Looking at composition at the site of making
I’d like to look now at the compositional modality at the site of production which involves, following Rose’s suggestion, investigating the genre and potential sources of inspiration. First of all, there are two levels of interpretation: the whole assignment (macro level) and the video (micro level) although in the case of Assignment 2 the video carries the main bulk of the assignment so the levels get conflated to an extent.
Macro level - blogging
Assignments 1 and 3 are set up using Wordpress, a well-known online platform commonly used for blogging. Blog can be understood as a medium but also a genre of digital writing (Jenkins’ convergence culture, Mc Luhan’s ‘medium is the message’? this needs to be elaborated on) and as such a conflated entity will display certain characteristic features: about page, comment facility, social media share buttons, use of hyperlinks and media and most typically content that is arranged chronologically and updated regularly.
When it comes to the writing itself, there is a range of blogging styles and genres, ranging from the daily trivia to academic content (need support). While the two assignments make use of most of the features, they do not comply with the rule of regular updates but instead constitute a single written entry submitted as a whole at once (there might have been multiple versions but unlike wikis, blogs do not make access to versioning history available).
How to make sense of such a hybrid genre which retains some of the original features of the medium but gives up on others and acquires new ones from a different genre? We can refer to this as remediation, that is an academic assignment being enacted in the new medium but we could also look at this from the point of view of the medium – the medium gets used for a different purpose. What is the departure point for the analysis here? The medium or the message? How would that affect the analysis and the conclusions? I think like to think of it a circular phenomenon, the two feeding each other – a kind of interaction.
Microlevel - 'videos'
Turning our attention to the videos, there are two genres I’d like to consider: digital sketches and screencasts (not sure if these can actually be referred to as genres, have they been theorised?).
Assignment 1 relies on sketches as the visual component of its video. The sketches have been created using an application 53 paper which allows drawing, painting and writing on touchscreen, using a number of functionalities: ‘lead pencil’, ‘fountain pen’, ‘marker’, ‘ink pen’ and a ‘brush’ (quotation marks used on purpose to denote online equivalents of the traditional drawing tools . The student-author refers to the visuals as sketches, an artistic technique and an expression form (medium and message?) known for centuries that has been appropriated for an online medium, another instance of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). What is the genre of an online sketch?
There are two approaches to examine it. Useful conclusions can be drawn from looking at the comparative analysis of analogue and digital photos which might also help understand the technological aspects of production. What is gained and what is lost when drawing on the screen or is it the matter of enacting analogue practices in new environments, transferring old habits into new media? (is it worth pursuing this line of analysis?)
Another source of useful information is to look at the use of sketching in the history of art. Based on my minimal understanding of art practices, sketches have been often used as preliminary studies of the subject, for example to test different angles and perspectives, different lighting or mood. They served to capture emergent ideas and experiment with different routes of developing those ideas. I imagine they were extensively used to prepare for the very act of painting, which involved using expensive paints. In this sense they provided a safe and cheap sandbox to play around with ideas and ways of executing them, being part of the process. But with time, sketches became an end in itself, not the means to the end. For example, some of the Rembrandt’s paintings resemble sketches in a sense they have been purposefully left unfinished, leaving space for ambiguity and multiple interpretations.
This process vs product understanding of a sketch, with an added layer of interpretation provided by digital practices around production, image and audiencing create interesting avenues for understanding what the sketches may bring in to the multimodal assignment.
All three assignments make use of screencasts created with screen capture software, a digitally born genre, whose name was coined by Udell, technology columnist in 2004/5. Screencasts serve different purposes, for example a tutorial or an online demo, and accentuate experiential aspects of digital practices (reference needed). Assignments 2 and 3 make use of them to visualise geospatiality and virtual world experiences, which allows the viewer to experience immersion, the second best option to experiencing it first-hand. Interestingly, screencasts allows the viewer to experience it in the first person, through the eyes of the screencaster, the reality on their screen being replicated on ours. This is much more powerful than attempting to describe the events in words. Similarly to metaphors (?), screencasts are much more economical but paradoxically they manage to provide rich experiential data. Support here might be provided by research into video/computer games.
Genre Theory?
The two genres could be discussed in more detail in terms of the typical features and their significance for the meaning construction processes but the scholarly context has to be accounted for. As mentioned before, it might be difficult to find parallels between the features of the used genres and those of academic writing. I wonder if reconceptualization of genres might not prove beneficial. What if genres are understood as practices, dynamic processes rather than static inventories of features, in line with Russell’s Genre Theory discussed in the context of online environments and practices by Carpenter (2009).
