I’ve chosen to link with Katie Naish’s post:

Task 8: Golden Record

First off, I really appreciate the layout of her blog.  While I’ve struggled with other blogs to identify the author anywhere in the blog, Katie’s seems to have that naturally in her blog’s layout.  With her logo that includes part of her name as well as an image that I could assume is meaningful to her (the stem of flowers) which appears on the side menu no matter where you go on her blog.  The ease of navigation that her menu choices provides is also better than mine, in my opinion, and very user friendly.  This is my first blog, but I wonder if Katie has had more experience either building or at least navigating through more blogs.

For this task, she starts off with the image of the golden record, which is visually appealing, and shows her better us of different forms of text in her blog.  Why haven’t I thought about using more visuals in my blog? The rest of her post is more similar to mine, and is written text heavy.

Katie talks about the overwhelming task of trying to curate a fully representative sound track that would both represent all facets of humanity, while also being aware of the potential “messages” that we are sending to extra-terrestrials.  This is something that the original curators where aware of, and attempting to find different cultures, peoples, and geographic locations that could be represented on the record, but they also spoke about how they couldn’t even begin to think about how the music or lyrics could possibly be interpreted if it was even possible to be ‘hear’ by the other life forms, which is why they chose some music specifically for it’s mathematical properties over anything else (MacDonald, 2019).  Katie is clear that she often picked songs that were familiar to her, which would therefore represent her experiences more, and any other songs chosen were more for their emotional response than anything else.  I chose songs based on representation of cultures (thinking more about the people on earth and how they would feel as opposed to who might be listening to in 40,000 years), as well as some with lyrics and some without in an attempt to have the widest variety of sounds possible.

Yet with those differences in approach, we chose the same 5 out of the 10 possible, although for seemingly different purposes.  Katie often refers to the emotions evoked in her by the songs, but I would wonder if a different culture would have the same emotions?  For example, colour is used by different cultures in almost exactly the opposite ways (mourning vs celebration).  Would the emotions behind sounds also be culturally influenced?  This is something that I’m curious about.  But not matter what, we would have no idea if the extra-terrestrials would even be able to hear in the frequencies that our music is recorded in, so would emotions be the most powerful tool to select by.

References:

McDonald, L. (Executive Producer). (2019-present). Voyager Golden Record [Audio podcast]. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

I’ve chosen to link to Graeme Baerg’s Twine post.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/gbaerg540/twine-task/

I really appreciated how Graeme took a different approach to the same task.  It was the first Twine creation for both of us, and he experimented with a non-linear story that didn’t have a climax.  This made me recognize the thought process that I used, which was similar regarding a non-linear story, but different in that I feel my story lines all had a climax.  I wonder if this was a cultural bias, in that the stories that I’m used to hearing and teaching all have a climax.  Is this generational (Graeme refers to ancient Greek scrolls as not having climaxes), or it is cultural?  I had made an incorrect assumption that all narratives have a climax, as I have been taught in school.

We certainly both struggled with the lack of training in the technology, which seemed to limit both of our stories.  He described his experience with “[u]sing Twine as hypertext was at once a foreign and familiar experience of attempting to create and maintain interactivity”.  I feel we both were able to imagine the possibilities since hyperlinking is not something foreign to either of us, but the challenge came in using the technology to express the way our brain was thinking.  The possibilities and potential was certainly there, but we both referred to our training as the main challenge.

While both of our blogs are similar in their presentation (mostly written text), one thing I struggled with was the context of the author.  Who is Graeme?  I struggled to even find his name on his blog, let alone anything about him.  I appreciated his personal insight on the top of his post about his recent family tragedy which was the only thing that told me anything about him.

I chose to link to Eduardo Rebagliati’s post on Mode Bending.

Task 7: Mode-Bending

I appreciated the different lens that he looked at the “What’s in the bag assignment” through.  Right away he speaks about how he wanted to give more clues, instead of using only gestures.  This also reminds me of the struggle I experienced during the emoji story task; how can I ensure that my intended meaning is being expressed through visuals instead of words? I agree with Eduardo that my experience has led to a similar belief that “visual and textual representations are usually the most precise modes to describe objects”.  I can again connect this to the emoji task where images often felt underqualified to represent the ideas that I was hoping to express.  His connection between dynamic images of verbs and the value of adding the sounds that his bag items made was very interesting.  In my mode bend, I also tried to make the assignment more dynamic, but in a different way.  Instead of trying to interpret specific items to aid in identification, I attempted to push their thinking beyond the literal and have viewers make inferences and recognize potential biases. Eduardo came to a similar conclusion with his assignment, that it is very possible to identify and analyze cultural bias through his task, which is the main focus of my mode bend.

