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Technical Writing · Exposition & Argumentation · Non-fiction Creative Essays · Grammar and Usage of Standard English · The Structure of English · Analysis of Shakespeare
Analysis of Literary Language · Advanced Professional Papers · The History of the English Language · First Internship: Tutoring in a Writing Workshop · Second Internship: Advanced Instruction: Tutoring Writing
Visual Literacy Seminar (A First Course in Methodology) · Theories of Communication & Technology (A Second Course in Methodology) · Language in Society (A Third Course in Methodology) · The Writer's Guild
UMBC'S Conservative Newspaper: "The Retriever's Right Eye" · UMBC'S University Newspaper: "The Retriever Weekly" · Introduction to Journalism · Feature Writing · Science Writing Papers
Visual Literacy Paper 1 · Visual Literacy Paper 2 · Visual Literacy Paper 3
Presentation of Lohr Chapter 5 · Presentation of LDW's Chapters 7 and 8 · Presentation of Kress Chapters 1, 2, and 3
Weekly Web Log Journal ·
Hurricane Katrina Personal Journal
Throughout our course, we have explored new media and visual literacy. As Kress explains, with new media, particularly within the 'image-space' of the screen, text is less important than image. Clearly that alters all we knew about reading. Use the following sources: Kress, your portfolios, earlier papers, and notes. Respond with details to the focus question:
How has your understanding of literacy changed?
My understanding of visual literacy is significantly expanded, yet I understand that I have only escaped from the crib and now find myself learning to crawl.
As a case study example, while working as a tutor in the UMBC Writing Center, a tutee came to me with a paper in American Studies, AMST 100 Ideas and Images in American Culture. The professor asked the tutee to take a topic discussed in class, perform a semiotic analysis, and then discuss the mythology behind the subject. The tutee chose to analyze the paths of the poor working student versus the privileged well-to-do student. She compared and contrasted their efforts or lack of efforts. In the final analysis the poor working student struggles the entire way through school in a lower class school, earning everything he or she achieves and the reward after graduation is a low-middle class job. On the other hand, the well-to-do student attends the Ivy League school, achieves grades just high enough to prevent being expelled and after graduation receives an upper management position based on their last name.
Chik Tsubaki, Yasemin Lawson, and I just completed beating our heads against the wall for days exchanging email deciphering Barthes argument of the difference between myth and semiology. From our discussions, I could see the myth within her argument, but she could not explain the myth with my newly found terminology. The problem is the poor do not have the financial backing to sustain a myth. The poor by sheer numbers can create a myth, but without the support to sustain it, a myth collapses. The poor are dependent upon the bourgeoisie class money in order to sustain a myth. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie can support a myth without the poor because the bourgeoisie have the financial power to propel a myth and sustain a myth for hundreds of years.
The tutee did understand that myth lied between the sign, the signifier, and the signified. She did not have the language or the terminology I would use, but the tutee had the basic premise in her paper. Because the topic of semiology and mythology is visual literacy, Barthes could have easily drawn a Venn diagram with three circles: circle one=sign, circle 2=signifier, circle 3=signified. Placing the circles on top of each other such that an intersection is created by all three, the central area where all three circles overlapped would be the place where myth lies and that a myth has all three components of sign, signifier, and signified. Semiology, on the other hand, would be a drawing of the same three circles that never intersect. The three circles would have lines connecting them, in other words pathways. This is significantly different from being contained amongst the three. I saw the tutee later and asked how she did. She received the "A." It was then I revealed what I knew about her subject and informed her I understood she was in the right direction but could not interfere because my understanding exceeding hers. I just nudged her along indicating "You're on the right path."
