What Is A Text?

Dear All Good Folks, Here are some links we'll revisit as we reflect on our attempts to perform Gries's "iconographic tracking" and as we wrap up this unit of the course: a space for articulating a transnational rhetorical (TRN) approach to textual and imagistic study   a space for applying Mao's "rhetoric of the Dao" to circulation The following two links are websites that will serve as the basis for Tuesday's case study, so I'll ask you to give yourself some time to browse each site (particularly KIVA): KIVA Microfunds Starbucks Ethos® Water Fund There are a lot of components to the organization of Kiva Microfunds, let alone to their website. Please give yourself at least 15 minutes to browse -- long enough to try to understand what a "microfund" is and how the website works. I'm asking you to try to notice as much as you can about how Kiva works, who lends and/or receives, and what kinds of things the website allow...

Dear All Good Folks in ENG 4815: As a follow-up to my announcement last class, please make note of the following changes to our reading and discussion schedule: Thursday, 3/29 - no class in WMS 319 - take time to finish the KIVA analysis from in class on 3/27 and read ahead for our fourth and final unit! Tuesday, 4/3 - come to class having read any 2 of the following 3 essays Doxtader "A Question of Confession's Discovery" Gilmore "Autobiography's Wounds" Anzaldua "Towards a New Consciousness" Thursday, 4/5 - Landow cancelled ; Delagrange "(Re)Vision and Remediation" OR "Embodiment by Design" (see 3/8 on syllabus); we'll discuss "hypermedia" and "embodiment" before analyzing some hypertext testimonies Tuesday, 4/10 - Vivian and Killingsworth as scheduled Thursday, 4/12 - Soja as scheduled; Harris "Taking an Approach" ( Rewriting  pp. 74-86) All else remains unchanged...

Dear All, In tomorrow's class, we will try on Laurie Gries's methodology, "iconographic tracking," for ourselves. Gries describes this as an approach that "elucidates how images become rhetorical and iconic in the sense that, once actualized in multiple versions, they become not only actants capable of catalyzing change and producing space and time, but also readily recognized and culturally or politically significant to a wide cultural group" ("Iconographic Tracking," 110). See you then! -Dr. Graban

Dear All Good ENG 4815 Folks: I'm re-posting most of this from Mar 8, as our visual composing exercise took us in a completely different direction. Thus ... ... after the break, please bring back your selected chapter from Susan Delagrange's Technologies of Wonder (either ch 2 or ch 3), and preferably download the PDF so that you can read it from your device. If you do so, you'll be able to use the interactive elements . Please also come prepared to discuss Sue Hum's "The Racialized Gaze." Delagrange Delagrange proposes the explicit use of hypermediated projects in classroom settings because they "provide opportunities for scholarly inquiry that have no equivalent in print, yet are equally as rigorous intellectually" (20). She does this by arguing for new theories of old concepts, i.e., " techne ," " wonder ," " seeing ," " vision ," " pleasure ," and " bodies ." I'll be i...

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Option 1: Global gun control Julia Knowlton Kimberly Girolimon David Ibarra The images immediately available to use were basic stock images, illustrations or backgrounds. We were limited to free images so we excluded any paid images or cartoons. We chose the large image of the gun as our key focus to make our topic come across clearly and quickly. We made sure to keep it open ended and not just about the United States and could be applied globaly. We wanted to be sure our images were visually ethical and would not be bias on one side or offend the audience. We were surprised by the lack of applicable images available to us. The lack of design elements limited our design options and what we could do with the poster.   Platform used: canva.com

We could use any image becuase Canva lets you upload images from outside sources. We struggled to find an image that would fit the "global" theme because gun control is such a hot topic within the United States and most of the images and information we found was relevant to the US gun problem rather than global gun problem. We had to discuss what question we were posing to our audience and also make sure that it was relevant to the global problem.  We wanted to promote a call to actiom about a discussion regarding the growing gun control rhetoric and working for a better and safer world. We have to first admit that there is a gun control problem and except that in our discourse. We had to agree that there was a rhetorical discourse to surround the gun control issue and then work from there globaly.  We would argue that this related to SA5 because we had to think about images and how they could be portrayed and seen differently. We had to see how an image would cros...

