Digital Rhetoric/Digital Rhetoric in Action

Below are links to some works which, in our view, illustrate and exemplify various concepts related to the field of digital rhetoric.

Remixing Portfolio

I designed an online portfolio to display my top design pieces in graphics, print publications, and websites. Through digital rhetoric and with the assistance of the Animoto website, I was able to create a remix using these portfolio pieces. By using the new and exciting elements of digital rhetoric, I am able to display my work in a more much dynamic fashion. Instead of future employers viewing my portfolio pieces as a flat static image, there is an exciting introduction with video, text, and movement of the images. This new discovery is more than just an average slideshow. It allows me to choose my “spotlight” images, which the remix will focus on during the 30 second clip. The Animoto website does this spotlight feature by shadowing these particular images or creating different affects to emphasize the importance of these images more than the others. This individual project provides an excellent example of how digital rhetoric can change and influence the presentation of what were once static items.

Remixing Portfolio

Mosaic: Implementing Elements of Digital Rhetoric

Created by Sara A. Lari

Throughout the semester, we have been trying to narrow down a definition of “digital rhetoric.” As a group, we narrowed down to something along the lines of the following statement: “elements of persuasion that work together in a digital world.” For my individual project, I wanted to work with the idea utilizing the concepts of visual rhetoric, authorship, context, and hyperlinks. At first, it was challenging coming up with a project that implemented elements of digital rhetoric. However, as time progressed, I decided to create something where I could educate my audience. The topic assigned to our group was Remediation and Remix, and I wanted to create something within those lines. I chose to create a mosaic of a famous architectural building. I decided to use a software called mosaic creator and uploaded an image of “Burj Al Arab,” the second tallest hotel in the world. It is famous worldwide for its unique architecture, as it resembles a billowing sail. I chose “Burj Al Arab” because I was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; I wanted to make the project personal. In order to create the mosaic, I used over 800 of my personal pictures. With the aid of the software program, I was able to create a mosaic-like piece. Essentially, my personal pictures became tiles, and created the mosaic while mimicking the original picture. The more pictures I used, the more accurate the mosaic appeared.

Now, in order to make it relevant to digital rhetoric, I decided to incorporate a hyperlink pertinent to architecture in each tile. However, due to time constraints, I was unable to attach a hyperlink for each tile present in the mosaic. For time being, I am going to be dividing the mosaic in six different parts. Each part is going to comprise of several hundred tiles, and I will attach one hyperlink, collectively. The idea is that once people scroll over each tile, they will be sent to a website containing information related to architecture or some interesting facts about the architectural building.

The idea is that in order to educate people about a certain topic, a mosaic can be used to aesthetically appeal to the audience. In addition, people can personalize the mosaics by using their own pictures, or if they feel uncomfortable with that option, the mosaic creator website offers packages with over a thousand pictures. Within the mosaic, hyperlinks can be incorporated to make the project more interesting, so that when people click on the tiles, and they are directed to a website or anything relevant to the mosaic. This tool could be implemented in classrooms, universities – the possibilities are infinite.

I really enjoyed working on this project, and I had a chance to actually implement and apply all the different aspects of digital rhetoric that we learned this past semester.

Here is the link to my project: Mosaic: Implementing Elements of Digital Rhetoric

Basics of Digital Rhetoric in a Wiki Format

Overview of the Site

For my final project I created a web page on wikispace, this site provide an indication of Digital Rhetoric and other related topics that I have learned in Digital Rhetoric class. The Main page of my site is the home page, which I describe the content and descriptions of the site. For each significant, I created individual pages. Each individual page will provide a summary and description of each topic. Along with the description I included a link to an important term on each pages. On the other hand, I included videos and images to provide visual details on each topic.

This site mainly was created to inform users about Rhetoric and other important topic that we have discussed in digital rhetoric courses throughout this semester. The main point that I want to emphasize in this page is Digital Rhetoric. Most of us are unaware about the importance of digital rhetoric and how it dominates public affairs, educations, organization and any other task that involves digital media or web. Whenever we go on a computer we use some form of Digital Rhetoric, but we might not know about it. Digital Rhetoric will advance as technology move forward especially digital rhetoric that involves web. On this wiki page I will create separate page for each topic that are a concept of digital rhetoric. On each page it I will provide a brief description and also provide links, videos, images that consist on each topic.

