Authentic Audio Composing Experiences

My current digital writing graduate students are currently embarking on an audio project. They are all experimenting with various genres and exploring a range of topics. They will no doubt become outstanding pieces of digital writing.

My last year’s digital writing students composed such amazing audio projects that I couldn’t let the world not engage with them! I offered them the opportunity to compose a collaborative webtext for the discipline’s leading multimedia journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. They were very in to the idea, and we spent a significant amount of time working on it after the course ended. I’m so happy to say that our article “Navigating the Soundscape, Composing with Audio,” will be published in the praxis section of Kairos in August.

I feel a significant amount of pressure (totally self-induced) to offer a similar opportunity to this year’s digital writing crew not only because their projects are sure to rock (their first projects blew me away), but situating them within a publication also renders an authentic writing experience. It takes student-composers’ work out of school-based, faux-like genres and into extracurricular genres with real-life rhetorical situations wherein they are positioned as composers (not student-composers). An authentic writing experience is infinitely better to teach the rhetorical nature of writing, the idea that writing matters (matters to writers, but also to others and to the public) and is meaningful (to the self and to others).

With that said, I’m dedicating this post to venues where students may think of trying to publish their work.

The Drum: A Literary Magazine for Your Ears
The magazine “publishes short fiction, essays, poetry, novel excerpts, and interviews exclusively in audio form. Works are organized not only genre but also by theme and length. The themes include: comedy, crisis, family, and relationships. Works can be small (under 10 minutes), medium (under 20 minutes), large (under 30 minutes) and extra large (max 40 minutes). Here are submission guidelines.

The Missouri Review
The journal identifies itself as the “most highly-regarded literary magazines in the Univted States.” It has a yearly “Miller Audio Prize” where audio works in humor, prose, poetry and documentary are considered for a prize. The deadline just passed for this year, but next year is always a possibility.

Snap Judgement
They publish radio stories. Here are some helpful guidelines for thinking about composing in this genre and submitting work.

Studio 360
This radio show is “public radio’s smart, fun, and provocative window on pop culture and the arts. Listen to surprising conversations, performances, and stories from across the spectrum of art and culture. Share your stories or your show ideas with us by sending an email or a recorded voice memo to studio360@wnyc.org.”

The below journals call for composing and writing about audio projects.

Copper: Journal of Music and Sound
Copper “is a magazine about music: the sound of it, the feel of it, the emotion of it and the people who create it.” It publishes work by “musicians engineers, philosophers, audio designers, historians and people who love music both live and recorded. Although these articles seemingly have little sound included, I imagine it must be an option.

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture
This journal is a “refereed journal devoted to contemporary theories of rhetoric, writing and culture” that invites multimedia projects. Here are the submission guidelines.

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 
This journal is a “refereed open-access online journal exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy.” They publish “”webtexts,” which are texts authored specifically for publication on the World Wide Web.” Here are submission guidelines.

Itineration: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture
This journal is “an international, refereed publication devoted to mapping the intersections of rhetoric, media, and culture. They publish multimedia texts and are “interested in projects that push the boundaries in their composition and presentation.” Here are submission guidelines.

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion
This “is an interactive digital magazine dedicated to exploring rhetoric in everyday life. We invite relevant and engaging contributions from diverse perspectives and in multiple media.” Here are submission guidelines.

AIR’s Pitch Page lists people and places that acquire work from audio freelancers.

Narratively is devoted to original and untold human stories, delivered in the most appropriate format for each piece, from writing to short documentary films, photo essays, audio stories and comics journalism. We are always interested in adding new, diverse voices to the mix and we pay for stories.

The Establishment is is looking to unearth overlooked stories, produce original reporting, and provide a platform for voices that have been marginalized by the mainstream media. And yes, we want your humor, wit, and good old-fashioned satire, too. We publish originally reported features, interviews, long-form journalism, personal essays, and multimedia of all shapes, sizes, and creeds.

