EmilyBloom's blog

Literacies: Visual and Auditory

EmilyBloom — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:16:50 +0000

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000)

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential. Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric. The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy. It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions. Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.

Image Credit: Screen Shot of Garageband

While I originally intended to outlaw any visuals, I relented and allowed them to use Garageband’s artwork track. This decision was inspired in part by the interesting results of the collaboration between UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center and Badgerdog, a local Austin creative writing program for K-12 students. I loved the way that participants in this program incorporated imagery into their podcasts without losing focus on the attention to language that makes podcasting such an interesting medium. The results were mixed. Some students seemed really motivated by the challenge of auditory delivery and blended interesting music, noises and audio clips into their presentation to create variety in their performances. Others presented simple, elegant spoken arguments with clear delivery. Then there were less successful uses of the medium: students who read papers that should have remained on paper and others who found oral delivery challenging for a variety of reasons. Those students that chose to incorporate visuals were not uniformly successful. I asked students for feedback on what they think defines a good podcast and very few mentioned visuals. They seemed to appreciate the medium as primarily auditory and one best approached through auditory innovation.

Image Credit: Undergraduate Writing Center

In general, my students were much better trained in visual literacy than, pardon the paradox, auditory literacy. However, they seemed to appreciate the particular auditory rhetoric involved in podcasts (which of course borrows heavily from old media such as radio) that to varying degrees they attempted to capture in their presentations. I wanted to end on this note because I think that many of our blogs on Viz are about the audio-visual or performative text rather than the exclusively visual and that we might want to further consider how teaching auditory literacy might help students better understand contemporary audio-visual rhetoric.

An American Tale

EmilyBloom — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:41:13 +0000

Image Credit: Empire Movies

There has been some controversy—though less than might be expected—about the racial politics of the new Twilight movie, New Moon. I went to see the film the other night and while I was prepared for smoldering gazes, repressed embraces, and some retrograde gender relations, I was not prepared for its representations of race. While several critics have protested the casting of predominately non-Native American actors in Native American roles, far less comment has been made about the portrayal of Native American characters as bare-chested pack animals that morph into wolves when they become angry. The main character in this storyline is Jacob Black who falls in love with Bella Swan and then comes down with puberty-induced werewolfism. He and the other wolves are all members of the Quileute tribe, which long ago signed a territorial treaty with the vampires. Sound familiar?

Image Credit: www.newmoonmovie.org

The storyline reminds me of a 19^th century Irish genre called the “national tale” in which national identity is allegorized as the choice between an English and an Irish mate. The heroine or hero’s choice becomes an allegory for national identity: should the nation embrace its indigenous roots or reach outwards towards Englishness? In New Moon, Bella is seemingly rejected by her urbane vampire beau Edward Cullen and becomes increasingly attracted to Jacob. While the story is simple, or simply formulaic, enough, I wondered how allegorically we are meant to read Bella’s choice between the vampiric cosmopolitans and the animalized locals? To further complicate and more firmly allegorize this love plot, the final scenes of the novel take Bella to Europe, which appears to be the origin point of vampire culture and home to the Volturi vampires. Compared to the blood-sucking European monsters, the American Cullen vampires seem models of restraint and compassion. Wedged between the Volturi and the Quileute, Edward and Bella seem to articulate a particularly American version of the national tale.

Image Credit: Screen Shot IMDB

In Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s blog post, “The Politics of Wizards and Vampires,” she argues that Stephanie Myers’ Twilight books represent a particularly right-wing fantasy world. While Valdes-Rodriguez clearly articulates the religious components of conservativism in the novel, I would add that the story also demonstrates conservative values in its representation of national identity. As an American national tale that rejects both European and Native-American identities, the Edward-Bella romance is also a romance of American exceptionalism.

Teaching You Tube

EmilyBloom — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:02:08 +0000

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.

Fort Hood in Images

EmilyBloom — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:41:09 +0000

Image Credit: The Guardian

As the memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting begins, I want to spend some time considering the visual representations of this event in the media. Photographs representing the shooting seem to mirror our conflicted understanding of this event as both a military and a domestic tragedy. In the absence of more information about the shooter and his motives, this ambiguity marks the photographs that appear online and in print. Some photographs evoke Columbine, Virginia Tech or 9/11 by focusing on groups of mourners and the buildings where the shooting took place. In so doing, these images emphasize the effects of violence on a place and a community. However, other photographs more closely resemble traditional war photography in which the soldier is represented through metonymic devices such as a uniform or a gun.