Throughout this semester we have learned about significant roll of digital rhetoric. One of the fundamental concepts of this course was the relationship between classical and digital rhetoric. Classical rhetoric is the foundation of rhetoric; however since technology advance rhetoric was adapted to be used in digital media and webs.

First I describe and define the term “digital Rhetoric” a page is created for this topic since it’s the main point of this project. Authorship also an important topic that we defined and described throughout this semester which, I think it’s an imperative note to be included in my site. Collaboration, Second Life, and Web 2.0 are also important terms that related to digital rhetoric, which is why an individual page was created for each of them. This project also related to digital rhetoric the way collaborate, share ideas, define authorship, and how technology advanced digitally.

Creating this was challenging and time consuming however it was a great experience. This project refreshed my memory on the important topics that we have learned in this class. This class also provided me an important role of digital rhetoric and how it outlined our academic life. Click the bottom link to View my Site.

"" My Wiki Site""

The Summer of '06

I created a bodyboarding video titled The Summer of ’06 that represents digital rhetoric in many different aspects. This video uses mixed media by incorporating text, music, images, and video clips, as well as hyperlinks. All the pictures and video clips were original photographs and video clips taken back in 2006. Authorship is the first and most prominent feature of this video. It has been put together solely by me and posted onto the social networking site Facebook, for the world to see and comment on. Viewers have the ability to post comments on this video through Facebook and also “tag” people or anything they want to identify in the video creating an interactive experience. Through this digital mean, my video is shared with the world with a click of a button and potentially informs thousands of people about The Summer of ’06.

Remix and remediation are other aspects of this video portraying digital rhetoric. Instead of just a normal video with original audio clips from the beach I have taken the original audio out and overlaid music as the background. The music, if you listen to it carefully while viewing the video, highlights some points of the video with phrases and sounds that are similar to what is being shown or experienced at the moment a picture or clip is shown. I slowed down, sped up, and froze certain images or clips in order to make them more interesting apart from their original forms. I applied filters to change the way in which some video clips and text appears especially with the opening and closing scenes. Transitions between scenes turn a normal slideshow into a remixed version, creating a connected video rather than chopped up video. I used Photoshop to alter the picture of Goodale Productions from its original plain lettered appearance and inserted it into the credits. I recorded original music within the closing credits. After recording the song, I remixed it by applying enhancements (cleaning the sound, changing the equalizer, adding additional stereo sound, and fading).

I originally uploaded my video to YouTube with the intention to add hypertext to it. However, YouTube flagged my video as being a copyright infringement due to the music I used by the band Nonpoint. I was going to insert hyperlinks on the video using the annotation editor option YouTube recently created. Hyperlinks would have allowed viewers to go to other places on the internet which are relevant to my video, further than my physical video could have shown them. I ended up uploading my video to Facebook instead, which killed my idea of hypertext but it still gets the point across, enjoy!

Bass Guitar lesson for Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones

The site on youtube is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu4sR86tIL8

If you like what you see please comment.

We have been studying the whole semester what digital rhetoric is. My section was how to tell the difference between composing and writing digital texts. That was my group project and now we have our own individual projects to do. I decided the best approach would be to make a Youtube video online. People use Youtube to teach, to entertain, and to express. I am finally getting to do a more personal video than my past one that is just a humor video. This new video is made so that I can actually try to help people who want to pick up the electric bass and learn a song. I myself am a beginning bass player just trying to learn the instrument, and I thought maybe there are other bass players out there who are looking for popular and recognizable songs to learn how to play. Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones was actually the first song I learned all the way through and I feel like others would benefit from someone showing them what notes to play and how to play them.

From this project I have now showed the world a little something that I know. People can now watch this video in China, Japan, Iceland, England, and etc. Youtube is an ever-expanding web of personal ideas and views. It allows people to place their thoughts and opinions on the Internet for others to see and then comment back. The comments can be good or bad but not everyone in the world will like what we put up on Youtube. That is the beauty of it; we can see the good and the bad and learn from those comments. The possibilities are endless as to what we can add and remix.

