viz. - Pedagogy

A Prezi Toolkit

Scott Garbacz — Mon, 05 May 2014 14:23:37 +0000

Image via BGC DML

By Scott Garbacz

Note for Instructors and Students: This is not a lesson plan as such, but rather a non-comprehensive “tool box” of tricks and techniques you can use to make memorable, comprehensible, and above all interesting visual presentations. I am also aiming at some basic, easy-to-implement strategies aimed at academic purposes. Click here for a primer on more elements of Prezi design. On the other hand, if you’re just wanting the very basics of Prezi, their official introduction to the service may be helpful.

What is Prezi?:

For those who don’t know what it is, Prezi is a web-native descendent of the popular PowerPoint presentation software. Like Powerpoint, you create slides that include images and texts (but no animations, alas), and progress from one slide to another. Unlike PowerPoint, however, Prezi has a number of unique features:

All your slides are laid out in a virtual space, which means that you can visualize the relationship between ideas, and let your audience see the shape of your entire argument at a glance.

In order to accomplish this, Prezi introduces the concept of frames. A frame is essentially just a place where the camera stops for a while, similar to a single slide in PowerPoint. There can be visible frames (which look quite a bit like PowerPoint slides) or invisible frames (which are essentially nothing more or less than a place for the camera to stop.)

Prezi is available online, which allows for collaboration. Plus, students don’t need to remember to bring physical copies of their presentations, or email them.
Prezi is free (for basic uses) and cross-platform. Students can use it on a Macbook, a Chromebook, a PC, a Linux box, or even a public computer without paying a dime.

The opening invisible frame for a Prezi used for a class demonstration. Note that all or part of five visible frames are also visible. Prezi credit: Scott Garbacz

The Dangers of Prezi:

First of all, it is important to remember why you should not use Prezi, or, for that matter, any powerpoint-style presentation. Objections to machine-assisted lectures are many, and should not be overlooked. In fact, I highly recommend that any future presenter reads this PowerPoint-style presentation on the Horrors of Powerpoint. At the very least, remember a few quick rules of thumb:

Never read text that is on a PowerPoint slide. Let it aid your presentation, not replace it.
Everything should be comprehensible and easy to read—complex illegible diagrams are worse than useless.
Don’t become addicted to fancy transitions. In the case of Prezi, this means that you should be very careful about when you spin the camera. Don’t cause sea-sickness.

Tools:

1) Visual Organization of Ideas. In a Powerpoint, you march from idea to idea to idea, in one long stream of thoughts. The media gives no sense of progress; slide replaces slide until finally the presentation ends. Prezi presentations, on the other hand, often open with a bird’s-eye-view of the entire argument. Let’s look at a few shapes those views can take:

Linear Presentation of Ideas. . Even if you only present one slide after another, showing your viewers what slides to expect lets them get an idea about how long the presentation is, and where they are in the argument. Remember, you want it easy for your audience to recognize where they are in your outline, so they can understand when they’ve moved from the introduction, to the midpoint, to the conclusion. Naturally, this can be combined (as Laura does below) with other modes of organization.

Readers can see that there are six main topics to be covered in order, though they also see that most major visible frames (the circles) contain two smaller frames within them. Prezi credit: Laura Thain.

Multi-stranded Argument. Let’s look back at the Prezi in the "what is a Prezi" section. Immediately, my audience can see that I have three major slides (these will be introductions to three characters from The Wire) and three minor slides (these will discuss the stories that each of these representative characters tell.) My outline primes my reader to expect this organization, making the presentation much less wearisome for them to follow.
“Zooming In” on Miniature slides. As you can see in the Visual Rhetoric Group Prezi, you can also nest slides within slides. Generally, it’s useful to have a consistent reason to do this: the slides within slides might represent “smaller” points or details, or they might show local examples of a larger issue.
Hiding Slides in Images Some of my most successful presentations involve images, rather than premade themes, as my organizing principle. One advantage of Prezi is that you can focus on different aspects of a single image while ensuring that your audience is able to follow your movements. But you can also “hide” a slide within an image, by making it tiny. These slides can serve to illustrate points associated with

Prezi credit: Scott Garbacz

In the case, I wanted students to be able to compare two maps side-by-side, particularly looking at the parallel way that religious and secular quotations were used to justify Empire. By using a Prezi and invisible frames, I was able to highlight different areas of the images while reminding students of the "big picture" comparison between the two. I was also able to make a visual argument when I zoomed out from these maps, revealing a final, larger map that showed the largest extent of the British Empire. Even though this Prezi featured very few words (either captions or map inscriptions), it was able to provide a visual correlary to the outline for my day's lecture.

2) Visual Jokes and Play

With quick transitions, you can actually have Prezi tell jokes for you (and every presentation is better with appropriate jokes.) I had a great audience reaction when I turned to the medieval “wheel of fortune,” then spun the camera: the King was suddenly at the bottom of Fortune’s Wheel, and the peasant at the top, in tribute to the destabilizing power of rhetorical eloquence. Similarly, what might happen if you set up an invisible

3) Blockquotes as Items

I like to ensure that my blockquotes include either more or less text than I will read, and are the only items on a slide. That way, they function like a handout—as reference material for my audience to follow along. Again, however, I work hard to not read text from the screen any more than is necessary.

4) Cannibalize Themes

There is a healthy medium between slavery to a fixed theme and building every visual element from scratch. Find out what in any given theme is editable, and play with it!

5) Adding Sound and Automation by Laura Thain

Sounds, especially voiceover can be an very useful tool for adding interest, presenting remotely or giving your audience material to cover on their own. To add background music, simply click on the "Insert" option on the toolbar and select "Add Backgrounds Music." This music will play during your entire presentation.
To add voiceover to your prezi, you first need to create an audio file for each slide. I use the simple tool GarageBand, although Audacity is a great free option for both Windows and Mac platforms, too. Make sure to save your file as one of prezi's supported file types: MP3, M4A, FLAC, WMA, WAV, OGG, AAC, MP4, or 3GP.
After recording each track, attach it to the appropriate slide clicking on it in the pathway sidebar, selecting the "Insert" option, and clicking on "Add Voiceover to Path Step."
For an example of a remote lecture, see my prezi on pathos appeals, which I made in response to one of many university weather cancellations this semester.

Political (In)action in the Meme Generation?

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 21:04:54 +0000

Dawkins playing a midi breath controller in Saatchi video. Image Credit: Saatchi.com

This will be the first post in a three-part series in which I will explore the relationship between memes and civic discourse.

What is an internet meme? Though most young people can instantly recognize a picture of Philosoraptor, Feminist Ryan Gosling, or a Lolcat, few know the history of this ubiquitous term. Nevertheless, show a room full of undergraduates an image of Nyan Cat, and you'll immediately elicit laughter and a sense of camaraderie. In that moment of laughter, however, it seems worth asking: what exactly is bringing consumers of memes together? From UC Davis’s “Pepper Spray Cop Meme,” to China’s “Big Yellow Duck” meme, how are memes shaping their viewer’s and creator’s understanding of activism and history? Is a comical form treated with such levity an effective means of communicating about more serious matters?

The term “meme” was first articulated by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in order to describe the way some ideas are spread through society in a pattern that is similar to the transmission of genes. At the time of writing The Selfish Gene how could Dawkins have predicted that within a few decades, his words would be used to describe a unique by-product of the digital age, one which has mutated and grown to such an extent that even the proudest luddites are hip to Lolcats? Check out this video of Dawkins for a fun (and highly visual) overview in which Dawkins links his theory of the meme with the other life it has taken on online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GFn-ixX9edg (for more background on the video, click here: : http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/20/new-directors-showcase) In the video he appears bemused, the unwitting but delighted progenitor of a term “hijacked” by internet culture.

Playfully embracing the term’s fluidity he says, “In the hijacked version, mutations are designed, not random. . . In some cases this can take the form of genuinely creative art, but now that I think about it, mightn’t somebody argue that all creative art comes about through something like a mutation in the mind?” These last words echo before a projector displays layered, brightly-colored collage imagery. At one point an owl shoots lazer beams at a cartoon rendering of a purple brain emerging from Dawkin’s head and then he begins playing a riff on an air midi. Hello Pied Piper of the web, here to whisk our generation away to Nyan Cat land. Eventually the screen is left only with the fluorescent hues of spilled oil. Is this a commentary on the enticing but polluted nature of the internet? Dawkins himself said that memes could be “Good ideas, good poems, as well as driveling mantras.” How do we, as consumers of culture, define the value of internet memes? In next week’s post I’ll look at several popular memes in the context of activist movements and large scale catastrophes and ask whether these are “driveling mantras,” rallying cries, or something in between.

For more on memes, check out this interview with Dr. Simone Sessolo on DWRL’s podcast, Zeugma http://dwrlpodcast.libsyn.com/simone-sessolo-interview-mp3

The Pedagogical and Aesthetic Possibilities of Crowdsourced Films

Calliope — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:26:13 +0000

Image Credit: RoseVallentine

I teach a class about the new rhetoric of internet commerce. I have my students write a standard rhetorical analysis paper around the middle of the term, and for their primary texts I ask them to use the digital marketing materials of dotcoms. Of all the paper genres I assign (expository, persuasive, etc.) rhetorical analysis is generally my favorite. I prefer these papers because I'm a literary critic, and rhetorical analyses are essentially close readings that use a standard rhetorical methodology. But there's another reason I especially enjoyed reading my students' analysis papers this semester: they introduced me to several fantastic websites that I didn't know about before. I feel compelled to share one of these sites with viz. readers because of its novel interventions in visual culture. (And I want to thank my student, who I will refrain from naming, for the great find!). The company is called hitRECord, an open, online platform for collaborative filmmaking and other artistic expression.

The novelty of the business concept is that it enables creative individuals to combine their talents through a transparent, user-controlled process, instead of having to adapt their ideas, writing, acting, etc. to the demands of a traditional production company. If users work on a project together and it turns a profit, half of the proceeds go to hitREcord and half are paid to people on the team. It may come as a surprise that the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, famous for his roles in mainstream features like Ten Things I Hate About You, is the man behind this decidedly un-Hollywood-like venture. But Gordon-Levitt is not just the site's celebrity mascot (despite what appears to be an ironic appeal to his celebrity status on the website's main page).

Image Credit: Screenshot of hitrecord.org

The founder is an active participant on the website's discussion boards, a guest performer in some of the short films, and the bubbly personality of HitRECord's Youtube channel, where the company broadcasts its massive casting calls and solicits all kinds of original, user-generated material.

Video Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

After watching a few of hitRECord's video prompts, like the one entitled "RE: Flickering Lights" (above), I was struck by their pedagogical aims and procedures. The initial project that Gordon-Levitt highlights in this video--a compilation of poetry, original music, and a thematic series of shots--is analogous to the first draft of a student project. Gordon-Levitt talks about this mashup as if he is a teacher urging his students to develop their ideas. "While I really like his edit and I think it's really good, I think that we can take it a step further," he says. Later on in the clip, after he sets the parameters for revising and amplifying the flickering light piece, Gordon-Levitt brings in a cinematographer to give viewers a short tutorial on how to capture high quality footage of flickering lights. The instructional aspect of these videos reminds me of the trend in education across subject areas torward MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and video instruction of all kinds. It also occured to me as I was watching that assignment prompts of any nature, though especially for creative projects, could be made way more engaging (and comprehensible?) if they were delivered in video form. It might also be a good idea to approach them as if they were a casting call, or call for submissions.

Image Credit: Youtube video by hitrecord.org

My final comments are in reference to a video called "Iterations" (above), which was created by several hitRECord collaborators and released days ago with support from Levi's. The caption posted with the film on Youtube explains that "ITERATIONS tells the coming of age story of a girl's sometimes difficult and sometimes reluctant path to adulthood." But some of the song lyrics--"I'm an experiment, each trial is a test, constant recalibration. I am recycled cells, I learn to like myself...all disjointed, my file corrupted"--suggest that the story may also be about the process of assembling a digital art project, and the challenge/futility/thrill of making an artistic unity from multiple "disjointed" standpoints. I wonder if the handmade, stitched look of the images in this film, along with the fact that many of the hitRECord's film projects involve animation, may be attributed to the crowdsourced origin of their production. Do crowdsourced films have different aesthetic and generic features than their traditional counterparts? Is one of the main differences that the crowdsourced kind cultivate or exhibit a patchworked sensibility? I'm not sure, but I'm interested to see what new frontiers the artists at hiRECord discover together.

