viz. - new media

Bob Dylan on Contemporary Literature

Jay Voss — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago a 2001 press conference with Bob Dylan emerged on youtube. Dylan, usually cagey and recalcitrant with reporters, is unusually earnest in the interview. He says a lot about his career and his Love and Theft album, which he was promoting at the time. You can check out a clip above, and the interview’s other five segments can be found on youtube. The reason I choose to bring this to the attention of the blog is that in the interview Dylan makes some interesting comments about the state of literature in America, and in particular some comments about how digital media is affecting the ways we feel. The comments, which I’ll outline below, are particularly relevant after yesterday’s massacre at the Boston Marathon, but I’ll leave that connection to your own reflections – we’ve all seen coverage of that tragedy, and I don’t want to add to the noise. As the version of Bob Dylan who appeared on the day of that interview might suggest, this post isn’t a work of art and thus I have no business telling you how to feel.

(Image credit: brainpickings.org)

Dylan’s comments on literature and the media come after a reporter asked him if there were any new writers he was particularly excited about. After a brief moment of thought Dylan says he “just doesn’t think there are any…we’re living in a different time. The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think to write that you don’t see every day in the newspaper or on television?” Many of us would disagree with the notion that there aren’t any new writers worth caring about. Few amongst us wouldn’t sing the praises of Zadie Smith or Dave Eggers. Just last week I picked up a copy of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, and I can confidently say it’s a work of genius. It’s certainly worth finding a copy of. So I think I chalk the first part of that comment up as the lament of an older generation. (Ibid Dylan’s later comments on there being no media in late-nineteenth century France.) But nevertheless, despite the factually incorrect way that Dylan frames his argument, I still think he’s on to something. A reporter responds to all this by asking whether “there are [still] emotions that need to be expressed,” and this spurs the heart of Dylan’s argument. “Yeah,” Dylan responds, “but the media’s moving people’s emotions anyway.”

(Image credit: quarterlyconversation.com)

I thought this was a really interesting concept. When I reflect on my own reading or talk to friends who keep up with contemporary literature, there does seem to be a general sense that things have changed. Writers certainly don’t have the cultural heft they once did. Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain had a profound reach in their day. Today people like David Foster Wallace are certainly considered influential, but that influence is reserved for a much less substantial audience than what Tolstoy or Twain enjoyed. Every serious reader I know has their own list of explanations. Some blame e-readers, some blame TV, some blame declining education standards. Who’s to say? Dylan’s point that other media tell us how to feel about our world is novel and valid. At its heart, I guess, is something about effort. Literature requires us to be active participants, while certain new media make it all too easy to be passive viewers. Some would probably say there are other valuable narratives superseding the novel, but that’s not what Dylan’s talking about.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 2

Laura Thain — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:58:53 +0000

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film. In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

I ended my post with the suggestion that the embedded “meme” or mimetic function of gifing was the essential element of gifing as a medium that allows for a conception of gif celebrity. Here, I’d like to explore the early stages of that celebrity in the predecessor to the gif: the “meme” itself.

Early this year, Business Insider published a puff piece of “What 6 Viral Internet Meme Stars Look Like in Real Life.” Most of this content was pulled from the popular internet archive Know Your Meme, which more fully documents who ascertained the true identities of these “meme stars,” and how. (A large portion of the investigative activity took place on the message boards of the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit, which has been much discussed as a source of controversial tactical media.)

Image Source: Know Your Meme

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

The public’s interest in the real identity behind these “meme stars” has two important implications in the rhetoric of the meme. First, it privileges the “real” or “authentic” person behind the meme as the ultimate site of authenticity by identifying it as the meme’s point of origin. (This is the implicit reason archives like “Know Your Meme” seem interested in the “real” image of the speaker in the meme—it is the point of origin from which all “memeing” springs.) This particular privileging of the authentic persona of the meme star as the site of authenticity signals a shift from meme “fame” to meme “celebrity”—much as DeCordova describes in early 20^th century film.

Second, this interest in attaching the meme to an “original” speaker gives us a way to tie the discourse on “memeing” to linguistic and rhetorical conceptions of the “utterance” as a basic linguistic unit. As I’ve previously discussed, the meme is a unit of cultural transference, usually in the form of a compressed emotion or attitude. We can understand this in terms of “utterance” as a theoretical term beginning with Saussure, who defined the utterance as the most basic unit of signifying, and thus, the most basic unit of language.

But Saussure’s conception of the utterance gives us a very particular way to consider context, and therefore intertextuality, as a network of social convention in which the identification of a point of origin, no matter how artificial, is of no use. By Saussure’s structuralist approach, the signified is an abstract, intangible object; we can approach, but never reach it, by examining its signifiers. Because the utterance is the most basic form of communication, to break it down further would be to enter the realm of pure language, which only exists in abstracts. (In short, it’s just turtles all the way down.)

Bahktin, however, considers the utterance to have a dialogic quality—utterances are by nature responses to previous utterances. An utterance, then, can be broken down and linked to a previous utterance. As Bahktin argues, utterances cannot be “self-sufficient,” and they rely on intertextuality (what Baktin calls “the dialogic”) in order to render meaning. In “Speech Genres,” he affirms

The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.

If we consider a meme a type of utterance, Bakhtin’s account of the function of the utterance helps us to understand why the discourse on memeing is so invested in identifying a point of origin of a meme’s unit of speech. Audiences are compelled to attach the utterance to a speaker when faced when an intertextual network of constantly shifting meaning attached to a single object (the meme); by identifying the original “speaker,” each variation of the meme attempts to counter the uncertainty of speech and assert the power over their own reading of the significance of the utterance vis a vis the “first” utterance. By this means, meme “stars” become meme “celebrities.”

But gifs function as memes too, although they draw from pre-established sites of celebrity as often as they create celebrity by means of repetition. And while the meme offers meaning by swapping out a distinctive white block text, the gif either appears without text at all, allowing gestures to function as utterances (as is the case of the archive RealityTVgifs) or is attached to a text related to personal experience (in tumblrs like OfficeHoursAreOver, WhatShouldWeCallMe, AllMyFriendsAreMarried, etc.).

Perhaps the reason gifs tend to rely on pre-established celebrity more often than they create fame from scratch is because the lack of text and the emphasis on gesture makes assigning the utterance to a speaker all the more crucial to the gif’s memetic function. However, as any gif proliferates, its intertextual dialogue creates a space that is distinct from, and often nearly independent of, the gif’s original context (usually, a scene in a television show or movie). The origin of the utterance becomes as inconsequential to the gif’s meaning as the meme’s “actual” identity—it becomes a site of authenticity only as much speakers recall it to establish their own ethos. However, as I’ve pointed out earlier, knowledge of the meme’s origin is often inconsequential to understanding or proliferating it.