In the future I might add more lessons of songs I have picked up along the way and add more videos. Unfortunately with Youtube being such an enormous web, it does have to ability to get lost in the mix. If that does happen though it really does not bother me because I know it is there and if I want people to see it I will find a way to for them to access it. Right now the class can see the video easily because I have put it on the blog as a hyperlink where all you need to do is click and it will take you there with no effort or time lost.

I did learn a lot from the class in terms of what we can do with the right tools. With something like flickr we can post pictures endlessly for people to follow our footsteps day to day, or we can use twitter and update our location, feelings, and ideas. Coming in to this class I had no idea what to expect but after finally doing projects and seeing what others do regularly I have learned that we can voice ourselves easily and find other people in this giant world who think and feel the same just with a click.

Egypt in Hollywood

Egypt in Hollywood, A blog about the pros and cons of antiquity films http://keithaharmon.wordpress.com/

Over the semester TSC 690 has focused on the meaning and methods of digital rhetoric. When I started this course, I was not sure what digital rhetoric really was; however, after the class discussions, readings, and projects, I am confident that I could explain the topic.

For my individual project, I wanted to create an example of digital rhetoric using my wikibook topic of hypertexts and hyperlinks. My individual project is a blog that incorporates several elements of digital rhetoric:

Remediation
Social interaction
Hyperlinks
Hypertextual elements

Remediation

My blog is a remediation of an old paper I wrote on how Hollywood portrays Ancient Egypt. The original paper was a typical report starting with a hypothesis, clear headings, and citations. For my final project, I decided to turn the paper into a blog. I used the main headings as a starting point, and I began writing short posts based on the topics in the paper. Because a blog format is very different from a report, the posts do not follow the paper word for word.

Social Interaction

The purpose of a blog is to encourage social interaction. I use persuasive language and controversial topics to encourage social interaction within my blog.

Because I only had about two weeks to complete this project, there are very few comments on my posts. To increase social interaction I have considered two methods. For the first method, I would visit similar blogs and begin to interact on other sites and then I would leave a link to my site on my posts. This method would encourage people with similar interests to visit and respond to my blog. The second method for encouraging social interaction would be to register my blog on sites such as technorati.com and blogcatalog.com. Registering my blog would make it easier to find and could

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are the foundations of hypertexts. I used hyperlinks throughout my blog, linking specific words to Wikipedia.com, dictionary.com, and content specific websites. Because my topic is very specific, I decided to include links that can take the reader to other sites and allow the reader to research topics they are not familiar with.

Hypertextual Elements

There are levels of hypertextuality. In Hypertext 3.0, George Landow defines a true hypertext as combining linked texts and images, having no beginning and no end, containing many entrances and exits, interacting with users, being unpredictable, being discontinuous, not being linear. My blog is not a true hypertext; however, there are several hypertextual elements to my project. My blog includes mixed media, social interaction, hyperlinks, and non-linear discussions.

Conclusion

This semester has opened my mind to new technologies on the Web. Working on my wikibook topic and this final project has been a great learning experience. Please feel free to look through my blog and post comments. You can view my final project at http://keithaharmon.wordpress.com/.

Volunteer New Orleans

My Project

My individual project was created in wordpress a free blogging site. This was a perfect host from my project because it let me post journal and essay style entries to give background information and provide links to other site for more information. For my project please see Volunteer New Orleans.

Digital Rhetoric Today

The purpose of this project was to create persuasive and informative visual rhetoric that leads readers through the city of New Orleans experiences and my volunteer experiences pre and post Hurricane Katrina. I hope that by the completion of this project I can educate and inform people on the affects and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Most importantly that there is a long way to go with the rebuilding stage and volunteers are always welcome. So my goal is to become an advocate for what I saw during my time as a volunteer and what I still see needs to be done. Certainly, I know I am no expert on the topic but I hope that we can learn together to rebuilding NOLA. By creating a project about New Orleans it has allowed me to reach a broader audience with more tools available to help recreate my experiences online through hyperlinks, texts, images, movies, blogs, social interaction, and sounds.