I’ve chosen to link to A. MacPherson’s emoji story post:

Task 6 – An emoji story

I first connected to their post with the layout of their emoji story, and blog post which was similar to mine.  I found other peoples’ stories were much longer as they went into more detail of different scenes.  I interpreted the assignment more like MacPherson, as we both chose to present our stories more as a synopsis than a full description.  Another cultural connection was that we both connected this to the game charades, both of which are turning ideas or text into visual forms without words.  The challenge of choosing symbols was apparent in both of our posts, and using the emojis as symbols instead of as syllables or other direct word connections.

The choice to find a movie that was ‘easy’ to represent through visual forms was also apparent in both of our posts.  I would emphasize how difficult it can be for others to interpret symbols or images in the same way.  MacPherson’s idea to use symbols for context instead of direct words is helpful to make it more universally interpretable instead of depending on English translations.  I would argue that much of the difficulty comes from the wide variation on how any individual from a similar cultural background would interpret each symbol, let alone people from other backgrounds, experiences or even age groups.  All of these could add to the challenge.  I didn’t think, when I did my emoji story, about how the title might be different in different languages which is something I would like to go back and address.

For this assignment, I’ve chosen to look at Vera Xiong’s potato printing task.

Task 4: Potato Printing

I purposely chose someone who had done the other offered method for this task as I wanted to compare their experience to my own. Right away we had similar, but drastically different experiences.  I took about 25 minutes to write 500+ words, while it took Vera the same about of time and likely more effort and creativity to create 2 printed words.  I was able to quickly create fairly reproducible letters with pen and ink while Vera’s where certainly more uniformly reproducible, but with an investment of time, energy, creativity and a wide variety of materials.

It was interesting that she described her lengthy and potentially frustrating experience as “therapeutic”, which I would compare to my post where I complain about hand cramps and the struggle of putting down clearly my shifting ideas.  As she spoke about the printing process for ancient cultures like China and Egypt, I wonder if they too would have described it in a similar way, “therapeutic, but time consuming”.

I really appreciated how Vera had not just photos of her effort and written descriptions, by also had a video on her post.  Her use of multiple literacies really allowed us to see her experience in many forms.  Her blog is set up differently than mine, with even her name hidden other than in the title of her video, yet she is able to describe her experience clearly, and we get to see her better than the one picture I have on my homepage.

It was the near the end of Vera’s post that I had an ‘aha’ moment.  The first, more minor moment was when she connected the mechanization of print to the abundance of literature that we have now.  But she later followed it up with the wonders about the intention, focus and pride that went into printing or creating literature in the past.  It made me wonder if that same intention has disappeared because of our desire for efficiency and speed in our modern world. Are we as intentional with our literacies when it’s a simple matter of hitting a button to change a word or delete part of an image? What shift has this caused and how could it be interpreted?  How has it influenced our world?  Kress talks about the “enormous experiment in mass literacy of the 19th and 20th centuries” (2005, p 55) and how has the cultural shift from literacy being something elite or only for some into something that is accessible to at least most of the population affected the quantity and possibly quality of literature.  I think we see this especially in social media.  It took Vera 25 min to write the word ‘peace’ twice, yet it is a matter of seconds for a person to write a hurtful statement online.  While Vera’s message on paper could be easily permanently destroyed in many ways, online words don’t disappear even when deleted of a site.

Link with Marlis Enders’s Voice to text task.

https://blogs.ubc.ca/meetec540/2021/09/26/task-3-voice-to-text-task/

I found many similarities between Marlis’ task analysis and my own. She used a similar technology, the google assistant on her phone, although I used Google docs on my laptop and she used MS word on her phone. I do wonder if this is partly why her dictation was more accurate since phones’ microphones are likely more powerful than a laptop’s. She acknowledges how structured the written English language is, and how speaking can be so much more fluid, random and less planned than written forms. Her experience is certainly different from my own as I am not used to voice to text, so was not prepared or in the habit of speaking “comma”, “period” etc as I use the tool. It makes me think of what other tools I could be using better, but because I am not in the habit of using them, I might not be able to reap the full benefit. My dictation would need significant editing, which begs the question of if it is even worthwhile using the tool.  

I find it interesting that her tool kept in the pause words like “oh” and “um”, whereas I was surprised that my tool automatically removed them.  I do wonder about the tool’s programming, and what words or sounds it is programmed to avoid?  How would this change with different languages or dialects?  Would it be much more challenging to use this tool if you had an accent that was different from the programmer?  

We both agree about the difference between oral storytelling and written forms of those stories. We are relying on the reader so much more in written form, so create their own images, emphasis etc, as opposed to oral storytelling where the teller can add so much more richness to the story through inflection, timing, facial expressions etc. Allowing the storyteller to adjust the story based on the non-verbal reactions of the audience is something that isn’t present in written storytelling. 

From looking at Marlis’ blog, I feel that she is very comfortable using digital text in this form.  Her use of italics instead of quotation marks as an example shows a comfort with different digital formatting options, whereas mine was often simply transferred from a manual form. The ease of navigating her blog, by getting to know her on the “about me” page, and the menus she’s chosen to use tell me that she’s aware of how the concentration of text on a page and in navigation can impact the user’s experience.