NCUR Practice Presentations
Follow these links to videos of your practice presentations (these are password protected):
Schedule for 3/25
Hi everyone,
Here’s our updated plan for next Tuesday, which I worked out with Colby and Laura at the end of today’s session.
2-3 PM: Colby and Laura have one-on-one meetings with Jenny (Reading Room)
3 PM: Kerishma gives her draft presentation (3rd Floor Classroom)
Following presentation/feedback, we’ll use the classroom as workspace. I will endeavor to meet with everyone one-on-one. You can stay all the way until 5:40, or you can move on once you’ve had a one-on-one with me.
Bring stuff to work on: presentation materials primarily, and digital project materials if you want to work on that at all.
I hope this works for everyone–if not, let’s figure out changes in the comments.
See you all next week!
Resources/Notes for Weeks #8 & #9: Practice Presentations and Individual Consults
Week 8: Practicing for NCUR
This Week’s Location: 2nd Floor Classroom, beginning promptly at 3 PM
Order of Presenters: Kerishma, Colby, Laura
Presentation Length: 15 minutes (we won’t cut you off if you go long, but we will tell you just how much longer you went, and give you advice on where and how to cut your material)
We will have an overall feedback session and discussion after all three presentations. Jenny will record your performances and post them (protected) on the eportfolio for your review. We will finalize our plans for 3/25.
Week 9: Individual Meetings
Date: Tuesday, March 25
Assignment: Meet with Jenny for 30 minutes, use the feedback from that meeting to work for 30 minutes, then meet with Lindsey for 30 minutes.
Meeting Location: 1st Floor Reading Room
Topic: your NCUR presentation or your digital thesis project, whichever needs more attention
Ideal schedule:
- Student #1 meets Jenny at 2 and Lindsey at 3
- Student #2 meets Jenny at 2:30 and Lindsey at 3:30
- Student #3 meets Jenny at 3 and Lindsey at 4
To-Do for Week 10 (April 1st)
Read one article on audience:
- Colby reads Jenny Kidd, “Digital Storytelling at the BBC: The Reality of Innovative Audience Participation”
- Kerishma reads Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience”
- Laura reads Peter Levine, “A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education”
Continue revising and preparing your NCUR presentation, as well as developing your digital thesis project as appropriate.
Past Digital Thesis: Ellen White’s Benevolent Millennialism
The completed digital thesis project that I looked at was “Ellen White’s Benevolent Millennialism” by Kaitlyn O’Hagan. The chief visual element used on the website is an interactive digital timeline that provides historical context to Ellen White’s life, as well as her own achievements. Another visual element that is incorporated is a wordle.net word cloud, which highlights key terms in the written thesis, such as “health,” “reform,” “Church,” and Methodist. Looking at that alongside the timeline provides the viewer with a fairly clear idea (at least of the background) of Kaitlyn’s written project.
The site itself if fairly simple and uncomplicated–the homepage is the timeline, and the other three pages provide a brief “About the paper,” acknowledgments, contact, and the written paper itself. I think the simplicity and the straightforwardness of the site make it accessible to a fairly large audience (one doesn’t need to know a great deal about American history or health reform or the Seventh-Day Adventists to understand it). The site is largely informational and educational about Ellen White.
Architecture of a Past Thesis Web Site: Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging
This web site, Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging, was created in 2013 to accompany an English (or English-ish) thesis on cannibalism tropes in zombie comics and movies, with special attention paid to The Walking Dead. The front page jumps directly into the research conducted by the student, with a couple of slides from her presentation materials included, to help explain some of her core theoretical content. The primary navigation for this site is through the slider menu at the top, and includes a set of pages (there aren’t really any “posts” here) that discuss her topics in a way that’s meant for a general audience, a full copy of her thesis, and some biographical data.
How does this site accomplish what it sets out to communicate? I think it uses the slider, more than anything, as its primary organizational tool. How well this works is an open question. It’s very visually appealing, but it doesn’t always seem to have a grasp on its audience (or it is trying to serve multiple audiences).
How do the different sections of this site relate to one another? Again, some of them seem to be for scholarly audiences, some not. There was an effort here to make the site a place where people could dip their toes into the topic or jump all the way into the pool.
What other possible audiences could there be for this site? I think that the visual media could attract the material’s fan base and help them learn something about the tropes the student is examining in her thesis.
What are this site’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses? It’s strength is its visual appeal. But I think the question of just who the audience is didn’t get fully addressed.
McKinney Response
Something that I was stuck on in McKinney’s post is his mention of Marxist theory early on in the post. In the 19th century, when Marx was writing and theorizing, labor was quite clearly defined; in this day and age that includes the digital world, what exactly constitutes “labor”? McKinney, of course, moves on to argue that the real value is in “presence” (which he defines as “attention,” as “being there” and being recognized), not necessarily in labor itself, but it was an interesting thinking point for me. I can’t decide whether I fully agree with the amount of importance he places on presence–partially because I’m not sure I 100% understood his complete argument, and partially because I think he perhaps overstates the value of presence for companies that have websites (like page hits or clicks or whatever–I suppose you could say it’s good for ads, but most people I know avoid ads by installing ad-blocking extensions or programs).
