Gif Gadget

A cool little tool that I wanted to share. These folks at "Glickr" are part of flickr, no surprise, but you can upload right from your own files and not through flickr in order to make a gif animation.

Here's the link for the tool: http://gickr.com/

But the crummy part is the Blogger doesn't exactly animate it! See the picture to left, how it's not moving to the next picture. Turns out that for you to see my animation easily, you have to look elsewhere:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/grmbegf8gg.gif

This is the easiest way around the problem, and other ways will have to be resolved in another post.

The slideshow/animation can add some pizazz to your website without encroaching on tacky. It's so easy because the tool handles making the show entirely. One thing I will want to do at a later date with my gif animation is edit my pictures in Photoshop in order to make them all have about the same appearance of being zoomed on the photographs; right now the women are of different sizes. I'll also use Photoshop to make all my images an oval shape. These nice design touches will make it better, but even as it is, I think it's nifty.

Who are these women in my animation? Part of my dissertation, I hope!

Postmodernism & New Media

In Writing New Media, Wysocki, et. al., address how our postmodern technological culture demands new literacies and new ways of teaching. The authors consider the intersection of composition studies and postmodern theory, calling for activism. Compositionists must realize the instability, the fluidity, the relational nature of composition in its myriad forms. As an act, composing is, and never can be, neutral.

Selfe's essay, "Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of a New Media Text Designer," argues that information technologies affect our culture, whether or not students have access to new media creation--the software and hardware required; that is, students are surrounded by new media creations even if they are cut off from the means to create. Because of its ubiquity, new media must be taught, particularly visual literacy.

Selfe argues against the traditional privileging of alphabetic texts, but one of the inevitable problems I see is the expectations of the academy--the burden placed on English departments. Because of our use as the labor force to support all types of writing at the university, we often aren't supported in teaching new media, as it might not, according to skeptics, help students pass a writing requirement. Of course, we wouldn't agree...

I can't easily separate my thoughts about the expectations placed on English departments from a video I watched earlier this week. I'm digressing from my post about the book, but I'm working out how all this is related...It's a disturbing commentary on the state of our profession. Click below to watch:

Uncle Tom's Cabin and New Media?

Most people wouldn't put Uncle Tom's Cabin in the same sentence as "new media." Yet, one of the most "famous" literature web sites/archives is entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-media Archive." The site can be found at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/

Of course, the first thing I have to address is if "multi-media" means "new media," and I'm going to say, "Yes." I'm going with Wysocki's broad definition of new media.

I'm intrigued at how a literature site can use multi-media/new media regarding a text that was written prior to the Civil War. The novel had a long, rich history well beyond being a best-seller, spawning numerous theatrical adaptations, songs, and films. Thus, the site uses sound to share some of the songs, as well as movie clips. The page on songs is impressive (and worthy of an article, since there's so little on sound out there): http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/songs/sohp.html

I see the future of literature in sites like this. I know that's a big, and potentially controversial, statement, but like anything else, literature must adapt to our mediated culture.

from Gutenberg to Gadgetry

In Multimodal Discourse, Kress and Van Leeuwen discuss McLuhan's idea that new media tends to repackage old media. Case in point: Amazon's new reader, the "Kindle." I also read an advertisement for Sony's version of a digital reader in Sky Mall magazine, available on most airlines.

I've read up a bit on the reading devices and see how these are instances of new media repackaging old media. Here are a couple of good sources about the devices:

*a Newsweek spread on it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/70983/page/1

*reviews at CNet http://reviews.cnet.com/e-book-readers/amazon-kindle/4505-3508_7-32751890.html

Here's an idea for a paper--"Remediating Reading: from Gutenberg to Gadgetry"

Archive as a Multimodal Site

Kress and Van Leeuwen have me considering archives as multimodal sites. I have a lot more thinking to do on this, but my beginning idea is to explore both physical and digital archives as multimodal sites. I know Jim Purdy in his dissertation considers the design of digital archives like JSTOR as multimodal sites.

I'm looking specifically at digital archives that represent American studies and am in the process of developing a rubric to assess how such archives work. One thing I should point out right away is that I'm going to have to define "digital archive"--that it's basically a web site, but a site with the purpose of archiving texts--anything from historic letters to electronic editions of novels or poems. There's a lot out there on the web, but not a whole lot of work yet on this sort of scholarship.

Kress and Van Leeuwen in Multimodal Discourse consider how magazines represent discourses, and it makes me consider how web sites represent discourses, because I think they operate much like magazines. If it's an academic website, say for some topic in "English studies," however large that might be, how is "academic discourse" depicted? What sort of ideology does a design of a web site invoke? (Visual rhetoric...)

What is expected of an academic web site? What sorts of colors and what organizational scheme? For example, how would the design of a site about literature differ from a site about multimedia or linguistics? What sorts of images would be used?

Would most literature web sites have a romantic feel? Is there a discourse of literature that usually involves romantic views of history? How does such a discourse operate in or reflect our culture? I think many web sites dealing with literature have similar visual rhetoric to Levenger ads (see the Levenger catalog here:http://www.levenger.com/)

So, does the design and visual rhetoric of English studies usually end up with images or tweed elbow patched professors, spectacles resting on an open book, and leather-bound tomes (or leather library chairs)? Do these images of "English" really represent the current state of our field?