Social Action

We can take steps together. Simply by educating yourself on the world issues today is taking the initiative for social action by becoming an informed citizen. Become a volunteer, access the site to find out other's volunteer experiences and how you can become a volunteer. Donate, find a way to give back without actually having to go down to NOLA. There are plenty of nonprofits struggling everyday to receive funding, and this is a great way to support with furthering achieving their mission. Comment, post, and learn, social action taking shape by interaction, educating, and sharing knowledge.

Conclusion

I truly have had fun with this project and enjoyed the opportunity to take what I have learned and apply it to an educational project. There is a lot of information to sift through to help take this site reach its potential. With each trip, the more photos and stories I will have to share and with more volunteers hopefully the more updates on progress I can report back on.

Why YOU Should Come to JMU (based on Common Craft)

For my individual project, I created a video for prospective students indicating why they should attend JMU. The short film is based on the Common Craft series, a husband-and-wife team who makes instructional videos for various topics from social media to investing.

Digital Rhetoric in General

How does my project relate to digital rhetoric? First, let’s review what the term digital rhetoric means. In a previous class, it was defined as “the way in which persuasion and communication function and work in digital environments.” Traditionally, prospective students who are unable to make the trip to JMU learn about it through brochures, word of mouth, or looking at the university Web site. While brochures offer pictures and the Web site offers a breadth of information, these forms of media do not stand out as well because other schools use the same tools. Word of mouth has its benefits, but it can only do so much. However, with this video, digital rhetoric (more specifically, the art of persuasion) is clearly illustrated through the content of the video “Why You Should Come to JMU.” Not only does the video showcase a Top 5 list (an influential tool), but it also takes a creative approach to deliver the point.

Intellectual Property

One concept of digital rhetoric that my individual project touches on is intellectual property. In his book, Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig discusses the stringent copyright system and how it inhibits the progression of spreading knowledge to and promoting creativity for others. Creative Commons responded to the call to action, and many corporations have jumped onboard to allow the public to “share” their creative work, including Common Craft. If Common Craft would not have obtained a “Some Rights Reserved” copyright, I probably would not have been able to remix their video to tailor it to my audience. Their license does indicate that whoever uses their work should attribute them and use it for noncommercial purposes. In the title slide of my video, I wrote that my presentation was based on Common Craft, and I even included their logo. I also stated this in the video description on the YouTube site.

Remix

A second concept of digital rhetoric that the video includes is the art of remix. Remixing involves creating a new, alternate version of an original concept. For example, my video is a prime example of remixing, because I used the Common Craft idea of using 2D imagery, audio, and animation on a whiteboard background to illustrate my point.

Visual Rhetoric

A third component of digital rhetoric depicted in my video is that of visual rhetoric. Christine Alfano, professor at Stanford University, defines visual rhetoric as “a form of communication that uses images to create meaning or construct an argument.” The entire video is filled with visual rhetoric, and its goal is to convince prospective students that JMU is where they belong. For example, the picture of the sea of students in Bridgeforth Stadium illustrates that students genuinely care about JMU, especially if they flock to football games in such high numbers.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, and I’m pleased that I was able to demonstrate several concepts of digital rhetoric.

Many Souths: Civil War era Southern perspective does not = Confederate perspective

Created by Robert Moore

Many Souths as a form of digital rhetoric

My final project — Many Souths: The Civil War era Southern perspective does not = Confederate perspective — was developed based on my understanding of the definition of digital rhetoric. In short, my definition of digital rhetoric is to create persuasion, using the affordances of the digital space, within the digital environment.

Format for Many Souths

In its present form, Many Souths is a prototype for a website. Furthermore, though I take advantage of the WordPress.com blog format, the site is not a blog. No posts have been created for this project. Rather, I have used the page creation function to create the prototype. As readers can see in the sidebar, there are 32 pages divided among four different tiers.

As elements of my digital persuasion, I have included non-social interface elements (internal and external hyperlinks) as well as visual imagery. Though the site is designed to “funnel” readers through my digital rhetoric presentation, and this “funneling” does not fit some theorists’ definition of hyptertext, it is still a hypertext. If the internal hyperlinks are followed within the individual pages, it is a linear presentation, however, the sidebar allows entrance to the pages at any point in the presentation. I have also retained comment boxes (a common feature of blogs) to permit social interaction with readers to fulfill expectations of the environment of Web 2.0. I will retain comment boxes in the design of the webpage for that same purpose. Ultimately, the hyperlinks, visual imagery, and narrative offer a different avenue of learning through mixed media.