Resources for Week #7: Information Architecture
Readings and Resources
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- IA Manages The Relationships Between People And Content (from The Guardian)
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- Here Is The Same Idea In Greater Detail (from Murray Thompson)
- Lindsey’s Google Doc
- Andrew McKinney, “Content Management Systems, Value, and the Interface as a Site of Production”
- “What Is Information Architecture?” (The Guardian)
Facebook Links
- How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? (TIME)
- 75 Amazing Facebook Statistics
- Facebook is collecting your data–500 terabytes a day (GigaOM)
Past Thesis Projects
- Ellen White’s Benevolent Millennialism
- Fixed Gazes on Grotesque Gorging
- Healing in the Abstract
- Hybrid Spaces in Memorial Architecture
- Flip or Swim?
Tools
Response to CMS, Value, and Interface
Considering that this article, to me, reads like stereo instructions (Beetlejuice reference, anyone?), I was able to pull up a few original ideas. Knowledgeable as he is, I do not believe that he skillfully relates this knowledge to readers. The one brief section that I was able to understand is near the beginning, when he assigns “presence” a value. My interpretation may be wrong, but I believe that he is asserting that the imaginary value assigned to the posts on BleacherReport.com lie in the online presence and attention that the authors are receiving. Behind the interface, authors and their content are merely the “presence” that draws in readers, ad companies, and big profits. Because of that, McKinney chooses to further address the interface itself, but that’s where I get lost.
Updated portraiture project proposal
Things are still up in the air right now with my digital project. I don’t have the funds available to me right now to set a budget or the know-how to create my online graphic novel. However, I still think that there is a way to address certain themes that stand out (or don’t get as much attention) in my written thesis such as split consciousness, Doubles, and feminist theory.
Within the next few weeks I will decide whether or not I can accomplish the self-portrait series I discussed in class. If not, I am open to utilizing film stills as a foundation for an intertextual layering project that visually represents my thesis’ argument about using Poe as a lens through which to read Hitchcock. These images are easily obtainable since I have the DVDs at home and VLC Media Player installed onto my computer (thanks Colby!).
Once I have the basic images (film stills or portraits as film stills) I can then work on superimposing text and other accessible images and hand drawn illustrations over the images. I can work on a program like Photoshop, but I prefer to work with my hands. Then, I would upload the layered images and present them on a digital gallery, like the one on Second Life that Lindsey described in class, that would be user friendly and encourage viewer interaction.
In class, we talked about the possibility of publicizing our essays online, and though I am still hesitant to post a PDF of my entire thesis, I would still like to work with texts and incorporate brief snippets of my thesis into my interactive image gallery, paralleling Hitchcockian images with Poe inspired texts.
In terms of context, I wish to focus on the women in these works (“Berenice,” “Ligeia,” Psycho, and Vertigo), considering I dedicated most of my paper to the “broken males” driven to self-destruction by these females. Their physical beauty is unquestionable, and it is their sexualized gender that makes them targets to the unwanted attention and violence that end their lives.
Since my knowledge of digital media and the untapped power of the interwebs only goes so far, I would really appreciate any suggestions in terms of what would constitute (to you) a user friendly gallery that gets my themes across as well as what kind of platforms and programs can I use to make this project as accessible and interactive as possible.
If all else fails, I wouldn’t be opposed to making a snazzy photography portfolio, but we’re dreaming big here.
(Also, I can’t remember if I posted this last week, but this is the photography post that inspired my image layering idea. Much neater than what I plan on doing.)
Digital Project Proposal
Deciding what I want to do for the digital presentation component of my thesis project has been a bit difficult for me—I really want to engage with the visual nature of the assignment, and coming up with something interactive and engaging has been a bit of a struggle.
After receiving (very helpful and constructive!) feedback on my thesis from Jenny and Lindsey, I’ve realized that I need to better solidify my thesis (that is, my core argument) before proceeding full speed ahead on the digital presentation.
Something that we discussed last semester as a possibility for the presentation was incorporating the TV show Game of Thrones, as it didn’t really make it into my paper and the show is such a huge part of the books’ recent mainstream popularity. I was thinking about comparing the books to the TV show, and looking into the process of adaptation, and any major character/story changes that happened in book-to-TV. Jenny also suggested a discussion of audience (niche, sci-fi/fantasy readers vs. the mainstream TV-watching population) in my digital presentation, and how that could affect adaptation changes and decisions.
Sorry this is so short and nebulous, but I’m trying to better grasp what I want to say before I settle completely on a project!
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