viz. - Writing

The Synchronicity of Cinema, Phonography, and Writing

Will Burdette — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:09:10 +0000

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

A Visual History of Audio Recording, Part Two from Will Burdette on Vimeo.

The audio-video convergence finally happened in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer," but Thomas Edison had worked on motion picture prototypes (the Kinetoscope and the Kinetograph) forty years prior. And, the convergence was far from complete, total, or perfect. The same year "The Jazz Singer" was released, Edison released another clumsy attempt at combining sound and pictures. According to Peter Copeland in the book Sound Recordings, The Edison-Bell picturegram was "easy to damage and was not a huge success."

The merging of audio recording and moving images represents both a period of convergence and a period of divergence. While phonography, writing, and cinema came together in the production of movies, they also fractured into distinct industries and skill sets. The kinetoscope and the phonograph came out of Edison's Menlo Park lab, but after their invention, motion pictures and audio recording (as well as writing) would increasingly professionalize, specialize, and fracture. In an article version of "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter," Friedrich Kittler writes:

The historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriter separated the data flows of optics, acoustics, and writing and rendered them autonomous. The fact of this differentiation is not altered by the recent ability of electric or electronic media to bring them back together and combine them. (113-4)

Even though computer users can now remix audio and video on their laptops—and even though audio recording and movies grew out the same place—optics, acoustics, and writing remain distinct.

It is important to see this prolonged synching of audio and video as both a convergence and a divergence. The convergence speaks to our desire to combine technologies to create environments in which we can access all of our senses and immerse ourselves. But the divergence suggests that optical, acoustic, and written modalities have developed into different industries for good reasons. Different parts of our bodies and brains are activated by different modalities. Different training and skill sets are required for producing visual, aural, and written texts. Different professions have different levels of access to knowledge and skills associated with each modality. And, of course, in terms of universal design, we all have different levels of access to the texts produced with these different modalities. And our levels of access are not fixed. We gain and lose abilities through things like employment, education, and age. As we keep in mind the fact that audio recording has a connection to writing, and to the realm of the visual, we might also consider the value that comes from separating modalities.

Works Cited

Copeland, Peter. Sound Recordings. London: British Library, 1991. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter." October 41 (Summer 1987): 101-118. Google. Web. 25 July 2011. .

This is the third in a series of blog posts that will explore visual aspects of audio recording technologies. If you enjoyed it, you might read the first post, and second post, too.

Creating Use Value Through Phonograph Ads

Will Burdette — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:50:19 +0000

Illustration of Edison's original phonograph from Scientific American in 1877.

Between the visual origins of the phonograph and a robust consumer market centered on record labels, there was a period of time during which the invention had to establish its own utility. According to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, utility always comes after the act of invention:

The link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things, and objects are the first artifacts): backward. (96)

Certainly, folks like Edison helped to create the utility for the phonograph. In "The Phonograph and its Future" in the May 1878 issue of The North American Review, Edison makes the following suggestions for future uses of phonography: letters, dictations, audiobooks, education, music, family records, music boxes, toys, clocks, advertising, speeches, and answering machines. But the use value of the phonograph is created as much by advertisements as articles. By looking at the advertisements from Scientific American around the turn of the century, we can get a glimpse of how the use value of the phonograph was invented in the context of both precision instruments and writing machines. The ads, which are printed two decades after Edison introduced the phonograph to the editors at Scientific American and posited its future in The North American Review, give a visual context for the phonograph.

A Visual History of Audio Recording, Part One (v2) from Will Burdette on Vimeo. This video shows advertisements from Scientific American from 1901-1903. The music in the video is "12th Street Rag" by Imperial Marimba Band. (http://goo.gl/gyKq3). For further reading that supports the unsubstantiated claims made in this video, see reading list below.

So what do we learn by looking at the visual context of phonograph marketing? Well, we can kind of see how imaginations were shaped by the instruments at hand. In the video, the phonograph is advertised alongside precision instruments like the lathe. From biographical information we know that in the 1860s one of Edison's few possessions was a lathe. In Edison, His Life and Inventions, Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin refer to Edison's "Arduous Years in The Central West." They write, "He rented a room in the top floor of an office building, bought a cot, and an oil stove, a foot-lathe, and some tools" (92). Later, they describe the phonograph's reproducing device "like the cutting-tool of a lathe" (219).The biography was written in 1910, just years after the side-by-side lathe and phonograph ads. Even as late as the 1950s, the cutting instruments for master phonograph recordings were called lathes. Although their use values were completely different, the early phonograph and the lathe were inextricable.

