LAURIE ANDERSON - LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

Research Methods: Digital Storytelling

DIGITAL STORYTELLING                                                                                        
Bea Staley
http://www.youtube.com/user/bxs018
http://www.storycenter.org
Joe Lambert

Point of View
- meant to be your personal point of view
- why are you telling this story?

Dramatic Questions
- if you have a "reveal" in the story, i.e. who did it??, is there a way to build up dramatic tension by building suspension?

Gift of Voice
- you are telling a story in your own voice

Power of Music
- Jamendo (http://www.jamendo.com/en/)

Economy of Words
- let images do the work; 500-1000 words (about 2 pages double-spaced MAX)
- take your time reading slowly

Pacing
- good stories BREATHE 
- can change the tone of a story by changing your pacing

Creation Options:
iMovie, MovieMaker
- iMovie wants you to put in the images FIRST - it will keep the audio recording to the IMAGE (put a 5-minute image in first and layer other images over the base)

"A shitty story is still a shitty story, even if you put technology into it."
Put a lot of time and editing into the story itself
Eliminate redundant words

"Fonto" for text...?

Keep transitions consistent otherwise they tend to be distracting
MAKE SURE that all of your images are saved in ONE PLACE until the video is RENDERED/SAVED otherwise they will disappear

Reflection

After listening to Dr. Funk’s lecture, I am particularly interested in working with the material culture approach. I was surprised to learn how much this will dovetail with my architectural interests and in the concept of memory and preservation. I was interested in the “agency” approach and looking at how objects act on people rather than the more traditional how we simply interact with objects.

Material culture = popcorn, making sense of it through all five senses

Colloquium: Dr. Clayton Funk

Dr. Clayton Funk                                                                                                                             
Material Culture

What is material culture?
What objects say
The semiotics of stuff (i.e. signifiers)
Agency - whether objects innately have agency over people, what they do to you
Object Oriented Ontology
- objects can also expose lies

Choices in acquisition and/or collection... what does that say about people?

Materiality

Inclusivity of material culture vs. visual culture studies

Material Culture as Popcorn - you can make sense of it through all of your senses

Rituals attached to objects
Dramaturgy - the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage

Chicago: cutting though buildings to get to places faster, vs. being considered "bad manners"

"I'm not here to identify what is visual culture and what is material culture. You can go and drink beer and argue about chickens and eggs if you want to, I'm not going to get into that."

Funk's research
Within school systems/where people learn:
- architectural spaces
- artifacts

"People have always known how to read, they just haven't always read books. You read a space and know whether you're supposed to be there or not... In our country, there were very literal symbols that said 'whites only,' there were certain areas of land where Native Americans were put and told, you know, 'stay there'... Very simply, social closure is usually seen as an alternative to Marxian theory. Marx talks about struggle of socio economic forces and the struggles whereas Vader would say that inequality has never been something that is a given. We make structures that exclude people and in doing so we create inequality."

"If we know how those things were made, can we unmake them? Can we reverse them?"

"There is a whole section of history that has been left out but you can read them in the architectural spaces of a place."

Public school system = mass media, source of propaganda/curriculum

Dwight Perkins - Chicago school architect                                                                                    

- worked for the superintendent, a social Darwinist; believed that most of the people going to high school were what he defined as "backward" (c. 1908 meant that you were feeble-minded)

- Anglo-Saxons dictated where the lower classes should be allowed to work, what they had access to, etc. - these lower classes were not permitted access to the fine arts

Jane Adams and other teachers/Chicago women's clubs - resisted this, partnered with Dwight Perkins and designed schools that supported student development with adequate light and working conditions with open space ("open-plan"), allowing students to "evolve" even if they were being held back by school policies from "on top"

Foucault's "heterotopias"= little utopias; people negotiate between the different "utopias," i.e. mass media, schooling, department store shopping, etc.

Perkins = "civic architect," designed solaria and medical buildings, park recreation centers, parks, etc.
- designed Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL

Correlative Causation - to prove something without a doubt

Analogy - explaining something by painting a picture so someone who doesn't understand the terminology can comprehend; material culture does a similar thing

Colloquium: Journal Modifications

- More questions and reflective thoughts

- Be selfish! Pull out what is relevant to MY research, not so much notes in general

...she needs to sort out her priorities...

THE ALLNIGHTER

"Academia, Here I Come!"