Ultimately, the “origin” of the gif—its original context—becomes the site of authenticity in gif celebrity much as the personal, private life of a movie star is the site of authenticity in film celebrity. It stands in as legitimate, original context that presents itself as objective or “real,” but is just as available for response and reinvention as the gif itself (that is, that the gifs context is still a subjective category). This layering is ultimately a result of gif’s reinvention of older media forms and its marriage with a distinctly new media characteristic. Thus, examining the relationship between gif celebrity and early film celebrity demonstrates productive points of intersection, but the divergence of these intersections is crucial to understanding the gif as a mechanism of new media and Web 2.0.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 1

Laura Thain — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:30:10 +0000

Image Source: Gorgonetta

As gifs begin to occupy more and more space in internet discourse, I’ve been contemplating the various ways they reinvent older media forms. New media theory tells us this is an inevitable historical trajectory; it is not just a characteristic of post-broadcast media but embedded in mediation as an ideological concept. What I find particularly interesting about gifs is not just how they remediate the television shows, films, Youtube videos, and memes from which they derive meaning, but also how they relate to a much older form of media: silent film. And in such a reading, the overlap between the production of fame and celebrity in the silent film tradition and in current gif discourse is remarkable—and worth discussing.

In order to describe such a relationship, we might first turn to scholarship on the production of celebrity in the realm of silent film. A problem we must account for in exploring this topic is that, while mass-produced and marketed motion pictures begin at the turn of the 20^th century, no form of cinema stardom existed in mass media until at least 1910, if not later. One common historical narrative argues that celebrity resulted from the battle between actors/actresses and film production companies. Although audiences wanted to know the names of performers, production companies resisted billing their actors and actresses in order to maximize their profit margins. It was not until the breakup of Edison’s Patents Trust by anti-trust legislation and the victory of independent film studios that the “star system” emerged as the direct result of specific shifts in production.

Clippings of Florence Lawrence, Biograph Picture's first leading lady, "obituaries" after her death was faked as a pubicity stunt by her agent, Carl Laemmle. Note the anonymous poem referring to her as the actress "whose name we've never known"--before her fake death, Lawrence was known only as "Biograph Girl." Image Source: 11e14thstreet

Richard DeCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Illinois, 2001) provides a productive counter-narrative. De Cordova argues that celebrity cannot be accounted for by examining shifts in production alone—we must understand its development as a discursive category. “The star system,” he argues compellingly, “is not simply the creation of one person or even one company; nor is the desire for movie stars something that arose unsolicited [among audiences].”

Instead of focusing solely on the development of film production, DeCordova describes a larger phenomenon: the emergence of a “discourse on acting.” A precondition of this discourse was the separation of the actor from the film itself. As the public began to understand moving pictures as a remediation of theatre, conceptions of the actor in the filmic space developed to account for the role of the actor and the actor him or herself. A difference between on-screen and off-screen presence was established. The result of such a distinction is what DeCordova calls a “picture personality.” Audiences traced these “personalities” across films, producing a discursive space in which actors and actresses were recognized intertextually and the role of an actor in one film was associated with the character he played in others. (In this sense, all actors and actresses of early film became recognizable to the public as “character” actors and brought with them from film to film assumptions about the dramatic space they inhabited. Mary Pickford was the ingénue, Douglas Fairbanks the swashbuckling hero, Charlie Chaplin the tramp, etc.) Still, picture personalities were associated with the films in which they appeared, not their private lives.

Mary Pickford in a 1920 publicity still. Image Source: Library of Congress

DeCordova concludes by arguing that the term “star” (a true film celebrity) can only be applied when an actor’s personal life is available for public consumption. The personal (“off-screen”) life of the actor becomes the new center of truth and authenticity. Only then can we consider actors in films true “celebrities.”

What does any of this have to do with gifs as a medium? Like early film, gif fame depends on intertextuality. The discursive space occupied by the gif strongly resembles the discursive space DeCordova gives to the “picture personality.” Gif fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning. Like silent film, gifs have an embedded “meme” function. If we read memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation” (OED) we can see the meme in silent film—how it communicates cultural concepts through characterized gesture and intertextual association, through the actor, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The gif accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, gifs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity created after the “picture personalities” of early silent film, even as they rely on that celebrity to creative enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. One need not, for instance, be familiar with the TV show or film from which a gif is extracted if one is familiar with other intertextual applications of the gif as an ideological concept (its embedded function as “meme”). For example:

Audiences need not watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta to interpret the signature gesture of Nene Leakes here.

Image Sources: RealityTVGifs

This Harry Potter-inspired gif can be coupled with a variety of captions--it captures an emotion, rather than a specific narrative.

Image Source: WhatShouldWeCallMe

This happens in terms of both a gifs adherence to and defiance of its own “meme” function. In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore the “meme” function of both silent film and gif culture, drawing parallels between the two in order to further demonstrate how gifs reinvent old media not only in terms of discursive space, but in the formal characteristics of the medium itself.

For Part 2 of this post, click here.

Wild Horses and Bayonets Couldn’t Drag My Binders Full of Women Away: Political Satire on Web 2.0

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:13:58 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Inauguration officials estimate that about one million people crowded the National Mall this weekend to watch Barack Obama be sworn in as President. While this crowd was smaller than the 1.8 million who attended his first inauguration in 2008, a number of luminaries were present: Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, and Invisible Obama. Apparently Invisible Obama had a busy day planning his inaugural ball outfit, surprising Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and acting as a “seat filler.”

In case you’re wondering who Invisible Obama is, he is a parodic Twitter feed started during the 2012 Republican National Convention. As Clint Eastwood lectured an empty chair occupied by an imaginary Obama, Invisible Obama tweeted his responses back. Over the course of this last year’s presidential campaign, a number of individuals used new media platforms to satirically comment on the election and the debate. Yet despite the fact that the election is over, however, Invisible Obama persists in commenting on political developments and other invisibility-related issues (like Lennay Kekua). As I spent two weeks of December in Boston reviewing myriad eighteenth-century political satires for my dissertation, this moment finds me thinking about satire’s evolution from the eighteenth century to our present age. New forms of media—and the new possibilities for remediation that they offer—create different opportunities for rhetors. In other words, as the 1662 Licensing Act’s lapse and evolving engraving practices enabled satire’s rise during the eighteenth century, new media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr expand satire’s spread today. However, it seems worth asking whether or not the various proliferating political memes truly function as satire. Can we compare Twitter’s Paul Ryan Gosling to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? And what insights does the comparison provide? What kinds of political impact can satire make? And in what ways does it persist within the popular political discourse?