In order to imagine the phonograph's possibilities, someone first had to reimagine the possibilities of a lathe. As the ads suggest, the lathe was part of the ecosystem from which the phonograph emerged. Still, a lathe that made a trace of a sound might have seemed trivial compared with something that already had a use, like the lathed leg of a table. In fact, Edison cashed in on the triviality of the phonograph in the days before these ads; he leased the machines to exhibitors who charged admission to listen to them. Edison also took a cut of the ticket sales. But that triviality was only one way of perceiving (and marketing) the phonograph. As Massumi writes, “An invention is a sensible concept that precedes and produces its own possibility (its system of connection-cases, its combinatoric)” (96). As the ads illustrate, the system of connection-cases that cluster around the phonograph include both the lathe and writing instruments of all kinds.

Lest consumers be confused, Edison was right there all along to situate the lathe-influenced phonograph among writing instruments like the pencil, the pen, and the camera. Edison writes that "The main utility of the phonograph, however, being for the purpose of letter-writing and other forms of dictation, the design is made with a view to its utility for that purpose" (531). Of course he also outlined a number of other uses, from the trivial to the funereal. On the trivial end of the continuum, he suggests "A doll which may speak, sing, cry or laugh." On the funereal end of the continuum, he writes, "For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of a dying member of the family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph" (533-4).

Returning to the ads from the turn of the century, we can see this continuum of use value that runs from play to serious work. Those values are built into the tools and the marketing of tools. The phonograph is just a lathe for amusement.

Of course I shouldn't have to point out similarities to our current multimedia ecosystems, but, at the risk of being too heavy handed, I will. The biggest difference between the multimedia convergence illustrated in the pages of Scientific American in the early 1900s and today's convergence culture is the soundtrack. Now, the ads focus on tools. In our current moment, we might be similarly obsessed with multimedia tools like iPads, iphones, android tablets, and laptops. But convergence is not really about hardware. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins writes, "We are entering an era of prolonged transition and transformation in the way media operates. Convergence describes the process by which we will sort through those options. There will be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). By no black box, Jenkins seems to suggest that we should not fixate on the tools. There never will be a magical black box. Sure, we now have computers and smartphones that allow for audio recording, writing, images, video, and amusements all in one device. But who among us uses just one device? (There is a whole, very loaded, very problematc digital divide argument in that last question, but that's for another post.) The cloud computing movement (access to your information from any device) on the immediate horizon is further evidence of the no-black-box theory of convergence. But there is a fact (of which Jenkins is, I'm sure, well aware) obscured by this quote and made visible by the ads: We have been entering this prolonged transition period for more than 100 years. We have been living in convergence culture for generations. "Convergence" does not signify the just the evolution of tools like multimedia Swiss army knives and digital Leathermen multitools. The evolution of tools is merely a tangible manifestation of an evolution of behaviors. These behaviors used to fall under distinct categories labeled "work" and "amusement." It is those categories that have been converging for more than a century.

Works Cited:

Dyer, Frank Lewis, Thomas Commerford Martin. Edison, His Life and Inventions. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. Google Books.

Edison, Thomas. "The Phonograph and Its Future." The North American Review. 126.262 (1878): 527-536. JSTOR. Web. 19 Jan. 2011. .

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

For further reading:

Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Syverson, M. A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 1999.

This is the second in a series of blog posts that will explore visual aspects of audio recording technologies. If you enjoyed it, you might read the first post, too.

The Visual Origins of Audio Recording

Will Burdette — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:17:07 +0000

Grooves from the original phonograph recording, reproduced in Scientific American in 1877.