Sarah Burgess and Jacob Godwin: Political cartoons were immediately accessible while looking into the issue of gun control, specifically images that advocate for or against the prohibition of sales of firearms and arguments against pro-gun lobbies (including the N.R.A. and the monetary donations to politicians). We were exposed to both sides of the argument with a simple cursory web search such as "gun control" or "NRA." This gave us insight into how separate groups are approaching rationalizing and processing the same ideas and notions as the events unfold. What is going on right now in the rhetorical process of coming to terms with gun control and the concepts at play in how groups argue for or against gun control were present in our decisions to include or exclude images in our search. We decided to take a stance that portrays all the sides of gun control, but with the interest of representing pro-gun control activists in a supportive way by identifying th...

When attempting to create a worldwide appealing billboard about an extremely difficult topic in under fifteen minutes, our group was lost in the beginning. How could we make something so controversial seem appealing? Not to mention, what kinds of visual aspect could we use to make it consumable on a global scale? Our billboard with the rainbow was our attempt at attaining both of these aspects simultaneously, but the result ended up looking a little silly. However, we made some conscious and intentional design choices: The use of symbols or images we thought would be at least recognized on a global scale like the earth, rainbow, and trash heap hopefully could be at least identified. Hopefully the global viewers could recognize the make of guns we inserted into the trash heap. If the viewer came from a western context, they might be able recognized some tropes we based the image off of, i.e., the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow, ironic because instead of gold we have...

Michael West & Samuel Zamor 1. We favored searching for and using images of inanimate objects such as globes and handguns for our poster. Our main venue for images was Google. 2. We focused on choosing images that could communicate with anyone in the world, mostly through simple and universal visuals. 3. Our original desires for the poster would have featured more text, but we decided that this would run against our goal of the poster being accessible to a global, multi-lingual audience. Our final design ran against our initial notions that text is typically the best route for mass communication.  4. We were inspired by our earlier work with visual ethics in SA5, and working on SA5 gave us familiarity with the constraints we faced in this activity.  5. It is a very difficult task to create a meaningful piece of visual rhetoric for a global audience, and written language is one of the worst means to engage with a very wide audience.

Dear All Good Folks: If you download your selected chapter from Susan Delagrange's Technologies of Wonder as a PDF and read it from your desktop, you'll be able to use the interactive elements . Delagrange is making a case for us to embrace more hypermediated projects in academia because they "provide opportunities for scholarly inquiry that have no equivalent in print, yet are equally as rigorous intellectually" (20). She does this by arguing for new theories of old concepts, i.e., " techne ," "wonder," "seeing," "vision," "pleasure," and "bodies." We'll spend most of Thursday's class conducting a visual composing activity in order to understand these concepts, as well as to define " hypermediation " and " embodiment " in the way we think her chapters encourage us to define them. However, here are some discussion questions that may guide us at some point: Of all of the sec...

Hi Folks, We'll begin with this animated version of Roman Krznarik's Royal Society of the Arts Lecture, "Outrospection, " consider its arguments, then try to determine whether Kress's approach to "modes" or "multimodality" can contribute to Krznarik's outrospective vision/ideal. In a way, this demand to "step outside ourselves" places unique demands on discourse and text. Let's explore the demands and see what we discover. I'll also introduce our third case study -- stills from Joe Sacco's Palestine -- and we'll begin to discuss how we might formulate an "ethic of looking" for textual study . As we begin this new unit, I'm hoping we can begin articulating a transnational rhetorical (TRN) approach to textual and imagistic study , though it may take a few class sessions before we are fully ready to do so. More soon, -Prof. Graban