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Eighteenth-century satire took various forms, from text and image to performance. Whereas Alexander Pope multiplied footnotes upon footnotes in his 1729 Dunciad Variorum to mock Grub Street figures like Lewis Theobald, Edmund Curll, and Eliza Haywood alongside Grub Street writing conventions, John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera turned political corruption and popular depictions of criminal life into comic melodies. The period also saw the development of a rich visual satire tradition, as caricaturists like William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank satirized eighteenth-century society at large. If satire is meant to enact critique, eighteenth-century satire aimed itself at many different objects. For example, James Gillray’s 1792 print A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion directs its ire at the spendthrift Prince Regent, who was known for his excessive eating, drinking, and gambling.

Image Credit: The British Museum

The satire here lies in the careful background details. The feathers and candles surround what should be Prinny’s crest, which here has been changed into a fork and knife crossed across a plate. His bulging gut contrasts with his carefully curled hair and elegant fob. Dice lie on the floor as a dripping pot sits behind him, both signs of his conspicuous consumption. The print hanging on the wall depicts Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman who famously wrote The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining and Long and Healthful Life, a text reprinted multiple times during the eighteenth century. Gillray juxtaposes the two gentlemen not only to contrast the wastefulness of “prince of whales” with Cornaro’s sobriety, but also to generally indict upper-crust voluptuaries. If other satirists openly critiqued the fop and the macaroni as cultural types, Gillray took on the most famous and powerful example of them all.

Today’s satire groups around similar topics, but its different forms enable different effects. For example, the Binders Full of Women meme consists of images which sprung up on Facebook and Tumblr quickly after Romney answered a question about gendered pay inequity during the second presidential debate with a story of how he chose women for his gubernatorial cabinet from “whole binders full of women.” Like all memes, the visual requires popular cultural knowledge to interpret.

Image Credit: Binders Full of Women

This example takes a screen still from the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing and overlays on top of it a rewritten line from the film: “No one puts Baby in a corner” is now updated to “No one puts Baby in a binder.” The reinterpretation works insofar as the viewer recognizes the original context, where Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle shows up at the movie’s conclusion to encourage the character Baby to dance with him, and thus rebel against her family’s attempts to enforce gendered and class-based restrictions. Thus, by juxtaposing Romney’s statement with this image, the meme connects Romney with similar forces of gendered oppression.

But what are the meme’s uses? The Democratic Party quickly adopted and employed the meme to articulate arguments against many of Romney’s policy stances, co-opting the popular response for political purposes of their own. Yet commentators like Amanda Marcotte have argued that Romney’s earlier attempts to seek out qualified women for political positions are good policy, if oddly expressed. In other words, while the meme works to satirize the popular image of Romney as a patriarchal figure—and the language of restraint inherent in the word “binders”—its cultural extensions may in fact work to ridicule policies that do benefit women.

Image Credit: The Daily What

The Horses and Bayonets meme, which developed after a comment by President Obama during the last debate in which he criticized Romney’s comments on defense cuts, likewise overlays text and image to make a pointed statement. In this case, the meme gets reimagined into a Romney/Ryan slogan where Civil War re-enactors with rifles are “leading the charge” for the Republican team. The obvious Photoshopped rifles included not only suggest a link to the NRA, but also an underlying violence within the political debate.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Similarly, many satirists enacted political commentary by creating parodic Twitter accounts. Taking advantage of the first-person expressive mode of the platform, individuals as varied as Paul Ryan Gosling, Diamond Joe Biden, Bane Capital, Big Bird, Rafalca Romney, and Mexican Mitt Romney began to comment on the election both in and through the persona of political actors. As Bane Capital, playing off Rush Limbaugh’s comment that The Dark Knight Rises was attempting to smear Romney because the movie’s villain was named Bane, tweets as a pathological venture capital firm ready to “free Gotham’s people… from taxes on income above $250,000 per year,” the feed played on public perceptions about Romney’s morally-dubious business ethics. On the other side, Obama Translated juxtaposes Obama’s celebrated coolness with the popular imagination of what an angry black man would say. In the picture above, we see how Obama's anger translator Luther reads Obama's inaugural address. This feed, however, differs from many of the other Tumblr or Twitter-based satire of the election in that it is still ongoing—and created by Key & Peele, a comedy duo with a Comedy Central show.

Looking back upon the variety of political memes, it’s easier to see how they functioned and what they could do. An account like Obama Translated in part continues to have life not only because Key & Peele have branded the idea, but also because Obama remains a powerful figure. Something like Binders Full of Women may still be able to comment on sexism, but Romney’s fall means that he is no longer the most useful means through which to do so. However, perhaps the difference between something like Paul Ryan Gosling and Gulliver’s Travels has much to do with the medium. While Gulliver responded to a political moment, its method of publication provided the kind of narrative and conclusion that new media platforms don’t, without specifically building towards it (as in the case with Mayor Emanuel). It may also have to do with the status attendant the book as an object that new media has not yet had the chance to obtain—in other words, we see A Modest Proposal as something worth preserving, but not Bane Capital. Yet as I’ve read through eighteenth-century satires that attack the Duke of Newcastle’s 1750 election to Cambridge’s chancellorship, I have to work hard to reconstruct the moment. If eighteenth-century satire favors only slightly-veiled characterizations that make identification a guessing game for readers, new media satire retains all the same karotic specificity, but builds through repacking cultural products in new ways. I’ll be interesting to see what afterlives new media satire finds in the time to come.

“No phonetic pronunciation”—xkcd and Layered Aesthetics

Laura Thain — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:34:38 +0000

Image Credit: xkcd

I’ve been following the webcomic xkcd for the better part of my adult life, despite its warning that it may contain “strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).” (Clearly, I was always already a liberal arts major, any way you slice it.) Randall Munroe’s bare-bones aesthetic consistently privileges an idea above the attached illustration; each entry thrives on an invented ethos of the supremacy of text to convey this idea, rather than the illustration itself. This ethos is also heavily grounded in an empirical interest in physics, mathematics, and programming culture, and this empiricism translates quite cleanly into any comment the comic makes on the condition of being human; that is, that it is always based in lived experience, but that this experience is best crystallized in the juxtaposition of concrete, minimalist illustration and sparse but highly suggestive prose. Its only flourish is that each comic contains a “hidden” joke in the roll-over text—often one that works to undo the rhetoric of the initial panel.