Truthout is works to spark action by revealing systemic injustice and providing a platform for transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis. With a powerful, independent voice, we will spur the revolution in consciousness and inspire the direct action that is necessary to save the planet and humanity.

Transom: We’re looking for great radio – things that are less heard, different styles, new voices, new ways of telling, and any other good pieces that haven’t found another way onto public radio.

Player FM is the multi-platform podcast app that helps you find shows on the topics you care about and play them at your convenience, even when you’re offline.

I’ll continue my hunt for more venues, and in the meantime, get in touch if you know of any not on this list!

Playing With Sound

For the past year, and more intensely this past month, I’ve been thinking about the role of play in the composing process. For simplicity’s sake (despite the fact I’m seeking to complicate it later when I write in another venue ), I’m thinking about play primarily in the way Henry Jenkins defines it: “the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.” Experimenting, testing, trying out, finding a fit, making a connection, and ultimately figuring out if something works in a way that helps you achieve your task. Play and reflection are intimately connected: you cannot play without ultimately asking yourself: Does it work? Why does it work? Does it not work? Why does it not work? Perhaps one might even argue that reflection–which has been understood as an active knowledge-making process (Dewey, Schon)–is an instrumental part of play. Perhaps one might even argue that play can’t indeed be play unless there’s a reflective component. Interestingly, reflecting has been identified as a metacognitive activity, and metacognition has been identified as a habit of mind that is needed for success in college (and I could argue life in general). Writing and reflecting on one’s writing is a way to help build metacognition, but the more I think about it, the more I think fostering an environment that encourages, nurtures, and rewards play may indeed be more effective than reflection activities alone.

I’ve seen the value of play at work, specifically in audio projects my graduate students composed last year in a digital writing course. I’m writing a conference paper right now (that is hopefully the seed for a new article), and I’m making an argument that sound uniquely affords the opportunity for play: play with genre, play with technology, play with rhetoric, and play with disciplinary intersections. From my students’ work, I realized that play not only helped students learn more about writing and rhetoric, but it also helped them “problem-solve” or in other words, work to achieve their own goals for the project. In this case, they achieved a wide range of personal and professional goals, which was exactly what I’d hoped for–they used the projects to create and execute their own learning and writing experiences.

But what is it about audio projects that are different than other multimodal and multimedia projects like videos? Undoubtably, composers play when they work with video–they play with layering, juxtaposition, combinations of various modalities; they play with color, with font, with transitions, time, pacing; they play with their assets–clipping, chopping, cutting, splicing, rearranging; and they play with various ways to help them find assets. There’s a lot to play with. So much so that play may feel overwhelming, tedious or maybe even not fun in the least bit if you’re a novice digital composer. While much of the play mentioned above can also be applied to audio play, I do think audio offers more productive and interesting play for a couple of reasons. I’ll talk about one here.

The aural mode can be uniquely isolated from other modes. Unlike a documentary that embodies multiple modes–alphabetic, linguistic, aural, visual, spatial, an audio drama embodies linguistic and aural (or orality, aurality, and vocality), which I tend to lump together anyway.

I hear my critics–all texts are multimodal. Modes don’t work in isolation.

I hear ya, I hear ya.

Audio projects emerge largely from scripts (alphabetic mode) and sounds like crickets or doors slamming harken the visual–the source of where it came from. (Interestingly, Emily’s Oz comes to mind and really challenges the relationship between the “what-is” and the “what-it-sounds-like” and so does Erin Anderson’s work on vocality) Yet ultimately, the audio project is comprised of aurality, orality and vocality, all of which can be categorized under the aural mode. Thus when novice digital composers work with audio, it’s a more manageable task with regard to rhetorical choices. Rather than considering the vast sea of modalities, their affordances,  their constraints, and the infinite number of rhetorical strategies inherent in, between and among these modalities, a composer of audio has less to work with, and thus the task becomes more manageable, especially when a composer works with a limited number of sonic rhetorical strategies (such as silence, music, voice, sound interaction, and sound effects). I am absolutely not saying that composing with audio is easier or less demanding or less intellectual than composing with video. It’s just as rigorous and intellectually challenging and requires just as many thoughtful, informed rhetorical decisions. I am saying, though, that composing with sound can be more manageable and comfortable for novice digital composers because there is a feeling of more control over one’s work. This comfort and manageability fosters a more productive environment for play, and more productive play at that–wherein a composer’s experimentation provides a individualized, robust learning and writing experience.

