locations for the rest of the semester

Regular locations updated

• Tues 4/27: Nevada St Lab
• Thur 4/29: UGL
• Tues 5/4: Nevada St Lab Updated — normal Tuesday location

Final Project

Project 5 will be both a reflection on your previous projects as well as a reflection on how new media theory informed and informs how you think about these projects and the role of new media outside the classroom.

Your 4-person project groups will work together to create a new blog. On the blog, you will have pages for projects 1-5.

The page for project 1 will include a pic of each of your projects as well as a short (under 100 word) description of each stencil. Then there will be a longer written section (250-300 words) that will be coauthored by the group. Here you will reflect on selected differences and similarities between each of your projects and how this might be reflective of different or similar understandings of the role and possibilities of stencil graffiti.

On the page for project 2, you will actually remediate all four of your individual projects into a single photo essay and also write a 250-300 word group reflection that examines the same questions outlined above for the project 1 group reflection. The goal here is not to try to force these into a single photo essay that would be suitable for project 2. You have a different assignment here: you are to create a photo essay that explores each of your attitudes to the possibilities and limitations of photo essays. We talked about one possible topic in class: the use of text. The use of music could be another. In this way, the remediated photo essay should align with the group reflection. You are not limited to the images you used in project 2.

On the pages for project 3 and project 4, you will do pretty much the same as you did for the project 2 page: remediate you individual projects into a singe audio essay and video in order to explore what each of you were thinking in terms of the roles, possibilities and limitations of each project medium and also write 250-300 word reflection that explores the same questions in purely alphanumeric text form.

On the page for project 5, you will write a longer group reflection, at least 500 words. You will also select one of the media from projects 2-4 and create another photo essay, audio essay or video. Your job for both of these will be reflect on a selected small body of new media theory and how it fits with, or possibly (at least in part) against, your experience in and out of this class. Combining reflections on your own experience and knowledge with the concepts and claims in the body of new media scholarship you select is the key aspect of this final project so don’t be afraid to be critical but do back up your claims with evidence, which your own experience with new media can count as.

Here is a list of some new media scholarship:

Final Project Theory List

Classical Rhetoric:
Read Overview; choose between Brooks & Mara, Fleckenstein, or Rice; read Prior et. al. Core Text; and choose one Prior et. al. node to read

Ball and Hewett, Eds. Special Issue “Classical Rhetoric and Digital Communication: A Canon Blast into the Net” Kairos 11.3 Summer 2007.

Activity Theory:
Read Introduction; choose one article each from “Producing Work and the Economy,” “Producing Selves in Community,” and “Producing Education.” Bazerman and Russell, eds. Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives.

Genre Theory:
Read Introduction; Choose 3 articles
Bazerman, Bonini, and Figueiredo, eds. Genre in a Changing World.

Genre Theory II:
Bakhtin: The Problem of Speech Genres

Feminist Theory (and Technology):
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”
DeVoss, Danielle. “Rereading Cyborg(?) Women: The Visual Rhetoric of Images of Cyborg (and Cyber) Bodies on the World Wide Web”

Theories of Place:
Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World- Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon
Chapter 1: Geosemiotics
Chapter 4: Visual Semiotics
Chapter 5: Interlude on Geosemiotics

(Video)Game Theory:
Nakamura, Lisa. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft”
Murray, Janet. “Toward a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture.”
Brooker, Will. “Camera-Eye, CG-Eye: Videogames and the “Cinematic”

or, if you can get it:

James Paul Gee: Part 1 from What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Comic Theory:
Scott McCloud Understanding Comics (the rest of the book)

New Media Theory I:
Marshall McCluhan- “Part I” from Understanding Media

New Media Theory II:
Lev Manovich: Chapter 1 – “What Is New Media?” from The Language of New Media
Lev Manovich- Chapter 6. “What Is Cinema?” from The Language of New Media

Visual Rhetoric:
Ellen Lupton- Thinking With Type

Visual Rhetoric II
Roland Barthes- “Rhetoric of the Image”

Gunther Kress- “Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre”

Theories of Digital Democracy:
Robert Putnam: Bowling Alone (section 1 and thoroughly skim chapters 2, 3, & 4)

video minimum and maximum lengths

Make sure your video is between 5 and 6 minutes. Less than 5 is too short and more than 6 is not really necessary. You might want to make it longer, but the max of 6 minutes will require you to decide what is really necessary and what can be culled from your video.

story of stuff video

Here’s a cool video:

schedule updated; video projects due 4.15

See the schedule page for the updated due date and other info for the video and final projects. Let me know if you have any questions.

