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[Music Intro]
In this issue of TheJUMP, titled Poems and Monuments,
we showcase five projects that take us into both new and familiar waters.
The projects themselves span from the poetic to the monumental
in both production and content
and open a variety of things for us to consider in the practices available in
digital media production.
The first project
"The Shadow of Turning" by Hannah Charlton of Whitworth University, is an interesting
project for us to include because it is a visual text:
it is a multimodal expression that uses text and image to create its meaning
(i.e., it's a comic).
The project, which is an adaptation of a poem by Hannah Hall, who is a fellow undergraduate
who wrote this poem a few years earlier
is presented here to readers as both PDF and in an online format via
the Wix platform.
The latter of course provides you with the ability to see the pages and panels
side by side,
which adds a richness to the project
not available in the static PDF.
The poem and the visualizations combine to help us come to understand or
experience the issues of identity, gender, religion, and world views Hall was
struggling with her first semester of college when she wrote this poem
and which resonated with Charlton as she worked to create a visual and emotional
space that stayed faithful to Hall's work.
The second project is a digital story, title "Ever After" by Miah Saunders of
High Point University.
The project is poetic in its intensity
an uses sound and image as a fundamental component of its narrative development.
Further, the project shows some of the potential impact
of repetition and difference
(using slight changes in focus, position, movement, and coloration to add
depth and a real richness to the narrative experience.
The third project, a video remediation titled "Loneliness" by Elizabeth Dougherty,
Meri Faulkner,
and Morgan Robinson of Clemson University, takes Katherine Mansfield's poem as its
backbone.
Using select visuals, they art of juxta- position, the act of narration, and both
illustrative and non-illustrative imagery,
the artists create something new of the poem.
That "newness" reflects their engagement with the poem, and seems
more about their experiencing and envisioning of the poem as readers
than Mansfield's position as author.
This project also offers us an interesting split in terms of the responses that
accompany the project.
One response embraces the nuances within the project that extend Mansfield's poem,
while the other challenges the nature of the assignment and the intention of the project itself.
In so doing, the latter raises questions about the relationship between poetry,
argumentation, and video
but i think
these issues are important for us to consider when including these kinds of projects
in our courses.
The fourth project is a mystory created by Cecelia Jones of Clemson University.
There is something poetic in the revelations that emerge across Jones' different discourse
areas (and different discourse identities)
which is not only part of the mystory genre but which Jones does
fairly conscientiously.
In getting to know and understand Jones through her mystory, readers may find themselves turning
insightful eye toward their own situations, their own discourse areas, their own
potential emblems in what those things mean for their lives,
their careers,
and their families.
The fifth and final project in this issue is a digital monument by Tanya Patel
of The University of Texas at Austin.
Patel's monument embraces the idea of writing the paradigm
and uses the technological focus of its monumentalization not only as content
but as an interactive visual metaphor guiding the site engagement.
Patel asks us to think about texting while driving (and urges us to sign a pledge to not do so).
To this end, one of the respondents, Cynthia Haynes, takes Patel up on this
pledge and provides us with a different kind of response.
Altogether, these projects provide a number of avenues for engagement--both both in terms
of their scholarship and in terms of their pedagogical value.
And while many of them are really excellently done, some prove to be
extremely valuable because of their ability to exist as a high-level project
while still retaining some of their rough edges, some of their exposed moments,
some of their developing qualities.
This, to me, is where a resource like TheJUMP begins to shine:
when good projects opened avenues for discussion in terms of their content,
their production,
and their possibilities.