I have to admit that the task this week was pleasantly frustrating! It was challenging but also a lot of fun to come up with a story (plot) that I wanted to share and then creatively pick out all the symbols (emojis) I could use to convey that message. My first challenge was to decide on what kind of emoji keyboard or tool I was going to use to construct the title and plot of for the last TV show I watched. One of the factors I considered to help me make this choice was the ease with which I could find the emojis I wanted to use to construct my story on different platforms.

Google Docs and Apple Pages offered the option of searching for emojis by name or keywords, which made the process of selecting emojis simpler and more efficient than scrolling through available lists. Google Docs also had an additional feature, which I didn’t see on any other platform when it came to filtering through lists of emojis i.e. the option to draw the symbol, or image you are looking for and it returning results based on a visual match to your drawing.

The other factors I considered in my choice of keyboard/ platform were the number of available emojis as well as the aesthetic appeal of their design. A common saying seems applicable here as not all emojis are seemingly “created equal” and below you’ll find four very different looking “tree emojis”. The combination of factors mentioned above eventually led me to choose Apple Pages to complete my task.

I predominantly relied on the emojis to represent certain words or actions to convey the story of the plot but there were cases where there simply weren’t emojis available for a literal representation and I had to rely on a combination of emojis to then try and convey the idea of the word I had in mind e.g. the basket and shower head. I also had to think creatively to how I was going to convey a sense of scale in my story and I decided to incorporate multiple emojis of the same kind in order to accomplish this. Therefore, even though I only used two emojis to represent the title of the show, the sheer number of emojis and their layout conveys a different message than that of a single tree-water droplet-tree combination would have I believe.

Additionally, I made use of a large amount of arrow emojis to help direct the reader in how to read the symbol representation of the story plot. In most cases, the emojis are meant to be read from left to right (the normal convention in Western writing) with the exception of line two. In this case, a symbol (the water pistol) limited my ability to adhere to the normal writing/ reading convention I am used to. Since this emoji only displays from right to left, with no mirror-image available on the platform that I used, I adapted my writing and this in turn also alters the way the viewer of my story will have to attempt to interpret this line.

This task presented a first-hand opportunity to explore the reverse ekphrasis phenomenon of using visuals to explain words (Bolter, 2001). I had to rely on emoji symbols (images) to do what I would normally have done with words (my primary method of communication). Emojis are of course most commonly used to display emotions, gestures, facial expressions or certain objects in digital communication with friends, family and even colleagues in the online or virtual space. They tend to be used to add an extra layer to the conversation by creating a more intimate and personal communication between the parties involved. This is successful because both words and the visual element offered by the emojis can complement one another and offer a complete message to the reader that is rich in context to the parties. This task focused on using only one medium i.e. emojis (symbols) as a primary communication tool or method. It was therefore challenging because I was trying to string emojis together to form a cohesive story and I lacked the words I am so used to using to help fill in the gaps so to say.

Reference:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

This was a really fun task to do although I have to admit it took me much longer to complete than any of the other tasks up to now. I first had to decide on what the story would be that I wanted to tell throughout my game and it took quite a few hours of brainstorming just to settle on this aspect of the task alone. I finally chose to craft a story that I could share with my younger cousins and I hope that even you (as part of a slightly older audience) will still enjoy it too. It’s meant to amuse and there are multiple endings that can be reached.

Of course, the story was only the peak of the glacier as working in Twine requires understanding how passages are linked, knowing how to edit fonts, add in effects etc. This tweaking is what brings the story to life and adds a personal touch to each Twine created. The passages are of course at the heart of a Twine story or game as they are the links (or hypertexts even) that allow the reader to follow a path of their own choosing. In my story, most generally these links appear as two separate word statements at the bottom of each passage as it’s displayed in the screen and although they appear to be just words, they require an action by the reader to choose how they wish to move to the next part of the story. There are also circular links included in my game at each alternate ending that allows the reader to return to the start of the story and travel along a different path if they so choose. I have also included associative links to other websites hosted outside of Twine for more information on certain topics.

