viz.

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: 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.

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:  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.

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:  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."

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.”

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”

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: 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.