Scholarly Webtext Proposal

Topic: For professional photographers, their portfolios are their way of proving their “scholarship” to the world. The ability to showcase their portfolios through customized websites is a new media technology that photographers have embraced since day one. Most, like the famous war photographer James Nachtwey, have sparse sites with little navigation. The site IS the showcase, a portfolio with as little explanation as possible because the pictures are supposed to do the talking.
But what happens when you combine words and photography? Isn’t that the strongest relationship of all? Joel Sartore, noted National Geographic photographer, has decided to take this approach. His site affords multiple paths of navigation as well as well-written stories to accompany his startling images. I wish to examine Sartore’s work as a scholarly webtext.

Delivery Medium: Online audio slideshows on my blog. One will compare the stark nature of James Nachtwey’s website/portfolio (a good example of most photographer’s websites) to Joel Sartore’s open site that welcomes navigation and other affordances. Another will show the strong relationship Sartore’s site represents between words and photos by removing photos from words and words from photos to represent impact. And lastly, a slideshow that brings it all together and incorporates sources from class and elsewhere to prove how photographers are using new media to their advantage. I will also continue to blog throughout this project about my findings, bringing links, photos and sources together.

Thinking like a DJ

I’ve pulled some “sound bites” from DJ Spooky’s “Loops of Perceptions” article in hopes of breaking it down into something I can understand through linking central ideas.  Each one begins with “think of” and ends with a series of linking ideas.

“Think of DJ culture as a kind of archival impulse put to a kind of hunter-gatherer milieu – textual poaching, becomes zero-paid, becomes no-logo, becomes brand X.”

We live in a remix culture.  Larry Lessig addresses this in his speech on how copyright laws are strangling creativity. He claims that the children of today learn and experiment by remixing things that already exist to make them relevant to today’s generation.  DJ Spooky is saying a similar thing: we take things on the Web and make them our own by “remixing” them to have a new meaning.

“Think of it as the act of memory moving from word to word as a remix: complex becomes multiplex becomes omniplex.”

When we remix something, it starts out as one entity and takes on a new identity.  The message starts in our head, broadcasts itself through the remix and becomes this linking chain of outreach.  It grows as other people discover it and remix it yet again.

“Think of the semantic webs that hold together contemporary info culture, and of the disconnect between how we speak, and how the machines that process this culture speak to one another, thanks to our efforts to have anything and everything represented and available to anyone everywhere.”

This sound bite really links all of what DJ Spooky is saying together.  He claims that we are talking and remixing through our machines, whether they be smart phones, music players, computers or other devices. The medium influences the message and how we remix it in the first place.  And like how a photographer showing up to an event impacts what is going on, the mediums we use to remix influence how and why we remix information.  But at the same time, it also disconnects us from the message because we are speaking to one another through our own remixes.

Imagine That…

Those first few moments before you truly come awake in the morning can be your most creative.

Your body is coming out of a REM cycle and whatever dreams you have dreamt through the night are still fresh in your mind, as detailed as they can be.

Then, the alarm goes off.  You’re all business and immediately begin your morning routine of getting ready.  There are a million things to do: need to get to the grocery store, get to work on time, consider eating breakfast, write that proposal for your next meeting and don’t forget to put that deposit in the bank.

But what if you started off your morning with something simple, like love.  For love.  What if the first question you asked yourself upon waking was “imagine that?”  Then, you followed it up with a snapshot from one of your dreams.  You could go to the Bank of Imagination in your pajamas, deposit in your idea “currency” and maybe stumble upon a bit of life wisdom while you’re there.

On the scale of the global economy, the Bank of Imagination would fit in that “love” category.  You can dream, share and pick up on the ideas of others for free.  This type of “wealth,” to be rich in imagination, ideas and dreams, contributes to the quality of life by affording you with the chance to speak, be heard and share.  Like a citizen journalist, you work based on inspiration and a willingness to share it with the world.

