Digital Media Texts
People have always appropriated narrative roles and models from their immediate culture. As new technologies proliferate, so do the methods and opportunities for people to tell their own stories. I am interested in the ways traditional definitions of “writing” respond to these emerging genres. I’m also interested in how traditional modes of identity construction are giving way to digital hybrids and new media texts.
The Craft of Meaning: A Brief History of Composition’s Future
Here’s a text I ran across from a seminar in Digital Media and Composition at the University of Louisville (instructor: Debra Journet) in May of 2007. Because of a time crunch back then, I failed to appropriately cite the films I sampled from the Prelinger Archives, as well as those I sampled from YouTube. I’ve since updated the YouTube samples, and I’ve included a couple more recent videos because I’d always considered the first version unfinished. So, I’ve still got to look up the credits for the Prelinger Archives and the music I used from Jamendo, but for now, this will have to suffice.
Watson Conference Call-for-Papers
Here is a short piece I put together as an assistant director for the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference. I hope it inspires some truly multimodal scholarship and presentations.
Ironing
In this movie, I speak about ironing as a way to investigate how I feel about the deaths of my parents.
Questions for Lydia
Here’s a text that I did for my friend Daniel and his family. He’s an amazing writer, and he’s chronicled some very, very difficult times he’s gone through with his family. His blog is titled: Followed Lingling as She Gave Lymphoma a Beatdown. It’s just about the most beautiful, tragic, and hopeful thing I’ve ever read. It will change your life. Really, it will.
I wrote this story quite a while before he started his blog. He and his wife were pregnant with their daughter, Lydia, and he asked a bunch of his friends to record something for his daughter for when she was older. He asked relatives to write something to his daughter, and then record it when they came out to visit him. I took the opportunity to make a digital story for a good friend. Here’s that story.