Image Credit: CNN

Examining these images together led me to consider the strange position of the military base in American life. Military bases, for good or ill, are integral to the life of neighboring communities and yet there is also a distance between life on the base and life outside. When 13 lives are taken on a military base it is a domestic tragedy and many of the photographers have been sensitive to this connection by showing mourners in the local community and images of soldiers mixed with civilians.

Image Credit: NPR

In addition to shedding light on the liminal space of the military base in American life, I think these images also contribute to a discussion that Andi began on this blog several weeks back in which she described a photo-essay on the life of the American soldier. The military base itself seems to fit into what Andi describes as anti-iconic images of war. How various photographers choose to represent this shooting— as iconic or anti-iconic, domestic or military—reveals a great deal about how we imagine this tragedy.

We Feel Fine

EmilyBloom — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:44:26 +0000

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

H/T: Stephanie Rosen

I spent an inordinate amount of time today on Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s thought-provoking website, We Feel Fine. This website scans, or in their words “harvests,” weblogs for statements with the phrase “I feel.” Each of these statements is then represented as a colorful “particle” and organized into a variety of visual and statistical data. The website generates fascinating examples of how people communicate about feelings and gives a powerful impression of both the diversity and similarity among affective statements online. It also raises important questions about privacy. The statements and images on We Feel Fine are from blogs, MySpace and Flickr. Harvested statements whose writers’ also posted images are represented as a “Montage” with the text embedded in the image. Site users can then save and send these postcard-like pieces. For both its creative design and surveillance techniques, We Feel Fine provokes interesting questions regarding affect, privacy and online writing.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

One of the amazing, and time-sucking, capacities of this site is the endless combinations of categories that users can search. With the options to search among 3,428 feelings, numerous locations (countries, states and cities), genders, ages, weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy) and dates, there are countless possible research queries. How do women feel in the UK when it’s cloudy? How do people in New York describe their apathy? What were people feeling in the US in the months leading up to the 2008 elections?

I thought it would be interesting, in the context of this website, to see who feels “rhetorical” and how they describe this feeling. Although there were only 38 people who felt rhetorical since data collection began in 2005, the responses show interesting uses of the word. While many wrote about feelings towards rhetoric assignments, one of my favorite particles reads, “I feel like throwing some rhetorical grenades.” The implications of data such as this is not always readily apparent and is clouded by the somewhat eerie concept of "harvesting" feelings, but as a means for exploring a specific phrase like "rhetorical," it is a fascinating resource.

Exhibiting Poetry and Rhetoric

EmilyBloom — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:39:48 +0000

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.

This exhibition includes virtual rooms recreating spaces that Yeats inhabited, display cases with clickable first editions and manuscripts, videos with scholarly commentators discussing Yeats’s biography and works and images of various artifacts displayed in the collection. One of the advantages of the online exhibition is that the viewer can virtually turn pages of documents that would otherwise be static in the display cases. In this manner, I was able to leaf through a few pages of a first edition without having to visit the archive.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

The exhibit also displays a few instances of visual literary criticism, such as a compelling chart that tracks the composition of Yeats’s The Tower. By clicking on the icon of a single poem, the display highlights a line tracking the publication history. Three poems—“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium”— are linked to auditory commentary on Yeats’s extensive revision process.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

In many respects, the strategies of this exhibition are similar to those in Yeats’s broadsides. In these broadsides, published by the Cuala Press, Yeats included visual prints, poetic text and sheet music to combine different sensory experiences in works that were, on several levels, blurring the tenuous lines between rhetoric and art.

Protecting Marriage

EmilyBloom — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:46:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music. This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship. The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees. After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates. Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner? Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Image Credit: Screen Shot Together in Texas

Twogether in Texas, a local HMI campaign, has billboards all over Austin with hugely inflated intimate portraits of couples. According to Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News, Twogether in Texas offers marriage workshops that are not exclusively same-sex. Although Texas has not legalized gay marriage, “non-traditional couples” can participate in these workshops that cover relationship issues such as fidelity, money management and communication. In such cases, is the pro-marriage movement symbiotic with the same-sex marriage movement? Recently, a same-sex couple, legally married in Massachusetts, filed for divorce in Dallas, further challenging the rhetorical constraints of pro-marriage positions.