Journey to the Center of a Triangle

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:38:36 +0000

I don't often get terribly excited about geometry. But in the case of the above video I just can't help myself. My first impulse, after viewing the entire clip was to blame my sense of wonder on the soundtrack. By layering music from Inception Robert Mikhayelyan and Alex Gill are hitching their wagon onto an incredibly carefully manicured experience. Inception was sold as, and sold itself as, this evocative, mind-blowing experience. And whether or not the film actually accomplished that for any given viewer hardly matters in the face of a sale we could so easily read. Inception, both in and out of the film, sold its sense of wonder so blatantly that it's the sales pitch that sticks--slightly Pavlovian, we hear the music we prepare for befuddled amazement.

Image credit: Bruce & Katharine Cornwell Journey to the center of a Triangle

This geometry, though, moves past this simple explanation. The editors of this video have created another with the same music, and while fun enough it doesn't have near the same result (neither does, for example, something like Inception Cat). I don't think that we can pin everything on the effects of synchronicity either. There is a tangible pleasure in finding patterns and meaning in seemingly disparate events, and as exampled in things like The Dark Side of the Rainbow we work hard at experiencing these blended experiences as potent. Soundtracks, unplanned ones especially, invoke audience participation; they ask the viewer to create wonder for herself. It's easy with this video to line it up with different tracks, and I tested out several different pairings (Justice and Battles both work fairly well). What I found, though, is that I had been shifting the blame. It wasn't the audio, synchronous or otherwise, that produced the sense of wonder I experienced; it was clever pedagogy and the facts of the matter.

Image credit: Bruce & Katharine Cornwell Journey to the center of a Triangle

And while geometry as a general concept doesn't elicit much more than apathy from me nowadays (my ninth grade geometry class was an exercise in apathy and frustration) the specifics of it can be shocking. The underlying video, Journey to the center of a Triangle by Bruce & Katharine Cornwell, is more than just some visuals behind a soundtrack; it confounds our perception of reality. It shows that there are four distinct centers to any given triangle--the majority of which different than common sense would lead us to believe. As the video progresses through the different centers, performing each on different triangles, it deepens the world; it reveals an understanding of the world, perceptual truths about the world, that in the day-to-day are unthought. There is something deeply satisfying about the fundamental multiplicities espoused here.

Image credit: Protious at en.wikipedia

More than simply presenting the facts of the matter, though, this video, true to its name, takes us on a journey. It begins by moving through the expected center of triangles. The centers are telegraphed to the viewer through the lines and circles it uses to find them. Throughout each method the viewer is able to see how, exactly the center is found, and the methodical pace gives him or her time to project a particular center ahead of any reveal. These projected expectations, though, are continually subverted, and it's that subversion that creates a lasting sense of wonder. While this could result in frustration there are so many triangles and examples that by the end of any given method we can catch up so that finally we project correctly and understand where and why a center appears. The video, in some ways, follows the example of Socrates and Meno's slave. The reader and slave both (well, in my experience) make the same common sense mistake while trying to find twice the area of a square. When Socrates then points out the error made and proper method we're both able to perform and understand the world in a new way.

The Changing Face of Media Consumption

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

This cutesy inforgraphic from Ad Age and MBA Online presents the reader with a breakdown of media use by type, time and generation. The initial study was performed by Magid Generational Strategies. At first blush this seems to present a thorough overview of how different populations consume media, but on closer examination there are some signifigant issues. These issues aside, and in some cases because of these issues, this long image (I've broken it into several pieces for readability's sake. See the full image here) raises a number of questions about not which types of media we consume but how our methods of media consumption are changing to the degree that this infographic doesn't quite make sense.

Some of the choices apparent in the key are pretty interesting. First, we have activities broken into strict online and offline portions. And while this initially might feel like a reasonable position to take, especially if you're concerned with the marketing to specific demographics through specific types of media, it brings to light the question of just how various forms of media are percieved by consumers today. Increasingly discreet artifacts, songs, shows, articles, games, etc are seemlessly available across a variety of media types without any appreciable difference. What we might consider is that rather than consuming any kind of blanket media people gravitate toward consuming particular artifacts.

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

This, of course, raises the question of how exactly we should begin to classify these artifacts. What exactly are we to make of an article initially written for a print magazine, though probably first published on the magazine's website, and finally read on facebook? There are several clear answers. We can look to the context of an artifact's creation. In this case it was created for a print magazine; it was constrained by a monthly publication schedule, the phsyical space available in the magazine, the cost of producing the magaziine (pictures, etc). You could say, though, that all these constraints mean little to the end user, and their experience is shaped by the context within which they consume the artifact. That several people have liked and commented on the piece, that it was shared by a particular friend, the ads running down the side of the screen create more meaning for the consumer than the specific reasons behind its length.

(Image Credit: Ad Age, MBA Online, Magid Generational Strategies)

These issues have, in some part, been played out in discussion surrounding MLA's decision to require that citations include the source's medium of publication. These generally break down between Print and Web, though according to the Purdue Online Writing Lab, "other possibilities may include Film, CD-ROM, or DVD." The question of just what a works cited is supposed to perform for both its author and subsequent readers is a slightly different question than how we should appraoch the blended mediation of various artifacts.

In the end the infographic doesn't really tell us terribly much. I would have liked to see a nod toward the differences between social and personal mmedia consumption. And many of the categories, especially in the online section, are either too broad (entertainment, what isn't entertainment online?) or to specific (Facebook, rather than social media in general) to give any clear picture of how people are spending their time. This, coupled with the lack of total time breakdown, makes drawing any sort of concrete conclusions other difficult. It is charming, though, and the rough strokes it works with have been useful in generating discussion.

Coloring 9/11

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:25:08 +0000

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

It didn’t take long for a media storm to emerge around Really Big Coloring Books new title We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids' Book of Freedom. It was quickly and roundly criticized for its heavy-handed portrayal of Muslims. In the face of these criticisms Wayne Bell, the publisher at Really Big Coloring Books, has steadfastly argued that the book only shows the truth of what happened. It’s fairly clear though that the book slips easily into the popular narrative of freedom-hating-Muslims attacking freedom-loving-Americans because they hate our freedom. We Shall Never Forget isn’t an especially smart piece of propaganda, though. The play between the large amount of text and the inconsistent images make it hard to pin down how, exactly, its message is delivered.

In a video on their website Really Big Coloring Books reminds us that this is a pedagogical tool. And as such first we have to ask who the intended audience is. Who exactly is this book supposed to be teaching? 9/11 happened 10 years ago. I don't believe that it's unfair to state that almost anyone that can actually remember the day has outgrown coloring books. Unlike the ill-received coloring book Something Scary Happened, put together in 2003 by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team, We Will Never Forget is ultimately intended for an audience that cannot forget in the first place because there is nothing to remember. So perhaps the audience then isn't necessarily children along but parents with young children. As such, it might be best to look at We Will Never Forget 9/11 as a textual and visual history book geared towards parents looking to teach their children a particular 9/11 history.

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

One of the more interesting aspects of this page is the extreme dissonance it presents itself with. Many of the images in this coloring book are created in a kind of realist style. There is an attention to detail that might require a colored pencil rather than the standard crayon. The bin Ladin kill shot, though, looks thoroughly cartoonish. The subject matter, though, is anything but. Coloring books are no strangers to violence. There are plenty of books featuring superheroes fighting villains in standard comic style. You'll often find the two foes frozen in mid-punch. What isn't so common, though, is the level of immediate violence presented here. This is, of course, compounded by the fact that this book attempts to present actual events rather than imaginations.

We are presented with somewhat more than a final showdown between Osama bin Ladin and the men that ultimately killed him. The first thing a viewer will notice is the armed SEAL staring down his rifle at bid Ladin and his wife. This isn't an unfamiliar image, especially to anyone who remembers the Elián González debacle in the late 90s. And while there are only so many different ways to display an armed man aiming at two unarmed people I can't help but draw a connection between the two images. Their image is, to a degree, undermined by the broad cultural memory of their audience--parents with young children. At this point it isn't too terribly different from the above mentioned super hero books. You've got the valiant hero about to take out the cartoonish bad guy. But we're not looking at a standoff.

(Image Credit: Alan Diaz)

This isn't the Elián González picture. Instead what we're seeing is the bullet as it flied toward bin Ladin, as he hides behind his wife (this human shield narrative, though, was almost immediately backed away from by the White House). So that in the end, when the full image is taken in, we're privy to not only violence, but imminent death wrapped in the worst kind of cartoon veneer all while the coloring book editorializes the event and instructs children to "ask your mother and father, your teacher, your preacher what it really means. What does it mean to be Free? Why are we a FREE people?"

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

The level of text in this book is pretty curious. It almost makes it hard to imagine exactly how this whole thing functions. Is there a combined action where the kid furiously colors burning towers while their parent plows through the text? Perhaps first they sit down to read through it--although the text is clearly directed at children as they are frequently asked to ask their parents about various issues--then, with the story in their memory they color things in. In the end it feels like this book was less intended for any real practical use and more that it is just an attempt (a successful attempt--this has been Really Big Coloring Books fasted selling book ever) at cashing in on the 9/11 anniversary with a clumsily delivered political message.

P.S. While looking for images of We Shall Never forget I stumbled across many from the above mentioned A Scary Thing happened. This one offers a particularly nice commentary on 9/11 media coverage.

(Image Credit: Something Scary Happened)

The Theory and Pedagogy of viz.: Reflections on the 2010-2011 Academic Year

ladysquires — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:39:28 +0000

As the year closes, we're reflecting on the ways our posts have connected visual rhetoric, digital literacy, and pedagogy. We've presented lesson plans that use programs like Animoto, iMovie, Sound Slides Plus, Xtranormal, etc. There are longer posts that detail how these programs were used available on the blog, but in the first part of this post, Elizabeth will focus on those that present ideas for using iMovie in the classroom. In the second part of the post, Ashley will explore one of the broad themes our posts this year have addressed and talk about the ways in which we are theorizing the connections between embodiment and pedagogy.

Elizabeth: In Megan Eatman's RHE 309k: The Rhetoric of Tragedy students used, among other media, iMovie to make visual arguments in the form of narrated slideshows. In one of two posts detailing how she used iMovie in the classroom, Megan wrote The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event." Students were given time to experiment with iMovie during class and were not required to use images related to their topics while learning the program. This created a low-stakes atmosphere in which they could learn the program comfortably. Megan also constructed her own video as a model that could be shown to students. Students then had the option of using iMovie as well as other programs such as Photoshop to create multimodal arguments.

Here is the model Megan created and a link to her lesson plan:

I also began to think about how iMovie could be used in the classroom. I noticed that I was writing a lot of posts about how images and digital media were being used to enhance online experiences of poetry and bring poetry to new audiences. In particular, I was taken with this piece by poet and scholar and UT alum Susan Somers-Willett in which she worked with a photographer to create a series of docu-poems. (Sidenote: there will be an interview with Susan available on our “Views” page.)

In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse on Vimeo.

I wanted to create an exercise that would allow students to think about documenting their own engagement with poems of their choosing. Creating iMovie files that include their reading of poems they interpret critically allows for a visual record of that interpretation and a public performance that goes beyond rote memorization.

Ashley: This marks the first year of aggressively using Google Analytics to track activity on the blog, and the data that we have gathered shows not only a growing audience for viz. but offers us a better sense of what readers are responding to. Posts that dealt with various representations of the body tended to be the most popular for all of the reasons you can imagine, but as we marked that trend, we talked about using those responses to shape a socially responsible and relevent set of posts on the theme of embodiment. These posts point to the ways in which bodies and representations of bodies function as a powerful form of visual rhetoric in our culture, and that importance has significant pedagogical implications. Our students operate in an image saturated world in which bodies are constantly circulating, so understanding how image producers and image subjects engage with their intended audience is an important part of building visual literacy.

