English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

We've made a lot of progress in the past few weeks. We met on April 1st and filmed the first scene in our machinima. We have plans to meet again this weekend to film the second scene and plan to record the audio on Monday. The website is moving along smoothly now that I've worked out a few of the kinks. The basic architecture is there and the modules have been uploaded and (fingers-crossed) correctly configured. I had to remove some modules that were causing problems. Unfortunately, there isn't a tagadelic module for the most recent (5.1) version of Drupal. I'm looking into the status of an upgrade. As far as I know, no one is currently working on one but there are some other options that would enable us to have a tag cloud. That's fairly minor, however. Overall, we should have acompleted project by some time next week!

I have completely reconstructed my project idea (hence, the new info entry) to account for my indecisiveness and my desire to simultaneously discuss and produce visual rhetoric. Much like my project, this entry is a hybrid, attempting to propose, clarify and inform. So, here it is (bereft of a pithy title):

My project explores the intersection between science and rhetoric as I attempt to use the findings of neurocognitive scientists and the strategies of visual rhetoric. First, I intend to present an exploration of the current scientific literature. The corpus is quite large, so I will try to choose the most representative works to include and provide additional resources for further study. I believe this to be a particularly important resource because many rhetoricians are less familiar with the primary sources of scientific inquiry and the temptation to rely upon more popular (yet certainly reliable) sources is great. Unfortunately, in writing for a lay audience, frequently publications like Scientific American are unable to present the important intricacies of the research. I don’t expect to be able to capture all of these myself but hope to design and promote the site so that scholars from different disciplines to contribute their knowledge to the site. This idea was inspired by Henry Jenkins report of Survivor fans who pool their knowledge in attempts to “spoil” the show. Although I find the intellectual work of fans to be valuable in its own right, I understand Jenkins point that if this kind of dedication and collaboration could be applied to something like the electoral process, it could result in significant political change. I hope to encourage the same kind of collaborative work among disciplines studying the visual.

When I received this week's Time magazine, I thought that the photo of Reagan looked a bit off, but since I find republicans generally uninteresting, I didn't look closer. (Plus, I'm pretty sure I had PoMo on the brain.) Anyway, I just saw this blog entry pointing out the interesting credits for the photo. The first credit acknowledges the photographer who took Reagan's photo and the second acknowledges the creator of the tear on his cheek! Time's response was even better. They compared that alteration of Reagan's photo to a previous cover of Cheney standing in front of rolling storm clouds (obviously fake). I wonder how Nancy feels about this. Of course, this kind of thing isn't new. Just a few weeks ago there was a magazine cover featuring Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama so that they appeared to be in the same photo but it too was photoshopped. (How fun is it that "photoshop" has become a verb.) Here's the magazine cover for Time March 24, 2007 and here's the blog entry about it. Or, you may want to read the article in Radar magazine. They've included an update at the bottom with Time's response. Oddly enough, a search of the Time website revealed nothing of this. I guess that Radar's readership is niche enough that they don't think its necessary to include it on their site.

I found this fun animation created to accompany an excerpt from Pulp Fiction. I really enjoyed the way that it makes use of text to accompany the dialogue. The visuals are entirely textual but very evocative. However, if you are offended by profanity or violence, then this is not the site for you. (Just to give fair warning) Here's the link.

I don't know how many of you are Moleskine fans, but I adore my little notebooks. (And if you've never heard of Moleskine, then I pity you and offer the following to enrich your life: the Moleskine website) While doing some visrhet research, I came across this little article that I thought might be interesting in the context of the paper vs screen debate (which, by the way, I proudly oscillate, turning my coat in and out as I shuffle between the two:)). I found it on The Wandering Moleskine Project website . It's a great site containing images of moleskine-user content. There's some exceptionally beautiful art, but the site architecture is less than optimal, so you'll have to scroll down some seriously loong pages:) Anyway, check out the article and the sites if you're interested. Oh, and the best part--the publication is a South African journal with the name Convergence. How awesome is that. The article is "Moleskine: or the Art of Taking Notice" and is attached below.

Here's another nifty item from GOOD magazine. They feature a short article on Hasan Elahi, a professor of art at Rutgers who was questioned by the FBI shortly after 9/11. He was continually harassed and repeatedly questioned, in Arabic, a language that he doesn't speak. This is unsurprising considering that he is Bangladeshi and not Arab. Afraid of being abducted during the night and spirited away to Guantanamo, he began tracking his own movements on his website Tracking Transience. It was a brilliant move. He documents all of his travel on this site, which currently includes a video feed of present location, a Google map indicating present location with flashing red arrow, and a series of photos of things like buildings, meals, and even urinals. If you click on any of the pictures, additional verification is provided in the form of a bank statement. When I clicked on the plate of spaghetti, a window listing the charge on his bank (or credit card?) statement appeared.

Ever since we started reading Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins has been popping up everywhere. He's quite the popular writer in the media sources that I frequent. The most recent sighting was in my new issue of GOOD magazine, which also happens to be a fairly new publication. They've just published their third issue and as a quick aside, I was a little suspicious of the quality prior to this issue but I've found this one useful. It's called "The Media Issue" and contains some interesting discussions that I recommend checking out. In fact, the print edition of the magazine is an enjoyable visual and tactile experience that the website cannot replicate, so I'd recommend picking up a copy. (Barnes and Noble carries it.)

I stumbled upon a site that might be a useful resource. It's similar to YouTube, although it's focus seems to be more on user content that documents events in ways different from the mass media. It's subtitle is "Redefining the Media." It doesn't seem to have as many random videos as YouTube. In other words, I haven't seen any videos of cats flushing toilets or chasing balls of string. I have seen a few of the "confessional" videos so prevalent on YouTube but these all seem to be vlogs that record commentary on current events. I haven't seen any personal diary kinds of vlogging. Also, according to their FAQ page, after users upload content, the video is approved by staff before becoming accessible on the site's public areas but is still available under the user's tag, which as far as I know is not YouTube's policy. LiveLeak also has some kind of point system to reward users for uploading videos and posting comments and punish them for posting unacceptable content. I'm not sure what these points confer on the user. I've looked through the YouTube site and haven't found anything similar, other than the ranking of videos using the star system, which are user-submitted and different from the point system on LiveLeak. Maybe someone with more YouTube knowledge can provide more insight on this.

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for the Second Life group. We met the Friday prior to break (March 9) and began scripting our machinima. We spent the afternoon drinking wine, eating cheese and writing clever and witty lines for our avatars. We scripted the first couple of scenes word-for-word and outlined the rest. Then Mark, our dear transcriber for the day, emailed a copy of the script to each of us and we are each working on the script individually and have plans to meet again and finalize the script. I've created a rough storyboard of our film to give us some visual guidance when we begin filming.

Clicking around on The Daily Prophet website, I found an announcement that the site had been reviewed in MIT's Technology Review (a fabulous magazine that I highly recommend).  Clicking on the link led me to an error page, but a quick site search for "daily prophet" revealed the aforementioned article and lo and behold, who authored it?  That's right, our very own Henry Jenkins.  Even better, the title of the piece is "Why Heather Can Write."  Sound familiar?