cyborgsdodance

So here it is--my first attempt to produce some type of digital narrative beyond a photo slide-show. Already there are so many things I would revise. But alas, a deadline forced me to publish it as is. Thank you for deadlines. While the final product is not much to be excited about, I am very interested in the process that lead to this process.

(For a product that I think is worthy of viewing check out Carlos Virgen's Dinkytown Steak House. This is a "product" that I'd eventually like to play with--especially in terms of his use of diegetic sound and voice.)

... in terms of process I can't help but think about how much the images drove what I decided to focus on. Eventhough my interview with Jim contained much more information on the internet's impact on used book stores, I feel that the images and footage I had reflected more the "feel" of the store. So, I found myself playing up that aspect in my final product.

Another aspect I keep thinking about is the choice to use my voice to narrate the piece. Ideally I would have liked to enter sound clips of Jim talking, yet I didn't have the equipment or the skill to do so at this point. In a way I feel like my son, almost two years old, who comprehends so much language yet has so little language for expression of his ideas. This gap or disconnect leads to feet-kicking and food-throwing tantrums. In my case the frustration leads to fear and anxiety about taking on this new genre of communication--fear that often keeps me from taking risks. I'm sure that our students experience these frustrations too.

pre-production preparation:

In terms of my pre-writing or pre-production preparation, I tried to story-board my ideas first. Yet once I got involved in the research (interviewing and filming) I found that my plan changed dramatically. I guess this is typical for my writing style. I will often make an outline and then never follow it. Sometimes the outline or the storyboard in this case is just the "chafe writing" for me the writing that I do to just get my ideas flowing.

In the end, my process planning occurred after researching and involved reviewing my interview notes & footage and then trying to think about how to match images with my voice-over.

Revision--well, I can't really get into that right now. I've rambled on enough as it is. I hope to write more on this later-especially as I acquire more language to describe the process in a meaningful way. But, to summarize in ONE sentence, I would say that ... the editing interface of imovie, with its three tracks and clicking and dragging feature, makes the revision "stage" of writing much more tangible.--much more than it is in writing with pen and paper.

That said, I wonder how studying the revision and editing process during video production might better help students revise their written documents?

... enough for now.

Posted by Candance Doerr at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My experience researching about Dinkytown for our collaborative wiki project started out with some informal Google searches, which resulted in pretty much the same links that everyone else had found and already added to the wiki. Another obstacle for me was figuring out what I wanted to focus on for my research. Knowing that we would eventually turn our research findings into some form of a video blog entry increased the stakes in terms of process and audience. It’s one thing to throw words up onto the screen and another to weave together sound, image, and text to create some cohesive narrative. For some reason the fact that it will be a video makes the sense of audience seem larger and less forgiving.

Anxieties aside, I finally decided to “write what I know” and do a feature on Cumming’s Books, an independent, used-book store where I used to work. Focusing on something I already knew, allowed me to reallocate my energies to the actual research and production process.

Articulating how this research unfolded is somewhat difficult considering I’ve never researched with a visual end-product in mind, which is something to keep in mind as I consider assigning a similar project to my students. Some of my questions include…

To what extent did images influence my research question?
How much did that desired image or mood influence what data I gathered?
To what extent is there a visual discourse or grammar already shaping how I view my topic?
Will my images convey the same depth for the viewers that they contain for me?
How will I use language to project meaning into images and vice verse?

While I still fumble in my attempts to answer these questions, I’ve found Jason Ranker’s (English Journal, 97.1) description of fifth graders’ digital video production to be a helpful start. In his case study, he describes the literacy practices involved in video composition/production as moving “markedly into the visual realm” (2007, p. 78).

Much like the students in Ranker’s study, my reading of online texts was nonlinear, a navigating from one site to the next via a network of hyperlinked texts. McNabb et al. (2005) describe this type of buffet reading as requiring the reader to quickly evaluate the “value, sufficiency, relevancy and validity” of information in order to filter and sift through various sources. I don’t know how well I was able to evaluate the sites I visited, but I would agree that my clicking through sites was an attempt to move through the enormous amounts of energy. Furthermore, knowing that my end-product would be visual, influence my evaluation of these sources. For example, some sources did not have very informative text, yet I found the images to be helpful.
----
See also my other explorations in online inquiry...

my research wiki, nonikwe's rabbit hole, devoted to digital literacies. I just started this wiki this month. My hope is that it will keep me organized.

(Below is the product of a new feature I just discovered, wherein I can link articles directly to my blog at the click of a button, while I'm doing research using the university databases/indexes. I don't fully comprehend the utility of this, but I'm sure it will come in handy eventually.)

