AWD Unit 4: Multimedia/New Media Popularization

Length: ~ 1000 words (negotiable!) Film maximum length: 4 min Audience: An interested general audience of non-expert adults. Peer Reviews: Apr. 4 (in class) Whole Class Review: (TBD)

March 19, 2014

Film minimum length: 1 min. Draft Due: Apr. 2 (8 pm) Final Due: Apr. 9

By now you should have established some comfort with a couple of topics in your major field. Are you comfortable enough to explain one of them to a public audience in an engaging way?? This Unit Project asks you to present one concept or idea to a general audience in an informative multimedia/new media form. Background: Before we tackle the multimedia, lets consider the usual forms that journalists and experts use to present information to the public. The following article types are conventional genres that often occur in newspapers and media outlets: The Translation is a journalistic representation of a development in a field. Translation articles in scientific (and social science) fields are published on Tuesdays in the New York Times Science Times. Usually, they report on a newly published scholarly article announcing a discovery or finding. Translations are also published in the humanities and the arts. (The humanities develop less by means of discovery than the sciences, so developments in the humanities rarely lead to translation articles exceptions include a newly discovered literary work, for example, when a new poem by the ancient poet Sappho was found, it made the news.) The Explainer is a kind of piggy-back article accompanying a larger piece or series dealing with nonacademic issues. Explainer articles are needed when a public debate or event opens the door to the misunderstanding of technical or academic issues, and the public needs to have the technical or academic issue clarified. Examples of such issues and explainer questions include things like the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. Explainers are informative and resemble reference documents in some respects. However, they always follow some development in the news or in social life outside of the thing explained. Slate, an online news site, has an ongoing column called The Explainer. The Profile is a journalistic biography of a star academic or other important person in a knowledgerelated field. The person profiled will have made some significant contribution to an academic or other field, yet will not typically be well known to the public. A profile may include selections from an interview with the person profiled or with that persons colleagues, allies, and rivals. The Book Review summarizes the main argument of a book in an academic or scholarly field and evaluates its success and importance. Effective reviews interpret the book they are reviewing in terms of their potential contribution the field, explain the field to outsiders, and place the book in context. Interesting reviews use the occasion of the book release as a springboard to a larger argument. Good model book review sources include Harpers Magazine, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and some more serious weeklies (The Nation, The New Republic, and The National Review). Op-Eds craft an argument developed for a general audience on an issue related to scholarship or the academy. For example, many op-eds were published on the recent changes to Texas history textbooks which now downplay or remove Thomas Jefferson. Some op-eds advocate understanding an issue in public life within terms of a specific field. Example: An op-ed by David Brooks in the New York Times discusses the usefulness of what Brooks calls cultural geography in understanding regional conflict.

Assignment: Craft a 1 to 4 minute video for a general audience of your choosing that presents some aspect of one of your topics/ideas from this course in an interesting, engaging way. One method for beginning this project would be to choose one of the above genres and then translate it into a multimedia format. For example, you could find an interesting, recent, scholarly article in your field and do a video translation of it. Or you could do a video definition of just one technical term in your field. Another method, and potentially a more interesting one, would be to consider what types of presentations are only possible in a multimedia format. Well discuss this in class and develop our own list of resources and possibilities. Consider, for example, the video we saw by Hans Rosling which used animated statistics impossible on paper. In either case, you are producing a journalistic or informational piece. We are not producing promotional materials, advertising, or educational materials. Your audience is made up of non-expert adults (in other words, you are explicitly composing for an audience outside your field an audience who knows very little about the inner workings of your field). This composition is likely to be challenging in a new way: popular genres are varied yet tightly constrained by ethics and clarity. We will begin by gathering popular pieces in your field and determining their criteria for success. You will then choose a genre and will model your project on examples you collect. Above all, this Unit is an opportunity to explore and experiment with new ways of composing. My hope is that you will be able to use the body of research that you have already done and that the bulk of your time will be spent in translation and composition (not in new research). Although genres of popularization vary greatly, they have some things in common. In addition to the overall features we look for in AWD, we will look specifically for the following elements: A concise introduction (or lead) that sets the stage for the rest of the composition, including both its subject and its context. Appeals to audience investment: these may include a human-interest dimension, careful use of tone (including humor), invitations to understand the academic field and its importance for them, etc. Effective highlighting of salient details. This may involve words, but may also involve sound or images. Syntax and vocabulary used at a level consistent with your proposed audience. A high level of clarity. A responsible and careful attention to possible counter-perspectives, qualifications, and limitations. You may find that some of the values you are trying to exemplify conflict with each other. For example, you want to explain your point concisely to the general public. This calls for a kind of language use that tends toward generalization. You also want to attend to counter-perspectives. How can you do both? How can you be responsible toward the nuances of the field and maintain a rhetorical stance that appeals to a general audience? This dialogue among values constitutes the major rhetorical challenge of this project. Your draft for this paper will consist of a written script, all of the media pieces you have collected by the draft date and a detailed context memo explaining your plans for the final draft, including what kinds of images, sound, or video you still need to collect/create. At the draft stage, you must also provide a short description of progress you have made and a list or folder of visual resources you already have. Your draft must be advanced enough that your reviewers can easily envision your final product. Your final draft should be preceded by a context memo to the reader identifying your exact audience, explaining your choice of subject, medium/media, and your view of why the public needs to know about your subject, and a response letter telling what you did in response to your reviewers comments.