In “The Future of Ideas,” Lawrence Lessig says that “free content fuels innovation.”  In our amateur culture, where copyright laws threaten to “strangle our creativity,” free is the new vice and device of society.  Laws look at it as a vice, and the child in everyone looks at free as a vehicle for more creative freedom.  We can seize on an idea, for free, and shape it into something new.  This is how cultures are built and improved upon.

Marshall McLuhan, the author of “The Medium is the Message,” believes that anything we create and put out into the world is an extension of ourselves.  The Bank of Imagination is a repository of these little extensions that are waiting for an ending or even continuation.  When someone else picks up an idea, it becomes a extension of ourselves built on by the extension of someone else, linking our society together.

The primary colored blocks of the Bank of Imagination represent a playground for our ideas.  But is clicking around and navigating a Web site, where you may never seem the same idea twice, a source of info sickness?  Carr would most likely consider the Bank of Imagination to be like Google, condensing ideas into boxes.  However, the access here is not as easy.  You control the results you see, whether through choosing tags or categories or allowing complete randomization.

Welcome… to the Matrix

Welcome to the Bank of Imagination.

Is it what you thought it would be?

Did you expect a pristine, white space, like in The Matrix?  Did you imagine hearing a calm, digitized voice welcoming you inside to deposit your bit of daily wisdom?  Was the last thing you expected to see a page full of falling blocks in primary colors?

This leads to an interesting idea: what should something with such a lofty name like the “Bank of Imagination” look like?  To be honest, I pictured a cross between the genius of J. K. Rowling’s Gringotts with the “Matrix” interface.  Instead, I was greeted with serene piano key sounds activated as my mouse drifted over primary color boxes.

The “Bank” itself, a repository for the ideas of the world housed online, consists of a very basic design that is deceptively imaginative and interactive.  We don’t expect to be greeted by this design, or that each box is an individual note from a piano, or that as the boxes fall, they form a new idea “block.”  Further, we can choose the types of ideas we wish to see, to narrow down this extensive, bold field to customized search results.  We can broaden our horizons by reading ideas in other languages (and translating them through some other source) or choosing an idea category that we aren’t really looking for but find ourselves fascinated all the same.

According to the Web site, this is not a “strict” bank, but like Virginia, is “for lovers.”  It plays on the positive aspects (and cliches) of banking: “sharing the wealth,” “banking in on a good idea” and “saving up for a rainy day.”  The bank is “a place for creating, sharing and searching for imaginations and the people who imagine.  In this bank, saving is sharing.  Investing is liberation.  Winning is squandering.  And imagining is, as always, free.”

So, now you have come to the bank.  What do you wish to do today?  Well, you can start by depositing your own imagination or browse around through the ideas of others.  Want to start with categories?  You can choose from 5 broad selections: smile, hate, act, feel or create.  From there, the possibilities are endless, or as endless as you can get over the next 5 pages of tags.

Why are these ideas here?  According to Larry Lessig’s lecture on how copyright laws strangle creativity, it is for “love.”  We exist in a society that aims to broadcast itself as citizen journalists.  The tools of creativity have changed and provide a certain type of literacy, especially for this generation, where anyone can exist and create in a digital culture.  Now, we “celebrate amateur culture, where people produce for the love of what they do, not the money.”  We can “remix to make something different,” according to Lessig, and that is exactly what the “Bank” affords.

Lessig embraces user-generated content, similar to the Bank of Imagination’s “deposits,” as the way we speak to one another.  At the Bank of Imagination, we can embrace all of the afforances of new media.  We, as consumers, are:

1. Agents, both creators and limitors, who

2. Act through sharing our ideas by depositing our thoughts in the

3. Agency of the Bank of Imagination in the

4. Scene of the here and now because our

5. Purpose is to provide everyone with a starting point.

The Bank of Imagination and its Rhetoric

When considering the “Bank of Imagination” as a rhetorical device of new media, I instantly refer back to how dialogue has evolved over centuries upon centuries.  When people look at mass media, especially in the beginning days of newspapers, they see a string of dialogue: news->audience.  It is a one-way communication, hence the word “mass.”  This idea of one large medium delivering information to a mass of people is very static.  The audience is not expected to respond, merely consume and understand the news.  They will react, but it doesn’t matter how.  Of course, people write letters to the editor and opinion pieces, but their voices are chosen by the mass media and the newspaper chooses who can be published.