Most of us do not process audio recordings in a vacuum. There is a visual dimension to our aural world. Although, sadly, liner notes are impoverished in the digital realm (although not absolutely or irrevocably so), we still have a world of visual information when navigating sound in digital spaces. Whether digital or analog, sights and sounds coevolve. This may sound overly simplistic, but just under the surface, things get complex. When you drill down into the relationship between audio recording and its associated visual media, a complex ecosystem of delivery technologies, mechanical inventions, distribution channels, and marketing efforts emerges. We might begin to explore this complexity by looking at some artifacts. Fortunately, the recording industry is an artifact-generating machine.

The visual aspects of audio recordings are most obviously attached to the delivery technologies, which exist in a lifecycle of planned obsolescence. The jewel case, the cassette box, the record sleeve— they are all dead. (Long live album covers and liner notes!) But the medium of audio recording evolves (or devolves) after these delivery technologies are obsolete. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins explains the distinction between delivery technologies and a medium. Jenkins notes that Bruce Sterling established a "Dead Media Project" that included, among other items, the Edison wax cylinder. Ironically, the Dead Media Project is now "dead." But, as Jenkins writes, examining dead delivery technologies urges us toward an evolutionary understanding of media:

[H]istory teaches us that old media never die—and they don't even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content—the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling's project lists falls under this category. Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies (13).

Once we make the distinction between medium (recorded sound) and delivery technology (records, for example), we open up the world of recorded sound to all sorts of artifacts in addition to the actual disc, tape, or digital file. The visual aspects of delivery technologies—record labels—are the most obvious marriage of sight and sound, and they deserve some attention. However, the entire delivery apparatus— from the labels, to the various housings and cover art, to ads and posters promoting the sale of the delivery technology, to the shelf spaces and layouts of record stores—had to evolve along with the medium. It's interesting to think of the visual aspects of audio recording that came before the packaging.

In the beginning, there was a much more modest delivery apparatus: simple grooves in tin foil. And, before Edison thought of etching a playable artifact, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created a machine that was designed to create visual representations of sound:

In fact, it was the visually oriented phonautograph machine that led Edison to create his phonograph. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler writes, "A Willis-type machine gave him the idea for the phonograph; a Scott-type machine pushed him toward its realization" (27). (The Robert Willis part of the equation consisted of a vibrating mechanism.) A marketing machine would push Edison's invention into the home of every American, creating some visually rich artifacts along the way. But that's another post.

This is the first in a series of posts that examine the visual context of audio recording.

Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Google Earth Pedagogies: Beyond “That’s So Cool”

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:54:43 +0000

(Image credit: Image capture of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece from Google Earth)

A fellow graduate student recently mentioned to me that his rhetoric professor had used Google Maps to show classical Athens to the class. He told me, “I kept thinking how much cooler it would have been if we were looking at it in Google Earth, walking around down there in street view.”

It’s true. As shown above, a street view of the Acropolis is, indeed, pretty cool. There is a simple and undeniable “wow” factor about flying to and viewing sites in Google Earth. But it’s been my contention throughout these blogs that the use of the Google Earth technology can go beyond the “that’s so cool” factor and can actually enhance and expand composition pedagogies. Former DWRLer Jim Brown (now of Wayne State University) makes this point, too, as he discusses possible evaluation strategies for Google Maps assignments. Brown writes, “These maps are writing. They are not just some ‘cool’ thing that will then require a ‘real’ writing assignment. This assignment should open up important discussions about how cartography is a form of writing and about how ‘the map is not the territory.’ Students are creating something here, not merely reflecting an existing reality” (Brown, “Mapping Home”).

Brown’s assignment, like most of the assignments I’ve found so far, asks students to work in Google Maps, not Google Earth. But the writing component is applicable. The activity he designed, called “Mapping Home,” asks students to map key sites in their daily lives, using the map to elucidate the “borders” that they negotiate or cross regularly. The link above includes a sample map created by Brown. Using the “My Maps” function in Google Maps, each of Brown’s students created a individual map with an introduction and placemarks with text and embedded links, images, or video.

To get the most out of the assignment and to aid evaluation, Brown encourages instructors to set their expectations about students’ maps:

How many placemarks should students create?
What components should placemarks include?
How much text should placemarks include?
What components, if any, besides placemarks, should maps include? (Should they include border lines, connecting lines, or other vectors, for example?)
Should the map include an introduction? What should the introduction accomplish?
Is an accompanying reflective essay required, or should the map itself (or an in-class discussion) accomplish the task of reflection?

