Workspace
9/8/16- In the text Fraser talks about the public spheres of society. To her this means the mediums in which people are able to communicate and have their agendas heard. Among this there are school board meetings, town hall meetings, and any other public forum . The public sphere in its modern sense has many genres. Common culture may be developed or described based on the time. Inequality is common in the public sphere as described by Fraser. Women, minorities, the working class or other groups that are unable to be heard are often supressed in the public sphere which is a major problem within our society.
9/12/16- Pauses and certain words can create an image for the listener. Even though podcasts could be edited they are rarely ever edited. When interviewing you can easily direct the conversation if you are finding that the interviewee is talking about something for too long that may not be interesting. Giving the interviewee feedback on the things they talk about can also guide the conversation.
9/15/16- A challenge that I faced while writing the poem about where I am from is connecting all of my thoughts so the words flowed in a way that made sense as well as sounded appealing. Thinking about all of the things that made my childhood special was interesting to connect them to where I am from and how they may be different for someone who did not grow up there. It also made me realize that I dont really know much about my family. I chose to keep my poem very limited to just the experiences of my town because I did not know that much about where I come from. Although I do feel like the parts that I shared were revealing about who I am as an individual because of where I grew up.
9/19/16-
Does sharing your message make you nervous or are you ambitious about sharing with the public
Do you feel uncomfortable when people ask specifics about your story
Do you feel more comfortable being asked questions or would you rather just tell the story
9/26/16- The feedback from my group was mostly about adding soundeffects (beach/ ocean noise) to make it more interesting/ break things up. To revise further, I plan to add music between the thoughts/ story breaks to make it more interesting for the listener. I also want to expand more at the end about how opening up and letting go of being shy has changed my life.
10/13/16- The chapter talked about the length of information that you recorded and how to break it down into something smaller that a viewer would be want to watch. It talked about deciding what parts were most important to the story line and what to get rid of to make it more concise.
I think that the story structure of our interview is really good. We started with her background and getting to know about her life, and then we heard about her life before the war. She then told us about her life during the war and told us a story about it. After that she told us about how she was able to get through the things that she was experiencing. After that she told us about her life here and how she was living, some challenges that she was facing since she moved to America 16 years ago. I think that we might be able to eliminate some of the questions that had similar answers or the same train of thought.
10/24/16- Sound is used as a metaphor in chapter 4 with the "Deep Sea" because it can be used in so many ways and also interpreted in so many ways. In radio it can be used to elicit emotion or even just to get people attention. In terms of our video stories we can use sound to emphasize the points that the community member wants people to know about them and what they have experienced. Sound cane make some points more emotional and get the viewer to emphasize with what she faced in Liberia and also get her message out about what its like to be a refugee.
11/3/16- The purpose of an edit is to get your work closer to a final product. It makes your vision of the main theme that you are trying to convey more clear for the audience. In editing you may cut things out that are not necessary, add things to add emphasis or clarify ideas. Framing is the outline of your story and all of the elements that comprise it. The framework includes the facts of the story as well as the timeline. Signposting is a strategy to help the audience focus on main point of what you are trying to convey. For example in my refugee project one of the main things that Celia wanted to focus on was her faith in God. We made that clear by allowing her to tell her story about her interaction with God which gave her the motivation to keep going through the hard times that she was facing.
11/14/16- Oral history can be considered the verbal narration of a persons life story. In other words the history of important, pivotal life events that comprise an individuals life story. Oral history can be considered a co constructed process of narrative composition because it takes many forms of writing to comprise a persons history. It may start with written questions that are asked by an interviewer, they are recorded, and then composed in an audio or video piece. In order to map coherence onto the disorder of lived experience I think it is important to keep the story line in order of how it happened in the individuals life, but also focus on the important life lessons that can be learned which like all of the important points that you choose to focus on. I think what we can use in our refugee projects from this is the focus on what is important to the refugee and what they want people to know about what is significant about their story. It is easy to lose the main message when editing because there are so many points that our refugee talked about, but focusing on the main message is important.