Designing Meaning with Multiple Media Sources: A Case Study of an Eight-Year-Old Student's Writing Processes

Author: Ranker Jason J
From: Research in the teaching of English
Date: 20075
Volume: 41
Issue: 4
ISSN: 0034-527X
Pages: 402-434

Posted by Candance Doerr at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. --Maya Angelou

Art is the transfer of emotion from one to another. --Tolstoy

both quoted by Ken Burns on 9/5/07

This past Wednesday, I had the fortunate opportunity to go see Ken Burns preview and discuss his new documentary film, The War. I knew that I was in for a treat. I had been enchanted by his work, The Civil War, the way in which he layered still images, music, and voices reading poems and letters of Civil War soldiers and survivors. Also, I had heard him speak on NPR and was impressed how articulate he was about his craft of using film to archive memories.

The power of memory and emotion in film came up again last Wednesday, when Burns described the role of documentary filmmakers as "emotional archeologists" who collect and our "greatest inheritance", memory in order to avoid preventing historical amnesia. This focus on emotion got me thinking a lot about the co-presence of auditory modes such as music with visual modes such still photos and moving images. Layered together, these two elements are very powerful for evoking emotion. Then when you add the voice over, narrating related content the experience is intensified. No wonder, YouTube and videoblogging have been so popular.

So I guess you could say Burns pushed my thinking on videoblogs and video sharing sites like YouTube. Videos, or "vids," allow writers/composers to capitalize on the various rhetorical resources that surround us such as the emotional potency (pathos) of music and images. The presentation of info. using these elements has a very different effect on viewers. Those who watch Burns' documentaries (or any documentaries for that matter) will experience the Civil War in a very different, perhaps more visceral way than if they were to only read an illustrated book recounting the same content.

I don't mean to say that video will replace writing, because it won't. Writing will always have it's specific form and purpose. However, if we are to consider the fairly easy distribution of video files for communication (e.g. the YouTube forum), we can't ignore that this medium is becoming an increasingly preferred mode of persuasion.

So how does this all relate to Ken Burns? Well, first of all, we all have memories, something Burns takes very seriously. Secondly, we and especially adolescents are drawn to consuming and composing multimodal texts. So, how can we as educators better tap into the multimodal draw of video composition/blogging to get our students to more deeply examine memories and related issues to write expository pieces?

With this question in mind, I spent three hours trying to find some good documentary vlogs that might serve as models for use in the classroom. My search was not very successful, but I hope to find some in the future. In the meantime, I'm going to try making some documentary shorts to play with the medium myself.

Posted by Candance Doerr at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, my search for a good documentary vlog, inspired by recently seeing Ken Burns, was unsuccessful. That said, I know they are out there and I intend to find one. In the meantime, I have made a list of some of the blogs that I stumbled upon. I've listed them here for different reasons. They all have a different voice. What exactly I mean by voice when dealing with multimodal texts is still undeveloped--a concept I hope to explore more throughout the next few months.

If I'd have to choose a favorite at this point it would be pouringdown because of its artistic play with images. I feel that the vlog's writer is really trying to re-see things through his camera. I suppose most filmmakers are trying to do this. Also, this vlog features some videos that use extensive voice overs, which get me thinking a lot about how video composition might be used to motivate writing--writing being what you do to brainstorm and plan out a video. To get a feel for what I mean, check out this video "feverdream."

In terms of a vlog that I feel serves as a mentor text, I am drawn to Mom's Brag Vlog I love the way she takes short clips of footage and turns them into gifts for her family and friends, all the while compiling an archive of memories for her daughters growing up. See for example the short video "Telephone". I've been trying to do some of my own memory archiving of mine and my son's relationship. I really enjoy the process of making little videos or slide shows of him. The process of choosing images and music, or deciding what footage to cut and what footage to foreground really slows down my thinking about him and who he is as a little person. Everybody tells me that before I know it he will be going to school and then GRADUATING from school. Making the videos allows me to reflect on what is happening right now in his life. In some cases it actually allows me to better appreciate the little things, such as new words, diaper rash, dinner time, which any parent can say is a messy ordeal.

I'm currently working on a little video called "Pizza." I hope to have it finished and able to post within the next week. All of this play with video composing and editing helps me to better understand the process. Hopefully, it will make me better able to study and teach video composition. In the meantime, I'm having so much fun.

------

Vlog sites:
Minnesota Stories
(personal picks include: Video Haiku, schmlog,Vlog Dan)

pouringdown (Daniel Liss' vlog)
seven maps (video assignments completed while visiting Montreal)
Mom's Brag Vlog
karmagrrrl (older archives)
90 seconds of Dave

Discussion of Vlogs:

The Film of Tommorow
loaded pun
Henry Jenkins' YouTube and the Vaudeville Aestetic

Posted by Candance Doerr at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)