English 344 Final Project

The final project is your opportunity to experiment with hypertext or multimedia. I've decided on four basic categories below: blogs, hypertext, multimedia, informational web sites. Blogs will be the easiest to do technically, but will require you to start early and do a lot of writing to fill the blog with content. Hypertext projects can be fiction or nonfiction and take from a variety of genre. I'm most interested in your producing a "mixed genre" piece of some kind that follows from the works we will examine in class. Multimedia projects will take the most technical skill and perhaps the most creative skill: you not only want something "flashy" but something thoughtful—there has to be rhetorical or aesthetic reasons for the technical choices you make. A traditional informational web site will perhaps be the easiest to do in some respects because you probably have the most experience with this form (most corporate or institutional web sites follow this genre). However, it fits less with the overall approach to digital writing that this class takes (I take a more traditional, corporate approach to digital writing in my 505 class, which focuses on standard web design). We will talk some about this form in class but not a lot. If you choose this option, make sure you familiarize yourself with the Web Style Guide.

What you decide to do for this project will depend on your personal or professional interests and either your previous technical experience or desire to learn a particular new technology. I want you to choose a project you think you'll get the most out of either in terms of new knowledge or in terms of a project you may actually keep using after the class is over. There is also an opportunity here to do a project related to Neuromancer and submit it to one of the Text and Community contests.

Options:

1. Blog

2. Hypertext

3. Multimedia

4. Informational Web Site

Details:

I'm most interested in works that employ the rhetorical approaches discussed in Rice and exhibited in Hayles, McLuhan, and Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) and/or the structural approaches discussed in Bernstein and exhibited in Memmott, Amerika, Malthrop, etc.

The rhetorical approaches seek to

  1. situate the individual body and identity in a complex position among various discourses—popular, technological, intellectual, historical, economic, familial, etc.
  2. mix these discourses via juxtaposition, collage, and interlinking in order to create associative connections.

The structural approaches seek to

  1. get beyond the linear forms that make print media "hot" by spelling out each connection for the reader
  2. find ways to make the arrangement "cool" without the reader getting completely lost in a tangle that has nothing at all for the reader to go on.

Even though I privilege the "mixed" genre approach that asks you to bring in material from a variety of genre and domains, you can choose to remediate more traditional print genre such as the poem or the short story as well as remediate a popular genre such as the "rockumentary" or the sitcom (think back to the Brooks essay).

If you are still at a complete loss for a focus, Rice's book has numerous suggestions that could be the basis for a final project. For exmaple, see p.89 #1-6, p.104 #1-2, p.119-20 #1-2, p.134 #3, p.143 #1-2, p.154 #3, p.163 #2-3.

Grades:

Whatever you decide to do, remember that I will grade you based on

  1. your level of technical expertise upon entering the course and how much you've been able to advance this semester
  2. on your ability to think rhetorically in the production of your project, no matter its level of technical expertise (i.e., your ability to communicate an idea through new media).

Proposals:

For the proposal, answer the follwoing questions and post them to your web site or blog:

1. Genre as purpose:

  • What do you want the project to do? (inform, communicate, express, tell a story, argue, critique, complicate (confuse?), create community (network), etc.)
  • What affect do you want the project to have on a reader (user)? (Do you want the reader to do something? think something? feel something?)
  • Why do you want to create this affect?

2. Genre as form:

  • What form would likely create this affect/effect? (collage, poem, short story, informational web site, multimedia, photo/image, linear argument, hypetext network (tangle, seive, mirror world, etc.), some pop cultural model, some new (hybrid) form that doesn't exist yet)
  • Why do you think this form will create the above affect? (What attributes does it have that will produce those effects?)

3. Genre as medium:

  • What particular technologies or tools will you need to produce this form and this affect? (blog, basic web page, straight html, html editor (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Composer), Photoshop, Flash, PowerPoint, Quicktime, Windows Movie Maker (iMovie), etc.)
  • What steps have you taken in order to obtain and/or learn the appropriate technologies? (Buy the tools, take a workshop, ask a friend for help, find out which labs on campus have the technology, etc.)
  • What steps do you still need to take in order to obtain and/or learn the appropriate technologies?

4. Rhetorical Focus:

  • Specifically, what is the primary claim, theme, emotion, feeling, or value you want the project to embody?
  • Specifically, what is the word, year, place, person or text that functions as a center for your remix or remake?

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