Julia R. Smith
The Remediation Project: "A Good Book Doesn't Teach You WHAT To Think, But HOW To Think."
The third and final project of the Writing Minor was to take our Repurposing Project and change the medium of presentation while still writing for the same audience. The goal was to experiment with and recognize forms of new media and how they could be used to create a composition. When it came time to start work on my project, however, I realized that the writing process would not be as clear cut, and that scared me. I decided not to stray too far from what I knew, and settled on the idea of making a poster. It would still deal with that traditional, scholarly medium: the novel. Still, I figured I’d use the computer (my idea of media) to create this poster. It would be easy. Well, after a few different efforts, I realized that creating such a poster was, in fact, not easy. For one, I was sticking with Word, a program far from suited for my new needs. What program should I have been using? I had no idea. Suggestions were laid down from classmates, but downloading and learning a new program sounded difficult and time-consuming, and what if I didn’t like the end result? One last suggestion caught my attention: just make the poster by hand. And so I did. Just like that, my enthusiasm came flooding back. As everyone else fiddled on their computers, I happily cut and paste various artifacts onto a piece of paper, plowing straight through the design as if I were writing the first draft of a traditional essay. I could see the entire trajectory of the project contained in one piece of paper, and that reassured me. It was worth improving, it would get better, and it would be read.
The results can be seen below. Even though they are not quite as multimodal as I originally hoped, they do present my argument in a new medium. In the drafting process, however, I learned to focus on emphasis and design so much that, somewhere along the way, I began to lose track of the actual message. This became evident when I realized that the purposely antagonizing newspaper letter words could not stand alone with just a quote to rectify them. Because they had taken so much time to cut and paste and I loved the way they worked asthetically, I stubbornly considered not changing a thing. It is only through my experience in the writing minor that I realized that visuals are about more than design, arrangement and emphasis: because they're a form of writing, it's important not to lose track of the message you're trying to get across. That should be first and foremost, and it took me a long time to realize this. Finally, I came to the solution of adding the opposite of the newspaper letter words in purple and gray, and this decision really drew the whole project togehter. That was going to be the end goal, until I took a look back at my repurposing essay and realized that I still needed to work on filling out my argument by paying particular attention to how I wanted readers to think about Ada and Lolita. Thus, I added another aspect by writing in the three literary concepts in black. The finished posters are below. Feel free to analyze them side by side, or click on an image to enlarge it.
To read my annotated bibliography, click here.