Megan's post on American Apparel advertisements and Mike's post on the use of pornographic images in PETA ads focused on sexualization and exploitation. Both posts point to the ways in which the use of stereotypical, oversexed images may actually work against the rhetorical purposes of their creators. As Mike says of a PETA campaign that visually links nude women to animals and/or cuts of meat, "The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent."

As a counterpoint to those posts, I explored the work of two photographers who use nudes or partial nudes in very different ways. The first was Howard Schwartz and Beverly Ornstein's The Athelete, which uses images of male and female Olympic athletes to make a point about the variety of bodies that excel at particular kinds of physical activity, broadening our idea of what a fit, healthy, or athletic body looks like. Later in the semester, I had the opportunity to interview award-winning New York-based photographer Substantia Jones, who photographs nude or partially nude men and women who self identify as "fat" as part of her Adipositivity Project. Jones's project is explicitly political. She aims to challenge our notions of what constitutes a normal or even healthy body by depicting subjects whose bodies are typically either inivisible or vilified in the media and celebrating thier physicality.

The interview provided powerful insights into the ways in which a photographer can engage with her subjects in a way that celebrates rather than exploits their bodies. All of Jones's models are amateurs, many of whom approach her about participating in the project. Jones talked about how she establishes a rapport with a photographic subject who is obviously placing him or herself in a very vulnerable position: "By the time someone contacts me and asks to be an Adiposer, I presume they've already done all the "Can I really drop trou for a stranger's camera?" work. Many lose their nerve during the scheduling phase (far preferable to losing their nerve during the me-ringing-their-doorbell phase, which has happened). But I think when (and if) they open the door, they see a smiling fellow fatty--a comrade--who wants the experience to be good for all involved. What we're doing is indeed ridiculous, so we usually laugh at lot. That helps. As does a cocktail."

This interview brought over 1500 unique visitors to our site in the first 24 hours, and the posts mentioned above have been among the most popular blog entries of the entire semester. Naturally, that raises questions about how we ought to use NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or pornographic content on the blog and in the classroom. Obviously, we would be irresponsible to present such images merely for the sake of titillation or provocation, but the widespread circulation of these images speaks to a greater need for dialogue both with the public and with students about the effectiveness and responsibility of using bodies to make arguments.

Assignment: The Flexible Final Project

Megan Eatman — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:26:28 +0000

Screenshot from student project Evolution, Not Revolution by Lacey Teer

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

Assignment

Students were allowed to make their final argument in whatever means they felt was most effective. This decision allowed students to make decisions based at least in part on their individual skill sets. Students were given specific standards for their argument that applied regardless of its form; for example, they were required to designate an audience and place of publication, use the rhetorical appeals discussed in class to persuade that audience, and construct an argument that added something to the conversation they had been studying all semester. There were also specific warnings about what was appropriate--or, rather, inappropriate--for multimodal assignments. Students were warned not to turn in a single picture with words on top of it because that would not show the appropriate effort or skill.

Preparation

Because this was a unit-long assignment, students had a lot of preparation. Our in-class preparation focused mostly on multimodal argumentation because it was the least familiar and because, after receiving project proposals, I realized that all but a few students were making a multimodal text. There was also a fair amount of overlap; we could sometimes talk about both in the same class. We spent class time learning iMovie, the basics of Photoshop, and talking about the rhetorical power of sound. We looked at a variety of sample projects, some by actual students (from my previous class and other classes) and some that were created in other contexts, to talk about their effectiveness.

Assessment

These will be graded according to the successful execution of the standards listed on their assignment sheet.

Feedback

While I have not received feedback from students on this project, leaving the project open (rather than forcing students to argue a certain way) seems to have been a good decision. The quality of projects already appears higher, and I am sure the arrangement is less stressful for students. The purpose of this assignment is to encourage students to think about the available means of persuasion, including the various media available to them, and then use them to make an effective argument. I hope that this assignment has given students a chance to reflect not just on persuasive strategies, but on the advantages and pitfalls of various media for making specific arguments.

Lesson Plan - Teaching Poetry with Image Databases

ebfrye — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:00:19 +0000

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

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

Goals:

Interpretation of content, historical analysis, visual literacy, public performance, class editions, citation, fair use

Overview of Assignment:

Each week one or two students create a digital “reading” of a poem using images. Students use image databases, such as the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, to pair relevant images with a poem of their choosing. They then record themselves reading the poem and arrange the images in an order of their choosing using a program such as iMovie. On their assigned day, students present their “readings” to the class, and the class is asked to respond. Students are also required to submit a process essay with their pieces that explains the rationale for their poem and image selection and how they are using images to “interpret” the piece. The essay should include a bibliography. The videos will be posted to a class blog or a class YouTube account. The exercise can be used to supplement or reinvigorate the recitation/ public performance exercises that are traditionally part of poetry pedagogy. Posting the videos in a common digital space create a class archive or collection of work, which could lead to further discussions about selection criteria and canonization.

The assignment may be repeated more than once during the semester to suit various ends:

-contextualize the poem historically using images appropriate to the poem’s time period

-interpret the poem’s content (may involve historically relevant but unaffiliated images)

-supplement their own pieces (in a workshop if the instructor assigns any creative writing assignments) with digitally available images or images they produce themselves

The assignment could also be done with an excerpt from a prose piece instead of a poem.

Assignment Length:

Semester-long project with each student contributing 2 videos and 2 process essays (4-5 pages and bibliography)

Materials:

iMovie, YouTube, image databases (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, New York Public Library Digital Archives, Library of Congress’s American Memory, etc.), class blog (optional)

Preparation Guidance:

Students should be introduced to and spend some time browsing image databases during class. They should also receive instruction for how to use iMovie and have some time to practice. It will also be helpful for them to have a model video, and you will need to set up a class YouTube account as a way to post their videos online. You may then choose to link those videos to a class blog. The videos should work in tandem with class discussions. These may emphasize the interaction of written and visual texts, historicist reading methods, the role of performance, and the impact of digital technology on literary production and presentation.

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?

Disaster Pedagogy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:38:25 +0000

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

It seems strange to ignore the earthquake and tsunami in a class that is built around discussion of devastating events. We talk about upsetting topics in class, although I do tell students that what they consider "tragic" is open to debate; I have received (very good) papers on, for example, Lindsay Lohan's personal decline and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. However, I think there is a utility to discussing scary or sad events as they happen, too. Making students aware of these moments as rhetorical as they happen seems like a key way to increase day-to-day critical literacy. What is important, I think, is making it clear that seeing the rhetoric in these public images doesn’t take away from the victims’ pain. In this case, it is actually easy to keep their pain in perspective because a potential motive (and a definite effect) of most of these images is to show how heart wrenching this event is. It gives us an opportunity to talk about how photographers show someone else’s pain: through direct images of anguish, of course, but also through the fear and fascination of seeing a building sway or an enormous crack in the ground. We can ask, why are there so many amateur videos of the destruction available online? Why do people want to see this? What work does it do? It can encourage students to think about when images help and when they sensationalize without helping. This particular event also gives us the opportunity to talk about the rhetorical power of animals, since the news coverage features images and stories of animals in peril.

Via Buzzfeed

My concern, of course, is that photographs will be upsetting for one or more students. While we're all adults, and we've certainly looked at some upsetting material before (meth PSAs come to mind), I do want the classroom to be intellectually challenging but still comfortable; students shouldn't feel as if their feelings or personal losses are being disrespected. While that is a concern for practically all of the events we talk about (especially Hurricane Katrina, because of the geographic proximity and huge affected population), there is normally at least a little distance between the class and what happened.

"Support the Tsunami and Quake Relief," Dave CT

We will talk about this event, but in a particular way. I would like students to discuss what they have been seeing, if only briefly: what images appear, and what effects do they have? Why do you think this picture was taken, published, circulated, etc--what is its rhetorical power? Additionally, I'd like to spend some time talking about the art that has come out of the event, like the first and third images in this post. Students have the option to make a poster for their final projects, so I think it is useful for them to see what one might look like. Some, like the Red Teardrop, seem very effective; others, like the image above, are somewhat more confusing for certain audiences, but potentially still persuasive. Talking about these images is relevant to the students' own work and allows us to engage with the images and the event in a way that is less likely to rub salt on a very raw, very recent wound.

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...

Re-Covering the Classics

Cate Blouke — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:09:40 +0000

Contest winning re-designed book cover by Philipp Dornbierer for The Fox Is Black

Elizabeth's post this week (about the Great Gatsby game) reminded me of a design contest I stumbled upon recently. TheFoxIsBlack.com, a blog about web and graphic design, has begun a series of monthly competitions inviting participants to redesign the covers of classic literature. Last month was The Great Gatsby (winner pictured above), and this month it's The Lord of the Flies. (The deadline is February 25th, so there's still time for you designers out there to get a shot at the $100 Amazon gift card).

Re-designed book cover by Matthew Gore for The Fox Is Black

It's interesting to think about the interaction of text and cover art, how the cover can shape our perception of and approach to a book. Aside from just being pretty cool to look at, the entries are fascinating to compare and could be used as a conversation starter in classrooms. For example, comparing the image above (Matthew Gore's entry) to the one below (Ian O. Phelan's entry). Though both feature the color green, what can we infer from the choice in hue? Also, the image above is more masculine and violent (with the broken glass), positioning Gatsby is the central figure, whereas the image below depicts a female figure and focuses our attention on Daisy.

Re-designed book cover by Ian O. Phelan for The Fox Is Black

Using iMovie To Talk About Tragedy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:55:41 +0000

Image: Mildly Amused

For their final paper, students in my Rhetoric of Tragedy class were asked to make a visual argument and write an accompanying reflection explaining, among other things, their use of rhetorical strategies and the relevance of their choice of medium. While I did not require that students use a particular medium, I taught the students how to make narrated slideshows in iMovie with the understanding that it would become the default medium. In this post, I will briefly discuss my experience with using iMovie in the classroom.

While only the last unit was focused on visual rhetoric, we had discussed visual rhetoric throughout the semester, in large part because of its particular relevance to the kind of events my students were talking about: events in which people are hurt or killed, natural disasters, even (and especially) celebrity downfalls. The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event. On the first day of class, we looked at a multimodal argument (pictured above) to begin thinking about the arguments we make about and with celebrity death. I also showed them the slideshow below, composed by Aric Mayer, as an example of what a narrated slideshow like this might look like.

Aesthetics of Catastrophe from Aric Mayer on Vimeo.

We spent one class period playing with iMovie. Since students were not required to use iMovie, I did not require them to work on their real projects in class; as a result, they made a lot of amusing slideshows, including several that prominently featured baby animals. I think engaging with iMovie in this way made learning the technology fun, but it obviously left little space for discussion of the medium's rhetorical possibilities. We focused heavily on these issues in other classes. Overall, the learning curve was minor and the students seemed to enjoy the process. iMovie also allowed easy improvisation, a quality that, as Eileen mentioned in her review, SoundSlides lacks. The fact that students could dive into iMovie without any prior preparation was very appealing.

Overall, I was happy with the students' final projects, and I was certainly happy with the program. I created a PBWorks workspace for students to upload their projects. Some students who had technical difficulties uploaded their projects as private movies on YouTube; this was an especially good strategy for presentations, since it took no time to get the video ready. I do think that next time I would frame this project as multimodal rather than primarily visual. As Eileen mentioned in her post, considering the auditory is an important part of this kind of composition, and while many students used narration and music in creative ways, the editing was sometimes clunky, which would lessen the slideshow's persuasiveness.

Below is an example slideshow that I made. I used an older version of iMovie than what is available in the labs, but was still able to achieve (more or less) the effects I desired. I did not show this example to my class this semester, but in the future I will likely include it, along with Mayer's slideshow, to give the students an idea of the different forms these slideshows can take. In particular, I wanted to highlight the use of video clips alongside still images.