Munroe set aside his reluctance to utilize the possibilities presented by a web interface on Wednesday, when he posted a toggle-able webcomic. Titled “Click and Drag” (but with no explicit instruction within the comic to do so), the final panel is navigable in the same fashion of Google Maps, which, in drawing on common procedural memory, brings attention to unnaturalness of the act of click-and-drag navigation. In short, while most of us consider navigating Google Maps to be intuitive, it is, of course, a learned motor skill.

The navigable panel is the last. Image Credit: xkcd

The landscape Munroe constructs if vast, and, of course, I took to exploring it. Within 10-20 minutes, I became curious as to how the interface was constructed and examined the script, looking for a way to view the toggleable-panel in landscape mode. For instance, did the navigable landscape exist as one large image within the frame? Could I access that image?

What I discovered was that the artist created the interface in java with a series of NSEW quadrants (again, much like Google Maps), and so I immediately started to try to assemble them.

An extremely cropped version of Munroe's js--Isn't it beautiful? Image credit: Screencapture from source code, xkcd

After an hour or so of this, I discovered that at noon, mere hours after the comic was posted, an ambitious blogger had already fully mapped out the “click and drag” universe and blogged about the process. As disappointed as I was to be scooped, the process of trying to construct that same map made me appreciate the aesthetics of this particular comic on an entirely different plane. The script’s construction and its seamless marriage with the visual material is a piece of art in itself—an additional layer, if you will, of the aesthetic experience.

Ultimately, having the complete landscape undermined my personal experience with the visual components of the webcomic interface, but the process of trying to construct it—of deconstructing (sorry, Randall), if you will, Munroe’s project, revealed another component of creativity, but one which I would still argue privileges language (that is, that "most horrible kluge," JavaScript). So I ask, how can a piece like this help us expand our boundaries of what constitutes language and reshape our concept of the interaction between the textual and the visual? What sort of media artifacts might we group with it? And how can these artifacts continue to change our notions of how multimedia works rhetorically, aesthetically, and cognitively?

Pinterest and Panopticon: Self-representation Through Appropriation

David A. Harper — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:45:27 +0000

Hacked Leviathan Frontispiece. Image Credit: David A. Harper

In the coffee shop where I ‘m writing, there are two large bulletin boards in a high-traffic area (the hallway leading to the restrooms). We all know how bulletin boards and advertising work: once a provocative image draws you in, the text informs you, proselytizes you, or sells something to you. On a well-used board layers upon layers of images vie for attention, each individual post contributing to an unintentional artistic whole. Gathered on the same bulletin board, even the most antagonistic images are put into dialog as the physical wooden frame becomes a conceptual one. We find patterns in the noise. These old-fashioned bulletin boards have been on my mind this week while I explored the high-tech virtual pinboards of Pinterest.

Our predisposition to find order when confronted with a variety of images reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’s use of the “perspective glass” metaphor in Leviathan. These quaint seventeenth-century devices made one coherent (and often surprising) image out of a variety of disparate ones. In Leviathan, Hobbes claims that “passion and self-love” act as perspective glasses in reverse, making every obligation imposed by the state seem a multitude of divergent grievances, whereas “moral and civil science” act as a perspective glass properly reducing a multitude of potential miseries into one less-obnoxious obligation to the state (XVIII.20). Similar to well-constructed perspective glass images, Pinterest invites us to make meaning from a variety of images organized by users of the social media site. Displaying a variety of images, a Pinterest user invites an audience to decipher a composite image of self. However, while the perspective glass contained a lens carefully calibrated to reveal the underlying composite image, Pinterest leaves that task to the viewer.

Image Credit: www.toutfait.com

Pinterest is the latest social media addition to an ever-more layered palimpsest of media revising older forms of authorship. Email transformed the epistolary art. The personal webpage gave individuals a bully-pulpit. Facebook and its competitors created a hybrid of webpage, text-messaging, and email to allow people to engage in an ever-evolving conversation or exhibitionist performance. Now, Pinterest has created an online commonplace or scrap book. Pinterest users fill virtual corkboards with images from the web (or from other user’s boards), using it like a visual Twitter account. It is a new, visually-centered performance space that encourages self-representation primarily through images.

Image Credit: David A. Harper via Pinterest

In 2008, E.J. Westlake noted that performances of self on Facebook are “energetic engagements with the panoptic gaze: as people offer themselves up to surveillance, they establish and reinforce social norms, but always resist being fixed as rigid, unchanging subjects.”[1] Self-representation on Pinterest is both more public and more abstract than the text-based performances of Facebook. It is more public because Pinterest doesn’t allow the same level of audience customization as other social media. Every Pinterest user can view, comment upon, and repin every post. It is more abstract because it is visual. A simple browser plug-in allows users to easily pin any image they find on the web to boards they create and title with names like “Wants,” “Yummies,” or “Books I’ve Read.” Pinboards are categorized by choosing from tags such as “Art,” “Film, Music and Books,” “Cars and Motorcycles,” and “Geek.” A user’s collection of virtual pinboards comes to represent them to the Pinterest community. However, since captions are limited to 500 characters, it is the images rather than text which must bear the interpretive weight.

Like the coffee-shop bulletin board, Pinterest boards create narratives through the juxtaposition of images. However, unlike the unintentional artistry of accretions on a public bulletin board, personal Pinterest boards (not to be confused with those run by bots) are organized by the pinner to perform for the panoptic gaze. Neither linear nor constantly in motion like the Facebook timeline and newsfeed, Pinterest encourages viewers to construct meaning by considering the entirety of a user’s board or boards. And since the majority of the images were not created by the user, the site functions like an early-modern commonplace book into which readers copied out choice quotes from books they had read.

Image Credit: University of British Columbia Press

Just as the quotes in a commonplace book are not creations of the compiler, most images on Pinterest originate from a source outher than the pinner. It is thus not the artistry of the images themselves, but the skillful choice and categorization of them that tell the pinner’s narrative, performing self-representation through appropriation. A recent Mashable Infographic reports that 80% of Pinterest images are repins from other users, compared to Twitter where only 1.4% of tweets are retweets. Even the 20% of pins that aren’t repins are far more likely to be captured from web pages than to be original creations. The site is designed to encourage this appropriation. When a user repins an image, they not only fit it into their own categorization scheme, but they may enter their own description, replacing previous interpretations of the image with their own.