Assignments 1 and 3 are set up using Wordpress, a well-known online platform commonly used for blogging. Blog can be understood as a medium but also a genre of digital writing (Jenkins’ convergence culture, Mc Luhan’s ‘medium is the message’? this needs to be elaborated on) and as such a conflated entity will display certain characteristic features: about page, comment facility, social media share buttons, use of hyperlinks and media and most typically content that is arranged chronologically and updated regularly.
When it comes to the writing itself, there is a range of blogging styles and genres, ranging from the daily trivia to academic content (need support). While the two assignments make use of most of the features, they do not comply with the rule of regular updates but instead constitute a single written entry submitted as a whole at once (there might have been multiple versions but unlike wikis, blogs do not make access to versioning history available).
How to make sense of such a hybrid genre which retains some of the original features of the medium but gives up on others and acquires new ones from a different genre? We can refer to this as remediation, that is an academic assignment being enacted in the new medium but we could also look at this from the point of view of the medium – the medium gets used for a different purpose. What is the departure point for the analysis here? The medium or the message? How would that affect the analysis and the conclusions? I think like to think of it a circular phenomenon, the two feeding each other – a kind of interaction.
Microlevel - 'videos'
Turning our attention to the videos, there are two genres I’d like to consider: digital sketches and screencasts (not sure if these can actually be referred to as genres, have they been theorised?).
Assignment 1 relies on sketches as the visual component of its video. The sketches have been created using an application 53 paper which allows drawing, painting and writing on touchscreen, using a number of functionalities: ‘lead pencil’, ‘fountain pen’, ‘marker’, ‘ink pen’ and a ‘brush’ (quotation marks used on purpose to denote online equivalents of the traditional drawing tools . The student-author refers to the visuals as sketches, an artistic technique and an expression form (medium and message?) known for centuries that has been appropriated for an online medium, another instance of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999). What is the genre of an online sketch?
There are two approaches to examine it. Useful conclusions can be drawn from looking at the comparative analysis of analogue and digital photos which might also help understand the technological aspects of production. What is gained and what is lost when drawing on the screen or is it the matter of enacting analogue practices in new environments, transferring old habits into new media? (is it worth pursuing this line of analysis?)
Another source of useful information is to look at the use of sketching in the history of art. Based on my minimal understanding of art practices, sketches have been often used as preliminary studies of the subject, for example to test different angles and perspectives, different lighting or mood. They served to capture emergent ideas and experiment with different routes of developing those ideas. I imagine they were extensively used to prepare for the very act of painting, which involved using expensive paints. In this sense they provided a safe and cheap sandbox to play around with ideas and ways of executing them, being part of the process. But with time, sketches became an end in itself, not the means to the end. For example, some of the Rembrandt’s paintings resemble sketches in a sense they have been purposefully left unfinished, leaving space for ambiguity and multiple interpretations.
This process vs product understanding of a sketch, with an added layer of interpretation provided by digital practices around production, image and audiencing create interesting avenues for understanding what the sketches may bring in to the multimodal assignment.
All three assignments make use of screencasts created with screen capture software, a digitally born genre, whose name was coined by Udell, technology columnist in 2004/5. Screencasts serve different purposes, for example a tutorial or an online demo, and accentuate experiential aspects of digital practices (reference needed). Assignments 2 and 3 make use of them to visualise geospatiality and virtual world experiences, which allows the viewer to experience immersion, the second best option to experiencing it first-hand. Interestingly, screencasts allows the viewer to experience it in the first person, through the eyes of the screencaster, the reality on their screen being replicated on ours. This is much more powerful than attempting to describe the events in words. Similarly to metaphors (?), screencasts are much more economical but paradoxically they manage to provide rich experiential data. Support here might be provided by research into video/computer games.
Genre Theory?
The two genres could be discussed in more detail in terms of the typical features and their significance for the meaning construction processes but the scholarly context has to be accounted for. As mentioned before, it might be difficult to find parallels between the features of the used genres and those of academic writing. I wonder if reconceptualization of genres might not prove beneficial. What if genres are understood as practices, dynamic processes rather than static inventories of features, in line with Russell’s Genre Theory discussed in the context of online environments and practices by Carpenter (2009).