No offense to Michael Pennell, but his article about fraternity web sites seemed to contain a lot of obvious observations (at least to a seasoned web nerd), albeit couched in the terminology of rhetoric and composition. Maybe I would have gotten a little more out of his article had I read the work of Anthony Giddens, but for the moment the little extra research time I have is reserved for upcoming papers. But if I missed anything groundbreaking in Pennell’s article—or if I’m writing it off a little too quickly—someone, please intervene.
Then again, I could also be blinded by the fact that I worked on a rickety university website for an entire semester and had all of my work accidentally overwritten by the person who took my place when I graduated; but I don’t think I could possibly be that petty.
As for the Graham and Whalen article, I think I was given a better perspective on things by having a friend who’s spent the last three years dealing with these issues. He went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon’s ETC (Electronic Technology Center), where he had a project each semester that was for a corporate sponsor. I don’t imagine that he’s even heard of new media theory (though it’s a possibility), but each one of these projects had to involve some form of what Graham and Whalen refer to as the Mode, Medium, Genre Interaction Heuristic (Fig. 6 on page 88). I followed most of his projects pretty closely, because I would go visit him and his brother every couple of weeks in Pittsburgh; and he had similar problems as the designer in this article.
One of his biggest projects came in his second semester when his team was contracted to create an exhibit for the USS Requin submarine currently docked at the Carnegie Science Center (it’s a WWII sub). They interviewed some surviving veterans on video, but had to decide how to present this information as visitors walked through the submarine. They finally decided on a series of kiosks placed throughout the sub which would give information about the specific area around the kiosk and give you the option to watch the replies of veterans who were interviewed for the project. They did run into a few problems with the content, though; the museum wouldn’t let them use interview footage where the men told gory/raunchy stories about their time in the service. But all in all, he was happy with how the project turned out—and I believe it’s still set up in the Requin today.
Actually, I did a little digging, and discovered that the tour is available via the web. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t scale to the size of your browser. I’ll have to yell at him for that.
Fun fact: he now works for a video game developer that works almost exclusively with licensed products. You wouldn’t believe how often Nickelodeon thinks that clouds/rock formations/random background objects look like penises.
2 comments:
Bob: this article reminded me of your project idea (web 2.0, etc...). I'm not sure how relevant it really is, but you might enjoy checking it out.
http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28899
And: I agree with your assessment of Pennell's methodology (eh, or lack of). Did he really do a visual analysis of the web page? Or did he think surfing is a form of visual analysis? On page 76, Pennell explains that "much of this textual/visual analysis was informal, better labeled 'surfing' in a sense" (this is a problem that was brought up during class).
It's almost an insult to the text itself when a scholar assumes that a textual analysis of a digital text can be completed simply by "surfing." Would skimming a print text be considered an acceptable method of textual analysis? I'd assume it wouldn't, and I think if we want to do serious scholarship that includes digital texts and other new media, we need to hold our methodologies and research techniques to the standards we use for traditional texts. Otherwise, new media texts will continue to be viewed as "secondary" to print texts.
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