This mechanism of appropriation by repinning makes Pinterest a formidable advertising tool. Each new pin creates another link pointing back to the original source, increasing potential click-through traffic and the source’s visibility to search-engine algorithms. A quick look at some statistics suggests other reasons marketers love it:

Pinterest ranks among the top 30 U.S. sites by total page views.
Pinterest users are predominately female, ages 25-44, and well educated.
The fastest growing categories on Pinterest are “Food,” and “Style and Fashion.”

Image Credit: Bansky

Pinners aren’t only creating representations of self, but they are also sometimes unwittingly tailoring online catalogs driving traffic to ecommerce sites. An ecommerce company that sells home furnishings told CNBC that customers directed to their site from Pinterest spend 70% more than those from other social media. The Pinterest consumer has seen the product contextualized within another pinner’s self-representation (as a “want,” a “need,” a “lifestyle,” or perhaps as “art”) and already has a developed desire for the product. By giving product images contexts that integrate them into idealized frames, Pinterest users do the marketers’ work for them more effectively than a store catalog could.

Recently, Pinterest has been in the news because they joined with other social media to discourage content encouraging anorexia or other forms of self-harm. The move was sparked by the alarming number of “thinspiration” posts on the site. But because Pinterest encourages wide-scale appropriation, once an image is pinned it takes on a life of its own. Whatever contextualization was granted the image by its original caption and categorization may be obliterated or reversed by the first repin. Images that were pinned as part of an “anti-thinspiration” board may be re-categorized by the next pinner as “thinspiration” itself. Context may be everything, but on Pinterest it is transient at best, as the images themselves quickly become orphaned texts uprooted from any single, fixed context.

Image Credit: GrandForksHerald.com

In Leviathan, Hobbes defined “wit” as the ability to observe similitude and combine disparate things, while “judgment” was the ability to differentiate (VIII.3). Pinterest provides a rich field where we can exercise these faculties, both while gathering images and whether we are viewing a friend’s board or Barack Obama’s. Ultimately, meaning becomes a collaboration between the gatherer and the viewer; however, as the viewer becomes the gatherer, images that once formed part of our composite self-image drift across the landscape of Pinterest and the web, providing someone else raw material to use as they fashion their own self.

Works Cited

[1] Westlake, E.J. "Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance." Drama Review. 52.4 (2008), 23.

Sol Lewitt, #StankyLegg, and the Publics for Conceptual Art

noelradley — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:47:43 +0000

Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt Via UIC

Can the Stanky Legg bring new publics to conceptual art? Perhaps this is arguable. But why don't you make up your own mind about it while Chaz Evans shakes a leg in his Vimeo video. Shots of Evans dancing the Dougie, the Robot, and the Hustle after the break.

The shots of dancing are from the interactive exhibit EDBSL-Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt, and the dancer and creator is a MFA at University of Illinois Chicago, who is working with the 1972 recorded performance of artist, John Baldessari.

As Evans writes on his Vimeo page: "I feel that this is a tribute to [Baldessari] in that I think his vocal stylings have been hidden too long in the walls of art institutions and video art websites. Perhaps by my dancing them to popular moves it will bring his songs to a much larger public." Baldessari's songs range from the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy to arhymthic compositions with no tune at all in the style of 1970s performance art.

With his get-down-boogie dancing, Evans is mirroring the intention of Baldessari himself who was in 1972 trying to reach out to the public by translating another strange artifact. Baldessari's singing was a delivery of the premises of conceptual art written by Sol Lewitt.

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
Formal art is essentially rational.
Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.

The sentences(there are 35 of them in all) don't seem to be written for a popular audience. But that didn't stop Baldessari and now Evans from bringing them to those who wouldn't engage or understand. Evans not only translates each sentence into a dance move from American popular culture. His exhibit also allows the viewer to use a controller to scroll through and choose which dances/sentences to experience. Evans writes, "It may be the case that after selecting the dances you will experience additional enjoyment brought on through a principle of choice-supportive bias."

It seems to me the exhibit does interesting work. It assumes the value of connecting new people with the historical work of conceptual artists. But this connection is made with a good dose of humor, more familiar parts of American culture, and also through gesture and the body. The disarming, enlivening dancing by Evans mediates a problematic relationship between the American public and the cultural heritages they either ignore or cannot access.

The user-oriented interface of the exhibit is another layer on top of that.

Sol DeWitt, Circle With Towers Via Artnet

Landmarks, our public art program on UT-Austin campus, recently helped to buy a major work of art by Sol LeWitt, "Circle with Towers." But the comments on the Landmarks press release indicate that conceptual art and the public still, at times, remain at an impasse. Those who posted comments against "Circle with Towers" argue that in a tight economy, the money used to purchase art would be better used on salaries, university technology, or anything else. The anti-art comments also question the aesthetic value and meaning of the Landmarks collection, which are mostly contemporary works of abstraction. On the other hand, the comments from art professionals and staff indicate the assumption that contemporary art has enduring value for the public. The whole purpose of the Landmarks program is to give people access (the art pieces are installed across UT campus). In their replies, the Landmarks staff post web links to multi-media support materials such as podcasts, written context, and images.

I believe the mini-controversy at UT shows that there is a bit of work to do in regards to engagement, but I believe personally that this presents a vital opportunity for us to reimagine our relationship to art in America in the new economy. I think Evans with his Stanky Legg is on to something. We need to engage art with our bodies. Also, I think we need to consider that we're not going to survive in a time of scarcity without digging into creative ways of thinking. It isn't going to work anymore to continue the status quo, and who better to show us that than artists like Lewitt who lived to upset it.

Being with Technology

Megan Eatman — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:25:55 +0000

Daniel Everett, detail ofGoals

Noel's post on tweeting with the body reminded me of Daniel Everett's work, which also deals with the intersections of man and machine. His pieces suggest, sometimes playfully, the myriad ways in which interaction with technology shapes selfhood.

Daniel Everett, two images from Search Queries

All three of the above images suggest the way the Internet in particular affects day-to-day life. While the first image, which invokes the consuming nature of online media, is amusing, the latter two seem somewhat darker. Their title plays on the frequent overlap of personal/emotional and online searching; if you have or think you might have a personal problem, you check the Internet first. Searching "self esteem" online may yield information that will actually help remedy low self esteem, but it also maintains the aloneness (if not actual loneliness) that can negatively affect happiness levels. I actually searched "something meaningful" and found a lot of self-help information which (depending on the particular advice) can also allow the individual to solve her problem without human contact. The spare, empty room in these words appear emphasizes the absence of others.

