Viola+does+Al's+Homework

Viola tries her hand at Al's assignment . Her responses & feedback are in **blue **.

**__1. Readings & Discussion__** (These articles are very helpful for those unfamilliar with visual literacy. Great jumping-off point for getting students to think about how to read visual rhetoric. Class discussion or online discussion needs to take place in order to clarify some of the points in the articles, and get students' thoughts & struggles on the table. I also would suggest, since your assignment deals with reading texts across different planes/spaces/mediums & what the implications are, that it would be helpful to bring in a couple of cultural texts that occur in different spaces, and discuss them in class... and perhaps focus it even more by bringing in 2 specific, contrasting media--e.g., a print text vs an e-hypertext projected on the screen. This would complement and supplement these articles, and allow students to acquire a foundation for the skills needed in reading texts occurring in different spaces. I also like Prof. Hanley's suggestion--on your blog--about narrowing down the focus to digital objects. Anyway, I hope my chosen cultural text & readings of it does not stray too far from your assignment... and let me know what you think! :) ).
 * Read Purdue's primer on visual rhetoric - check!
 * Read Stanford's examples on reading visual images- check!

**__2. Choosing a cultural text that appears in 2 or more different spaces. Write an informal list of responses about how my reading inscribes different meanings & values depending on where and how it is presented:__** The cultural text I have chosen is **Orson Welles's 1947 film, //The Lady from Shanghai//, which gets reproduced in these different spaces and apparatus:** Woody Allen's //Manhattan Murder Mystery//, DVD, YouTube, and mobile phones. Is the medium still the message?

media type="youtube" key="yUmd9w84Q2Q" height="212" width="254" align="center"
 * __**//Manhattan Murder// //Mystery//**__ - Watch Welles's scene reinserted into Woody Allen's movie below or here. : Welles's //Lady from Shanghai// appears in Allen's movie as a projected film in the back of an old revival theatre, serving as intertext to the new (Allen's) movie. This classic scene from cinematic history is replayed and remediated in compressed technology, the projection screen within //MMM//.


 * ** __DVD__: ** watch at one's leisure at home on the television or computer screen (a private experience in most cases, with some exceptions where the DVD has interactive features that allow users to go on the Internet for resources, interactive games, etc.)

>Film is republished, reproduced, and remediated for the computer screen on the Internet; film is compressed for the computer screen & YouTube's media player. > Quality is compromised (bits are lost in the process of reproduction), so viewer may miss some details and objects that contribute to or inform the meanings in the movie. > Lev Manovich wrote, "Once an object is represented in a computer, it automatically becomes interactive." > Individual is able to situate his or her viewing experience within the larger social sphere by joining in the global, open conversation about the video, and by posting video or text comments viewable by the community. In some cases, user can also annotate the video. > This specific scene (which appeared in Woody Allen's film) is reproduced as a snippet ("part 9 or 9") in YouTube due to video length restrictions -- this snippetization takes the scene out of context. > Scene has intertextual relationships with other "related videos" suggested by the site. > Film is further compressed; tiny screen. > Quality is more and more compromised; meanings and values traditionally attached to the movie may be lost in the reproduction of the film in such compressed apparatus. > Film can be viewed on-the-go, so that not only does "life imitate art" (as Allen's character says in //MMM//), but art is quite literally a part of one's life, as the user is able to travel with the movie in hand (user's life gets saturated with the life of the movie).
 * **__YouTube__:**
 * **__Mobile phone__:**

**__Thoughts:__**
 * Just as Welles's movie is reproduced in the revival theatre within Allen's movie, we now have new technologies (YouTube, Hulu, cellphones, etc.) as the platforms for watching old and new movies. Our new and social media are the 21st century resurrection theatres, restoring movies in compressed screens, and providing the community with a network to communicate with each other on ideas about the movies. If the cinema brings the public together, and if reproductions in the form of video cassettes and DVDs remove the communal effect by bringing films to one’s home, then new media is perhaps a renegotiation of the public and the private by making the film accessible from one’s computer screen, yet allowing viewers to participate in the social network within the website. One drawback, however, is the loss of quality, and thus the loss of possible valuable meaning systems that may be found in intricate details within the visual landscape of the film.

**__3. Write a similar analytical response in a more formal blog-essay with Whitman's__** **//__Leaves of Grass,__//** **__again using two or more different spaces where you have seen or can find the poem.__** // Al, we had talked briefly about Meagan's discovery of a line from Leaves of Grass at the Lafayette Bart Station -- which I think is an awesome find! How appropriate that Whitman's work gets transcribed at a train station, a place of transit, a place where people come and go... //

I would like to focus my analysis on Whitman's work occurring in the digital space (sort of a follow up to my past ideas on thinking about Whitman "forensically"). My goals are:

1) to compare Whitman's manuscript drafts of "Song of Myself" with the published 1855 version (**this great site** hosted by U of Iowa has an extensive collection of the facsimiles & transcriptions of all the surviving manuscript drafts of the poem), and gain insight on how Whitman's published version is actually an enormous project from the beginning, involving numerous revisions, revisions, revisions... 3) examine the __materiality__ behind digitally-occurring objects (in this specific case, Whitman's 1855 "Song of Myself" that the public can now read online is actually based in materiality and history -- an important aspect of digitality that is often overlooked due to the "cleanness" of digital textuality). There is so much more to the historical and social dimensions of any kind of cultural text that will inform our readings of the text more deeply. In this specific study of "Song of Myself," digital tools allow me to zoom in on the "physical" manuscript (reproduced online but is arguably quite a "material" object, as we can view the pencil markings and written words in high-res) and examine the changes, the strike-outs, the revisions in Whitman's writing processes, and compare them with the now-digital object that is Whitman's poem, the poem reproduced multiple times on the Internet devoid of a sense of physical human writing that is visible in the old manuscript. This is where visual rhetoric is important -- in the multiply-reproduced "Song of Myself" that we see now hosted in so many different websites, what have we lost or gained as the poem is now written in fonts that we may even characterize as boring, standardized (Arial or Times New Roman fonts)? How important is it for us to read the now digitally-occurring "Song of Myself" in multiple websites alongside the physical manuscripts and print text of the poem?

**Afterthoughts** Al, I really enjoyed doing this assignment. I like the articles you assign at the beginning of this unit, and #1 and #2 of the assignment helped me in thinking about the importance of being more literate in visual rhetoric. Finding a cultural object to dissect and discover in different spaces is a really fun project, and I think students will dig it. On the whole, I think it's a great exercise for students to learn about visual rhetoric, and to be more //literate// in the current visually-saturated media culture that we live in, so that they become more well-versed in reading cultural objects & texts across different platforms & spaces -- to be able to read them, and not just look at them. I think your assignment will help in shaping students as //produsers// of cultural texts.

A couple of suggestions... For the first part of your assignment, after students have read those great articles you point them to, you may want to narrow down the choice of cultural objects to 2 contrasting texts, and discuss them in class first. For instance, you may discuss (in class) the similarities & differences of reading a print text vs a hypertext, or a film released in the theatre vs a film reproduced on the Internet, or a photograph vs digital image, etc. I think narrowing down the choice of cultural objects might actually extract more insightful readings from the student. Plus you'll be able to guide & teach them in developing foundational skills for reading such specific cultural texts if you were to go over them beforehand, and also find out what they are struggling with in terms of reading such diverse texts. While I do like the idea of leaving the choice of spaces/mediums open to the students, I also think that we might end up with readings that merely gloss over the surface, and with the limited training they've had in reading "new" media and such dynamically-occurring objects, they may not be able to perform a productive reading of the texts.