Category: Digital Production

For some time, I have been meaning to write up a more comprehensive “behind-the-scenes” account of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST) Oral History Project (OHP). The ARST OHP is a collection of interviews of rhetoricians of science, technology, and medicine conducted at the 20th anniversary meeting of the organization at the 2012 National Communication Association convention. The organizing and technical dimensions of the project were challenging and educational–my goal here is to make those facets of the project more visible so that others might be able to conduct similar projects. (You might read that as a “too much detail” warning.)

Perhaps the most impressive student project I’ve ever seen for my Visual Communication class:

In the Fall of 2013, I had the pleasure of teaching COMM 189H, a course I titled “In Search of the Common: Rhetorics of Extremism, Moderation, and Polarization.” The course engaged in the study of a number of themes, from the history and virtues of moderation, to rhetorical scholarship in the wake of the tumult of the 1960s, to the impact of internetworked technologies on public discourse, and critiques of civility. Much like when I taught the course in the Fall of 2010, I worked with the students to research, write, storyboard, edit, film, and produce a documentary which ultimately was titled “In Search of the Common: When Tomatoes Polarize.” (The subtitle references a gonzo-style experiment in which we tried to polarize students outside the union against tomatoes–a cause near and dear to my heart.)

This year, in addition to the documentary, we maintained a blog which featured regular student writing on the course themes, and a podcast series where we archived interviews with various experts that helped us sort through some of these big ideas.

Thanks to the Web Committee’s hard work over the past year, we unveiled a new website. Design by Arboreal:

Last semester, my Honors Visual Communication class researched, wrote, edited, storyboarded, filmed, edited, and produced a documentary called Digital Ways of Seeing. This hour long documentary attempts to illustrate how visual culture has been changed by digital media. I had a very light directorial hand in this effort–the students really took the baton and ran with it. Fairly amazing what you can do as amateurs these days to create artifacts that outlast the class…

You can watch the individual segments at our channel on YouTube.