Other assignments using Google Maps technology include Jeremy Dean’s “Map Three Readings,” which asks students to use a map to “draw a physical and thematic connection” between multiple readings by placing authors or characters on a map, and Eileen McGinnis’ “Mapping Galapagos,” which asks students to map landmarks and events in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Galapagos. McGinnis frames the map as a thinking process, not a product, at least at the outset: “Keep in mind that your map will function initially as a tool for discovering something unexpected about the novel rather than for charting the Known World.”

These assignments demonstrate well how writing within maps can aid students’ invention process, prompt students to make visual, spatial, and physical connections within and across texts, and can, themselves, constitute an argument (thereby denaturalizing mapping as an authorless or objective rendering of space).

Most of these assignments were created before the release of Google Earth, however, so they might be adjusted or reformulated to more fully take advantage of Google Earth’s distinct capacities, such as its capacity to show non-static data, to depict historical change, to show beautifully-rendered, 3D buildings, to travel from site to site via a user-generated animated tour, to offer various annotation options via clickable layers, and to move quickly between macro and micro views of the same landscape. While some of these features are available in Google Maps, Google Earth’s animation feature allows users to dramatize these functions, heightening their effect.

Google Earth’s homepage includes a Gallery of selected tours and animations that demonstrate the technology’s advanced functions. These animations give a sense of the informational and analytical uses of features particular to Google Earth, such as 3D buildings, historical timelines, and the ability to travel. The Gallery includes tours of major world cathedrals, castles, libraries, and universities, as well as an animation of major international flight routes. Each file must be opened within Google Earth, so users must download the software, which is free and available on the same site, to view the demonstrations. It's also important to note that users must find in Google Earth's left-hand sidebar an icon that looks like a movie camera. Clicking this icon will "run" the file.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, the DWRL’s Geo-Everything Group has been putting together resources to familiarize instructors with Google Earth and help them integrate it into the writing classroom. Their recent Google Earth Workshop provided a practical introduction for using Google Earth in the classroom, including tips for making basic and customized placemarks and using Google’s data template, Spreadsheet Mapper, for creating collaborative maps with “branded,” standardized placemarks. I recommend taking a look at their Google Earth Workshop handout for practical guidance to getting started in Google Earth.

Google Earth Pedagogies: A Survey of Pedagogical Applications

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:33:24 +0000

(Image Credit: Google LitTrips)

As I’ve been previewing Google Earth educational applications on the web, I’ve noticed that while many disciplines (science, geography, history) are using Google Earth to engage students and invite them to create within the software, applications for the English classroom (at least those that are featured and discussed on the web) overwhelmingly take the form of teacher-made presentations. I imagine that this tendency speaks to an ongoing conservatism about the design of writing assignments, a desire to retain the five-page paper as the product of the literature and writing classroom.

In a video presentation that I’ll discuss later in this post, Sean McCarthy, a graduate student at the University of Texas, admits that there may, in fact, be an “amateurism” that attends writing in the Google Maps environment, but suggests that perhaps there are some benefits to this amateurism. This quality, he suggests, may open up a level of analytical adventuresomeness that the more formal structure of the essay quashes.

I’m interested in this suggestion, but before I explore it further, I want to address some more common uses of Google Maps and Google Earth technologies in the literature and writing classroom. I’ve noticed that the use of these technologies takes three main forms: Mapping as a Presentation Tool, Mapping as an Analytical Tool, and Mapping as a Writing Tool. Of course, these uses overlap, but the discrete categories generally reflect the way the software is actually being used in the classroom.

Mapping as a Presentation Tool

As I mentioned above, presentations are overwhelmingly the primary, much-evidenced use of Google Maps and Earth technologies in the literature classroom. The Google for Educators site offers a collection of Google LitTrips as their recommended idea for using Google Earth in the English classroom. The LitTrips include maps of The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. In the latter case, the LitTrip was created by German literature students at Notre Dame, but this student-created example is the exception.