For a list of images used, see Works Cited

Reboot: Literacies: Visual and Auditory

emcg — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:06:11 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of a drawing by Katie Butler for my E314J class

Last year at about this time, Emily Bloom offered a thoughtful post in which she cautioned against privileging visual literacy at the expense of what she called “auditory literacy,” a crucial component of both analyzing and creating new media productions in the classroom. After assigning a narrated slideshow project this semester, with decidedly mixed aural results: I consider myself schooled.

This semester, I asked my “Literature and Biology” students to create a 4-6 minute narrated slideshow that analyzes a text on the syllabus while immersing viewers “in an act of storytelling.” Before proceeding to dissect the project, I should note that I consider it an overall success. I’m proud of—and grateful for—the hard work and creativity reflected in these projects, as well as the opportunity to compose my own sample slideshow. Embedded, with permission from their creators, are samples of my students' work that use images and sound to great effect—from the original drawing above, which renders Elizabeth Frankenstein as a 1950s housewife to emphasize her subordinate status in the novel, to a video with humorous visuals and a deadpan delivery befitting its subject: Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow by Isaac Gifford for my E314J class

Yet, despite our attention to sound at viz. this semester, I still managed to forget about the importance of oral performance when preparing students for the assignment. Many otherwise promising slideshows faltered because of a rushed (or ponderous) pacing, poor recording quality, or the absence of audio entirely. I’ve since realized that successful image productions should begin with an in-class discussion of how image, sound, and text interact to create a cohesive whole, as well as an analysis of how successful podcasts, like those produced by RadioLab, use aural elements rhetorically. More specifically, students need practice narrating their slideshows before pressing “record”: in restructuring this assignment, I might ask them to read their scripts aloud to peers for feedback on their delivery.

Image Credit: A narrated slideshow Bethany McNeely for my E314J class

So, because they bear repeating, here are Emily’s original reflections on sound in the classroom:

Image Credit: The Guardian

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.

Picturing Poetry in the Classroom

ebfrye — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:08:40 +0000

Image Credit: "Don't Touch My Flag," Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Greetings, all. In my last post for this semester, I'd like to continue on the poetry track down which I've been more or less rambling. Lately, I've noticed the growing frequency with which both poets and larger institutions are using visual media to bring poetry to broader (usually younger) audiences and to augment the form of the reading experience. I've also thought about how some of these techniques can be added to my own pedagogical practices.

In that frame of mind, I've put together a short piece using iMovie and images from the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs collection to accompany my reading of Donald Revell's poem "Election Year." The clip models an exercise I'd like to use in the classroom in the future.

I'm interpreting the poem as indicating the speaker's willingness to be outside of all of the "Americanisms" an election year might evoke. However, the title emphasizes the weight of a nationalistic, mass culture that is difficult to escape. Consequently, because the poem's title arouses and insists on what the rest of the poem deliberately eschews, the poem is about what it is not about, if that makes sense. To emphasize such a contradiction, I've chosen a series of images that are highly saturated with associations of patriotism, protest, and significant events in U.S. history. Included in the clip are a photograph of Lincoln's funeral, a shot of listeners at a Civil Rights-era protest, an image of a group meeting in an Arizona labor camp, and a photograph of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk.

In a literature class, students could produce similar videos using images from the databases that we have listed on our "images" section of the blog. Students could be instructed to take multiple approaches, using images to interpret a poem, to historicize it, or a mixture of both. The exercise might be modified to allow students to use images of their own making in interpeting a poem. The latter approach could be particularly fruitful for a creative writing workshop in which students could produce docu-poems similar to these. Students would be asked to give a presentation and/or produce a short essay with a bibliography to accompany their pieces.

Significantly, as much as the exercise focuses on images, it also requires students to read the piece aloud, which is a practice that should be emphasized in any teaching of poetry.

Xtranormal in the Classroom

Cate Blouke — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:55:32 +0000

Image Credit: Adriana Cervantes, created as final presentation for my RHE 306 class

Particularly in technology-based classrooms like we have here in the DWRL, instructors are always looking for new ways to teach students non-traditional forms of writing. A few weeks back, Ashley wrote a viz. post about the on-line animation program, Xtranormal, whose motto is “if you can type, you can make movies.” Her post inspired/challenged me to give it a try with my students. It's extremely user-friendly, and we were able to create animations in a single class period. Users enter text, and the program animates the dialogue for them. Above and after the jump are examples of my students' work, and I'll talk more about pedagogical value of the program.

In addition to viz., the DWRL hosts Blogging Pedagogy, a blog that each of the instructors contribute to each semester. I already blogged there about my first classroom experience with Xtranormal, and you can view that post here. It explains the premise behind the video below. To avoid repeating myself, I'd like to use this viz. post to approach the program from a more theoretical standpoint.

In his seminal work, Understanding Comics, cartoon theorist Scott McCloud posits that “cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing.” He argues that cartoons are uniquely poised to amplify arguments through simplification. He explains that the less representational the figure, the more likely we are to identify with it, and this abstraction makes viewers more receptive to the message – less apt to focus on who is saying than what is said. This can be particularly useful with students - asking them to focus more on the argument itself than the person making the argument.

Image credit: Loraine Ng and Leticia Garcia, created in class

As you've probably noticed, because Xtranormal uses mechanized and predetermined voices for the characters, the emphasis can end up on the wrong syllable, and the resulting animation often makes familiar language sound foreign. In theories of performance, intentional distancing (or alienation), prevents audiences from identifying too closely with characters, and consequently encourages more critical observation. Here, this distancing can be useful to call attention to the soundness of an argument, especially because we have to listen carefully to follow what the characters are saying.

This combination of identification and alienation produced by Xtranormal animations is often both funny and informative. As Megan pointed out in her viz. post about the TSA, Xtranormal can potentially be used to depersonalize sensitive or inflammatory issues. It also encourages students to translate arguments across media, and to think critically about the substance of arguments without focusing so closely on the players involved. And while, like Megan, I find the robotic voices particularly irritating after about 2 minutes, my students loved the exercise.

QR Codes in the Classroom

catherine_c — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:37:22 +0000

Image Credit: Screen capture of a powerpoint from my E314 course

For my final viz post of the semester (I'm officially off duty in the spring, but might pop back in occasionally), I'm going to reflect back on one of the more pedagogically interesting technologies I've discussed this semester -- using QR codes in the classroom.

I've talked with a lot of people about QR codes this semester and encountered discussions of them all over the web. On viz, I've written entries on their history and background, use in outdoor art intended for Google Satellites, and use in artwork in general, including material generated by this semester's DWRL guest speaker, DJ Spooky. viz has also had the pleasure of collaborating with the DWRL's Immersive Environments group who are getting up close and personal with QR codes and incorporating digital links into real world environments.

Image Credit: Link from DJ Spooky QR code ("Nauru Elegies") at Art Basel, Summer 2010, from Mickie Quick's Flickr photostream

While I only discussed QR codes in passing with my Reading Women Writers class this semester, I've found several interesting discussions of their use in pedagogical contexts on several teaching blogs. I've also been asked several times if I think that QR codes are going to stick around for good in cultural contexts, though their commercial applications seem increasingly entrenched with Calvin Klein featuring them in provocative ads and Ralph Lauren allowing customers to shop instantly from their ads through a QR code link.

Image Credit: New York Calvin Klein Ad, by way of Signature 9

One seemingly unavoidable collision is presented by the increasing number of smart phones in the backpacks of college students. Having been a student all the way from when phones were an abnormality to be warred against through when they were an unavoidable annoyance - "don't even have it on vibrate, just turn it off!" - I'm eager to embrace this technology. Teaching in the DWRL has shown me that students are more likely to be engaged in course materials when these materials are available to them in the mediums that they use most often and with which they are most comfortable. Use of new and familiar technologies should not undermine standards of classroom etiquette -- in fact, incorporating these technologies into the classroom has inspired me to present materials in my Rhetoric and English courses in ways that engage students' attention and keep them focused on the matter at hand. QR codes are a great way to encourage this kind of learning and exploration.

Pedagogy blog Eat. Sleep. Teach. has several outstanding suggestions for incorporating these codes into classroom life. QR codes are a great pre-class "hook" (and can be seconded by shortened URLs in computer classrooms for students without smart phones). QR codes can be linked with YouTube videos or other media, class blogs, or other online resources to get students thinking about the topics for the day. They also suggest linking up additional information or questions during presentations, featuring information for new students on a tag. Other activities where images or facts are linked to QRs and must be researched or identified or where visual images for rhetorical analysis may be presented out of context and then analyzed are also possibilities. Social games are a more in-depth option.

Image Credit: Example of QR Tag in a Powerpoint from Eat. Sleep. Teach.

UK eLearning blog Don't Waste Your Time expands upon the usefulness of linking shortened URLs with QR codes. The codes generated by shortened URLs are less complex and more likely to be read easily by more mobile phone readers, even at the back of the class. Shortened URLs also ease access for students using computers. Some uses suggested on this site are mainly for presenting additional information that you don't have time to cover in class including videos, links, online readings, etc. Instructors could even link to library e-book links or call numbers for interested students, links to polls or surveys, or to audio copies of the lecture, online course content, extra credit or take-home assignments. QR Codes are also quick ways to allow students to share contact info for out-of-class collaborations or peer reviews or to create direct links to blog entries. I've also found browser plug-ins that generate QR codes to be useful in allowing students to instantly and paperlessly save articles they have found online or library call numbers.

Image Credit: QR Link to Mobile Project Gutenberg Site on Main Page

For classes focused on digital media and writing that seek to incorporate mobile technologies into the classroom, QR codes are a great way of linking up information. In other types of courses, they are a convenient way to link sources and ideas together in a flowing and natural way. While quite a few exercises in QR coding end up being too complex - I have found that simple codes like URLs, phone numbers, email addresses work better than the more complicated codes like those featured in QR Comic (where I frequently had to "cheat") - these codes are great for linking up information in simple and easy to use format that encourages students to learn using a variety of different platforms.

As technologies improve, the smart phone market expands, and more students become familiar both with how these codes work, QR codes will likely play a significant part in classroom life. These codes suggest a horizon of future possibilities for visually encoded information that will not only spread information but suggest new connections and possibilities.

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.

A Sample Narrated Slideshow Using SoundSlides Plus

emcg — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:33:28 +0000

Image Credit: Eileen McGinnis

To follow up on this week's review of SoundSlides Plus, here is a brief demo that I made for my "Literature and Biology" students using the software.

Creating a Narrated Slideshow with SoundSlides Plus

emcg — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:37:24 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of my SoundSlides project

Thanks to Alicia Dietrich at the HRC’s Cultural Compass blog, we at viz. learned about this easy-to-use software that allows journalists to create sleek, sophisticated slideshows. But how does SoundSlides translate to the writing classroom? A mixed—but mostly enthusiastic—review after the jump.

SoundSlides’ appeal lies in its simplicity. As indicated by the initial screen (pictured below), sound + slides are really all one needs to get started: upload your folder of images, upload your audio, and you are well on your way to creating a beautiful slideshow.

Image Credit: Screenshot of SoundSlides

While the straightforward interface is praiseworthy, it means that quite a bit of initial preparation is required before you actually sit down to compose: students will need a pre-recorded narration or soundtrack, and a folder of images that will fit the length of their audio. They may also need to convert their files, as SoundSlides accepts only jpg and mp3 formats. In addition, they will not be able to edit the audio file once it’s been imported into SoundSlides.

Given that a narrated slideshow asks students to consider the interplay of word and image, the advance planning required by SoundSlides functions as a possible constraint. In fact, when I sat down to create a sample narrative slideshow for my students, I found myself gravitating instead toward iMovie, which allowed for a more dynamic exchange between images and sound. To me, this at times messy exchange was a crucial part of the composition process. It was when I started putting the narration and images together that I realized which images didn’t work or found places where an additional image was needed.

That said, SoundSlides Plus is still a relatively flexible tool. A simple drag-and-drop process enables you to rearrange and delete images. A "movement" tab animates individual slides to create a more dynamic, video-like feel. A timeline at the bottom of the screen allows you to customize the length of time that each image appears; click the play button at any time to preview the results.