In the end, the hyper-textual links in Twine passages allow the reader to visit and carve out for themselves a rich virtual path in the story (unique in many cases to each reader as there are multiple snippets of information to move and link through, which in essence will make the story and how it’s read unique to each reader). To play the game I designed, download the Career Fair Day folder and open the file. Enjoy!

Reference:

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110

I wanted desperately to do this task because it reminded me of a school activity I did years ago when I was learning about how writing developed in different civilizations and had to do a lino print. From what I can remember, my lino print was far easier to do than this task as it took me about 50 minutes to carve my first set of baby potato stamps. You’ll see from my pictures I made a mistake in my first attempt to create letter stamps for the word “coast*”, which I only caught onto when I started with the actual printing (I didn’t carve out the reverse of the letter “s” so when I stamped my initial version of this stamp, it gave the mirror image of the letter that I wanted). No matter, I got them made but there are some other struggles in the process that should also be highlighted- like the video tutorial I tried to trace my letters with a sharpie to make the cutting easier, which didn’t work at all (re-watching the video I realized I forgot to dry the potato with paper towel before trying this)! I tried a different marker, a pen and finally just used a pencil to carve an outline of each letter before using a carpenter knife to cut out the shape I had traced.

Looking at the two prints, I think they turned out okay. There is a big space between the “c” and “o” letters, which were due to the size of the potatoes that I had aligned with markings next to one another to get my two prints (my own alignment technique). The letter “t” in my first word print smudged a bit but I think it is legible even though there is no doubt that it would have been thrown out by the monks in their scriptoria.

Working on this activity, I found the words spoken by Paul Collier true when he demonstrated the working of the letterpress in the video included in our module this week. Using a letterpress or potato stamps “requires a greater degree of consideration” than had I done the same task using a word processor and printed the document on lets say a laser printer. The mechanization of writing that we utilize today has definitely taken away some of the planning and organization that was needed with this kind of printing. The quote mistakenly attributed to Marshall McLuhan but which rings true to his ideas on communication and technology summarizes this: “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (the words belong to John Culkin, a close friend of McLuhan). We are now at the stage where we shaped our printing methods by developing the computer and printing equipment that can produce documents in a matter of seconds and in the process it has taken over the organization and the “thinking” once associated with printing for us. In that way it has shaped us too as we now only concentrate on the meaning that we want to convey with our words and we leave the printing to the machines.

*The word “coast” has a lot of meaning for me, I picked it for its use as a noun- a place where I feel most at peace and also the verb- to describe how I view my daily movement at the moment, simply coasting forward without much purpose or direction (I wrote more about this word in Option 1 of the task).

Culkin, J. (1967, March 18). A schoolman’s guide to Marshall McLuhan. Saturday Review, 51–53, 70–72.

I made the choice to complete both options for Task 4 because I simply could not decide which one I would rather do. I am an old-school lover of written notes and right next to my laptop sits a notepad with a pen ready for any thought that I feel is so important that it requires a permanent commitment to paper. The task was thus not difficult in the sense of the mechanics required to produce the final product, as I am familiar with writing hand-written documents and favor this form of expression over typing on a word processor and printer.

To address some of the questions posed in this task though- when I make a mistake in written documents; I most often scratch it out by using two lines. This is a habit I picked up from my undergraduate years of study where we were prohibited from using correction fluid. I don’t find it bothersome and I now read over these blotches on the paper quite easily- I have no qualms over the resultant look of the document even though some might say it taints the document. I also don’t really care about how neat my hand-writing is. I used to write in cursive but as the need arose to write faster, I adapted to a style that allowed me to record thoughts at a quicker pace. Rather unconventional, at times, I also draw attention to certain parts of the text by underlining it or by including a small diagram. This is a habit I picked up from work where I often rely on diagrams to convey thoughts or ideas (I’m no Picasso but I think my diagrams get the job done).

However, the part of the task that was challenging was to decide on what I wanted to share with a larger audience. Very few of my written documents are shared with others and it felt a little intrusive to have to share my work with people I had barely met. Sharing the document, I felt would expose me and allow others to in effect spy on my inner thoughts and feelings. The podcast we listened to this week confirmed that these feelings were valid when the presenters succinctly summarized that writing lets us “be with each writer through their text”. Reading someone’s writing allows you to see and experience a world through their eyes or representation and thereby gives us an intimate view into their thoughts.