The Google Earth Education Community , run by David Herring, a long-time teacher at University High School in Tucson, Arizona, similarly focuses on presentations, providing instructions for teachers to build presentations and a space for users to share their Google Earth presentations. The Google Earth presentations on Herring’s site include “The Life and Works of Jane Austen,” “Locations in Shakespeare’s Plays,” as well as maps for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and River Horse, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. While these presentations offer useful geospatial conceptualizations of literary works, they do not take advantage of the technology’s capacities for encouraging students to think and write in new and networked mediums.

Mapping as an Analytical Tool

In the aforementioned video presentation on Google Map pedagogies, University of Texas graduate student Sean McCarthy explains uses of Google Maps that extend far beyond getting directions. McCarthy shows how students can use the maps' built-in analytical tools such as the terrain map, satellite map, and street view, as well as the optional “overlays,” including articles from Wikipedia, photos from Panoramio, and video from YouTube to analyze geographical and social spaces and their online construction.

He suggests that students might be divided into groups to examine a city, its neighborhoods, its layout, its public transportation and other services, its parks and greenspace, and its history using such user-generated data.

He also notes that such an examination requires students to examine the rhetorical construction of Google Maps itself. Which areas show street views? Which areas include large amounts of user-generated content, such as links to Wikipedia articles and YouTube clips?

Mapping as a Writing Tool

While the above example engages students directly with maps, it stops just short of asking students to actually create compositions in dialogue with these technologies.

McCarthy has a number of suggestions for how to get students writing in Google Maps. Here are just a few:

McCarthy features an assignment designed by University of Texas graduate student Amena Moinfar, in which students map the national origin of each player on the French soccer team, Les Bleus, to help them conceptualize the reach of French colonialism and the ongoing effects of the French-Algerian War.
McCarthy features a student-created map of the history of rugby that shows the sport’s presence overwhelmingly in the southern hemisphere. The student who created this map discovered through this process the connection between rugby and colonialism.
McCarthy suggests asking students to create a map alongside a formal, five-page paper, as the map allows for reflection and for a different mode of presenting research and representating connections.
McCarthy features a student map, created in real time during the uprisings in Tibet and elsewhere in protest of the Beijing Olympics. McCarthy notes that because the student created the map in the networked space of Google Maps, linked it to his blog, and kept updating it, the map turned into a real public commentary on the protests, which in fact got thousands of hits.

As is evident in the last assignment described above, composing in Google Maps places students’ writing into a socially networked environment. McCarthy joins many composition scholars, including Sharon Crowley and Michael Stancliff, when he argues that placing students’ writing into contexts that extend beyond the classroom enriches the compositional activity and connects students to audiences, which raises the stakes of the writing activity. He further argues that creating and sharing content is, indeed, the way students are increasingly accustomed to writing: according to McCarthy, 60% of all 19-year-olds publish on the web every day through social media outlets such as Facebook.

While composition and literature instructors may prefer the familiar, formal, linear structure of the traditional essay, McCarthy's findings suggest that the "amatuerish" writing student sometimes produce when composing in digital mediums in fact bespeaks the quality and complexity of their research and analytical connections.

There are more Google Maps- and Google Earth-related assignments indexed in the DWRL’s database of technology-based lesson plans. If you plug “Google Maps” into the site’s search bar, you’ll easily turn them up.

Interview of Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:12:29 +0000

In the fall of 2008 Viz. contributor Nate Kreuter interviewed Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaties about their book No Caption Needed and their blog of the same name. Here is the transcript of that interview.

* * *

Viz: In the “New Media” environment, where so many sources of news and media outlets are competing for our attention, are iconic images as you define them in No Caption Needed still possible? Will we see new iconic images in the future?

Hariman: Well, we suggest in the book that there should continue to be iconic images for several reasons. Precisely because of the information overload there’s a need for some sort of common lingua franca visually. People simply can’t see the jillions of images that are available every day, and so in fact you’re likely to see a relatively small number of images circulate much more than others. Within that circulation there might be some iconic images. And one of the things about iconic images is that they clearly travel across media, across genres, across topics, and so they seem to flourish and be defined in part by circulation. So as more media get interactive, as images can be transferred ever more cheaply and easily, all of that should provide the conditions for the continued emergence and use of iconic imagery.