Image Credit: Screenshot of my SoundSlides project

From a pedagogical perspective, another worthwhile feature is the ease of attributing images with captions. Given our emphasis in class on choosing and citing images responsibly, it’s nice that the journalistic context for the software puts attribution front and center.

Exporting your slideshow and publishing it to the web require a bit of care: this tutorial from the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley is quite helpful in walking you through the process. For instructors here at the Digital Writing and Research Lab, students will need to store their slideshow materials in their "Teacher Folder" in order to play their presentation on your course web site.

The pedagogical value of SoundSlides Plus depends a great deal on the context of your course and the specific goals of the assignment. Although SoundSlides doesn't allow students full control over manipulating and presenting their work, the simple interface allows them to focus on discovering, supporting, and structuring their argument, while still introducing them to the process of multimedia composition. I also like that my students will end up with an attractive, professional-looking slideshow they can take pride in. This project will still entail a great deal of choice and creativity, but the emphasis will be on practicing and extending the skills they’ve built this semester.

I’ll be introducing SoundSlides in class next week and will report back on my students’ experiences using the software. In the meantime, look for additional perspectives on SoundSlides Plus from Cate and Elizabeth in the coming weeks.

Infographics and Image Creation

catherine_c — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:59:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screen capture of Colors of the Web infographic from Colour Lovers by way of Cool Infographics

Lately we've been discussing image production in our viz meetings including slide shows using Sound Slides, Animoto, and other ways of encouraging students to create images while getting beyond the basic slideshow. One of my pet projects for this semester was to learn more about creating infographics and to determine whether it would be reasonable to ask students to create a basic one-layer infographic (no statistics, just visual relationships) of an essay for an English or Rhetoric class. After the jump, I'll give a brief overview of my findings so far.

I started off working with a guide to infographic generation by Sneh from Spyre Studios that explains the basic anatomy of an infographic, giving a basic idea of the visual and conceptual structure of infographics. The breakdown of infographics into visuals, content, and knowledge is particularly useful, as is the distinction drawn between one-level deep and two-level deep infographics - the former being simple and mainly driven by visuals and the latter being more advanced with thematic aspects and color coding. This tutorial would be suitable for students, perhaps even more suitable than a tutorial I later found helpful for issues with design. This guide covers the entire process from sketching and research to the difference between theme and reference graphics. Their approach makes it easier to wrap your head around the basics of what an infographic is on a more detailed level than a pretty or polished image relating data.

After reading this guide, I tried to make an infographic. The results...were not pretty. I wrestled with creating the image using Photoshop and, by the end of designing the most basic of infographics, concluded that it was not so feasible for students.

Image Credit: From Spyre Studio's Anatomy of an Infographic

My next discovery came in the form of an outstanding step by step tutorial on creating infographics in Adobe Illustrator from Vector Tutorials. Jonathan Patterson has created a step by step guide (rated intermediate) to creating a sophisticated infographic in 3 hours using Adobe CS4. His step by step guide answers a lot of questions I had about design and formatting and shows that Illustrator is clearly a better choice for creating a complex visual document like an infographic. From creating a grid to filling in text and creating clip art images, Jonathan's guide is informative and yet simple enough for a student or infographics noob like myself to follow along.

I haven't had a chance to sit down with Illustrator yet, but I hope to shortly. In closing, I would like to take a moment to discuss why infographics might be a great option for use in the classroom. Encouraging students to reconceptualize their ideas according to a visual rather than a textual schematic will cause them to approach and address their ideas in new ways. Like mind mapping, infographic creation requires students to come up with a visual schematic to organize their argument or information, but it goes beyond even the sophisticated media embedding achievable with Nova Mind in giving them ultimate freedom. At the same time, the assignment can be as bounded as instructors need or would like. My original draft of the assignment required students to use different colors to indicate their argument and formal, cultural, and historical approaches which form the basis of my sophomore level English course and required that they incorporate a set number of images. The possibilities are even more unlimited for rhetoric classrooms as the "Colors of the Web" and the following "Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names" from World Famous Design Junkies suggest:

Image Credit: World Famous Design Junkies

My primary concerns remain the amount of time required to teach students and whether or not, within that amount of time, they will be able to create a visual work in which they can take pride. Spending several hours on a rather basic and boring infographic in Photoshop has made me all the more concerned with the learning curve and quality of results. At the same time, the one to two class periods that it would take for students to follow along with Jonathan Patterson's tutorial could be made up by having abbreviated presentations or web presentations. Translating infographics, which are generally used to make statistics or data sets more inviting or for marketing purposes, to the writing classroom presents a number of challenges, but also a wide range of possibilities.

Picturing Poetry

ebfrye — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:30:55 +0000

"Mulberry Fields" by Lucille Clifton Image Credit: Poetry Foundation

Some treats for your Monday! Because we all need a little poetry in our lives…

I’ve been to a lot of poetry readings in my day, ya’ll. I’ve cheered on countless buddies in coffee shops and dive bars, listened to many recordings of the greats reading their work, and even purchased a recording of e.e. cummings on vinyl. Therefore, I know I’m pointing out the obvious when I begin with this frequently circulated statement: most poetry is best read aloud.

Despite the fact that poetry is one of the more notorious aural/oral forms, the experience of listening requires some kind of visualization on the part of the reader. You hear and then you “see.” As a result, there’s quite a lot of interesting ground being broken in terms of poetry’s intersection with other media, especially in attempt to ensure that the form reaches a broader audience. The Poetry Foundation in conjunction with docUWM at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has put together several animated versions of poets reading their own work.

I think these would prove especially attractive for younger audiences and would work well in an introductory discussion of imagery. Whether in a literature class or a creative writing workshop, those who have access to some form of animation technology might consider producing such short pieces. I think they’re charming and offer something to the rest of us, too. I’ve included some favorites here. Visit the Poetry Foundation for more.

“Nina’s Blues” by Cornelius Eady:

“Lake Echo, Dear” by C.D. Wright:

The classic “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, read by Carl Hancock Rux:

And, in celebration of the season, Jane Hirshfield’s “The Heat of Autumn”:

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?

The Sweet Tweets of Pedagogical Success

ebfrye — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:23:29 +0000

Video Credit: Twitter and World Simulation

I’m always impressed (and, I have to say, sometimes a bit bewildered) when I hear of instructors who are especially successful in using online social networking in a classroom setting. For an example of what’s lately leaving me pedagogically awe-struck, take a look at the video, posted above. More, after the jump.

The video documents one of Kansas State professor Michael Wesch’s many ongoing teaching experiments in digital ethnography. Just in case you blinked or sneezed during the first part, the quickly moving text of the video tells you that students in an “Introduction to Anthropology” class created their own cultures along with “live simulation” scenarios. I’ve heard of such exercises being used before; what’s new to me is that the class used twitter to record their findings.

I’m also quite interested in the means through which the YouTube video communicates the method, the overall scope of the project, and the intentions behind the project. Atop the footage of students directing, trading, and interacting with each other runs a feed of associated tweets.

Particularly striking is the way in which the video, with a blurred effect, intersperses factual information and images alongside the class’s simulations.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Twitter and World Simulation

In trying to read the significance of blurring contemporary and historical photographs, I can only speculate as to the videographer’s intentions. The incorporation of news photography, relevant data, stills of recognizable figures such as Naomi Klein (below) and Ghandi, and a quotation from the work of Margaret Mead point to what might constitute the theoretical backdrop for class discussion.

Image Credit: Screenshot of Twitter and World Simulation

As a result, the video successfully communicates the scope of a class project while situating it in a contemporary, historical, and theoretical framework.

Under Their Spell: An Interview with Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:12:38 +0000

Image Credit: Small Screen Scoop

I know that this post is a bit belated, but my excitement in posting this fabulous interview makes me unable to resist the potentially corny title. (And no, while these actresses are not my actual interview subjects, both of them love musicals as much as I do, and one has even written about the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from which this pictures comes.)

I had the lucky opportunity to interview Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis, recent graduates from the PhD program in Performance as Public Practice from the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin, at the end of May. The initial reason that I asked to interview these ladies was that both include musicals as a part of their research interests and that each worked with Stacy Wolf, a former UT professor whose book A Problem Like Maria made its way into my own syllabus this past year; however, both ladies were eloquent on the challenges of teaching students to enact visual analysis and to think critically about musicals. The lively and interesting conversation we shared can be found either on the views page or directly here.

Interview of Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:25:25 +0000

In the spring of 2010 viz. contributor Rachel Schneider interviewed Drs. Michelle Dvoskin and Shelley Manis about their experiences teaching musical theater and performance for the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Here is the transcript of that interview, conducted on May 19, 2010.

Viz: To start off our discussion, I’d like it if you could introduce yourselves briefly for the viz. readers, and describe your academic and teaching experience here at The University of Texas: what kinds of classes have you taught here? Have you yet had the opportunity to teach your own research? And what is your research?

Dvoskin: My name is Michelle Dvoskin. I just finished the PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught Intro to Theater for non-majors for two years, which is a 400-student lecture class. I taught two semesters of Intro to Acting for non-majors, and then Theater History Post-1800 for a semester. My research is on musical theater as a way of doing what specifically I’m calling queer historiography: that is, a queer--counter-normative--way of communicating histories.

Manis: I’m Shelley Manis and I just finished a PhD in Performance as Public Practice. I taught a year of the theater history for majors sequence, which is first Theater History to 1800 and then Theater History since 1800. I have been a TA for Stacy Wolf’s musical theater class. I was a teaching assistant for the regular history class for two years before I taught it, and then taught for two years in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, including teaching the Rhetoric of Performance.

Viz: Great! Well, as I mentioned before the interview started, viz is interested in the intersections between visual rhetoric, visual culture, and pedagogy. While we come from different academic disciplines—you both have doctorates in PPP and I am in the English department—we all share an interest in pedagogy. What commonalities do you think there are between these disciplines of rhetoric, English, and performance studies, and is there any benefit to make our students of interdisciplinarity?

Manis: Actually, one of my biggest interests is in the intersection between rhetoric and performance, and I think that a lot of what they have in common for me is that rhetoric works in terms of time and place—specificity in time and place—and for me, performance’s power comes a lot out of where something was performed, in what circumstances, and who is observing it. I think that in terms of the underlying sort of things that come together to make performance and rhetoric powerful—they’re both very similar in that way—performance is really powerful because of its affective structure, because you can watch it and be invested in it either live or watching a recorded performance. It’s something that’s trying to speak to you at an emotional level, so I think teaching about the way a performance works affectively is a really useful way of teaching students about emotional appeals in rhetoric, and how emotional appeals can work both in terms of the text, which we spend a lot of time talking about in rhetoric, but also in terms of what we’re seeing, what the bodies are doing onstage, what are they doing to each other on stage, and how audience members are responding to what they’re doing both viscerally and emotionally.

Dvoskin: One of the things that’s most interesting to me about musical theater and reception is the thing that Stacy Wolf and others have written about: that musical theater is embodied. We don’t just watch and think, we don’t just watch and feel, we watch and do as we hum along or we’re tapping our toes, or—

Manis: Going forward at that first moment in Wicked where Elphaba soars up and the whole audience—

Dvoskin: Yes, there’s that small lunge that everyone around you is doing, and that there’s a way in which it becomes a kinesthetic experience as well as an intellectual and emotional one that is really powerful that I look forward to thinking about more. I also think that it’s so important to remember that performance texts—especially musical theater—aren’t just texts. Even for theater history majors or students whose focus is performance or design, those elements are so easy to lose track of when you’re reading a script. We need to remember that this can actually happen in all kinds of ways on the stage. When I teach Gypsy, which is the musical I teach most consistently, there’s an exercise I do when I bring in clips of four different women playing Rose from all the major productions and I show the exact same section of the “Rose’s Turn” number and have the students practice analyzing the performance through that. This helps students see all the ways in which what’s being communicated is both the same and completely different depending on what body and what production choices are happening. And I think that’s a really important thing performance studies can bring, that it's not just all page, it’s—

Manis: Three dimensional or even four dimensional. I think the thing that students in rhetoric can struggle with is what is an emotional appeal, what is an intellectual appeal, what is an appeal based on authority, and I think that the multidimensionality of performance is a nice way of getting students to sort of dig in beyond the text and understand the other aspects that come into play when making arguments.