The Olive Project helps me think about multi model because it shows that besides audio and video recordings there are many ways that you can construct them for a viewer. Instead of just having audio recording, you had clips of different stories of people that were important to her grandmothers life. I think the website was really creative for conveying her grandmothers story to public audiences. In an audio or video she might not have been able to tell all of that information because it would have been too long, but in this form, you could kind of pick what you wanted to hear about in her life story. I think that this project shows how hard it is to comprehensively represent a persons story. In our refugee projects we didnt really learn much about our refugees life outside of her experience as a refugee, so for example in the Olive Project we learned about things that her grandmother liked to do, but we didnt really get to learn about our refugee in that manner so the story that we share in our final project wont be about her, and her whole life, but rather a focus on an experience that changed her life.
This project helps me think about what it means to represent a persons life because it shows how many different ways that you can do it, and the flaws that can make it un understandable for an audience. In the first video that we watched it was confusing and there was too much going on to focus on what she was even trying to convey about her story, I got nothing out of it. So that is an example of a medium in which it ruins that narrative and oral history of the individuals life. In the second display, I thought it was really creative the way that she linked all of the short clips together and you could pick what you wanted to hear, but I still didnt really get a comprehensive meaning or story of her life. It was confusing to hear the clips without context of where it was coming from.
11/17/16- The purpose of this article was to address the ways that words that we use can be defined and used in many ways. In different discourse communities words are used for different purposes and may produce different meanings. The definition and meaning of words can also evolve, for example the word new media has grown and expanded so much that it is explained that its original meaning is not even connected to the meaning that we understand today. Determining definitions for words is also complex because people use them for different reasons in their areas. It also talks about using words that your audience will understand, if you are using complex words it will distract the audience from what you are trying to convey as your main message. using precise language is important so the audience understands what the meaning of the word that you are using is intended to be.
I think that the Historically situated section was the most interesting because the idea that words have evolved over time to mean different things because of the advancement of technology. New mediums have given us the opportunity to express ideas in ways that are more interesting to the audience. Gunther Kress compares the radio being new at one point in time to a lantern which a new concept at one point. Cynthia Selfe talks about how digital media is always developing. At its start it was simplistic and now has developed to do things that people are even still figuring out. the contextual section was also interesting to me. Gunther Kress talks about the idea that new media is a term that we use today because it almost did not exist before because the lack of technologic advancements. The evolution of new media to digital mediums has evolved to allow us to be more creative. And lastly the idea that digital media may also become a thing of the past because of advancements in technology.
11/21/16- For the video project I was in charge of recording the answers to the questions that we asked during the interview, I also used the questions to make the manuscript for the subtitles so that viewers could understand what Cecelia was saying. I also helped Kathryn on some of the editing on IMovie, I didn't know as much about how to use it but I was able to help decide where to make cuts and what we did not need in the video. I think my group worked well with the distribution of work, we all worked together through the process so there were no points where only some of us were working on it, unless there was a scheduling issue. That being said I think that my contribution was equal to everyone else's.
I think the meaning and the message that Cecelia wanted to convey is my favorite part about the video. We were able to keep most of her story about her experience in Liberia, but also connect it to what she has accomplished and how her life is now. Her story is very powerful, and I like the ending where she talks about her advice for other refugees. The part that displeases me most about the video is the subtitles, we worked really hard on adding them and getting them just right to what she was saying, but I think they were the most challenging part of the video. Also the camera angle, I think this is something that if I had the opportunity to redo the project I would have put more thought into while recording.
After completing this project, and what I now know, I think that I would revise the way that we created the questions and the way that we filmed it. When we were filming we didn't know what the main message of idea of the piece would be in the end so the questions that we asked kind of guided her to talk about what she wanted to share and there was no way that we could have known that before filming so I think that is what made it hard to put the final video together. I also think the way that we filmed in terms of the view I would have changed to make it more interesting for the viewer, but again that is something that we would have only figured out after filming the whole thing.
12/5/16- After looking at the work that my classmates have done I think I need to put more work into making my reflection more creative, the ones that I looked at had good reflection but also had creative elements along with the reflection of the goals that we have accomplished which made it more interesting to look at, rather than just reading about what we did. I think I need to add more of the course readings and the things that we talked about in class to make my reflection connected to the objective of the class and how I have met them. I think I need to add more about the video project and then tie the loose ends together to wrap up how I accomplished the learning objectives of the course. More reflection on this rather than what we actually did will accomplish this.