Now, we have a developing and increasingly popular trend towards “citizen journalism.”  Society as a whole has become largely more verbal and visual through the many devices of new media: cell phone video and audio, digital cameras, computers, netbooks, smart phones and the Internet.  Rhetoric has transitioned from how an act of speech can impact other people to a textual, visual AND language act meant to elicit a response from the audience.  But the biggest difference is communication.  New media, especially social networking and interactive Web sites allow people to have communication not only back and forth, but in multiple and linking directions.  We can talk back to mass media or put out our own news.

The Bank of Imagination is a site for sharing creative ideas or threads of thoughts.  They have authorship but willingly float around for others to seize.  Rather than feeling like mindless Twitter updates, the falling box patterns represent starting points.  It is the beginning of a silent conversation meant to inspire others.  When a user contributes their idea to the bank, they are essentially depositing one idea to receive another; “give a penny, take a penny” in the new media age, if you will.

Some criticize this banking metaphor as “passive learning,” a lazy way out of coming up with our own ideas.  But new media is built on a foundation of shared creativity.  Each part of the Internet’s inner workings was created by another person.  In a new media society, taking a note from someone else and building on it constitutes improvement.  We are constantly updating to something newer and better.  Why not share these starting points with others, especially if we have no path that follows our own idea?  Someone else could come along, read the idea and create a whole foundation and future based on a one-line imagining from a stranger.

Through the Bank of Imagination, we are not only speaking our minds to one another, we are sharing inspiration, ideas, quotes, musings and even random silliness with the world.  Free outreach, a chance to have our voices heard and the ability to build on the ideas of others makes this “bank” a valuable rhetorical device of new media. In this age, we have the power to communicate in any direction we want and the user interface of this Web site could not make it any clearer.

 

The Evolution of Writing

I was both fascinated and opposed to an article I read called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  I didn’t really agree with most of what Carr said, but I was “stung” by his few paragraphs on Nietzsche:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

I began writing when I was 4-years-old.  I would sit on my mother’s lap and dictate stories, which she typed out on the computer.  It blew my mind, watching my words appear on the screen.  They felt important; to me, print on a screen was just a step away from the books she read to me at night.  The words, my words and my story, had permanence on that page.  At school, however, we were still encouraged to write them out.  My teachers even provided little books stapled together, full of blank pages.  I began filling them up, but seeing my words on paper didn’t carry the same importance.  I could write them here, but I  could write them anywhere I chose.  I could open a book and write my words over the text if I wanted.  But typing and printing them not only made the story my own, but it felt “official.”

I hit the first stages of a real writing style in high school.  My freshman and sophomore years, writing became one of the most important parts of my life.  I thought I wanted to be an author and I experienced wave upon wave of story ideas and poems. As I developed this style, I also became aware of a process that accompanied the writing.  For some reason, I always started out physically writing the words out in pencil in my notebooks.  Then, after I worked out and wrangled with all of the words on the roughened page, I could type up a clean, polished copy.  The notebook paper was full of scratches, smudges, arrows and words hovering on top of other words, itching to replace them.  Whole phrases moved from one place to another, showing the skid marks of their journey.  It was all documented, the birth and evolution of the piece.  Then, it came together on the computer screen.  Its struggle to exist was forgotten.