Viz: Actually, this brings up a question that got answered for me a little bit when you, Shelley, came and guested and did a guest lecture in my class. Finding performance texts and getting students to have a text in front of them I found to be one of the difficulties of using pop culture pieces in the classroom because organizing discussions around a text that students have previously seen but don’t have in front of them on the page. Michelle, you said you deal with this by using YouTube clips. What are the ways in which (a) you make your students aware of the multidimensionality of the text and the strategies you use in the classroom and (b) on the practical level of having texts in front of you in the classroom, how do you deal with that? What advice would you give to someone who wanted to teach a similar class at Texas or elsewhere?

Dvoskin: Show stuff. That’s the basic thing. It takes time—and it’s an interesting problem; in teaching this semester I taught two units on the musical, one on the “golden age” of musicals and a post-1969 unit. In the post-1969 unit I had all this stuff I wanted to show and two days for the lecture and discussion before we got to specifically talking about A Chorus Line, which was the case study for the unit. And the first day I got through three slides because I showed so many clips. For each clip we stopped and talked about it and picked it apart and we looked at what are the lights doing, what’s happening, what do you see, while also reminding them that it’s not quite the same because what we’re seeing on a screen is a captured moment, an archive moment, and not the repertoire moment that we have in the theater. It was incredibly worth the time and I think it was one of the most rewarding days we had all semester, but it’s also a challenge because you can’t spend that much time on everything unless you’re going to teach very little over the course of the semester. And I didn’t show nearly as much the next day because I couldn’t if I was going to explain to them what, say, concept musicals were, since really it was all rock musicals that first day, and it’s a tradeoff. But I’m hoping that, since we spent so much time really watching and discussing and unpacking that first day, they were able to do some of that work themselves, and I think they were, based on the discussion we were able to have about A Chorus Line, which doesn’t have a great video archive.

Manis: Yeah, I agree with all of that, and one of the things that I do is that I usually start with is saying, “Here’s something that we’re going to watch, and this time, just watch it and lose yourself in it.” Then we’ll watch it and do some talking about what’s going on. Then I’ll say “we’re going to watch it again, and this time take careful notes on exactly what you see: so, what are the bodies doing, what are the lights doing, what catches your eye, what throws you off—whatever it is, take extremely detailed notes.” Then we watch it that way and then we start talking about what they saw, and I stress that it’s going from what you see to interpreting what you see and how what you see made you feel to get to a piece of analysis, so that it goes from observation to analysis and evaluation.

Dvoskin: Which is one of the most difficult things to get students to do—articulating what is actually happening in front of you is one of the hardest things for me to get them to do. They want to skip straight towards “I loved it” or “It was weird” or “It reminded me of this.” They want to skip to that comparison phase of the critical triangle. One exercise that I stole from a colleague of ours, Kelly Howe, is a Boal exercise that I’ll use to have them start discussions of texts. I’ll ask them to sculpt an image of the text and go through those three steps and stopping them—“Oh, it looks like she’s reading.” “No, what do you see?” because—

Manis: Sculpting an image is them using their bodies to make a tableau, either moving or still, depends on what you want. You break them into teams and then they make a tableau.

Dvoskin: Sometimes I’ll make them do it at the front, so the exercise is as much about getting the people in the audience to articulate what they see in front of them as it is about the people who are creating it. In my acting classes in particular I’ve found it to be a helpful thing to get them to step back and to get them thinking about what they’re seeing and what the literal visual is before you move on. It’s an easy way to push back against the tendency to do comparison or evaluation.

Viz: That was something I found to be difficult for my students, that they just wanted to go straight to aesthetic appreciation of “this was bad,” but we have to talk about “what is it trying to do, how is it trying to make that work,” more analysis instead of—

Dvoskin: “And what do you see that tells you that?”—that’s a question I go to a lot. “Well, it really looks like they’re not connecting at all.” “Well, what do you see that gets you there? What’s physically happening that gets you to say that?” “Oh, well, they’re not making eye contact.” “Great; what else?” “The lighting is different on the two of them; she’s in a purple-y light and she’s in an orange-y blue light.” “So, that’s an interesting judgment, but how do you get there?” I make them walk it back.

Viz: Another question that I have is about trying to be interdisciplinary and trying to get students to think rhetorically about musicals is finding a vocabulary to use in the classroom to actually describe and discuss commonly together; how do we talk about how they move across the stage? My project last semester for viz. was trying to come up with such a vocabulary for what rhetoric would call delivery; I looked at Richard Schechner’s textbook, which didn’t seem to have a lot to offer—is there a language that performance studies uses or were there ways in which you found you had to come up with vocabularies for students in different places, like for you, Shelley, teaching rhetoric students who are not familiar with theater—

Manis: I use performance language. One of the first things that I do a section on what is performance and what is the vocabulary we use around performance, and then another section around what is rhetoric and what is the vocabulary we use around rhetoric, and then we spend a eek melding those together: what are the commonalities, where is the overlap in those, where are they different, and then how can we use those two things to talk to each other? There are always the basic things like setting, staging. With movement, I found this from our colleague Claire Croft to be “what do you see happening.” You don’t need to know what a pirouette is or anything technical about that. All you need to be able to do is describe, so I encourage them to use a lot of descriptive language and I have them read from a book called Writing About Theater which has an introduction about writing about theater for undergraduates and have them read selections from that which gives them a vocabulary to work with, and then whatever terms of rhetoric I’m using, we work with that.

Dvoskin: I guess I don’t really have a rhetoric vocabulary, so for me, I don’t work with that.

Manis: You use the language of history a lot! You’re still interdisciplinary in that you’re talking about historiography.

Dvoskin: Sure, I guess I just never found it difficult melding languages. That’s not something that’s come to my attention. And when I teach, even when I’m teaching non-majors, I make sure they have basic theater 101 vocabulary—what’s upstage, what’s downstage—but I think what you said about just describing what you see is what it always comes back to: what’s happening. If you can tell me that, I don’t care about a jeté or an upstage cross. Just tell me what they’re doing.

Manis: And what’s exciting about that is that students often will find more interesting ways of describing things that if we had just given them a word for it. Or a lot of times you’ll have students—as in my rhetoric of performance class, I had students who were good at math, and some students who had done theater and done directing and some students who had done music, and so gave each other that kind of vocabulary. So I think being open to descriptive language will often times add an expertise that you wouldn’t have arrived at other times. And when I teach rhetoric, I don’t teach things like the difference between pitch and tone because I don’t know how to teach that in terms of rhetoric; I teach it in terms of performance. That may be my bias as a performance scholar, but I have a really hard time teaching tone in writing.

Viz: To back up a little bit from where the discussion has been going, because I’ve just taught a writing class, how much writing instruction have you done in your classrooms and what kinds of writing assignments have you given them. If you have done that, do you think that learning to write better helps them analyze performances better?

Dvoskin: I always incorporate writing when I can; the courses I’ve taught have not been writing component classes. One assignment that I like to use, which functions differently in the three classes I’ve taught, is some sort of a performance review. And I start that out, whichever class I’m teaching—and I got this from Claire Croft—with the performance response triangle of description, analysis, and evaluation, where you’re building them on top of each other and you have to describe before you can make a useful metaphor, and that you have to do those levels before you can evaluate anything. We do a lesson on that and talk about how to do that. We practice that with the sculpting exercises, we do things like that. In an acting class we would practice that with the work they do on stage. Then I'd work with them on their written reviews of other people's work, offering read to drafts, and helping them to push on what they saw, because so often—and this is true across every class that I’ve taught—the impulse is to relate the plot: this is what happened in the show. I don’t really care. That’s not the point of a performance review, and that’s not the kind of work that we’re trying to do, and so really pushing them to think about—OK, if you need to give me a sentence or two of plot so I can follow what you’re saying, fine, but what’s physically happening on that stage? What are the performances doing, what are the design choices doing, how are they communicating? And how do you build that into—particularly in theater history—an analytical piece that also engages with theater history. In that assignment, I ask them to do a little bit of research into the history of the piece that they’re seeing and make an argument that fits the production that they saw into that theater history, which for a lot of them was very challenging. And that was a moment when I wished I had four TAs for my 50 students and we could have really taken time to go through multiple revisions and write a couple of them, but there were two of us and there were 50 of them, so . . .

Manis: I do very similar writing exercises. In my rhetoric of performance class I have them do a performance review. This year, my class was based around controversies, to follow the RHE 306 model that we taught last year, and I had everyone choose a performance that either was controversial, engaged with a controversy, or caused a controversy of some kind. And their performance review needed to incorporate not only those things that Michelle and I talked about, about what do you see, but also the rhetorical context, so what’s going on at the moment this performance was released, what historical moment is it coming into, and how does that historical moment influence the ways in which the audience would likely take up the show. So that’s one exercise that we do. I’ve been teaching writing for 8 years; I taught 3 years at KU, one including an intro to drama class, so that was a literary writing class, and 5 years here. Another writing exercise that I like is that I have them do dramaturgy casebooks, where I have them interpret, they have different sections that they have to do research about, so what is the history of their production, what major productions have been done of this play, what do we know about the playwright, what do we know about the people who were in the play, what do we know about the historical moment, the world of the play itself, how can we help people understand what’s going on in that world—that kind of work, so that they are doing research skills and having to synthesize the information that they find in order to say something about an argument they think that the performance is making.

Dvoskin: I would also throw in that the final project I had my theater history students do this semester was a performance project instead of a written piece, but it certainly incorporated writing as they had to turn in a script, as well as an annotated bibliography. I found that incredibly useful to get them to think multi-dimensionally and to get them to play around with those ideas in a way that’s not so much about learning to become better writers, but still push them to engage with those ideas and to do it in writing. Some of the scripts were quite good, and as writing were quite good, so I think that’s also a really useful tool when working with performance.

Manis: I also have them do a lot of in-class writing in teams, so a lot of times if I’m teaching them about, say, rhetoric and performance, and what were the differences in between them, I had the teams get together and write a few sentences about what were the areas of overlap and what were the difference between rhetoric and performance. I wanted to get them to make an argument about performances and the similarities and differences between performance and rhetoric. So, little things like that. Just every now and then we’ll have in-class work, like if I’m trying to teach them how to write a thesis, we’ll watch a piece of something, and I’ll get them into their teams and have them write a thesis sentence about the kind of thing they saw. I do a lot of in-class workshops when I’m not teaching a writing-specific class, so in my theater history class I gave another writing assignment where I would ask them to situate themselves in a particular historical moment that we had talked about, and as a particular person—so, say you’re a theater manager in Elizabethan England. What play do you think would be a successful play to do and why, so that would then ask them to bring in the historical aspect and bring in the context, but also the analysis of the play itself; so, things like that.

Viz: What seems to be one of the useful overlaps between all the work that we’ve done is to get the students to think about historical context.

Manis: Kairos! Performance is all about kairos!

Viz: But moving on from this, I wanted to ask a little bit about, since you both write about musicals in your own research, the ways in which your teaching impacted your writing or what kind of research do you do. Have these things worked together for you in your career here at Texas?

Manis: Teaching your class, Rachel—having them read a chapter from my dissertation and then having them talk about Wicked in your class—was one of my most successful teaching days ever. It makes me realize that I think teaching one’s own research, whether you have them read your own work or—I don’t know, there’s so much investment in it and I loved seeing them get excited about it. I always get excited about what I’m doing, but that was so magical for me to say here’s what’s going on, now watch this and let’s talk about what you see. I would like to do more of that in the future, and I think one of the things about teaching musicals too, and being able to teach writing—and I think Michelle can speak to this more than I can—is the affective investment in musicals. People get so excited about them. Whether they love them or hate them, there is something that you just cannot help but get invested in that.