Daniel Everett, Speed Run

While I think Everett's work gets at the both personal and cultural functions of technology, I wonder what it would be like if it were more immersive. While these images invoke formative experiences with technology, they keep the viewer at a distance; they therefore draw attention to how certain media (photography, for example) work differently than others. How might someone accomplish similar arguments, but within a more interactive space? What work does the recognition of immersion through a more distant viewing experience do?

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...

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.

"What Exactly is Mediated Content?"

noelradley — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:48:55 +0000

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

Click play, and you're smack in the middle of composing, as Jason Dockter, PhD student at Utah State University, creates a digital ethnography of skateboarding sub-culture. His website Going Multi-Modal documents, as Dockter writes, "the process that I went through creating multimodal composition similar to what I might ask students in my first-year composition course to create in a future semester." You can watch the digital iMovie take shape from the beginning, through several...different...stages of production, and through to the end. (The example piece is embedded after the break.)

Image Credit: Jason Dockter 'Going Multi-Modal'

I recently came across the skateboarding project while trying to answer--"What exactly is mediated content?"-- a question raised (for me) by compositionist Cynthia Selfe.Last year, Selfe came to UT-Austin campus to give a talk "Stories That Speak to Us: The Intellectual and Social Work of Literacy Narratives & Digital Archives."At a morning coffee with graduate students, she offered some advice about publishing, New Media, and composition. She said that a key to getting hired in today's market was working in "mediated content." To explain what what she meant, she talked about the digital press she had recently founded, and she commended the work of Cheryl Ball of Illinois State University.

Selfe, speaking to graduate students about publication, was talking about mediated scholarship. She was indicating that our work should be crafted in digital formats with critical reflection on media available to communicate our arguments. But as a influential scholar in composition and literacy, I assumed that Selfe also meant that we should be teaching students to produce mediated content. The continuum between the work of our teaching and the work of publication, I inferred, should foster these same skills and concepts. And it's the work of Cheryl Ball that perhaps best illustrates the connection between research and pedagogy (see her teaching philosophy). In a 2007 interview below, Ball argues for greater attention to scholarly publication in online formats, and she also discusses student New Media work in her English classes.

Video Credit: Ben McCorkle

I won't attempt to summarize the extensive contributions Cheryl Ball has made to Computers and Writing, but the Kairos online journal she edits, along with Doug Eyman, is possibly the site for sorting out what mediated content means in our field.And it was Ball's online tenure application that led me to (among other productions) the skateboard-ethnographizing by Jason Dockter. Dockter produced the website for Ball's online graduate class Multi-Modal Composition in the Spring of 2009. The meme continues forward from here.

On viz. this year, we'll continue to ask: "What exactly is mediated content?"Although a seeming commonplace in Computers and Writing, defining mediated content is not simple. The skills, aesthetics, and ethics of this kind of production are not readily apparent, although these modes are in existence and better known to some of us than others of us. For those of us whose scholarship still seems framed by residual print concepts, we're eager to learn more about what the shift to "mediated scholarship" means for our thinking and our teaching. In the Visual Rhetoric project this year, we're hoping to answer the questions of mediation through action: producing mediated content with our students and, as well,producing research for digital formats. We'll document these activities on the viz. blog, so stay connected. Please send your comments our way, as well, as we attempt to tap in to discourses others of you are so intrepidly trailblazing.

DWRL Flash Workshop Friday, September 24

noelradley — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:11:29 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles

Computing and New Media Technologies UWSP

For those of us wondering what it means to compose in New Media, one answer appears to be Flash. Visit Wanted Dead or Alive by Scott Cowles for a seriously funny example of a student Flash project. Fellow Flash neophytes should also know about Anthony Ellertson 's "New Media Rhetorics in the Attention Economy" from C & C Online. Ellertson discusses the advantages of Flash and showcases student Flash "essays." And yes, as the title of this blog entry indicates, the DWRL UT-Austin is sponsoring a Flash workshop this Friday. The workshop announcement is after the break...Stay tuned for more on Flash and New Media composing in the coming weeks on viz.

Workshop Announcement:

You could have the slickest presentation at the conference! All you need to do is mark your calendar cause Scott Nelson continues his workshop-series on *Flash* this *Friday, September 24th, at 2 pm in FAC 7*. Last week, Scott showed us how to use some of Flash's basic tools for drawing. This week, he will cover the basics of movie clips and graphic symbols, and how to nest them to create animations. If you weren't able to make it last week, no problem, as no prior knowledge is necessary for this week's workshop. Don't miss this opportunity to make your pretty pictures move!

"Cinematic Sound" and "Acoustic Portraits": DJ Spooky's Art

noelradley — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:58:17 +0000

Image Credit: DJ Spooky, "Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica," 2008

Via Robert Miller Gallery H/T Sean McCarthy

Last year, at about this time, I was writing my very first viz. blog post. In 2009, the series of photographs that had caught my attention were about ice fishing in the northern United States. The ice of the northern lakes, it seemed, had begun to diminish. New York-based photographer Maureen Drennan had been featured in the Times DotEarth Blog for the work of photos she called Thin Ice. I loved Maureen's shots of the fishing shacks and the people there, because they seemed potentially transformative, depicting the intimate textures of human life affected by climate change. My first post this year again returns to imagery of ice. Over dinner this weekend, one of my friends described DJ Spooky's latest performances on Antarctica, replete, he said, with stunning images. (The penguins above do have a point, after all. See after the break).

Image Credit: Screenshot of DJ Spooky performing Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

The iconic, militarized penguins with bomber planes above them in formation are part of a series of ink jet posters by Spooky, who visited Antarctica in 2007 and returned to create rich multi-media formats about the world's largest, and most threatened, mass of ice. One part of the project was recording and then remixing the sounds of ice, penguins, artic waves, etc. Other parts of the project included creating original art work, collaging Getty images of Antarctica, sampling 'ephemera' of Artic explorers, and revisiting a 20th century symphony on Antarctica, complete with a collaboration with a pianist, cellist, and violinist. Many who have heard of D.J. Spooky (aka Paul Miller) associate him with innovative, genre-bending turn-tabling, much of which he creates in collaboration with heavy hitters in a variety of musical fields, such as jazz and hip hop. Spooky has been performing, writing, and recording music since the 1990’s. But increasingly Spooky has become known for creations that stretch beyond the work of acoustics (his initial emphasis and the origin of the first part of his moniker“DJ”); he also becoming more widely recognized for his artistic multi-media formats and, as well, for scholarly writings.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

In October—sponsored by the Digital Writing and Research Lab and others here at UT-Austin—Spooky will be giving one of the large scale performances he has become known for as of late. The DWRL and Spooky have dubbed it a “Rip, Mix, Burn” event, a lecture that will highlight Spooky’s multi-media work, as well as his latest academic writing. Sound UnBound, a 2008 imprint of MIT features Spooky as editor with multitude of voices on sound, intellectual property, and the economics of 21st century media. The themes of Spooky's late work resonate with those of us invested in theorizing media, and also in those of us invested in crossing disciplines. Like us, Spooky wants the disciplines to start talking to each other.

