Task 8: Golden Record Curation

In choosing which 10 music excerpts to include, I wanted to base my choices on what I felt represented the widest variety of examples of what human music is and can be to an audience who may be entirely unfamiliar with the concept of music. To me, this meant trying to select tracks that not only maintained diversity of geographic and cultural origins and musical traditions, but also tracks that featured the widest possible combinations of diverse musical elements. Some of the musical features I prioritized for inclusion are unaccompanied vocal music, instrumental-only music, mixed instrumental and vocal music, vocal harmony, self-accompanied singing and playing, solo music, ensemble music, primarily rhythm/percussion-based music, music without a steady beat, music with pitch-bending & ornamentation, and a wide diversity of types of instruments and arrangement styles. I found this task to be very challenging, and I feel like I will not be satisfied with my selection without the addition of another 4 or 5 tracks.

Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43

Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08

Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14

Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51

Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18

Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52

Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20

Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38

India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

“Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15

My spreadsheet of considerations.

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Task 7: Mode-Bending

Play on itch.io (may take some time to load; may not work properly for all browsers and devices): https://etec565sdruids.itch.io/mode-bending-whats-in-my-bag

Download to run on your computer: click here to download

(please note that you will likely need to scroll left-right and up-down on your device to access all parts of this multimodal work)

To begin this project, I started by thinking about the original purpose of the “What’s In My Bag” task: presenting the private contents of my bag in order to “implicitly prompt the viewer to begin to construct a narrative about” me. The original task was entirely visual, with the contents of the photograph taking on the roles of texts to be interpreted by the viewer.

In shifting modes, I wanted to see if I could re-imagine the ideas behind the intent of the original project without relying on the core visual element (and without re-introducing written language text… trying to convey meaning without any written language was a fun challenge from the previous task that I wanted to explore again here). I decided that I would represent the original images through emoji. To lend further context to each object/representation, and to redesign the original “glimpse of my private life” aspect, I created audio clips meant to represent a combination of audio “snapshots” of my day and internal monologues made audible. To tie these audio clips to the emoji that represented the objects in my bag, I created an interface using Twine that the user can freely interact with to freely explore each object/sound combination in any order.

To organize these connections between digital pictographic symbols and audio clips, I introduced another Available Design that also allowed me to lend additional weight to the “glimpse of my private life” aspect of the design: the literacy or “grammar” of a cartesian plane-style timeline (New London Group, 1996). With the x-axis labelled by time (using emoji that call upon the additional literacy of reading the face of an analogue clock), I was able to represent and chart each item’s use or uses to specific times in the day. In cases where an item is used more than once, this created opportunities for me to connect multiple audio clips for the different instances of each item’s use, creating additional context for the user as they use the representation of these items construct their understanding of who I am.

The presentation of this timeline of emoji in a html file produced in twine invites the user to click on linked elements in the hypertext interface to interact with the “text” in an order of their own choosing. In this way, the use of Twine and html helps to “create patterns of meaning that are more or less predictable in their contexts” (p.22), as the medium inherently suggests the active interactivity of the user that is required to “read” the text, rather than a more passive form of consumption.

The biggest challenge I encountered when working on this task was ensuring that the organization of emoji stayed spatially organized relative to each other so as to not disrupt the precision necessary for the grid-coordinates system, which is important for that element to maintain its meaning. Originally I used pairs of emojis (and colour coding) to construct concepts such as “wallet” (credit card + folder) that do not have an obvious representation in the emoji character set, but I soon found that the thin columns that the grid is made from would often force the second character “wrap” down to the next line of text, displacing every other symbol in the column below.

A screenshot of an early version of this task while it was in progress. In the 12:30 column, the laptop+charger character pair, dog+poop character pair, and coffee+barrel(mug) character pair are experiencing text wrapping that I did not desire. The black-line emoji seemed to address this issue, but it persisted after later design changes. The black line emoji were retained as they helped to reinforce the grid-like nature that was desired for the visual presentation.

References

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

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Task 6.4: Emoji Story

Note: the title for this story is at the very end of this post.

My emoji story, rendered as an image reflecting how it looked on my phone:

The same story, rendered using emoji characters:

Emoji story (for some reason emoji are being converted to question marks when I post to this blog, so I have attached a text file)

For rendering my chosen plot, I chose to focus on using the emoji to represent ideas, and occasionally specific words. I sometimes used the arrangement of emoji pictographically to depict a scene, and in other cases I used them in a symbolic manner. In some cases I appropriated certain emoji to represent concepts that are more abstract and difficult to render through images, but I tried to limit this approach to only a few symbols and to be consistent in how I used them.