Objective of Many Souths

The objective of this project is to persuade others that, as opposed to the beliefs of some, the Civil War era South is not defined by one perspective alone, but by many.

Developing the persuasion: The pages of Many Souths

The first page — Southern perspective = Confederate perspective — sets the stage for the persuasion, establishing that there are people who believe that Southern perspective is defined by the Confederacy. The second page — Southern perspective, Version 1.0 — puts symbols in context for the audience in order to reinforce the suggestion that Southern culture has come to be defined by images such as the Confederate flag and, therefore, might help readers understand how the memory of Southern culture has come to be defined in terms of Confederate imagery. The third page — Civil War era Southern perspective from the “bottom-up” — suggest that we should no longer look at the history of the Civil War era South as defined under the generalization that the war was a sectional conflict. Instead of looking at the war as North vs. South (Union vs. Confederacy), or from the “top-down,” we should begin to look at the war from the perspectives of the many people who lived in the South during the war. When we begin to do this, we realize that the people of the Civil War era South had many varying perspectives. To enable this understanding, the persuasion is carried to the next level by 28 different perspectives of Southerners during the Civil War, none of which could be defined as part of the “Confederate perspective,” but all could be included among Southern perspectives of the war. The final page — Then… “Southern perspective” or “Southern perspectives?” — closes-out the argument. Cenantua (talk) 20:01, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Applying Components of Digital Rhetoric to a Wedding Blog

Created by Elizabeth H.

For my individual project in TSC 690 Digital Rhetoric, I wanted to create something that I would use after the conclusion of this class. As a WRTC graduate student, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of print and electronic projects. I focused my graduate studies on project management, instructional design, and the usability of print and electronic texts. Thus, I decided to create a planning and communication tool that will help my fiancé and I plan our wedding scheduled for October 2010. This tool is a blog, Getting to Happily Ever After: The Official Blog of Elizabeth & Neal’s Wedding.

I was inspired to create and maintain a blog, as opposed to a website, because it allows for social interaction and collaboration, two important components of digital rhetoric. A blog allows me to post text in the form of words, photos, videos, and links. This text can then be read and commented on by others allowing for the exchange of ideas. This feature of the blog is particularly helpful for planning a wedding, which is like managing a large documentation or Web project. The blog permits me to post my plans and resources in one central location where my fiancé and I can discuss our options.

Before I created my wedding blog, I was making lists, pasting links and photos, and jotting down ideas in a Microsoft Word document on my desktop. I could not share the Word document with my fiancé in real-time. If I wanted to show him something or run something by him, I had to send him an email or call him and say, “Hey I need you to check this out!” This routine was frustrating and inefficient. As a technical communicator, I strive to find effective solutions to problems—a Word document was not the answer.

The most important reason why I created this blog is for its accessibility. I could have easily made a Facebook page by posting text, photos, and links; however, not everyone in my bridal party and family has a Facebook account. The blog enables me to not only communicate with my fiancé, but also with my bridal party and family. It is important to me to involve my family, especially my mom and grandmother. This blog allows them to view my plans and provide feedback or suggestions—my Aunt Karen in Chicago, Illinois is just as connected as my Aunt Kathy in Bel Air, Maryland.

I would have never thought I would be able to create and maintain a blog until taking this class. I enjoyed applying the various components of digital rhetoric (i.e., authorship, context, remediation, intellectual property, social interaction, collaboration) to texts, both print and electronic. I have more confidence in my ability to talk about and learn new tools/media. I especially enjoyed our class discussions on authorship and intellectual property law. These topics are important to our field and will continue to be controversial areas of discussion in the future. I also learned so much about rhetorical theory. Going into this class, I had little to no knowledge of rhetorical practices. Now I feel confident that I can apply traditional rhetorical practices (or at least talk about them) to electronic texts. This will be an excellent asset for me going into the field of instructional systems design.