 

 

Infographic Assignments in Writing Courses

Last summer, I had an article published in JOGLTEP’s special issue on multimodality. I was excited about the publication, but perhaps more excited to read the other articles in the issue. I’m always looking to learn more about how to teach multimodal writing, and I’m always looking to tweak, change, revamp or create new multimodal assignments in my writing classes. I knew these articles would be great inspiration for doing any of the above.

This blog has motivated me to return to the issue and explore some of these articles in a bit of depth. When perusing the TOC, Annie S. Mendenhall and Sarah Summers’ “Designing Research: Using Infographics to Teach Design Thinking in Composition” immediately caught my attention. I’ve wanted to do an infographic assignment for a long time, and this article was interesting, practical and inspiring. It provides a good rationale for why infographic projects are valuable, and it provides two sample assignments. Below, I provide the important takeaways.

According to the authors, the incorporation of an infographics assignment can help instructors achieve various pedagogical goals in a writing course. Infographics can help students:

• “See research and writing as creating and designing, not just mining and reporting sources” (359).
• Develop “’design thinking,’ an invention strategy that asks writers to explore multiple composing possibilities and to see design as a critical strategy connection multimodal and alphabetic essay assignments” (360). Infographics call for students to “engage questions about information literacy and the ethics and possibilities of composing for a public audience” (360).
• Learn how to “synthesize multiple sources, to interpret the relationships between those sources (both for themselves and for an audience), and to develop their own interpretation of the data” (360).
• See value in engaging with and composing data visualizations, a genre that has become quite common as of late.

The authors offer two infographic assignments that they’ve used in courses at their institutions:

Sarah’s Infographic Assignment

Pedagogical Goals

• To get students involved in ongoing local conversations at their STEM institution, specifically responding to the question: How has STEM changed human life in the last 300 years?
• To equip students with the ability to research, synthesize and categorize information, compose for a specific purpose and particular audience, and create writing with information that can’t be easily “googled”
• To expand students’ research practices and strategies, moving them away from a heavy dependence on Google

Description of Assignment
Choose a STEM innovation that interests you. Create a research question that is connected to the ongoing campus conversations related to STEM, and produce an infographic that “shows us something we don’t already know—or shows something we do know in a new way.”

Text
Gareth Cook and Nate Silver’s The Best American Infographics 2014

Technology
Piktochart

Scaffolding

• Students analyze infographics, identify design elements, arguments, use of sources, source citation, and strengths and weaknesses
• Students learn how to find and evaluate online resources. They also learn about Creative Commons and how to find CC images
• Teacher invites a member of the board of trustees to discuss the larger STEM question being discussed on campus and the member gives feedback on students’ ideas

Assessment
Rubric with following categories: approachability, transparency, efficiency, research, content, and mechanics. The first three categories are from class discussions and Cook and Silver’s text. This rubric is also used to analyze other infographics in the Cook and Silver book.

____________________________

Annie’s Assignment

Pedagogical Goals

• To help students develop and enhance transferable rhetorical and genre knowledge, and learn how to activate this knowledge in various writing situations
• To equip students with the ability to synthesize sources, visualize connections between and among sources, and recognize that working with research in a variety of genres provides a more sophisticated, complex view of an issue
• To help students understand the commonalities and differences between and among genres
• To help students understand the importance of revision in the composing process

Description of Assignment
Students select a current policy issue, local concern, or an organization to advocate. They compose a project proposal and write an annotated bibliography for their subject area. They then choose three genres to compose in to achieve various self-created goals: a genre written for a public audience, a genre focused on research, and a multimodal genre. (The infographic was the most popular multimodal genre.)