Writing by hand is definitely more personal to me though than using mechanized forms of writing. Apart from obvious cues such as how we write certain letters, underline words of importance or draw diagrams, I believe that even those mistakes documented in writing can give some insight into the thoughts of the person that wrote the text for e.g. I still struggle in deciding whether to write certain words in English as one or two words. My first language has a general tendency to write most words as one and in English, it is the opposite. My cheat (incorrect grammatically I think) is to use a hyphen between words like lock-down (should actually be one word) and hand-sanitizer (should be two words). Writing those words on a word processor would have allowed me to spot the errors and correct them before sharing my thoughts with the world as a printed document (a process that would have de-personalized the text). In conclusion, there is a personal touch to be witnessed in hand-written notes and letters that somehow can get lost when moving to print-based forms of writing.

Reader Warning (Disclaimer): Gross misrepresentation of people and objects ahead! No dogs were harmed or involved in this story in any way despite what the text below might seem to indicate.

Disclaimer: not the actual pizza of the story below but one I made previously.

Hey friend! So I thought I’d just keep you updated on what we’ve been doing over weekends since the lockdown. Friday is normally start the same way since we always make a pizza for dinner. You asked me for a recipe awhile back? So I thought I would just give you some pointers on how we do it and what our Friday pizza was like. Mostly important part is to get the diorite. So to make the pizza dough you need to have some yeast the instant kind and dissolve the packet of feast in one cup of warm water. The water shouldn’t be too warm definitely not pointing. Also add about 2 teaspoons of sugar to the Heast mixture as sugar is food to Heast. How to check when he says ready is to look out for bubbling or a thick layer of Heast that looks frothy in the water. Normally it takes about five minutes. And then measure of 2 cups of flour, the recipe calls for bread flour and was never have that on hand as you know so I mostly use cake wheat flour. Your remember that I really struggle to find flower in the shops of the last few weeks and so when I couldn’t find wheat flour are you did a pint 5 kg. Right so to the flour mixture you add 1 teaspoon of salt and also 2 tablespoons of Olive Oyl and then you’re ready to add in your used mixture. Mix it really well either with a spoon or with your hands I don’t like it in my hands dirty so I always use a spoon. When the dog comes together into a nice bowl then you know you can stop mixing. Since this is a historic we need Space to let it rise and I normally do that by cover in the bowl in the kitchen towel and then place it somewhere warm in my case that’s my microwave. You can maybe think of using that kitchen counter you have that always has some sun shining on it. Leave the door for about half an hour I don’t sit back and relax go the extra effort and make your own tomato base. I’ll share with you Saudis secret recipe don’t tell him I told you. Your Waze takes one can of either diced or whole peeled Italian tomatoes and two that he adds just a little bit of butter and Olive Oyl and he secret spices of salt and pepper as well as some oregano. We just got in oregano plant a week ago and since we’ve been adding in fresh oregano it’s been the next level pizza sauce. You have to reduce the source until you happy with the consistency it should take about half an hour. And by now your door and you’re so should be ready so I hope you preheated the oven but 200°C is good and are you ready for Semley. So on our Friday night pizza we added first hour dry ingredients so we started with a layer of Olive Oyl to help Chris the base and then we added the tomato base sauce that you made followed by some salami and olives. Next came layer of grated cheese followed by the wet ingredients or those that will give us some moisture when they bake in the Aven those were the cherry tomatoes and some mushrooms. We bake the pizza in the oven for about 20 minutes that’s all normal time and when I came out the added some freshly sliced avocado i’m sure you know to never take avocado in the oven it will go brown and horrible. And as you know Peter is not complete without some hot sources which fatty taught me to eat so we put out all four varieties of Tabasco sauce as well as a home-made have a nearest source. But honestly just add whatever you want or eat it as you like I hope you. Get a chance to make it this week 20 and don’t forget to parent with some here if you have any left or if you’re like us we now always have non-alcoholic beer same experience, awesome meal and a great time oh and I forgot to say that we ended up watching charger upJoJo rabbit upon your recommendation I really liked it but found the reader.