I’m not sure why the process was so important to me then.  Now, my style has evolved.  I can begin on the page or the screen.  Because so much of my work is online journalism, I usually work in WordPress pages or Word documents.  Journalism has also caused me to shorten that original, flowery style and come away with brevity and clarity.  Is this also a byproduct of working straight from the computer and bypassing my old notebook process?  It’s possible.  I can definitely relate to Nietzsche in that regard, although if I’m blinded, it’s by technology without knowing it.

Constrained Creativity

Oulipo seems like it would be the most fascinating and frustrating writing technique I have ever come across.  The idea of constraining yourself to produce new, fresh waves of creativity seems as though it “cannot be ill, cannot be good,” to borrow from Hamlet.  But I also say, don’t knock something until you try it.

To be honest, I’m surprised Oulipo didn’t begin as a movement until 1960.  The roots feel modernist.  Well, as I think about it, maybe Oulipo is more postmodernist.  Its outward appearance is absurd, the inner workings completely logical and mathematical.  T. S. Eliot meant to take us through a “Wasteland,” not an abbreviated, constrained version of the long, unfurling picture in his mind.  But the deconstructionists and postmodernists, they would appreciate reining in a poem or novel to the bare bones for a larger meaning.

Oulipo seems to me like it is all about personal interpretation.  I feel like you can be as free as you want to interpret this constrained piece of creativity someone has put out into the world, as free as the creator.  Working through a constrained medium to produce a creative work provides a certain type of freedom of the creator.

I’ve tried my hand at oulipo before, but the closest I came was forcing an image in my head into sonnet form.  For someone long-winded and descriptively obsessed as I am, that was a challenge.  But when I look back on it, I like the result.  Why?  Because I successfully translated an image in my head into 14 rhyming lines without losing what I wanted to say.  Palindromes are another animal all together and I think I’ll save that for another day.

Random, but Awesome

Ever wonder who has the coolest job in the world…of photography?  I think just about anyone at Canon, but this guy seems pretty awesome.  Plus, this is even better because it’s my camera!

“Live” Learning

Have I mentioned that I love photography lately?  Because it’s my main man.

In all seriousness, I really do love photography.  I’ve only been shooting since April, but throwing myself into assignments for the newspaper last week really jumpstarted me.  I’m also taking an intro to photojournalism class right now, so between the two, my brain is expanding with photo knowledge every day.  I spent most of last Thursday running around shooting scenes that were beautifully and naturally lit: sunrise, sunset, late afternoon on a ranch.

Oh, yeah.  I’m that crazy girl who chases sunrises and sunsets and visits guest ranches in Madison, Ga. because she’s panicking about not having any shots to turn in come Friday at 5 p.m.  I had a blast the whole time.  Photography isn’t really great for a normal schedule at all, including sleep, but the payoff comes when you catch that perfect moment in your camera and strive to share it with the world.

For the first time since I’ve started this photographic journey through my life, I had one of those “a-ha” moments.  Not just an epiphany, but a photographic version of one.  This happens to every amateur at some point; you’re driving along looking for the perfect thing to shoot when this great potential image pops up on the side of the road and you wrench the wheel a hard right to the side of the road.  You may also tramp through waist-high freezing wet grass in a giant field to shoot an old water tower with the sun creating a perfect silhouette behind it as mist rises from that same wet grass.  I’m just saying that it happens, it happened to me and it made my day.

A water tower on the side of the road past the State Botanical Gardens. (Photo/Ashley Strickland)

Rather than go to the LSU game, which I’m actually glad I didn’t, I found myself in downtown Atlanta this weekend for an exciting photo op (the educational kind, not an actual picture).  A few weeks ago, my photojournalism teacher, Mr. Johnson, told me that Canon was bringing one of their famous “Live Learning” workshops to Atlanta the first weekend in October.  He not only had a student discount, he had a way for me to pass go and skip paying $150!  I contacted Canon, passed out postcards to promote the event and got a comp ticket for my efforts.  Saturday was the payoff.