Text
Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design Book (2015)

Technology
Piktochart and Canva

Scaffolding

• Teacher consults with students, facilitates genre analysis, and designs activities for students to research different genres (so students can collaboratively “generate multiple paths to completing each assignment”).
• Students learn CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) design principles, developing a vocabulary for discussing infographics
• Students find and analyze infographics, and assess their effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses
• Students draft infographic
• Students conduct peer review. Some share drafts on social media for more feedback

Assessment
Four categories: persuasive technique, visual design, stylistic fluency, and use of medium [same assessment used for print genres]

_________________________

This article has motivated me to try to imagine how I might incorporate an inforgraphic assignment into my writing courses, specifically my freshman writing course next semester.

More on this in the next post….

Making Digital Writing Relevant

Today, the Writing Intensive Curriculum (WIC) program hosted a brown bag lunch event “Using Digital Writing Activities in the Classroom.” Led by the very talented Danah Hashem, a group of folk had a fantastic conversation about digital writing, how to use, why to use, and what kinds of assignments work to achieve particular learning goals. One participant brought forth a very important question: how can we explain to our students why they’re doing this work and why it’s important? Interestingly, I had another conversation yesterday with a faculty member about digital writing assignments and she herself questioned the value in teaching students how to compose with digital tools. She said, “I mean, it’s fun, but what else does it do?”

Scholars have made several arguments responding to the question about why we should teach digital writing: this is the kind of work students will be doing in their professions; this work foster skills and abilities that are essential for 21st century literacies; school-based digital projects reflect the kind of writing students do outside of school; digital work is engaging, exciting and fun.

The above image, created by Bob Humbug, is a drawing of three dogs and a tiger. It reads: Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe. Catch a tiger by his toe. If he hollers let him go.

My go-to reason is this: students need to understand one simple thing about writing–writers make choices. Writers make choices in an effort to achieve their rhetorical and communicative goals. Period. We have a huge toolbox filled with moves and strategies that we can pick from. Each of these moves and strategies work differently to achieve particular effects, and further, each of them work differently with others to make an impact in some way, shape, or form on an audience. Helping students understand that the linguistic mode is not the only site where we can mine for communication tools is so important; if we don’t teach them other modalities (aka vehicles of communication), we don’t teach them a whole range of choices they could draw on to construct meaning and communicate.

 

But what if that’s not enough. What if students don’t buy in to any of this? What if students say, well, I’m not going to do that in my profession or I don’t think that’s fun, or understanding that writers make choices makes sense but why is it relevant for me???

In my previous iterations of undergraduate digital writing, I’ve had mostly English and Communication majors. I’m pretty sure they all bought in to my “writers make choices” explanation. My undergrads this semester are a drastically different demographic than previous courses. I have mostly business majors, two biology majors, a history major, a nursing major, and two lone English majors. And I’ve noticed a big difference in how this semester’s students engage with the material, and the extent to which they’re invested in the course. My colleague at the brown bag event made a suggestion–one that I had actually been thinking about the past couple of weeks: ask students to explore how digital writing is used in their profession and compose digital writing that would be relevant for the workplace and that they’ll actually be doing in their careers. Totally makes sense. Totally relevant. Definitely worth the money they’re spending to take my class.

Why hadn’t I designed this assignment years ago???

And….. on to curriculum revision….results to be reported at the end of the semester!

 

 

Composing with Hypertexts

One of my students made a really interesting comment on my last post.

She wrote:

“In one of my classes, we read an article that talked about how hypertext in articles disrupts our reading because we have to make the decision to either click on it or not. I am wondering what your thoughts on this are. I have definitely seen how my thinking can be disrupted when I see a hyperlink in a text (deciding if I should click on it) and then if I do click on it, it creates a completely new text, which is incredible for the reader– they become a writer in a sense, but must be a little frustrating fro the writer. How do you create a coherent article while also considering that each reader will read your work differently based on whether or not they click on a link.”