I used the built-in dictation tool on my iPhone in the Notes app. and I think I will steer clear of this function on my phone for quite some time to come in the future. It was fairly easy to set up and use but the first thing I noticed I had to train myself to do was to voice the punctuation marks I wanted to include in my story. Unfortunately, you will notice I did this fairly inconsistently throughout the text as I found it really challenging to concentrate on telling the story as I remembered it and still consider the technical workings of how that would translate into text. The second issue I had with using the software on my phone was that the dictation would switch off by itself every few minutes. Restarting the function led to words being amalgamated together in my text. The result of my labor is alas a piece of work that doesn’t even equate to a typed first draft had I written the story myself.

It’s also very clear that the software couldn’t quite make out my dialect on certain words with the most notable being whenever I tried to say the word “dough”, the words “diorite”, “dog” and “door” would appear on screen. “Yeast” became “heast” multiple times and my poor Fiancé’s name was construed into “Saudis” and “fatty”! Just a heads up- if he comes to me and asks about this, I will know one of my classmates leaked this information… I also have no idea why the software would interpret “Olive oil” as “Olive Oyl” or why “I’m” would be typed as “i’m”. Those were interesting and unexpected errors, which I can’t really think of as being due to my dialect.

My South African English and this software was perhaps a mismatch or maybe others fared similar to me. I’ll be reading the other posts with great curiosity and keep in the back of my mind that I should perhaps look up an English pronunciation course online. I do believe the result would have been better had I scripted what I wanted to say as I would have had a chance to make notes of the punctuation marks I needed to add and say aloud for the software to incorporate them into the story. I’m also not sure if there is an instruction available where I could spell out certain words that the software clearly had issues with? That would have gone a long way to have improved my story too.

I believe that written storytelling constitutes a more calculated and thoughtfully constructed design process. The option exists to edit, re-edit and contemplate how the pieces of the puzzle fit together in a meaningful way. The web of the story with all its connections is spun until it is perfected. This is important as written storytelling leaves the interpretation of the story to the reader. In the case of a badly written story like the one above, I’m not sure readers can interpret much at all and the sense of emotion gets lost. Only I know what the story is that I wanted to tell. In oral storytelling, there is no going back and changing things but the reader/ listener gets to hear the story first hand. There is thus less interpretation that has to take place as the listener gets to hear the story exactly as the author intended it with all the emotions expressed by the storyteller either by their voice or in their facial expressions etc. Each therefore has their advantages and depending on the task at hand, one might be preferred over the other but they are both very capable of conveying their intended messages.

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Additional thoughts (27 May 2020): The original draft of this post was constructed on the 20th of May and I hadn’t begun the readings for Week 3 by that time. Having had a chance to catch up on the readings, I had some additional thoughts on the task that I wanted to include here. Gnanadesikan (2011) in their chapter titled, The First IT Revolution, refers to writing as a process of translating a message of time into space that uses words to create objects that are visible and tangible for the reader. Following that argument, then the above technology used to create the written words in my story has fallen severely short of accomplishing its purpose as there are large parts in the story that no one can read and imagine seeing in front of them.

The chapter by Gnanadesikan (2011) reaffirms my initial statements in the post that written story-telling is more carefully constructed by referring to writing as being more deliberate than speaking. What I now find intriguing is the idea that this task offers a technological blend for storytelling. Our input was oral but the output of our labor was a written product. Where there would have been a deliberate cognitive reflection undergone had I written this story myself in text, the dictation software took away that process and the result is perhaps then not to be so unexpected- a story that reads terrible and lacks coherence. This sparks in me the same Technology Question brought up by Ong (2002) when he asks what the nature of computer technologies are and what their impact on writing is. Although I don’t know enough yet to answer that question I do recognize the step missed in the construction of this story i.e. my own cognitive process of thinking over the events described and then relaying them in a purposefully designed material text artifact through writing.

References:

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York; London: Routledge.