Dvoskin: The vibe in the room is palpably different on days you do musicals. In 301, and I’ve guested in lots of 301s, even the 8:00 AM sections get so excited because it’s something they’re familiar with in a very sort of non-threatening way. It’s interesting that in the musical theater field, there’s so much angst about is it dead, is the form dead, “the young people, they don’t like musical theater,” and I just want to start telling everyone to come to my classes. Every time I do a lecture on musicals I start the class by asking everyone in the room if they have seen a musical, and at least two thirds of the 400 hands in the room go up, usually more. They know them, and the investment is huge. The day we got through the three slides on rock musicals, it was in large part because of the time we spent on the clips, but why we spent so much time on the clips was because they couldn’t stop talking about them. Particularly when I showed the piece of Rent, and the room of students who had no exposure to the original production, who had only seen the DVD of the last performance that was filmed on Broadway or had seen the movie version were obsessed and couldn’t—it got to a point when one of my students raised a hand to ask a question, and had to specify that it was for one of her classmates, because her classmate was clearly such an expert in this particular version of the show. I mean, it was awesome. But yeah, that investment level is huge and makes it so much more fun in the classroom. Those are the days when you’re really all on the same team, which is fun.

Viz: That is something I found to be true too; one of the things that I found to be interesting and sometimes difficult is that it can become so fun that that they have problems taking it seriously. Have you ever had that problem where they’ll be engaged, but find it difficult to take it seriously as an object for analysis—pop culture as something we can discuss and describe?

Manis: I make a clear division with that, about when we’re going to have fun with it, and then when we’re going to turn it back into an object of analysis. I like to give them the room to express the silly stuff, and I’ll do that with another pop culture reference, 30 Rock. On that show the writers have their two-minute dance parties and the writers break it down and dance around the table. If we start doing that, I’ll say, “OK, 2 minute dance party, let’s riff on this for a while” and then we do and then we go back to analysis. But I think that they find that because they’re such experts that they actually have a lot of fun talking about it analytically when they realize that, oh, they can do that and that they know that they’re doing.

Dvoskin: I’ve never had a big problem with that. Sometimes I’ve had them focusing on analytics that aren’t as interesting to me, particularly in 301 when I try to break down the history of musical theater in 50 minutes, and I usually end up structuring it by subgenres, the book musical, the concept musical, the rock musical. Often I’ll find afterwards that four or five students are running up to me onstage afterwards asking me what would this musical be, and they’ve missed the part where I said that categories are really flexible and provisional . . . But at the same time, they’re engaged and it is a mode of analysis and they’re looking at musicals as something to take seriously. They are thinking about genres, and it is important what kind of musical it is. It’s not so important to fit it into a tidy slot, but in terms of the kinds of work they can do, book musicals and concept musicals, for example, are allowed to play by slightly different rules.

Manis: And I think that a lot of times too when they—when I was in your class and would ask them what the music was doing, and they would want to go to something slightly different because that’s such a hard thing to do, so I think that sometimes just saying, “Yeah, this is really hard, but we’re going to grapple with it” is enough to get them to go, “Oh, OK, yeah, that’s true. You’re not expecting me to be perfect; it’s just hard.” For me, I think that sometimes that’s where it can go off the rail—and to give them a hook to think of it in terms of genre, or what does it remind you of, and your students said, “It’s like ‘Thriller’!”, that was so bizarre, like a whole new way of looking at Wicked, but there’s a moment where they do move their arms back and forth, but sometimes that opens up new ways of thinking about things.

Dvoskin: I think it’s also important that musical theater fits in a weird cultural space: it’s not precisely pop culture, and so I think in terms of their responses, there’s a difference. Talking about Glee, for example, is totally pop culture, but Gypsy, even though it’s a history of previous forms of popular culture, but it’s not—it operates in a really complicated culture space.

Manis: Some musicals are definitely popular culture; like mega-musicals.

Viz: Spring Awakening I also think crosses into that, in terms of what I had in my classroom and the ways in which my students responded to it and thought and felt about it seemed more like pop culture.

Manis: The touring mega-musicals like Wicked, with how many it sells, how many locations it’s got worldwide, and where it’s going—I don’t know that I would argue that Spring Awakening is actually pop culture because people still have rarefied access to it.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the same is true—the ticket prices on Wicked, who can access—I mean, it’s not a television show where anybody who can afford one television in their house can access it.

Manis: But they can afford the soundtrack.

Dvoskin: Yes, but the soundtrack is not the show. It’s something that actually fascinates me in terms of studying musical theater and something that using Stacy Wolf’s book pushes us to talk about on our musicals day in class is—what this is this thing in terms of cultural capital and cultural status. In part because a huge part of how the field does and doesn’t work at its best has to do with people’s cultural assumptions and their discomfort with something that is a lot like pop culture, but isn’t pop culture because of questions of access and those issues—there’s no easy way or place to get at it.

Viz: It’s also weird to think about the way in which in the 50s and 60s it was more pop culture than it is today. The introduction to A Problem Like Maria wants to go there.

Dvoskin: Yes, but she also explicitly sort of argues that it is and it isn’t pop culture. It has this weird middlebrow thing going on. The albums are pop culture and are artifacts of pop culture, but the actual production isn’t quite.

Manis: Though it is part of the zeitgeist. It’s complicated.

Dvoskin: That’s something I think is interesting and want to keep on the table because it’s useful as a pushback against the—“Oh, musicals,” which I say as I throw my arm back behind my head in a vaguely dismissive way with an ironic eyebrow raise.

Viz: Well, I think you’re absolutely right that that’s a good way to fight back against that assumption because it’s something that came up in my class with students going home and talking about taking a class on the rhetoric of the musical over spring break.

Manis: That’s one of my biggest investments; for me, one of the things is that I absolutely do not believe in separating pleasure and intellectual rigor. It’s not two different things.

Dvoskin: And one of the arguments I make in my dissertation is that this stuff matters because it’s stuff that sticks with us. They do have a wide audience, and in my conclusion I talk about reading Daily Kos, a liberal website, while finishing the dissertation, and in a discussion about something happening one of the comments quoted 1776 without attribution, just a line from ‘Cool Cool Considerate Men’: ‘Ever to the right, ever to the right, never to the left, ever to the right’—no attribution, no nothing; he actually misquoted it slightly, which tells me he didn’t look it up. That was the thing that popped into his head, that was the response—a line from a musical about history.

Manis: And the most recent advertisements for the Garnier Nutrisse skin cream are “Defy Gravity,” with the background in that Wicked green, and it’s all about skin cream, but “Defy Gravity” is a phrase in the zeitgeist.

Dvoskin: I have to say, I wish Macy’s would stop using Rent, though. That’s just disturbing. I’m like, “Why is ‘Seasons of Love’ on my—no!” Not that Rent isn’t terrifyingly commercial, and whatever, but—no! It can’t be a Macy’s ad!

Manis: It’s like that Pepsi ad that was with the—it’s the song that’s actually about a guy who’s struggling about coming out, “Break Free,” and there was a Pepsi ad with people break-dancing to “Break Free,” but that song is actually a really tortured story about a young man who’s scared to come out, and it’s selling Pepsi.

Viz: “Break out and be homosexual and drink Pepsi.”

Manis: “Homo drink Pepsi?”

Viz: OK, well, this is maybe a good point to lead into a discussion about Stacy, because I know both of you were her students while she was here—

Manis: And after she left!

Viz: And actually, I, like you Michelle, I’ve used parts of that introduction to A Problem Like Maria as my version of the introduction to the musical genre, what is a musical, going off the things she talks about how the musical is conventionally defined. Since both of you have worked with Stacy, how do you feel her work has influenced yours, both in the classroom and in your own writing? Were you both TAs for Stacy?

Manis: Only I was. Actually both of these things—and what’s influenced me in both my pedagogy and writing is Stacy’s enthusiasm. She comes into a room, so excited to be there and so excited to talk about what she’s doing, and students get on board with her. Even reluctant students got on board with Stacy in her classroom respectfully. Stacy’s enthusiasm is how I model myself in the classroom as a teacher and dealing with students, both in being enthusiastic in what I’m teaching and what the students are doing well, and then in terms of writing. Her writing has given me—she’s got this great article called “In Defense of Pleasure” and that is sort of the essence of Stacy: I’m not going to apologize for thinking this is fun and writing about it as though I love it. That’s what I get from Stacy.

Dvoskin: Yeah. I think that Stacy offers a model for scholarship in musical studies that is really rigorous and theoretically engaged. That has not necessarily been the norm for that field, but it's been changing because of people like Stacy. I don’t think I’d be able to do the kind of work I’m doing without Stacy having first done the work she’s done, in a variety of ways.

Viz: No, I had the opportunity to meet her when she came back for Lisa Moore’s class conference on lesbian genres, and she was very helpful at sending me some of her materials and talking with me about some of the stuff that she’d done in the classroom, and I was able to use some of it, with tribute to her, a little bit.

Dvoskin: She’s incredibly generous.

Viz: Very much so, which is really appreciated. It seems to me that one of the nice things about UT that I’ve seen across many departments is that people in rhetoric, in performance studies are helpful about giving to each other, and supporting each other’s work in a way, which is hopefully what the DWRL does too.

Manis: It does!

Viz: Well, some random questions to jump to think specifically about what you’ve specifically done in the classroom in teaching musicals; in my first semester I attempted to teach rhetorical theory like J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and Kenneth Burke’s dramatism. Have you ever taught that kind of theory in your class or used it to apply to musicals?

Dvoskin: No.

Manis: I’m trying to think—I don’t think I have. I always stick to the rhetoric, whatever rhetoric they’re using because I’m new to this department, so I sort of—I’m still getting oriented to that, so I stuck to the rhetorics we used in the classroom. And I felt like since I was asking them to almost learn two disciplines that I didn’t want to go too theoretical. I wanted them to be able to grapple with it.

Viz: Are there particular theories that you do teach in the classroom that you think are relevant for thinking about the cultural work that musicals do?

Dvoskin: Not explicitly, and that’s largely a function of the classes that I’ve taught. Trying to cover all theater history from 1800 on, even in the case study model that we’ve moved to, I’ve got enough to do without trying to explicitly teach a lot of theory. I will use theoretically inflected work—when we talk minstrelsy I’ll use Eric Lott, things like that—when we do queer theater I’ll talk about queering and queer theory a little bit, even just to explain why I’m using that word, but—

Manis: That’s how it comes up: if I use a word that comes from some sort of theory I’ll say, “So I’m using this word, and here’s the way people who do scholarship in this area talk about it,” but I don’t assign theory.—For example, I had a student doing the movie Milk and talking about how one of the things it did was advocate for a day when gay people wouldn’t be queer, they would just be people. And that was a moment where we could have a discussion about how actually queer is a word that has been taken back and now it’s theoretically strong and here’s why, et cetera.

Dvoskin: If I were teaching a semester on just one aspect of musical theater I might, but not in the kinds of classes I’ve been teaching up to this point.

Manis: I did have them read a little bit of Schechner and Turner on what performance was, but only so that we could start thinking about performance and how we wanted to talk about it. It was never something that we returned to it in the sense of “Talk about this à la Schechner” or anything like that. It was just to give them a sense of where performance studies as a field was—one of the founding myths of performance studies, basically.

Viz: Because one of the things that’s come in the course of the discussion is sometimes about some of the issues that can come up in discussing musical theater: for example, Stacy Wolf’s work often deals with issues of queer identity, and audiences’ interactions with that. We’ve talked about moments like that; one of the questions I have is: is this something that you try to do in your own teaching work, bringing up some of the potentially controversial issues related to musicals? Is this too explosive, or the students are comfortable, or you don’t wade into those waters at all because it’s Texas?

Michelle: I guess again for me it’s about the classes I’m able to teach and the time I have. I don’t push away from it—when we talked about Golden Age musical theater, the section I had them read from the introduction had some information on gay men’s relationship to the form, and we certainly talked about that, as well as the relationship of Jewish men to the form, but it’s not—I don’t avoid it at all, but in the context of the specific courses I've taught, it hasn’t been something I’ve spent a ton of time or energy on.