I was going to write a response but then realized the topic was worthy of its own post.

There are all kinds of arguments about what technology has been doing to our brains, much of it framed in negative terms. Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” comes immediately to mind when thinking about this topic. The Internet invites all kinds of distraction and disruption, whether it be hyperlinks, search engines, videos, flashing advertisements, pop-ups, images, RSS feeds, music, YouTube, you name it and it has potential to be a distraction. We are engaging in a networked space that has an infinite number of pathways and channels, ones we can both stroll down and ones we can sprint through, just like the image below. While yes, one can make the argument that hypertext disrupts reading because of it’s call for a decision-making process among other things like the change in color, the possibilities of where the link may lead and where links on that page may lead and so on and so on. While all of this may be true, while technology may be changing our brain for the worst, I would argue that the affordances of technology, specifically hyperlinks, outweighs the negatives.

I’ll frame this discussion in terms of the scholarly digital text I just created. In academia, we’re constantly talking about conversations. We engage, elaborate, extend and work with others’ ideas in conversations about particular topics. We enter conversations; we contribute to conversations; we linger and/or leave conversations, all hoping to build, grow and nourish knowledge. In a scholarly digital text, the use of hyperlinks enabled me to do exactly that. While I focused on a very specific topic–designing multimodal assignments–I was able to provide my reader with an opportunity to see how my work both engages with similar conversations and larger conversations about multimodality, as well as how others’ ideas inform mine and mine informs theirs.

My awareness of the reader in this particular article was KEY. I’m submitting this article to a journal with an international audience, thus I felt the need to provide much more context than I would normally do with a US readership. My readers will have options as to whether or not they want to learn more about what conversations this text emerged from or just focus on the topic at hand–how to create effective multimodal assignments. While the hyperlinks may serve as a distraction, they serve a distinct rhetorical purpose in this scholarly text, which I could not have done in a strictly alphabetic text.

And yes, my student is right on. The reader composes the text by making decisions about how he/she wants to navigate it. But don’t we all compose our own texts in a way? Reading is understood as a dialogical meaning-making process. We bring our own experiences and knowledge to a text. The text embodies its own knowledge. We make meaning from the interaction between the two knowledge sets. A hypertext document makes this process transparent and provides an opportunity for readers to accomplish their own rhetorical purposes.

I think my student’s question about coherence is relative to how one defines coherence. It’s subjective. A person may engage with my text without clicking any hyperlinks and feel like it’s logical and coherent. Or maybe they won’t. A person may engage with my text clicking on several hyperlinks or all of the hyperlinks and feel like it’s logical and coherent. Or maybe they won’t. Again, I think this brings us back to one’s rhetorical purpose. What is the reader hoping to gain from engagement with this text? And this question leads us to the composer: what does the composer hope to bring to the reader; what can the composer assume about readers’ rhetorical purposes; and how might the composer create a digital text in a way that meets the unique needs of readers? So. many. questions. So. many. questions.

While I thoroughly enjoyed composing a scholarly digital text, I have never in all of my writing career had to make as many deliberate rhetorical decisions as I did here. I’m really looking forward to reading my peers’ experiences with my article, which will certainly teach me more about the kinds of decisions that need to be made while composing in this genre and other considerations that likely didn’t even cross my mind.

Binge Writing

Binge writing. It’s no good for the eyes.

I woke up this morning and my eyes were stinging so badly that I could hardly open them. This is a result of staring at my computer screen for way too much time and not blinking. Sometimes when I’m really focused, I forget to blink. No bueno.