Image Credit: subliminalspooky

'DJ Spooky on Secret Song

Spooky's work attempts to blur the supposed boundaries between art and economics, for example. As he says in the interview below on Secret Song, an album that was a work of film and music, "The album was inspired by philosophers, economists, and, above all, a will to bring them all together.” Spooky's art itself is premised on the "juxtaposition of radically different materials." I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from the Secret Song interview, a quote that justifies writing about a musician on my first viz. post of the year: “Art and music are compellingly connected," Spooky said."There is nothing that separates them. Nothing[...]The world is a complex and compellingly linked place.” '

Challenging a Youtube Video Take Down

noelradley — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:58:31 +0000

Image Credit: Know Your Meme H/T Hampton Finger

This youtube video explains the difference between fair use and copyright infringement involving Youtube videos. It also shows how to dispute the take-down of your video on Youtube, if you have created a fair use work.

Steve in Action

timturner — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:15:10 +0000

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.)

Through this collaboration, the DWRL and the Blanton are conducting a study that explores how undergraduate students use software (like those provided by social media sites such as Flickr or Facebook) to tag digital images of abstract works of art. We are particularly interested in exploring what type of language undergraduate students use to respond to abstract art, and how tagging art alters students' experience and understanding of the artwork. This study will have implications for understanding social tagging as it is used in art and writing instruction. In addition, the project should serve as a way to understand the greater implications of social tagging as it investigates students' abilities to produce forms of knowledge in other areas based on skills learned in the literature, composition, or art classroom.

Although the Steve in Action team believes that its research into the value of social tagging to enhance finding will prove a significant contribution to our community’s understanding of social tagging and access to abstract art, the constraints of deploying the Steve in Action tagging tools in an artificial environment structured specifically to answer research questions have made it difficult for the Steve in Action team to develop authentic and engaging tagging activities and interfaces and thus to begin to examine another series of questions about social tagging. We are keenly interested in questions of motivation and in understanding how social tagging engages and rewards the visitor; in gauging the uses and benefits of social tagging for institutions and their visitors; and in measuring what kinds of support and resources are required by institutions hoping to institute social tagging practices.

As part of a major research university, we extend the research on tagging initiated by the Steve in Action team to look at a primary audience we serve, undergraduate students, and to learn about what language they use to describe and categorize works of art that use abstraction. We hope to use the data we collect from this research to inform museum education practices at the Blanton and to share with faculty who use this content to teach undergraduates.

Currently, the study is its first phase, which asks students to look at a collection of digital images and read contextual information about them if they choose. They then answer a series of questions about the experience. The survey collects information about how students responded to the art and asks them to describe the experience of looking at it, and also to engage in a small writing exercise by defining abstract art and retitling three of the images. You can explore the interface here.

We record the language these undergraduate subjects use to describe abstract art in order to help museum professionals and educators assess what university students find interesting, understand, or misunderstand about such art. We hope that the data we collect will provide information about how social tagging technology mediates students' experience of images and helps them translate visual meaning into verbal descriptions.

The second phase of the project will ask student to tag the digital images using the social-tagging interface designed by the Steve Project. It will likely be implemented in the fall of 2010.

Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan

noelradley — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:28:16 +0000

Image Credit: Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty

H/T Seeing and Writing 3

For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above. Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present. I have a heart for this image. The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992). Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo: "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."

View Larger Map

The search results in the map above, which I think shows some potential uses for Googlemaps streetview function as a way for students to connect to documentary photography. Does this help us locate the documentary photo? Does it give a greater sense of the place's materiality? Does this complicate or compound Sternfeld's original message about urban decay and social injustice? In what ways is the place the same, and how it is different?

The Glee Effect: New Media Marketing for Old Institutions

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:52:57 +0000

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds! After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz. I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all. My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

While I might critique the video for what seems to me to be an excessive length (it’s over 14 minutes, and starts to drag during the long list of student activity groups), what I find fascinating about this is that what seems to be one of the most traditional American universities is choosing to brand themselves using the most current cultural trends: the YouTube viral video and the unexpected musical. While Andrew Johnson, the Yale graduate who dreamed up the idea, disclaims that he was influenced by shows like Glee and High School Musical, the “campiness” noted by Matthew Nojiri of ABC seems very influenced by Glee’s particular brand of snark and softness.

What Nojiri doesn’t discuss is that these attempts to advertise colleges are a long-standing trend. A former professor of mine, Mark Edmundson, wrote a wildly controversial essay called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students” for Harper’s in September 1997 which critiqued universities for marketing themselves to students “immersed in a consumer mentality.” This ad does just that, selling things like Yale’s residential colleges (and their organic meals) alongside experiences like “monitor[ing] a foreign election. / And now I volunteer at a law school clinic on human rights protection.” While both things might appeal to a student body, there’s something uncomfortable about suggesting that the university is another fashionable purchase to make alongside a Wii or a hipster shirt, or that volunteering at law school clinics is cool because cute girls do it while sitting in fabulous new buildings.

Glee, as I’ve already noted, markets itself as dramatic irony; what is more interesting about the Glee
phenomenon is how successfully it has turned itself not only into a popular television show, but also an iTunes phenomenon where individuals can buy cast recordings of the songs, and season DVDs before the season is even fully finished. Taking advantage of the appeal of old 80s songs and new R&B htis, Glee is helping make FOX serious money in a time when media conglomorates are trying to find ways to monetize the web. While it’s understandable that in a time of financial crisis even Ivies like Yale want to seek out the greatest number of possible undergraduates to fund their coffers, there’s something disturbing about a university marketing itself like a musical. Is the slick marketing of “That’s Why I Chose Yale” a little too knowing? What is the substance underneath which this video is meant to express? Or is it a good sign that professors seem to be rethinking what they're doing as not merely educating, but selling valuable skillsets and educational services for a newly media-savvy generation? Maybe Yale's Glee-ification is just all in good honest American fun, like the musical itself.

