conference paper

My conference paper has been posted on my blog. I made it a google doc and it offered to post on my blog. I htought it would just provide a link to it, but it is an actual posting:) Click title to go to my blog.

Final Project Ahoy

Here ya go...

(no frills)

(Re)Defining Rhetoric

Posted on Oakspace. YouTube said it was too big, as did the blog.

(Re)Defining Rhetoric: De-Scribing the Privileged Narrative with Digital New Media

(Re)Defining Rhetoric: De-Scribing the Privileged Narrative with Digital New Media

Our 15-minute iMovie questions traditional definitions of text and ways of reading, redefines digital text as auditory, visual, and intercultural, offers a new rhetoric through which to read new texts, and argues that rhetoric and composition pedagogy that disrupts privileged, linear narratives and requires digital, new media work benefits students by emphasizing critical thinking and multiculturalism.

Melanie will focus on intersections of auditory and visual rhetoric represented by Joan Osborne’s Spider Web and selected images and quotes, introduce Spider Web rhetoric as a way to read and compose digital new media texts. What distinguishes Spider Web rhetoric from other rhetorical theories is its ideological grounding: it originates from a pre-"historic" Pagan system of beliefs that value feminine and masculine principles equally and questions the origins of text.

Russ will focus on the importance of teaching critical thinking of new media and new media literacy because of the cultural emphasis upon it, how it shapes our identities, and the growing volume of communication within the associated domains. Furthermore, Teaching new media literacy leads to connections between affinity groups by encouraging the appreciation of their internal language and understanding their cultural/professional significance because of its ability to convey meaning in a more detailed, multi-modal way. Also, this opens the door to transfer problem solving methods from one affinity group to the next.

Todd will begin by focusing on traditional definitions of concepts such as rhetoric and text. After doing so, he will then move on to discuss how emerging technologies complicate our understandings of these concepts. In an age where digital media plays such an important part in so many of our lives, we, as rhetorical thinkers, must become aware of how and why certain rhetorics and texts maintain a privileged position in our society. The goal of his portion of the Imovie will be to demonstrate how we bring our own unique cultural backgrounds to texts. Through a brief exploration of hip-hop culture’s influence on American culture, Todd will explore how factors such as race, gender, and class play a part in our understanding of the rhetorical aspects of these texts.

PROJECT OUTLINE

"(Re)Defining Rhetoric: De-Scribing the Privileged Narrative with Digital New Media"

3 min

The Value of Text and its Origins

Montage: The thinking man, Aristotle (Orator MP3 too), quill, pen, pencil, press, Word Processing, web page, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, mayan alphabet, ogham script.

Make a distinction between traditional next and new media texts

Rhetoric = Text = Literacy (images of definitions)

• The Essay, its importance, its impact on ourselves as writers and our audiences.

3 min

But Technology Had Other Plans for Text...

Define: New Media Domain and Multi-Modal Discourse.

Montage(New Media Domains): Web pages (extensive list to be generated), video (extensive list to be generated), Power Point, etc.

• Volume of communication in New Media domains to be reckoned with. Also shows how text is at the foundations of these domains. Because text is at the foundation of these domains then English Studies cannot ethically turn away from educating students to think critically of New Media domains.

3 min

Now we have a question to ask ourselves. Are we ready to teach our English students (Digital) literacy in New Media domains?

• Resistance within English Studies to expanding New Media use and lessons. Irrational fear it will replace text? (McDavid quote – text will take on new purposes, “build recursively on its predecessor”)

Quote from C Selfe -

We have to embrace the technology and find out what it has to teach us.

Quote from Alexander -

Our youth are shaping their identities not so much in the classroom, but in the popular domains such as the internet and its various media.

Quotes from Sirc and Wysocki -

7-8 min

Implications (and where we get to stretch our legs a bit as individual group members).

• If we do expand teaching digital literacy in New Media domains...

1. This is where Todd will discuss how hip-hop culture can allow composers to redefine concepts of rhetoric, literacy, and textuality through new media.

2. This is where Melanie will discuss spider-web rhetoric as a vehicle for composers to redefine concepts of rhetoric, literacy, and image (as text) through new media.

3. This is where Russ will discuss how new media literacy leads to new uses and applications for traditional text. Furthermore, teaching new media literacy leads to connections between affinity groups by encouraging the appreciation of their internal language and understanding their cultural/professional significance because of its ability to convey meaning in a more detailed, multi-modal way.

• If we don't expand teaching in new literacy domains...

Ø We will have a society of inactive thinkers and media will shape us rather than we will shape media.

MATERIALS (MEDIA) LIST

Collection

Montages –
The chronology of writing instruments shows not just evolution of writing, but a strong dependence on the foundation of it all, text: (thought to oration?) quill to pen, to press, pencil, type writer, word processor, web page (power point, video, audio recording?)

Images to accompany Hip-Hop rhetoric: instruments, bard, orator, (folklore, storytelling?), MC, Hip-Hop culture

Buzz words, military, law, politics, plumber, stocks, music, art


REMAINING DEVELOPMENTS

Interview shots? – Should each contributing author state some of their arguments grounded in an interview shot, maybe interspersed with montage and reference clips?
*-this is effective in how it humanizes the argument (can also be done with just a photo too)

The Poeticomic - Dave, Lydia, and Brett

In order to better understand the rhetorical possibilities of combining print media and new media, our project will take existing poems of ours and translate them into hypertext-laden comics. Within the comic-book-esque renditions of the poems themselves will be links to pertinent scholarship by Gunther Kress, Albert Rouzie, Myka Veillstemig, and Scott McCloud. The associative nature of this project stems from our interest in the traditional personal essay, and our belief in the lyrical, poetic possibilities of “the new essay” as defined by Viellstimig.