Anyway, this week has been a trip. I’ve spent day and night composing, designing, thinking and rethinking. I’m happy to say I have a complete draft of the text. There’s all kinds of stuff that needs to be done, but it actually looks like an article so I’m pleased with that. Now don’t get me wrong. It didn’t only take me four days to write this thing. I’ve actually worked with this content for quite sometime–delivering it to the SSU faculty at several workshops and at a regional writing conference last year. It’s been on the page and in my brain for two years. So I only had to do a minimal amount of research to get everything in order since I had already done so much before. I did this slowly and progressively here and there for the past several weeks. So the tricky part wasn’t creating the content, it was actually transforming the content and rewriting it in a way that fit the genre of a scholarly digital text. This was quite challenging; it took me a long time to imagine what this content would like on a digital text and even longer to execute it on the screen. (I also had to do a considerable amount of manipulation to the wordpress template to make it fit my vision.) Then, once I did get the hang of it, I felt like I was falling down the rabbit hole. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the connections I could make, and the most exciting affordance of a digital text is that I could do so with links to separate digital spaces. Now the wild thing about using links in a scholarly text is that it’s very similar to using footnotes. And I’m queen of footnotes. Yet I found an enormous difference between alphabetic footnotes and linked pages. I felt an incredible sense of freedom; i had this seemingly infinite amount of space to explore related ideas, ideas which I could then connect to other ideas in different digital spaces. See the rabbit hole problem? The question I need to keep asking myself as I revise is “how deep  should I go?”

Time to rest the eyes.

Design Matters

Design matters so much so that I’m agonizing as to what my webtext should look like. I have a complex rhetorical situation that I need to attend to. My design needs to rhetorically function in a number of ways: (1) it needs to help achieve my goals and purpose in the article (content wise); (2) it needs to capitalize on the affordances offered within the design itself; and (3) it needs to reflect me, as a scholar and as a teacher, and somehow needs to connect to my other work out there (like my personal website). Yet I’m restricted in what the design can look like because I’m working in wordpress. Nothing is exactly what I envision as being perfect for addressing my rhetorical issues. So for now, I’m working in a template that kind of does so, but I will later be on the hunt for something that is near perfect.

While I’m faced with these challenges today, I did find solace in reflecting on all of the multimodal work I’ve created in the past. Somehow, last night, in the frenzy of it all, I forgot about the many, many websites I’ve created for my courses as well as my personal website (which I created from scratch). And these documents, I tell you, are not in any way low-stakes. So I find solace in that realization.

I got this.

Composing a Scholarly Webtext: Day 1

While my students and colleagues are off in far-away lands for Spring break, I am confined to my writing bubble. “Confined” might be the wrong word: it makes it seem like a bad thing. It’s not bad. In fact, it’s an amazing place to be.

As a professor, I juggle a lot of things: teaching, administrative work, committee work, spontaneous discussions with colleagues and students, and scholarship. (Not to mention all of the stuff in my personal life, especially being a fairly new parent.) Sadly, scholarship, at least for now, is the part of my job that I dedicate the least amount of time to (despite the fact I entered this profession because of my love for writing). I’m able to steal or reserve some minutes and sometimes hours during the week for my writing, but I can never, at least not during the semester, spend uninterrupted time devoted to my intellectual work.

Until Spring break. Or Winter break. Or Summer break.

So, I am spending this week working on an article that is due in less than a month. Yes, you read that correctly. Less. than. a. month. To be honest, I wrote the article proposal without thinking much about what would happen if it was accepted. I sent off the proposal the day it was due, thinking, “hey, I’ll give this a shot.” When I received the “congratulations” email, I thought, “oh no, how am I going to write this thing so quickly?” (This is of course within the context of all my job duties, but it’s also in the current context of me co-editing a special journal issue with a colleague in Canada AND sitting on a pile of coded data that needs to be analyzed for an article that absolutely needs to be written in the very near future!) Since it’s an online journal and it’s a special issue on multimodality, I cannot, in good faith, compose an alphabetic text: I need to compose a multimodal text. Once that thought came to mind, this thought was next:  “oh no, how in the hell am I going to compose my first scholarly webtext so quickly?” Yes, I’ve created multimodal texts, but those have been basically just for fun. This thing is high stakes, and I may or may not have extreme anxiety about it.