Lucaites: I think we’ve seen this already. Certainly the picture of the guy in the Christ-like pose in Abu Graib, with the hood on, achieved in some measure, its iconicity as a function of precisely the process of distribution and circulation that Robert just talked about. Not that that might not have happened anyway, but it wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way and maybe not as quickly. So, I don’t think we’ll see a lack of iconic images in the future as a result of that changing media environment.

Viz: If anything then, images might become iconic more quickly and more cross-culturally because of their wider distribution?

Hariman & Lucaites: Possibly.

Viz: There’s a line in the final chapter of the book No Caption Needed where you say that we already have the vocabulary for talking about images and that much of our traditional rhetorical vocabulary can be applied to talk about images. But it seems that a lot of people in our field are still intimidated by the idea of writing and talking about images, still have some reluctance about it. Do you see that reluctance changing at all, and if so, how?

Hariman: Well, clearly there’s some interest in it. There are blogs. Cara Finnegan, ourselves, Debra Hawhee, Josh Gunn, the Blogora, and there are others, and you’ll see discussions of images on all of those, some more intense than others. It’s still costly to publish images in journals and so you’re less likely to see change occur there. So it depends where you look. I know that John [Lucaites] and I are certainly encouraging students to write about images in our classrooms. I think if you just look across the university more and more subjects are being taught of necessity in smart rooms all the time. So visual literacy is becoming more and more widespread, and the disciplines that don’t get on that bandwagon are going to be left behind.

Lucaites: Yeah, and I think that you’re finding more and more people are actually writing about images. A book just came out edited by Cara Finnegan and Lester Olson and Diane Hope [Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture] on rhetorical culture and visual rhetorics. It’s an anthology, so it’s pulling together work from a range of people who are working in that arena. There are some people who still resist it. You know, deliberative democrats still think that the visual can be problematic, but I think increasingly more and more people are comfortable with looking at the visual as a site of the constitution and the reproduction of public culture and central to what we used to call “public address studies.” So I’m kind of optimistic about the possibilities, although I think we need to do a lot more.

Viz: Along those lines, in this year’s MLA listings a lot of jobs ask for or express some sort of desire for a visual rhetoric competency. Do you think we’re getting to a point in the field where that sort of competency is expected, rather than simply desired?

Luacites: I don’t know. It depends how you define it. Is it sort of like asking if you can use Word? That used to be a standard question for people in the secretarial field and now it’s taken for granted. So, are they asking that you have an interest in the visual or that you do research in that area, and can teach courses in that area and so forth? So, I’d have to say, what are they really looking for? You’d have to go behind the job ad to get a sense of that. Right now this [visual rhetoric] is hot. I think every research program has a half-life, some longer and some shorter, so it’s probably going to wax for awhile, but then I would expect it to wane.

Hariman: I think it would be productive if we could create an environment where visual literacy was not just something else that one could do but was seen as really important to the production of a humanistic scholar or a productive citizen.

Viz: Related to that, for those of us in this bull market of visual literacy and who consider ourselves to be working in it, most of our attention is oriented toward consuming images to understand them, do you think we should be asking students to compose in images as well? The New Media craze is asking students to compose in video and images. Do you think there’s some merit in that, or should we be focusing on having students learn to read images?

Lucaites: I think we should be doing both, but I don’t feel particularly competent about doing both myself.

Hariman: There are already programs—film studies, journalism, so forth and so on—there are already places where you can do production. We were just trying to hire for a New Media arts position and we wanted someone who could do both production and scholarship and it was tough. We ended up not filling it. It’s tough to find someone who’s really good in both and much easier to hire for one or the other.

Viz: How you do deal with images in the classroom? How do you have students deal with images interpretively or in terms of composition?

Lucaites: I teach a course on visualizing war and a significant part of the class is devoted to developing strategies for interpretation and reading images. But of course, that’s a double-edged sword. Just as I try to teach students a range of what I consider the topoi of visual war discourse or visual war rhetorics, by the end of the semester I ask them to put together group projects in which they employ these topoi or themes or inventional strategies in a project that would engage a public audience on the issues and problems raised in thinking about war in a visual register. And so, I try to get them to translate their interpretive skills into a critical engagement that employs visual practices, either incorporating the conventions we’ve been talking about or by trying to call attention to them in a critical register.