New Media Pedagogy & Visual Rhetoric

EmilyBloom — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:42:02 +0000

Image Credit: Mary Lucier, "The Plains of Sweet Regret" (North Dakota Museum of Art. Photo: Rik Sferra)

As more individuals and organizations are using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other sites to engage in debate, express viewpoints and organize politically, instructors are incorporating these new media into the rhetoric classroom. How can studying new media enhance rhetorical thinking and writing? What is the relationship between new media and visual rhetoric? What problems do instructors and students face when adapting traditional rhetorical concepts to new media? Are assignments possible that not only analyze but also utilize new media? What are students' expectations concerning new media assignments and how might they conflict with our goals as instructors?

The following assignments and discussions suggest a range of approaches to these questions and offer innovative strategies for teaching the visual, textual, and auditory rhetorics of new media.

YouTube

Jim Brown (Wayne State University): “YouTube and Detroit—State of the Debate”

Alexandra Juhasz (Pitzer University): Viz blog post regarding "Learning from YouTube"

Bill Wolff (Rowan University): "Oral History Video Composition"

Facebook

Josi Kate Berry (UT): “My Facebook Ethos”

Mark Fullmer (Fullerton College): “Theorizing Facebook in the Classroom”

GoogleMaps

DWRL (UT): "The Geo-Everything Project"

Jeremy Dean (UT): “Map Three Readings”

Eileen McGinnis (UT): “Mapping Galapagos”

Podcasting

Kevin Bourque (UT): “The CWRL Guide for Podcasting in Pedagogy”

Lydia French (UT): “Community Podcast/ Video Group Assignment”

Megan Little (UT): “Recording Good Ideas in Oral Peer Review”

Paige Normand (Badger Dog & The Undergraduate Writing Center): “The Pagecast Process"

Twitter

David Parry (UT Dallas): "Twitter for Academia"

David Silver (University of San Francisco): "Twitter Assignment"

Flickr

Eileen McGinnis (UT): “Using Flickr to Teach Visual Rhetoric”

Mixed Media

Ingrid Devilliers (UT): “Showcasing/Peer Editing Student Drafts and Public Arguments Using Technology”

John Jones (UT): “Translation Assignment”

Literacies: Visual and Auditory

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

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.

Teaching You Tube

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

Image Credit: You Tube

H/T: Noel Radley

Image Credit: You Tube

Visual Tweets

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

Image credit: From YouTube
H/T to A Mutual Respect

Full confession: I just joined Twitter about 30 minutes ago. However, for considerably longer, I've been curious about the significance of Twitter's text-based 140-character format. Although Twitter contains some visuals such as profile pictures and links, it is primarily a print-based medium. The viewer experiences Twitter posts, or tweets, as a wall of sentences. While tweets are themselves primarily textual in nature, two recent videos offer visual interpretations that play with the relationship between image and text.

The first, by http://markfullmer.com/ ">Mark Fullmer, uses the 140-character constraint of tweets to take on the most iconic of American genres-- the road odyssey. In the video for Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey, Fullmer voices these micropoetic tweets over black and white footage of the passing scenery. The video begins with the image of a twitter feed, but most of the subsequent imagery focuses on the western landscape. Once on the road, Fullmer shows himself jotting his words onto a pad of paper as he drives. In the sense that Fullmer writes rather than texts his words on the journey, tweets become a poetic constraint rather than a new media per se.

Image credit: From The Washington Post on YouTube
H/T to Kevin Bourque

A very different visual interpretation of tweets is the Washington Post satire of celebrity tweets called “Twits." In this series of visual/text juxtapositions, actors read celebrity tweets with all the pomp of a Masterpiece Theatre production. Emphasizing the grammatical mistakes, bizarre punctuation and tonal oddity of these tweets, the actors illustrate not only the strangeness of celebrity but also, the absurdity of our interest in them.

Together, these videos led me to think about the nature of the tweet and the kinds of restraints, opportunities and follies it engenders. As Fullmer says in Tweet Tweet, “A tweet is not a text, not haiku, not a telegraph. Stop. A tweet is.” I’d be interested to see what other kinds of visual rhetoric and poetry the tweet may inspire. Is there any way to visually capture the back-and-forth quality of tweets? Can a visualized tweet recreate the immediacy of the ever-changing updates?

Digitizing Revolution

timturner — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:33:05 +0000

Image credit: mousavi1388 on Flickr

I wanted to call this post "The Revolution will be Twittered," but Andrew Sullivan (whose coverage of the Iranian protests has been ongoing) beat me to it. But we could also have gone with "The Revolution will be liveblogged, YouTubed, or Flickred." Here in the states, the development of events in Iran has been accompanied by a critique of the (at least initial) lack of coverage on cable news and the widespread reliance on new media technology to cover the events of the protests. In this case, it's hard to ignore the power/potential of these technologies in getting information out of a country that has tried to close its digital borders by shutting down Internet access and intensifying restrictions against foreign media correspondents.

Further, the Iranian regime only seemed to confirm this power when, on the day of the election itself, cellular-, texting-, and social networking-access were all shut down by the state. I've been somewhat skeptical, in the past, about the social and/or democratic potential of social networking technology, but when even the oppressor grants this premise, it becomes difficult to sustain skepticism.

For more on the possible implications of this technology for events in Iran, see this analysis by Haroon Siddique or this one by Marc Ambinder. For more images of the protests, check out tehranlive.org or in mousavi1388's photostream on Flickr.

And in light of these events it is difficult not to think of Tiananmen Square, perhaps because the twentieth anniversary of that abortive uprising just recently passed. Tiananmen has come retrospectively to be symbolized by the iconic photograph of a single individual staring down a row of oncoming tanks. It's difficult not to wonder whether those events might have unfolded differently if they had occurred in our more thoroughly digitized, socially networked age. It's also hard not to see (or at the very least fervently hope for) the truly revolutionary power of these tools for democratic reform.

In a small coincidence, June 12, the date of the elections in Iran, also happened to be the day of the official transition to digital television transmissions in the U. S. We've obviously been living in the digital era much longer than a few days, but the end of analog television (the definitive technology of the twentieth century, I guess, along with the atom bomb), marks something like a watershed moment in the history of mass media technology (and thus public culture in general). But the deluge of information pouring out of Iran almost certainly marks a digital revolution of another sort, and in many senses.