viz.

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.

Image Credit: AmericanTeenMovie.com

I recently posted a new page on "Visual Literacy and Solidarity" to the "Theory" section of VIZ. It passes back over some of the material from my posts this semester on food, food culture and food policy, but I also couldn't resist encroaching on Rachel's pop-culture territory with a few references to The Breakfast Club and Kanye West (to be fair, though, the movie is named after the most important meal of the day).

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Image Credit: Joe Wirtheim

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I have always had a soft spot for "victory gardens" and mid-century propaganda. It may be a result of the countless times I watched Bugs Bunny steal carrots from the Saturday-morning victory gardens of my childhood (how many of us were introduced to serious political concepts like shortage, rationing and military conscription through the Flatbush intonation of Mel Blanc?). It may have been the vintage singns and posters ("Loose Lips Might Sink Ships") hanging on the wallls of the local burger joint that was a favorite haunt of my grandfather. Whatever the reason, my eye is always drawn to the bold fonts, severe angles and jingoistic slogans of WWII era posters, particularly those aimed at action on the home front. This week, while trolling for vintage design and espirit d'corps, I came across "The Victory Garden of Tommorrow," Joe Wirtheim's modern day art/propaganda campaign that repurposes and reinvents the genre. More on Wirtheim's project, refurbished propaganda and mobilizing the population after the break.

This page is meant to provide the basics of how to code images for the web.  This link is a starting point for learning to code images. 

Image Credit: David Halliday on samuseum.org

Photographer David Halliday's current exhibition of still lifes at the San Antonio Museum of Art contains some stunningly beautiful and surreal photographs of food. It also lends itself to use in the rhetoric classroom and could be used for teaching lessons about visual literacy, changing contexts and visual rhetoric within communities. More about Halliday, still life and possible classroom uses after the break.

Image Credit: FairFoodProject.org

This carrot-wielding fist appears on the website housing “Fair Food: Field to Table” a multimedia presentation created by the Fair Food Project in cooperation with the California Institute for Rural Studies. The project draws on a visual iconography of labor and political activism as part of its educational outreach to university students. It also aims at turning students into educators with its three-part multimedia presentation and associated resources. More about the project,including video, after the jump.

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:  Screenshot from The Grub Street Project

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

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

Image Credit:  Wikipedia

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

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