Our homepage will situate the poetry on a picture of a musty, yellowing book. Within the poems, numerous links will take us to discrete comic book scenes that will also be able to be viewed as a cohesive story.

We hope to be able to make this experience interactive; our three poems will line up thematically in a way that should allow the user to choose-her-own poem, choose-her-own-comic, choose her own way through the web of print media, new media, hypertextual link, traditional scholarship, and visual argument.

For instance, clicking on the first line of Lydia’s poem may bring us to a scene in a bowling alley. That page may have two linked options: continue in the poeticomic bowling alley, or choose the next line and comic scene from Dave’s poem (which will be thematically-linked and probably set in an Applebee’s). A third click might take the user to a picture of Albert Rouzie, animated: text here might read “POW KAZAAM, Take that you serio-villains; always be LUDIC. BLAMO.” The word “ludic” will link the user to a funny line from Lydia’s poem, back in the bowling alley (but this time with Zombies). We foresee productive challenges with this method that we will reflect on in “Dave Wanczyk Law Blog,” “Critical Pickle,” and "A Metanarrative."

To make our website, we will become well-versed in Dreamweaver, Comic-Life, Photoshop, and Photo Booth; we also hope to take advantage of the technology in the @lab for rendering our images.

Our process will be logged on RouzieWiki as well as RouzieBlog.

Comments and constructive criticism welcome.

A further note about our process: We will be drawing on some of the scholarship mentioned above to theorize our experience and its implications. I think Geoffrey Sirc's box logic will be particularly relevant and helpful, considering the many boxes involved in our potential project: boxes within the comic form, boxes as links, the blog and the wiki as separate but connected boxes, also we have begun to learn from our friend David Grover, and a bit from our virtual tutor Garrick Chow, about the invisible boxes containing our web design and floating above it to provide links to our other boxes. Boxes abound. We'll see what we can make of them.

Proposal Draft for Craig, Jules, and Rebecca

Snapshot and Snap Judgment:
Pulitzer Photographs, Theorists, and Interaction ... Oh My!

Pictures and figures have increasingly become a major component of literacy studies. Every day we see hundreds of images that provide information (news) or tacitly ask us to purchase a product. Sometimes, however, images are given stronger context by the text displayed with them such as the details surrounding the events of that brief moment in time. This presentation will explore the impact of textual notation on Pulitzer winning images between 2000 and 2007. Further, it will also explore impressions of these pictures without the textual explanations and how text changes the interpretation and meaning of the photographs. By using visual examples, this presentation will allow web surfers to interact with images both with text (thus, context) and without (con)text and also provide opportunities to discover how others interpret the same visual images.

Visual texts, photographic essays, and visual portfolios now pepper several composition and writing texts because they offer another option for teachers to engage students. To better utilize these compositions, we need to understand the psychological effect of images. Some images stop viewers and they want to know more. Others “provoke,” as Roland Barthes writes, “polite interest” (27). What is the fundamental difference between pictures that grab us and those that do not? One possible answer is provided by Barthes, he suggests, “Photography evades us” (4). The meaning of the image is lost because viewers are more dismissive of images. People see so many images; they are likely to make snap judgments about them, their context, and their meaning. This indifference distorts the realism of the image. This presentation will use a user-guided interface on the Web to solicit impressions of images, then provide original context for the images, and finally offer a space for viewers to detail their thoughts about the differences.

Susan Sontag explains, “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images” (349). Thus, pictures report reality to us. How images are interpreted is important because it is our construction of reality—in that one moment. That one moment may be supported by context or not, and the generation of that story—that (non)fiction of reality—needs to be explored. Sontag also writes, “Reality itself has started to be understood as a kind of writing” (354). The text, I think, she refers to is the context explored in this presentation. If Web viewers choose, this website will have a theoretical section where a discussion takes place by three theorists (portrayed by the designers/presenters) where they discuss a photograph based on their respective theoretical positions.

Therefore, this presentation will focus on some key questions. What impact does an image by itself have? Does this impact change with text? If so, in what ways? How does a viewer’s emotional response change with textual explanation or more information? How do theorists such as Sontag, Barthes, and Mitchell see the use of images? In responding to these questions, this work will provide an analysis of how visual literacy is exercised within our daily lives and through several theorists' interpretation. The goal of this presentation is to engage web viewers with how they interpret images and how a theoretical framework supports those interpretations.

A Web site will be created that will include interactive and theoretical components that demonstrate how "new" media and "old" media can combine to be productive facets of the proactive classroom.

Prospective audience: students and teachers of visual rhetoric, especially instructors who want to incorporate "new media" and visual rhetoric into the classroom but are unsure of the theories, books, images, or assignments available. This website will not only provide an interactive interpretive experience for the casual viewer, but will also provide instructors with an introduction to visual rhetoric and photography through (text)book reviews, helpful links, as well as entry-level assignments that have proven effective in the classroom.

Review of Marcel O'Gorman's Book

As part of my review, I have completed an assignment found in the O'Gorman text. Please, if you have time, review this link before class on Tuesday.
Thanks!
http://sites.google.com/site/introecrit1/Home

Best,
Craig