Teaching and Learning Context

Write-up and my interpretation of the exercise: Throughout the semester we have looked at different elements that revolve around digital rhetoric. The one that has jumped out at me is the idea of context. Context is the topic that I worked on developing for the wiki along with my partner Christy. We developed a well written page that highlighted the important ideas of context and explained why we feel it is always changing. We also looked at how web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are related to context along with hypertext. I wanted to focus more specifically on the context of an image for my individual project and decided to develop a class activity that could possibly be used in a future class of TSC 480. The goal of this activity is show students that by using the technology that is available to them today to manipulate or change a photo can change the overall context and message of and image. I used adobe Photoshop to change make the original image black and white. The reason I chose black and white was so that when student looked at the image they would just see the chaos going on and might be able to understand the true intent of the image. The original image is in color and they dye sample used it red, which bring a morbid vibe the first time you see the image because instantly you think its blood. After taking a closer look at the image you can see that it is an advertisement for Diamond Dyes and the young girl in the advertisement has gotten into her mother’s dye by ruining her doll and dying the family cat in it as well. In a sense by removing the color from the image and making it black and white it is actually easier to see that it is an advertisement for dye because you can look past the initial misconception that this image is the young girl killing the cat, only because the red stands out so violently. This is why I asked the question to students, would the interpretation have been different if the color blue was substituted for red. I think so because it would not be mistaken for blood and blue would be an unusual color to see on a cat or doll. The same message to buy Diamond Dyes would still be present in the image. I am very happy with my individual project and would be very interested to see how this activity would play out in a classroom of students studying digital rhetoric.

here's the link! ‹[1]› enjoy! I would love feedback!

How to Bake a Cake: An Example of Digital Rhetoric

Our project is a how to video. The object of our video is to show how putting visual, audio, and text rhetoric together makes digital rhetoric and how those processes enhance learning. Each form of rhetoric helps with different styles of learning and better understanding of concepts. This is a simple idea to attempt to explain a complicated concept.

Visuals are a great way for quick persuasion and comprehension. They are able to offer a demonstration, an argument, an emotional appeal, and occasionally, a mix of all three. However, visuals also leave ground for misinterpretation. Often just a visual means that each person may find a different meaning in it than what the author intended.

Audio is an excellent form of persuasion as well because it gives the audience the opportunity to chose a different form of media to learn a process. For those individuals that are audio learners this video is an excellent way to learn how to bake a cake. Audio can oftentimes portray a more powerful and persuasive message. Voice inflection, music, sound, and other forms of audio media can have a moving effect on forms of presentation. Audio along with visuals and text are prime examples of how collaboratively they can have a large impact on the world of digital rhetoric

The text is helpful for many different reasons. If someone cannot hear, or has a hard time hearing, then they can see the step-by-step instructions. If the audience did not hear the audio part, or forgot what was said, then they can rely on the text to figure out what they missed. In the digital world, users can change the text's size, shape, color, and even language. Using those different techniques, we can alter the video so it can reach a much larger audience.

The collaboration of these different types of media allows users to decide which way they would like to learn the process. This could be helpful for those individuals that are specifically audio or visual learners. Collaborative media essentially gives people the option of how they would like to learn a process and if they choose to it also allows them to read, listen, and watch to get a thorough understanding of how to complete the cake baking process. This concept can also be applied to other more complex ideas to help an author portray his or hear meaning to an audience. Overall, this video is a representation of the use of collaborative media and which is a perfect example of digital rhetoric and the different types of genres (video, audio, and text).

Remixing The Boondock Saints

The movie The Boondock saints is a story about two twin Irish Brothers that thing they have been chosen to rid the world of evil, by killing and eliminating Russian thug and mob members in boston. Before killing their targets, the brothers recite a prayer to more or less tell God that they are doing this for him. The movie itself is packed with rhetoric as the two brothers are constantly running away from an opera-loving FBI agent, who in the end, is forced to decide between bringing the brothers in or joining their cause.

The purpose of my link is bring the infamous prayer off the screen and into the digital world. The clip includes visual images, text, music and themes from the movie to bring together the idea of the prayer and the purpose of the movie. Remixing is a new and tricky form of digital rhetoric, but it eliminates the limitations that one genre can impose on digital pieces. When remixing, I was not limited to just words or pictures, but I could use all the elements of all the genres to make a new piece. Remixing will prove to be an constantly growing genre of digital rhetoric as technology becomes more advanced and people start moving into the new digital world.

Click Here to see the Remix