interview with Drennan about "Thin Ice" and being a finalist on the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition. We discussed remote places, the scale of her project, the themes and the arguments of the photos, as well as the intersections of photography and story.

“A small story about a greater problem”: Interview with Maureen R. Drennan

Viz.: I was talking to a colleague about your series of photos. She said that when she thinks about visual rhetoric and the environment, she thinks of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She was struck by the contrast between “An Inconvenient Truth” as a visual rhetoric piece and what your series of photos are doing.

Drennan: With Al Gore’s movie, he was really trying to hammer home this situation that is imminent, and I think he’s trying to reach as many people as possible. I think it was done very successfully. It was done in a way where a lot of people could understand it. It was accessible, and it was also dynamic and intense. I know my work is not like that. I wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. That would be for a different photographer…I’m not a scientist. I don’t claim to be an expert.

Viz.: How do you think your photos compare to the other visualizations of climate change?

Drennan: I hope this doesn’t come across as self-deprecating. I think [my images] were a little more subtle. It’s not super dynamic, but I think that’s okay. It’s a small story that I think can relate to the big picture. We’re all involved in small stories. It’s what we’re involved in every day. It makes up the big picture. I think other visualizations of climate change are grand and monumental. My pictures aren’t like that. They’re a lot more quiet.

Viz.: Can you describe how you began to take these pictures of ice fishing?

Drennan: I’m from Manhattan, born and raised here in New York. I’m really drawn to remote, beautiful places because it’s so different from what I’m accustomed to. My husband Paul is from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which is a very small town in northern Wisconsin. When we would go visit his in-laws, I usually wander around and take pictures of the area. I was just really drawn to these beautiful, remote lakes, and the fact that there are these little shacks on the lake. [For people who aren’t from a cold climate, ice-fishing] is sort of a foreign thing. I was really drawn to it…What are they doing out there? Why are there these little houses out there on the lake? I just instinctually wandered out there and started chatting with people and taking their picture and taking photographs of the landscape and the ice shacks.

What was initially so interesting was the community and how tight knit they are: these temporary communities out on the ice. They only last a few months, and people bond. They become so close. It’s like having a cabin in the summer at the lake. It’s a little place—a little refuge that you go to—and you’re friends with the neighbors. You also (for safety reasons) have to be looking out for one another. Even though it’s an isolated activity, there’s also a community aspect.

Viz.: How did your photos become part of the Artist as Citizen project?

Drennan: Even just in the two years that I have been doing this, the season got a little bit shorter. The ice shacks went out later in the winter and came back earlier. It’s way below zero—like 10 degrees below zero and 20 degrees below when the wind picks up—so I spend a lot of time in the shacks talking to people. In talking to people this past winter, people [would say] how the season is changing and the ice is changing…That’s anecdotal. I don’t think [the ice fishers are] studying charts and graphs, but it was interesting to hear. It just got me thinking about these lovely communities and how this is a small story about a greater problem.

For the full interview, click here.