Writing 304 O – Reading and Writing in Digital Environments
Summer 2021 – Michael J. Cripps, Ph.D.
Nothing fancy here. Just a quick random pen drawing on the back of scrap paper, a photo, and a tweet. I’m pulling a bit on three threads: Frank Zappa’s song “Joe’s Garage,” my longstanding interest in VWs, and the garage where my youngest son works.
I think this meets the criteria!
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This assignment isn’t difficult on a “technical” level, so take more time than I did to come up with a fun “story” idea for this DS106 GIF assignment. Mine is boring: Sitting at a desk, fiddling with a paperclip while reading, I decided to do the Photo it Like Peanut Butter assignment as a riff on the classic “notepad bicycle jump movie” by stitching together a few photos of a progressively bent paperclip – which is basically what I was doing with my fingers.
I did make little pencil marks to hold my paperclip in a consistent spot on the page – visible right in the curves. But I didn’t do such a good job holding my phone at a consistent distance from the paper, so my animation both opens/closes and zooms in/out – with a shadow moving because of my hand. I don’t think this is particularly subtle or good “peanut butter” in the spirit of the prompt. A little more care and attention to detail could have produced a MUCH COOLER product.
Where I would ordinarily turn to Photoshop to make a GIF from a set of images, I decided to steer folks toward an easy browser-based GIF tool that doesn’t throw a watermark on your product: EZGIF. Look it up and play with it. There are lots of editing features. I adjusted contrast, speed, and even cropped the image to get more paperclip and less paper background. Then I even added text right in the browser. In the end, I hit save, downloaded it, and BANG!
Don’t let the “tech” get you down. Tell the fun “peanut butter” story with this GIF.
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Wow. This was fun. Not sure why, but I started with the idea of an abridged book as Haiku. Next, I pondered the book and came up with Pirsig.
I grabbed an old image of the cover, modified it a bit in Photoshop, added perspective, a drop shadow, and some DS106 “born on” dating to mark it as a daily create. Then I played with words a bit.
For those who don’t know the book, it’s pretty interesting. Ostensibly a story of a man on a motorcycle road trip with his son, it’s really not about that. It’s a journey into the mind, into meaning, and more.
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If “What’s the Meme” encourages us to tell a fun story by starting to put image and text together, remixing a frame from a show, and revealing a little about our personality, Selfie with a Pet is a super easy approach to sharing a slice of life. Here’s mine!
Ceres and me on our early Saturday morning walk in the woods, our weekend morning ritual. It’s one of the few opportunities I have to let him roam off leash.
Like many families, ours adopted a shelter dog during the pandemic. My wife and I have had dogs since the mid-90s, but our last dog died of old age about three years ago, leaving us with three kids and three cats. Then a cat died – old age. Then two children left for college. Then the pandemic hit, with everyone locked down at home – including the college kids. We picked up Ceres sometime last summer, maybe in July.
He’s 85 pounds of goofy mixed breed with the deepest bark imaginable. And I think the selfie captures him pretty well.
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This one still hurts. In 2008, I taught a much “earlier” version of WRT 304 at my prior university, the City University of New York (CUNY). I used to work at York College, one of the 4-year colleges in CUNY. Anyway, when York College was built, NYC had a “1% for Art” rule, which required 1% of all construction costs to be spent on works of art for the space. York College had phenomenal art just laying around the campus – massive sculptures, really important work, paintings by masters whose work is in some of the world’s foremost museums.
As York is located in Queens (near JFK) and serves an overwhelmingly Black student body, it is only fitting that much of the art is by famous Black American artists. I kid you not. There’s amazing work right there. Martin Puryear has a massive sculpture that takes up maybe 40 yards of space and hangs precipitously from a 3-story atrium. A Frank Stella hangs in the student cafeteria – right on the wall!
In Spring 2008, as a major class project, we photographed, researched, and prepared informational resources for most of the art on campus. We designed a website for an online gallery of art that students named “Unforgotten Masterpieces.” We worked on a color palette, coded the website, and put it all together. I then worked with ITS at my college and with curators at the City University of New York to get the website on the school’s servers and listed as an online gallery in CUNY. It was awesome!