Hariman: What I’ve been doing is having students write blog posts, and I’ve found that’s a very effective way to improve their writing, just as I think having to write for the blog improves my writing. So, they post on particular images. I think it helps having to write for a public reader, rather than a solely academic reader.

Viz: Related to these writing issues, co-authored books tend not to be the norm in the humanities—can you talk about the process of writing collaboratively? Also, do you think we should be encouraging students to write collaboratively more often?

Hariman: [laughs] We get asked this question a lot. Well, for us it works, and what we do wouldn’t necessarily work for any other two people in the universe. What we’ve found is that we really enjoy working together. We’ve also found you don’t save a minute of time. If anything it takes longer to work collaboratively than to work on single author projects, but it’s a lot more fun.

Lucaites: And it produces better work, across the board, because you’ve got two voices that are engaging, and correcting and pushing.

Viz: Well, what’s the process? Does one of you generate something and then pass it along to the other? How does that work?

Hariman: The first thing we do is we get together and we cook Greek food for a couple days.

Lucaites: It’s true.

Hariman: And our wives say “what are you doing?” and we say “research” and we get very funny looks. After that we send a lot of email back and forth. Once in a while we have “grand strategy” meetings which are almost never followed thereafter. For the most part it’s a really interactive process and we’ll have a certain division of labor, you know “who’s starting with this chapter, who’s starting with that chapter?” Generally if we had to divide it up John does more of the hardcore research, because he’s better at that than I am. Things like that. So we divide up some of the tasks. Mostly it just clicks.

Lucaites: We have an idea and we run with it. Somebody starts writing and then we go back and forth. We’ll get fifty or sixty pages and then throw them away and start all over again. I’ve collaborated with a lot of people and the collaborations are always different. The other part of your question was whether or not students should be encouraged to write collaboratively or not, and I’m really ambivalent about that. On the one hand, my collaborations, and especially this one, have been incredibly gratifying and I think I’ve been very productive in the areas where scholars are traditionally rewarded for being productive, publications and whatnot. But I think the way the academy and the humanities in particular are configured you take a big risk if early in your career you dedicate yourself to doing this kind of work because it is still in some measure held to be suspect when you get to tenure and promotion types of considerations. So, I always want [grad] students to be cautious about that.

Hariman: I just did a tenure review of someone who the majority of her work was collaborative and it made it difficult to evaluate. So, I’d say doing some collaborative work is a very good idea, but we did this only after we were established as individual authors.

Viz: So if it’s a risk for graduate students, what about for undergraduates who may be entering into entirely nonacademic fields?

Hariman: They’ve been writing collaboratively since middle school. They do that all the time before they get to college. The deal there is that you have to solve the free writer problem, because what typically happens is that the one or two people in the group who are smart and concerned about their grades will do all the work. People are not freely entering into collaboration when it’s pushed upon them in a classroom. Students are very skilled socially, very adept at networking. They can collaborate in their sleep, so what are you really teaching them? They don’t need to learn how to collaborate. They probably do need to learn how to write. I think that’s much more likely to happen if they’re having to write as individual authors and then editing each others’ work, which is a very useful procedure for teaching writing.

Viz: At this point I think we’ve all heard some Facebook horror stories, which indicate that students might not be aware of the audiences that might be out there for their own images that they think are private. Based on your own classroom experience, can you generalize about whether or not the proliferation of digital imaging technologies has made students more aware of the power of images, or is that technology simply something they take for granted?

Lucaites: I don’t have a clue. I assume they’re more aware. But that doesn’t mean I know how they use images, how they read them. They may be very attuned to visual media, but they may also see photographs as hopelessly traditional media.

Hariman: Our general position is that all the problems in communication are typically attributed to the newest medium, or the seemingly supplemental, marginal medium. So, Susan Sontag inveighs against photography for what are general hermeneutical problems, problems that apply to texts as much as they do to imagery. The problems of new media are the problems of media for the most part. There are always particular inflections that have to be accounted for, and issues of succession and supplementarity, but for the most part the response is significantly overheated and the real issue is, whether you’re talking about new media or old, whether you’re talking about images or texts, most people are lousy readers. So there’s plenty for us to do as scholars and teachers. Whether you’re talking about students forty years ago looking at a sonnet or students today looking at an advertisement, to start with, they’re not going to get most of what’s there. But as you get them going, give them some tools, and get them engaged with it, then they can discover a great deal.