So I decided I will use my blog this week to document my process of composing this webtext. The coolest thing about doing this is that my students are doing it as well. They are all in the midst of creating a digital project, namely an audio project. So this week, I write along with them, negotiating new terrain, learning, discovering and writing. Cheers to that.

Wood Talks

My husband and I took our 14-month old to the Peabody Essex Museum a couple of weeks ago for a bit of fun. They have a little play area for kids, so when we want to escape the confines of our small apartment in this brutal weather, this is the first place that comes to mind.

Of course it’s not just fun for him, it’s fun for us. I adore this museum; I’ve seen some amazing exhibits there over the past year. During this last trip, we saw both a furniture and wood art exhibit. While exploring all of these amazing works of art, I came across this sign:

Wood talks. Wood communicates. Wood tells stories.

Just like visuals. Just like the alphabet. Just like gestures. Just like aurality.

We’ve spent a ton of time in my DW courses talking about multimodality, yet our conversations have been focused on modalities that emerge in digital spaces or modalities that are mediated by digital technology. This isn’t surprising since the courses are about the digital. Yet multimodality is so much more than the digital; it’s also about physical artifacts and how they function in the world, both as ways to communicate and ways to understand. We interact and engage with objects, with things, everyday, and they have just as much rhetorical power and significance than anything else. This sign illustrates this concept perfectly.

 

Emily’s Oz + Semiotics + Epistemology + Rhetoric

My husband told me about Emily last night, a 7-year old girl who is blind and watches movies. Her favorite movie is “The Wizard of Oz.” Interestingly enough, Comcast supported a recreation of “The Wizard of Oz” according to what Emily “sees” when she “watches” the movie. They transformed it into a commercial to advertise a new Comcast feature, a “talking guide” to help visually impaired people engage with television. The commercial debuted at the Oscar’s the other night.

The video below is “The Making of Emily’s Oz” and the one below that is the commercial.

As I watched this video last night, I immediately thought about its value in my Digital Writing courses. It brings forth all kinds of interesting ways we can think about multimodality, modes, modality affordances, modality constraints, denotation and connotation, accessibility in digital projects, ways we make meaning, and ways we “see,” “read,” and “engage” with the world around us. It’s also an interesting commercial to analyze rhetorically (one reporter notes: “Rarely does a television commercial elicit the emotional impact as an Oscar-nominated drama.”) I’m eager to hear what my students say about this in relation to what we’ve been studying in class. I’d like to use this post to do a little bit of riffing on this video myself…

This quote from Emily struck me: “I’m unique because I can’t see anything. I pretty much have to take everything off of memory or touch or smelling or hearing or smell or sound or taste. You can’t take anything off of your sight.” The interesting thing of course is that Emily does in fact see, not with her eyes but with her mind. She sees the movie from how she understands and engages with the other available modes, which is primarily sound, both music and speech. The sounds are directly connected to memory (she must have been able to see in the past because she references drawing on her memory to imagine), to her experiences, to her understandings of her surrounding, to how she uses sound to make meaning of the world. If we think about speech, the language between and among the characters in Oz, we think about the complicated process of how she actually makes meaning of spoken language (aka words). Some of the ways is drawing on memory, intertextuality, association, engaging sounds in relation to one another (remember her comment about the crickets) and visual analysis + interpretation. What’s fascinating is that sound mediates the meaning making here and is the catalyst in the actual creation of visual, visuals that are so unbelievably descriptive and imaginative. She lacks the kind of cultural context (at least in visual terms) to engage with the Oz characters that have arguably become icons in their own right in a way that many sighted people do. The idea of sound mediating meaning making also really expands how we think about denotations-connotations, symbols, and icons and how they function in knowledge construction. I think Emily provides us with an interesting way to think about the relationship between words and images, the multimodal nature of all modalities, and as a result, the way we begin to think about how modalities function rhetorically. I look forward to talking more about this on Thursday!