Video Project; No class 3.30; Sub on Thursday 4.1

Note: I have not yet updated the schedule to reflect these changes, so disregard it for the time being. We will be doing all the readings listed so it would be a good idea to keep up with them, but we will not be discussing them next Tuesday.

As I mentioned before break, we will not meet today. However, Jon, the instructor of another section of WAM has agreed to be there for class this Thursday, 4.1.

Thursday will be a workshop day for you to decide on a topic and see if you have any questions. I have intermittent online access but can access my email over my phone so that’s probably the best way to ask me questions. Also, during class, Jon can call me.

Send me a proposal of (300-400 words) explaining your topic and ways you might approach making a video about it by 4pm Saturday.

The project groups will select a topic, subject, problem, question, issue, institution, organization, person or place that is locally anchored. This means that while the scope of your subject can include campus, it must also go beyond our university setting. However, it must still be local — basically, an average person must be able to comfortably ride a bike to the relevant space and back.

That effectively limits the scope to the immediate Champaign-Urbana area. It does not have to include a university angle, but it can. It does have to have something to do with the local community.

One way to go could be to tie a national issue to local people or organizations. For instance, you could investigate immigration questions and/or labor issues through the lens of local people, groups, organizations or institutions.

Or, you could choose a subject that has a purely local focus such as campus safety or enforcement of drinking laws. Just remember to go beyond the borders of campus and tie it to the outside community.

To save time and because of our somewhat limited access to cameras, each project group will collaborate on shooting video after you settle on a topic. Then, each project group will split into pairs. Then each of the pairs will work together to make the video project. So, while you will work with the three other members of your project group to shoot the video, you will work with one other person to create the video for this project.

Refer to the project groups page; the first two people in each group will form one pair and the second two will form the other pair. That means that, since there are five project groups, we will end up with 10 videos — two from each project group made individually by each pair after collaborating on shooting the video.

If you want, you can stake out different areas to focus on, but as before, I’m not concerned about any overlap that might occur.

project 3 deadline extended one week

I’m moving the project 3 due date back a week. It will now be due on Mar 16. I’ll update the schedule to reflect this change shortly.

dirpy: extracting audio mp3s from youtube videos

Here’s a link that will make your life easier.

Go to dirpy, search using terms just as you’d conduct a youtube search, and then scroll down and click to download it as an mp3.

linking to your audio essay from your blog

1. Go to your netfiles page at UIUC (everybody has one):
   • https://netfiles.uiuc.edu
2. Click the upload button and find your mixed and finished file and upload it to your netfiles account.
3. Click in the box next to your file so that a check mark appears, then click on the share button in the top menu.
4. You don’t need to worry about specific users, you want it to be shared with anyone, so click “next” through the first screen
5. Select the circle that says public/view, then click finish
• Once you have changed the share status of your file, it should say “everyone” in the “shared to” category in the menu.
6. Select the file again and select manage/summary in the top menu.
• The unique link address to your file is found next to “Full URL”
7. Copy the “full URL” link
8. Go to your project 3 page
9. Click on the “link” button above the text entry box
10. Paste the netfiles “Full URL” link into the field in the pop up screen
11. Be sure to click “publish”

Questions from Shipka

1. What, specifically, is this piece trying to accomplish—above and beyond satisfying the basic requirements outlined in the task description? In other words, what work does, or might, this piece do? For whom? In what contexts?
2. What specific rhetorical, technological, and material choices did you make in service of accomplishing the goal(s) articulated above?—This is the longest section of the student’s statement of goals and purposes as it is comprised of all the specific choices he/she made in his/her work.
3. Why did you end up pursuing this plan as opposed to others you may have thought of? How did the various choices listed above allow you to accomplish things that other sets or combinations of choices would not have?—For the majority of the tasks assigned students need to come up with three or four plans of action, or alternate goal structures, for approaching the task.
4. Who and/or what helped you accomplish your goals?

Jody Shipka, “Sound engineering: Toward a theory of multimodal soundness,” Computers and Composition 23 (2006) p 360.