viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Photosynth

I was delighted this week to have Noel Radley introduce me to an interesting TED talk about Photosynth, a new imaging software created by Microsoft that not only incorporates the ability to get incredible close-ups on images, but also stitches photos together to create larger images.  As they claim on their website, Photosynth “allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.”  The results, as you can see above, are fairly impressive.

Image Credit:  Towleroad

H/T:  Noel Radley

While usually I’m good at keeping up on my pop culture news, I’m grateful to Noel for giving me a tip about American Idol star Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards of his new song “For Your Entertainment.”  As can be seen in the above image, Lambert aggressively performed his homosexuality in the number, including simulated oral sex, men on leashes, and an unplanned make-out session with one of the members of his band.

Image Credit:  Gossip Girl Insider

Having returned back to Austin from an enchanting trip to St. Louis for the Midwest Modern Language Association conference, I thought I’d talk a little bit about “OMFGG: Advertising Class Mobility and Ambivalent Spectatorship in the CW's Gossip Girl,” the paper my friend Sarah Orem and I co-delivered there.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

While I wrote in my last blog here that I would use this week’s blog to discuss my upcoming conference paper for MMLA, I was led astray this weekend by an excellent panel I attended at CSECS that I thought the viz. audience might enjoy.  (Sorry, Gossip Girl fans.  Tune in next week!)

After deciding to attend the panel entitled “Mapping Culture:  Topographies of London,” I was delighted to discover it featured not only a paper on Boswell’s enchanting London Journal, but also an excellent discussion about using mapping strategies to teach and research eighteenth-century texts.  What united the various papers on the panel, which discussed such disparate texts as John Gay’s “Trivia,” the Mohock Club, Boswell’s aforementioned Journal, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, was that each paper was based on material provided by The Grub Street Project, a website that unites topographical data with literary texts like Pope’s Dunciad.

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

I’m a bit nervous and distracted right now, as I’m in the middle of preparing to go to Ottawa for the CSECS/NEASECS conference this weekend, and anticipating the following weekend’s jaunt to St. Louis for the MMLA Conference.  My plan to manage to stress involves using my blog posts for the next two weeks to examine my paper topics through the lens of visual rhetoric.

For the CSECS/NEASECS conference, I’m going to be presenting a paper on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke entitled “Fragmentary Selves: (Aesthetic) Living with the Man in the Breast in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.”  While the title may be overlong, it’s in part because I’m trying to balance within the paper a discussion of the Burkean sublime and how Smith uses that aesthetic rhetoric to discuss and picture an ideal self that is so responsive to the feelings of others that such a self is in part fragmented by this openness.  The connection that I see between this paper and my work here at viz. is through the trope of ruins.

Image Credit:  Spring Awakening

This weekend I happened to attend a performance from the Broadway Across America’s tour of Spring Awakening, which was incredibly enjoyable.  The show, based on Wedekind’s 1890s play, deals with issues of teenage sexuality, rebellion, depression, and even abortion.  Spring Awakening does a very good job in its staging and design of making the connection between teens of the 1890s with teens of the 2000s.  

Right now in my class we’re preparing to turn in the first draft of the second paper assignment, which is a comparative rhetorical analysis between two productions of the same musical where I’d like my students to talk about the different rhetorical arguments made by each production using sets, costumes, and performance, as well as changed scripts.  In order to alleviate student concerns, I’ve set myself the task to write a sample paper for them.  It’s been an interesting experience for me, and a somewhat difficult one.  For my texts, I’ve chose to compare the original 1949 Broadway production of South Pacific with the 2008 revival.

Image Credit:  CastRecordings.com 

Credit:  New York Times

H/T:  Jezebel

I found an interesting article posted on Jezebel today about a New York Times story, with an accompanying video report, about anti-abortion protestors rallying together after the death of an anti-abortion activist, James Pouillon, in Michigan last month.  The article specifically discusses the ethics of using such images within the debate, which is a particularly vexed question.

Image Credit:  Vice Magazine

I couldn’t resist covering this piece that Tim brought to my attention.  NPR did a segment covering the evolving phenomenon of “ruin porn” by interviewing a writer, Thomas Morton, who wrote an attack on this phenomenon for Vice Magazine.  Morton argues against these images because he says they mislead audiences about the actual economic state of Detroit.

Andi, I enjoyed reading your post from Saturday, as I'm struggling myself to think about how to teach visual rhetoric in my classroom-although, the concerns I'm undergoing are much different from yours.  There may be ethical concerns about using podcasts to teach a variety of songs united around a different theme, but most of what I do will involve looking at pretty pictures.