Viz: Is there then a risk of putting too much stock in these new media forms if we’re not grounded in one form or another of reading, we’re doing a disservice to students?

Hariman: Well, one thing we’re trying to do with the blog, and what people seem to really appreciate from the feedback we get, is read images. So, there is certainly an appetite for that, and part of what we do is to just slow down, and just attend to one or two images at a time. All forms of reading are changing because of media. We scan much more than we read now, simply because it’s more functional to do so.

Lucaites: Each new technology also adds something to the equation, and we have to attend to the ways in which they operate somewhat differently, or require different kinds of skills. But I don’t think we should see the end of the world, in good ways or bad, with the changes in media and interpretive practices.

Viz: Are there any new projects you’re working that we should be looking forward to? Has there been any Greek cooking going on?

Hariman: Well, a couple things, some independent, article-length projects, but no joint book-length projects at this point.

Lucaites: I think if there’s one theme that we’re interested in though, it’s that if someone wanted to launch a critique of No Caption Needed, the book, one way to do it would be to say “you’re looking at these canonical images and in some measure recreating the Great Books approach with images.” And if the argument of the book, which is that photojournalism underwrites liberal democratic culture, can be sustained, you’ve got to be able to do that by looking at something other than just the command performances, the more quotidian and the every day.

Hariman: That’s what the blog’s all about.

Lucaites: I think you need to look at the more “everyday” images, so that’s one of the things that drives what we do on the blog, as well as some of the other things we’re working on. We’re trying to look at more everyday types of photojournalistic practices and to take account of the ways in which they work. So, we do some stuff with the normalization of war, and how civil rights imagery is reconstituted and remembered.

Hariman: We started the book thinking that we were going to talk only about iconic photographs, identify the genre and figure out how the genre works, so we could say “we can now account for this class of images.” As the book progressed we realized that we were identifying processes that occur comprehensively. Not that there’s no longer such thing as iconic photographs, but that there’s an intensification of processes that occur across photojournalism or across visual culture. We thought that appropriation was something that fundamentally distinguishes the icon and have come to see that appropriation happens in myriad ways. So, we started out being interested in the question, what is the iconic photograph and why is it so appealing? That became, what is the visual public culture, what is the visual dimension of a liberal democratic culture? -- and that’s where we are with the blog. I’m really proud of the book, but I’m really proud of the blog too.

Lucaites: Absolutely.

Hariman: I more proud, perhaps, of the blog than some of the other journal projects we’re doing right now. It’s certainly more immediate.

Viz: Is it more fulfilling because the blog has a potentially much larger audience than the journal articles?

Hariman: Well, there is that. [laughs] I don’t want to knock journal publications, which are still really important. But, go to the blog and let us know what you think.

Visual Rhetoric Writing Exercise

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:56:23 +0000

I recently incorporated the Garry Winogrand photo below into an in-class writing exercise. The exercise is essentially the same as one that I came up with when helping Brooks Landon teach his Prose Style course at the University of Iowa a few years ago. Keep reading to learn more about the writing exercise.

I bring a photo in to class, usually one that depicts something weird, something that probably has a story behind it but that doesn't make that story explicit. I project the photo and don't tell the students a word about it, not when it was taken, by whom, nothing. Then the students have to write about the photo. It's a creative assignment and in this case I was trying to get them to think about form. Specifically, after a workshop on the subject in the prior class, I was asking them to write "cumulative" sentences. Cumulative sentences, for those of you who aren't prose style junkies, are described in Francis Christensen's essay "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." So, the photo was just a prompt to get the students writing in a new mode that we had been working on. The exercise went very well and my students generated some whacky, but stylistically adventurous, prose. If I get their permission, I will post some of their writings in the comments soon.

Maybe this exercise isn't about visual rhetoric in the strictest sense. There's not much for us to read in this example. But I include it here, in this forum because, hell, it's close enough.