Kress in chapter one says that the world told is different than the world shown. Barthes is an excellent example of the world told and not shown. If Barthes had followed Kress claim and used a simple diagram of what he meant, a light bulb would have gone off above our heads. Or as Dr. Murray, a professor of mathematics once said, "A picture is worth a thousand words, or at least a couple of hundred," and he would proceed to draw the graph of an equation on the board which would turn out to be a washer. One of those flat things used with a nut and a bolt. Dr. Murray's simple diagram demonstrated that sometimes language breaks down and becomes overly cumbersome in attempting to explain that which is simply explained by a visual illustration using only a few basic lines.
Kress also said that the computer screen has not reduced the amount of writing being done it has only increased writing. His idea was supported by another paper I read discussing digital publishing entitled "The way we will have become: the future (histories) of computers and writing" from the Computers and Writing Conference published on the web in 1998 (http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/3.2/coverweb/townhall2.html). Both the conference and Kress said that with the Internet and the computer screen, the 'gatekeepers' or referees (the book publishing editors) are being removed, opening the gateway for everyone to finally publish via a web page. Kress said the ones doing the new publishing are the same people who were doing the old publishing. I assume what he means here is the people publishing on the Internet in many cases are those who have not been able to get their works published through the traditional publishing houses.
Rose was our primary source for how to perform the analysis of visuals who left a great deal to be desired in the layout of her text. All too often I found myself bogged down in her explanations of a discourse and who argued what. As students, our requirements were visual layouts explaining step by step what to look for when using a particular method of analysis. Unfortunately, now that we are finally learning how to crawl, the semester end is upon us. The chapter on conducting a mixed method by Rose makes the most sense. At this point, conducting interviews would be the next step in our visual analyses. This of course becomes extremely complex due to methodology involved as I learned in statistics. The way one formulates the questions can have adverse effects on the data. This experience occurred in CHPDM where several interview questions were removed from a study/questionnaire because of wording which skewed the analysis. This would be similar to Rose' explanation of interviewing a family as group about television viewing where one person may take the lead and the others follow, not speaking their own mind, hence the data reflects a "group think" mentality.
In the last research paper there was simply not enough time to perform the research necessary to discover something of significance. Proposed solutions would be interviewing Japanese women who actually read Manga and Hentai to determine various aspects of what the read and what they "think" they are reading. In other words, the message delivered by the artist and the message received by the viewer. Does the viewer comprehend the artist's intent? Clearly many of the symbols were impossible to decode because the symbols are from ancient cultural rituals, religion, ancient myths, ancestry, and mysticism. Specifically, drinking tea is not simply drinking tea, but a highly elaborate ritual in the way the tea is prepared, the way it is poured, the way the cup is held and raised to the lips, and so on.
The second proposal would be looking into secondary journal sources in women's studies, studies in Asian culture, sociology, and psychology. There was so little information on the subject of Hentai and much of the required information is likely to be found within other disciplines, there was no way for me to come up to speed to understand the messages. In addition the computer is not the intended medium for reading Hentai. Hentai is read quickly as a series of images and not viewed one at a time as is done in web viewing. Viewing Hentai by this method violates the way Hentai should be read. Western culture is clearly viewing individual slides for artistic value and not for the symbolic messages being conveyed by the artist through a series or gallery of images. Viewing one image is similar to reading one page of a book. It takes many pages of text or many pages of images to create a story or a plot and theme. The Japanese read for the artist's intended meaning. This is also true when attending an art gallery. If one proceeds without a guide, the viewer does not understand the artist's message necessarily without guidance. When viewed as a group with a guide, the guide explains much of the content within the image.
I know much more than I knew before I entered this seminar class, but now feel compelled to perform self study in order to understand some of the more complex methods. This I believe may become necessary with studies with Dr. Shipka because I suspect she will leave the door wide open for whatever projects one would like to pursue so long as we can offer support for each of our design decisions along the way. It seems that she thinks of communication as much more than a body of text on a page and expects an exploration of multimodalities in delivering a body of information. My hope is that I can use what I have learned so far to expand on what I know now as far as modes and mediums of communication (Mode and medium comes easily. Mode in computers is usually used to describe transport of information: cable, DSL, dial-up. Medium: is a little different, but similar).
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