I left CUNY for UNE in 2010. Sometime around 2012 or so, in a college website update, someone decided it wasn’t important to retain that online gallery, and now it is lost to the dustbin of Internet history. (More likely, the custom coding doomed it in a mandate to have all sites in the “Content Management System” of the school’s website. There’s a lecture I could deliver, and we’ll read a bit about the rise of the CMS.) Millions of $$ worth of master works of art goes “forgotten” again, my students’ voices are deleted, and I’m angry about it.
This DC was easy. I have a screenshot from the homepage of the site in the Hypertext Projects area of my website. I was hoping the Wayback Machine might have archived some of the web pages from that site, but mostly it’s just the text of my introductory essay that opens the site.
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This one was fun. I decided to quickly scan my email inbox this morning for some words/phrases that could work as a motivational poster. “Your are welcome!” popped right up, and for some reason I quickly thought about someone holding open a door. A quick Google image search surfaced a guy with a bowtie holding open a door. (Those who know me will understand why the bowtie resonates.)
Anyway, a quick trip to Preview on my Mac enabled me to import the image and add meme “Impact” text to the bottom of it. I styled the colors by picking from the photo’s color palette. And voila!
Original Image Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2565002/Holding-doors-open-men-threatens-masculinity-makes-feel-vulnerable-study-Indiana.html
Hologon V. A few islands dotted around an ocean mostly free of ice… Plants are shaped like giant blue geodesic domes. The skeletons of deceased animals are re-used as shells by small, functionally immortal rugose creatures. #tdc3413 #d106 @eng304cripps @ds106dc pic.twitter.com/qVi7zWM7p2
— Michael J. Cripps (@michaeljcripps) May 17, 2021
Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. 10 minutes to run though a few planets until I found one I liked and tweet it out! Right off, this planet had me thinking of Waterworld, the “epic” – maybe epic fail – post-apocalyptic film starring Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Dennis Hopper, and others. I liked the film, but it was hugely expensive and film critics mostly hated it.
It’s always interesting when the Daily Create invites exploration of some digital image/text generator as the creative activity. I enjoy these because they showcase the playfulness that abounds across the Internet. And we learn something.
Who is Zarkonnen from Zurich and why did they develop a planet generator tool? It’s neat to dig deeper, which in this case leads me to the “Captain to the Bridge,” a game featuring a hungover Star Trek Captain (https://zarkonnen.itch.io/captain-to-the-bridge). Zarkonnen is one of those people putting fun things online – so people can have fun.
This Daily Create captures the SPIRIT of DS 106 in so many ways – explore a tool, find a way to make it your own, tell the story.
Seeking to hit the WRT 304 ground totally running on May 17? Follow my lead and take on the #TDC3413 challenge yourself. Don’t forget: Tweet it out to the key places with the key hashtags; make a “page” in your ePortfolio that embeds the tweet AND that frames your creative decision process. Don’t lose track of the guidelines!
Want to get your WRT 304 legs under you before trying a Daily Create? No problem. We have days before the first daily must be done..
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Thinking about GOP responses to Liz Cheney’s views as I ponder today’s Daily. #tdc3412 #ds106 @ds106dc pic.twitter.com/rcvf1QrdcI
— Michael J. Cripps (@michaeljcripps) May 16, 2021
Here’s an example of how one might have approached the Daily Create for May 16. The prompt, “Make a Snowflake,” is wide open. In fact, the instructions suggest one might even get out paper, scissors, and crayons to make a paper snowflake. Awesome – and surely fun.
I took it in a different direction, bringing together a common political metaphor for snowflakes together with the “idea” of making a snowflake. I opted to invert a common conservative complaint about so-called “liberal snowflakes.” The whole thing strikes me as fitting after last week’s expulsion of Liz Cheney from the Republican leadership.
I pulled up Photoshop for this one, but I could have used GiMP, which is free. (Get GiMP and practice using it!) I did a quick Google search to grab a relatively clean GOP elephant, brought it into a Photoshop document, and got busy.
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Welcome to Writing 304, Reading and Writing in Digital Environments!
I am very excited to see what you can do over the next six weeks.
Let’s get started with an orientation to the course and its components:
Note: The video below shows an earlier course theme; the actual content is accurate and remains current.