From 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., my mind was blown by just how incredible the art of photography can be, especially through four different “Explorers of Light,” Canon’s collection of the world’s best photographers.  We gathered at the Georgia World Congress Center and played with unreleased new Canon cameras and lenses.  I was the youngest and least experienced photographer there, but that was part of the eye-opening experience.

A horse is silhouetted against the sun as it sets over Southern Cross Guest Ranch in Madison, Ga. (Photo/Ashley Strickland)

We learned how to “maximize our EOS” (translation: make the most of the controls on your camera to make great images), creatively and technically use multiple flashes, shoot HD video with Canon cameras (did you know that SNL has been using 5D Mark II’s, which look like regular cameras, to shoot episodes?), and my personal favorite, the art of landscape, nature and wildlife photography.  I especially enjoyed the last seminar because my ultimate goal is to shoot endangered species, especially snow leopards, for National Geographic.

Some general notes of advice from the workshop:

Great pictures are made up of multiple components.  It is the marriage of a moment and composition, where the camera is not an obstacle between you and the emotion unfolding.  A good photographer will find that one magical viewpoint of a peak moment, like the jubilation shot from a football game, and be ready to record it in the camera.  You know you’re a pro when you master all of the roles and techniques of good photography, and then successfully break all of them.  Ideally, we all want to shoot what has never been shot before.  But most of all, practice.

One of those moments. Isabella Stewart, 19-months-old, and Pumpkin the dog size each other up at the ranch. (Photo/Ashley Strickland)

I’ll see what I can do to get there.  :)

Front Page Feature

Photography and journalism may consume my days and nights, but I still love them.

This usually happens to me on Wednesdays.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s because Wednesday is the middle of the week and I have to experience a journalism/article/photo/news pile-up at least once a week.  And live without sleep.  Oh, well.  Wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I had already lined up 3 interviews after my day of classes and then Jake Daniels, my photo editor at Red and Black, texted about needing some construction site photos from the ripped-up Spec Towns Track.  The track team and recreational runners used to love it, but construction started over the summer and they are stilling working on it through November.  I said what any good photojournalist taught by Mark Johnson would: “Sure thing, boss.  I’ll take care of it.”

Heels and all, I took on the interviews and then the construction site.  They didn’t like me walking around taking pictures of the site, although they knew I was legit, but I will say it was totally worth getting kicked off a construction site to land TWO front page feature photos on the cover of Thursday’s Red and Black.

Construction continues on Spec Towns Track, leaving the UGA Track Team and recreational runners practically "homeless" during the fall. (Photo/Ashley Strickland)

The Spec Towns Track is closed until November. (Photo/Ashley Strickland)

I booked it back to the office after I got my shots and then Daniel Shirey stopped by.  It was Wednesday night and he was prepping for another “First and Goal” cover for Friday’s football issue.  We ARE playing LSU this weekend, which is huge, and he had some great ideas for a Mardi Gras theme with two of the defensive linebackers, Cornelius Washington and Justin Houston.  But he needed someone to help with lighting.  Hey, last week I got to meet kicker-extraordinaire Drew Butler and I love helping Daniel, so I brushed off a chance at dinner and went over to the football compound.

Let me just say this: defense may look scary (Houston put on 55 pounds of pure muscle since joining the team), but they are really nice and have a great sense of humor.  Shirey and I set up in the team meeting room and got all of the flashes, lights and umbrellas adjusted.  Then, we waited.  For two hours.  Football practice ran late and then we had a hard time coordinating when both players could show up.  Someone brought in their jerseys (on hangers, really?)  and then the two guys finally came in.  Shirey told them about his idea with the Mardi Gras beads and they gave him the death glare: “Say what?”

Washington and Houston came around and they seemed to enjoy throwing beads at Daniel while he shot frame after frame.  When else can you throw things at a photographer and legally get away with it?  We came away with a great First and Goal-worthy shot, packed up our gear and then walked out into the night.  Mission accomplished!

While we didn’t win the game, it was still a heck of a fight and we have the picture to prove it!