Viz: That’s something just you work more with in your scholarship then—

Dvoskin: It’s very important in my scholarship. My scholarship is about queer theory and musical theater together, but it’s not something that—I don’t get to pick the classes I teach. We have some freedom to design our syllabi, but I didn’t get to say that I’m going to teach a class on musical theater, gender, and sexuality, which I would love to do someday. That would be awesome. But if I’m teaching theater post-1800, of the time I’ll spend in musical theater, about two weeks, I can probably spare about 20 minutes, if that. And when it comes up, great. And when we look at A Chorus Line and people talk about the ways in which sexuality played out in that musical, and how that was important it its moment, that’s great, that’s a part of the conversation. But I don’t feel like it would be fair to them to make that the conversation, because then they lose everything else they should be getting about that material on that day. When I get to pick my own classes entirely, I’m sure it will be a different story.

Manis: Same thing.

Viz: I find that stuff may come up in discussing a particular musical as a part of its context—

Manis: Yeah.

Viz: It never came up so explicitly.

Manis: In my class, which wasn’t just about musicals, but it was about their final projects, which they all chose film because they could see it and watch, everybody had to do an individual presentation on the argument they were making that their thing was making. And the last student to go said, “Wow, I just realized that all of us—our films have arguments about what it means to be an American, or what it means to have the American dream.” There are definitely courses you could design around those ideas of nation-building, identity building, or of subjectivity, that kind of thing, but I think the limited amount of time that we have in a survey or even in a topics class, in some ways.

Viz: Something you can touch on and have to move on?

Manis: I do a lot of “tuck this away for later.”

Dvoskin: I was fascinated in my theater history class with the final projects how many of the final projects took up gender and sexuality; they had to take two different movements and put them in conversation with each other in performance, because that was a central theme of my class. Stuff doesn’t happen in isolation. I would say that more than a third of the groups chose to use either lesbian, feminist, or queer (or some combination thereof, since they’re not easy to pry apart) performance as one of their two movements, which I found heartening.

Manis: You know, and I should—I have my students read Brecht, which is theoretical, and then we talk about—since Brecht is all about making arguments; that’s his shtick anyway—there’s some theoretical work that happens there.

Viz: And just as a final question about classroom affect, not just the students’ but your own, since the musical itself is such a theatrical, dramatic genre that is conscious of its own stylistic features, have you found that teaching musicals made you conscious of your own performativity as an instructor, and has that ever affected the way you’ve developed a classroom persona? Not that you would ever probably go in with arms wide—

Dvoskin: Depending on the day, I might. I performed a number on the day we did A Chorus Line.

Viz: Really?

Dvoskin: Well, for a good reason. I had been joking about it for a couple of days beforehand since it’s a musical that I love and I used to do one of the songs as an audition number, but—

Viz: Not “Dance 10, Looks 3”?

Dvoskin: No, but I was joking that I should do that for my students, just to see what would happen. No, what happened was that a student asked, “how does the song ‘Sing’ work, because if she can’t sing, how does she sing a song?” When it’s on the page you can’t tell. And I said, “Actually, it’s very—I need an Al,” which is the other character in the song. And I knew that I had enough musical theater junkies in the class that I would get someone, and sure enough, several hands went up. And I was like “Great,” and performed a chunk of the song for them, because it was easier to do it than to explain how it worked. I mean, I could have probably done that in a sentence or two too, but with the singing there’s a visceral sense of “Oh. Yeah. OK,” and besides, it was a day on musical theater! But I’m also a performer deep down and so when it comes right down to it I’m likely to show that when I can. I actually think I’ve thought more about my persona in terms of teaching 301, where it was shaped more by: there are 400 of them staring at me, how do I craft something that will make me approachable and likeable but also authoritative enough to not have 400 students talking for an hour. I think that really helped shape my teacher-performer self because that was the first class I taught here.

Viz: Wow.

Dvoskin: Yeah, the primary thing—I also was a TA for the small Intro for Majors class, but I was a TA for 301 for three semesters before I taught it, so my initial experiences were, “Hello, large theater-like room full of people,” and I’m sure being a musical theater person had something to do with how I came up with who I am.

Manis: Yeah, my affect in the classroom is, I don’t know if it’s as influenced by me as a musical theater person as much as by me as a fan, and so for instance in the rhetoric of performance class the first thing I do on the first day is show them a clip from Lost and then we analyze it. So that’s one of the first things we do and I don’t hide my enthusiasm about it. I’ll show it and then I’ll go, “BOOM,” and then we’ll talk about it—we’ll talk about what’s so compelling about it and why we get excited about it. The other thing about me is that I have—even when I taught theater history which was a 60 person class—I must be performing something because one of the comments I got was that “she’s so happy all the time, I don’t know how I feel about it.” So it’s enthusiasm for me, and I guess that does come from a sort of—I’m sure that there’s an ethos of musical theater in there and an ethos of fandom for me. And because I want to model that fandom doesn’t mean mindlessness: that you can be totally enthusiastic about something and still totally thinking about it very seriously.

Dvoskin: And I do set myself up from day one in every class I teach, whether I’m introducing myself, part of what I talk about is that my work is in musical theater, but I’m also a big musical theater geek, and I may burst into song at any moment. It’s part of what I put out there, because it’s true.

Manis: It’s true.

Dvoksin: There’s an off-chance that I may find myself singing and not know it. It happens

Manis: I find myself saying things randomly like, “look at what we can accomplish—together.”

Dvoskin: If anything that’s a point of contact for the students. We bond. Some of them roll their eyes, and I’m always very careful to say that you don’t have to like musicals, I won’t judge you.

Viz: I did more straight theater in high school and not musicals, so I had to specifically promise myself and my students I wouldn’t sing, and it does make it harder to discuss the songs at times. But thank you both so much for doing this interview with me and I hope that this is a nice little capstone on your time here at UT. Thank you very much!

Hell-O?: Glee’s Karotic Appeals

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:24:34 +0000

Image Credit: Hulu

Glee’s return last night to television with their new episode “Hell-O” not only served to get my students excited this morning before class, but also demonstrated the utility of using rhetorical concepts to analyze the musical genre. In this unit of my class my students are considering how kairos informs musical performances.

Kairos, defined by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee as “situational kind of time, something close to what we call ‘opportunity’ (as in ‘the time is ripe’),” is a concept that works well for thinking through musicals as it asks students to complicate their ideas of context and audience. What appeals may work for one group at one particular time and place might not serve as well in another time. Arguments about, say, feminism receive a different reception today than they did in 1960, so an analysis of Bye Bye Birdie would want to take that into account. Because students can often assume that audiences’ dispositions are constant, looking at a contemporary cultural example like Glee can show students how kairos is both situational and can be created by careful rhetors.

In the case of this episode, which just aired yesterday, “Hell-O” seeks to draw viewers back into the world of Glee over four months after the previous episode, “Sectionals,” which showed New Directions winning their glee club sectionals competition. “Hell-O” also has to establish the new conflict between the club and their regionals rival Vocal Adrenalin as well as the new romantic developments between Finn, Rachel, and Rachel’s new suitor Jesse St. James. Thus the show takes advantage of this moment of re-introduction by incorporating a number of songs into the show that contain the word “Hello” in their title, as by including Lionel Richie’s famous number:

What makes this number successful is not only the charm of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff (former co-stars in Spring Awakening) but also the winking inclusion of the number into the plot. This song sets up the lonely Rachel Berry to fall in love with the successful senior St. James as it simultaneously introduces him and his vocal abilities to the show’s viewers. The violinists who pop up in the background ready to accompany them acknowledge the musical genre’s falsity while also drawing attention to the moment’s created “magic.” After this scene, the teenage Rachel is ready to think of herself as “in love” with a man she barely knows, and the music sets the audience up to believe this. Likewise, the show’s closing number “Hello Goodbye” works towards a similar goal:

The titular hello and goodbye demonstrate the complex division and development in the Rachel and Finn relationship: while the episode started with Rachel assuming that she and the reluctant Finn were dating, it ends with Finn interested in Rachel, while she is pursing a secret relationship with Jesse. In other words, as she says goodbye, he says hello. Their body language as they move back and forth reverses the dynamic of the first thirteen episodes: now he is the pursuer, and she the pursued. However, coming at the end of the episode, this number sets up their new romantic conflict for this season’s remaining eight episodes. The show says goodbye for the evening, but lets us know that this is far from permanent. Here, Glee takes advantage of the kairotic moment to not only maintain its meta-discourse by winking to the audience but also to set up dramatic arcs and create narrative tension between the New Directions group and Vocal Adrenaline; the road to hell is paved with hello, in other words. While the reviews have been mixed about certain other elements in this episode, I only wish my students could grasp kairos as easily as Glee does here.

Eighteenth-Century Engravings and Magnificent Mezzotints

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:32:38 +0000

Image Credit: A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections

I thought I’d step back from the contemporary pop culture discussions today to look into two archives with a more historical emphasis: the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection and A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections. Both of these collections offer extensive resources for instructors in eighteenth-century literature, politics, art, and culture.

The Lewis Walpole Library, which contains over 11,000 digital images, focuses on the library’s “world-renowned collection of English caricatures and political satirical prints from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Included are works by Bunbury, Woodward, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Newton, among others.” The Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections intersects with the Walpole Library’s Digital Collection as the latter is one of the former’s sources, but this websites indexes such satires by name and year.

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection

In terms of usability, both websites lack some help. The catalogue’s index is useful to the viewer who knows a particular print they’d like to find, or who is looking for something from a specific title, but the site features no searching capacities. The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection has a search feature which looks through the call number, the artist, or the image’s title, but their images are not organized by important keywords or popular figures in the images. A search for “Rowlandson” can turn up a number of prints by this famous illustrator, but a careful search would need to be done to find the particular one where he satirizes the Prince of Wales who, during the 1788 Regency Crisis when King George III was thought to be mad, schemed to take over the throne.

Image Credit: The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Since both collections deal with images held by research libraries and museums (like the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art), all of these images are under copyright. Both websites are open to the public to use, and all of the images are available for personal use and even “study purposes,” so their use in the classroom should be fine.

What these websites might help provide for students in rhetoric classrooms is the opportunity to analyze visual material whose context is less familiar to them, but which was popularly produced and reproduced to do specific cultural work. Since most of these prints are satires, they can be compared in purpose and function to contemporary political cartoons in terms of their strategies. For educators focusing on the eighteenth-century, this material opens up and might indeed accompany a study of the popular period literature. I hope some of my readers here at viz. will find this material useful for their classrooms.

Advertising in America

Andi — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:39:45 +0000

Image credit: screen shot of Emergence of Advertising in America database

On March 26^th Noel will be leading our workshop on Best Practices for Digital Images here at the DWRL and in preparation for that meeting many of us at viz. are compiling several blog postings on image databases. This week Rachel posted about Radical Software—a database that provides access to work done in the ‘seventies with the creation of and theorizing about digital and video media. I’d like to take us back even further to a database dedicated to making available early advertising images from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s. I found Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 to be extremely entertaining to browse and can easily imagine integrating it into my classroom practice.

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 is housed at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History as part of the Duke University Libraries. The database is home to over 9,000 images from the early period in American advertising. Because the strength of this collection centers on the period of increasing professionalization within the field of commercial advertising and the rise of national print magazines, this database holds many many images that will be of use to those of us who work with visual culture. Moreover, the ability to access so many early advertisements may provide several unique opportunities for the use of these images in our classroom. Obviously, these images would be useful for any unit providing a history to advertising in this early period but I also think that access to so many early ads might offer some contextualization for popular advertising campaigns today. Introducing students to these earlier advertisements may help to denaturalize to pervasive nature of contemporary marketing tools.

The database is easily searchable—especially fun is to use the search function to look up early advertisements for particular products. Typing in “perfume” or “soap” or “cola,” for instance, yields several fascinating results. Browsing through the collection strengths was also amusing—the database has designated pages for the history of specific campaigns, including Pond’s, Kodak, as well as for the history of particular types of advertising strategies, including broadsides, trading cards, calendars, and advertising cookbooks. I hope this resource proves as useful for your research and your pedagogy as it might for your entertainment.