Image Credit: YouTube

H/T Huffington Post

In a spoof of California’s Proposition 8, the website rescuemarriage.org presents a fake PSA in favor of a fictitious bill called the California Marriage Protection Act. This PSA uses almost identical language as those opposed to gay marriage to argue that divorce is “unnatural like polyester, glasses and twinkies.” This parody addresses the complications of pro-marriage arguments in the context of same-sex marriage debates. On the website this is even more explicit in the article “The Gay Divorcees” in which the author, John Marcotte, goes to torturous lengths to explain why a legally married same-sex couple should not be allowed a divorce because it would be a violation of traditional religious values.

Mapping Relations

EmilyBloom — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:54:12 +0000

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history. Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares. The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record. Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention? And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Most immediately, the family tree implies the presence of roots—a metaphor that Alex Haley significantly mined in his book and miniseries. The Times (London) used a similar visual metaphor in a family tree for Barack Obama in which they, rather tastelessly, represent his African ancestors as the roots and his American ancestors as the tree.

Image Credit: Times (London)

Issues of subterranity are rendered even more explicit by trees revealing hidden histories, particularly, as in the case of Michelle Obama’s geneology, histories of slavery, interracial kinship and upward mobility. On the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,” scholars discuss the significance and meanings of Michelle Obama’s family tree. Among these voices, several expressed doubt about whether the family tree can generate significant public debate on the issues it reveals. As Mary Frances Berry writes, “race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved.” Other scholars lamented the inability of the genealogical chart to tell the history it purports to represent. Martha Hodges writes that the simple line connecting two individuals does not reveal the violence that could be contained in that encounter, particularly between a slave girl and an unknown white forbearer. On the other hand, Ira Berlin points out that the connecting line not only obliterates violence, but also other complicated emotional connections between individuals. In both cases, the family tree does not depict affective ties—whether those of pain, shame, betrayal, love or joy.

Image Credit Left: Clauset, Moore and Newman in Nature

Image Credit Right: The Boston Herald

In a recent article in Nature, “Networks: Teasing out the missing links,” Sid Reidner describes the limitations of the family tree's “highly unrealistic, insular population” in our age of increasingly complex social organizations. Reidner cites work by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman in creating a "hierarchical random graph" that represents the links omitted in a standard family tree. While the creators of this model use it to predict relationships when information is missing, this chart also offers an interesting visual representation of relations that emphasizes the multiplicity of links, rather than the simple procreative line. While a much messier affair, the Clauset, Moore and Newman model makes for a more compelling glimpse into the Affleck-Damon connection, for instance, than a tree– no matter how deep the roots.

Bodies of Evidence

EmilyBloom — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:16:14 +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.

Visual Tweets

EmilyBloom — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:15:45 +0000

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?

White House, Green House

EmilyBloom — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:30:33 +0000

Image Credit: The New York Times

Nestled between the white monuments of Washington D.C. is a new dash of green. On September 17th, Washington D.C. opened a weekly farmer's market near the White House. This opening, ceremoniously attended by Michelle Obama as well as hundreds of shoppers, led me to think about the ways in which the First Lady has championed the sustainability movement. One of her first ceremonial acts as a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was to plant a garden. The White House website includes a film about digging this garden and compares Michelle Obama to Eleanor Roosevelt, the only other First Lady to plant produce on the White House lawns. In her remarks at the opening of the Farmer's Market, Michelle Obama refers to the White House gardens as "one of the greatest things that I've done in my life so far" and describes supporting the Farmer's Market as an extension of her commitment to making healthy food more widely accessible.

Together, the White House gardens and the adjacent farmer's market represent a distinctive "greening" of the First Lady role. Rather than directly entering the health care debate as Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 1993, Michelle Obama argues that her emphasis on healthy eating is an important part of the discussion of health care. In her speech to the farmer's market, she said, "I've realized that little things like a garden can actually play a role in all of these larger discussions. They make us think about these issues in a way that maybe sometimes the policy conversations don't allow us to think." How do the Washington D.C. farmer's market and the White House garden participate in conversations about such issues as health care and economic stimulus? Is Michelle Obama advocating policy by digging gardens and shopping locally or are these photo ops merely obfuscations of policy discussion?

The White House website offers numerous examples of Michelle Obama's visual and spoken rhetoric on the subjects of sustainable gardening and healthy eating that could make for interesting classroom discussion.