I chose this particular story because it was the piece of media that I had most recently engaged with when I began this project. The title of this work is very easy to accurately depict using emoji, so I have chosen to save the title for the end of this post. Some parts of the story I felt were very easy to convey (although the decipherings by my classmates might prove otherwise!), while other parts were very challenging to render in a way that I felt could be understood. Additionally, some details in certain emoji are difficult to visually distinguish on my phone, such as the difference between the closed padlock and an open padlock pictures.

While I was working, I also tried to keep in mind how emoji are rendered differently on different technology platforms, and so I tried not to rely on the specific details of how any particular emoji was rendered, rather than the idea behind it. To assist with this, I often had my phone “read” different emoji out loud so I could learn what they were called in order to avoid misinterpreting the idea of what an emoji is meant to show and to try to anticipate whether a different rendering on another platform might change the image too much from what I intended to show.

While I was working on this project, I also happened to start listening to the Lingthusiasm podcast (co-hosted by Gretchen McCulloch who was featured in the listening resources in Module 5.2] and she and co-host Lauren Gawne devote a significant portion of the first episode discussing why emoji lack the linguistic features required (assuming no future development of a workable grammar) to function as a language on their own.

The title of the story: THIS EMOJI (for some reason emoji are being converted to question marks when I post to this blog, so I have instead used a link to a page for the single emoji that represents this title)

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Task 5.4: Twine Game

Task 5.4 The Time Traveller’s Personal Shopper

Play on itch.io: https://etec565sdruids.itch.io/the-time-travellers-personal-shopper

OR download the html file

My original concept for this game was a time-travelling adventure in which the player would have to interact with various forms of language technologies (spoken word, clay markers, scrolls, codices, radio, television, e-mail, etc.). As the project evolved, I steered away from a full implementation of this idea as I realized that the time-travel element itself (and the juxtaposition of making the player memorize or write down abstract code from a hand-written note in order to operate an advanced machine in the game) could be an interesting aspect to explore using Twine.

Instead, I decided to focus on using the affordances of variables in Twine to responsively change the content of certain scenes based on the player’s past actions, rather than manually creating numerous branching unique variations of passages to try to replicate the same effect. This allows for players to navigate parts of the game more freely, rather than being contained to interacting with passages only in predetermined orders along set paths that I created. This is best demonstrated in the 3 pickup times/locations. Not only can the player choose to visit these in any order, but the description of each scene responsively includes comparisons to times/locations that have already been visited, without referencing any that have not yet been visited.

Given that writing and programming for the players who do everything “correctly” is rather straightforward, my strategy for implementing the mechanics of this game was to first focus on what happens when a player tries to do things like going back to previously visited scenes or entering space-time coordinates other than the ones that lead to scenes I have written.

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Task 4.4 – Manual Script

“Sunny’s Adventure” is a spontaneously-composed fictional story about what my dog might do if she had the chance to go for a walk around the neighbourhood by herself.

Do you normally write by hand or type?

I do both, depending on the purpose of my writing. For notes to myself, such as to-do lists, brainstorming ideas, or taking notes during a phone/Zoom call, I usually prefer using pen and paper. However, I will often make due with touch-screen typing on my phone if I do not have paper and pens handy. For longer compositions (especially anything that I am writing for somebody other than myself to read), I prefer to type on my laptop keyboard, but again I will make due with my phone’s touchscreen if it is all I have available at the moment.

Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

I found this task difficult due to the physical discomfort that came from writing much more than I typically do in one sitting. I remember frequently writing pages like this by hand in-class during my intermediate and high school years, but it has been a very long time since I have hand-written something this long and I clearly no longer have the stamina in the required muscles that I once did. Given that this was only about 500 words of sloppy writing, I can definitely appreciate how books were once rare and expensive items, as mentioned by Lamb and McCormick (2020) in Invention of the book: Part 1.

Another difficulty came from trying to keep my writing slightly more legible for others than it typically is. As something I usually only do for myself, I realize that my manual writing is probably difficult to decipher in many places. I tried not to get too hung up on this, but I realize that hand-writing with an audience other than myself in mind would mean significantly slowing my writing speed in order to ensure legibility.

What did you do when you made a mistake or wanted to change your writing?

Some mistakes I tried to correct by re-writing the letters in thicker lines that obscured whatever I was trying to cover up. In other places, I simply scribbled over mistakes and carried on.

How did you edit your work? Did your choice of media play a part in how you edited your work?

I wrote this work as a freeform story that I invented as I wrote it down, but during that process I did find myself occasionally pausing to consider where I wanted the story to go next, knowing that I would not be able to go back and re-arrange paragraphs or re-write sentences later. If I were writing something more “serious”/meaningful by hand, I would certainly start with a rough draft to make my edits on before coping out a final version.

What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?

In my mind, hand-writing lends itself to a more direct transcription of ephemeral words (spoken or thought) to physical text, and is especially ideal for shorter passages and anything that isn’t intended to be copied and things that do not need to be perfectly edited. Mechanized printing, such as the printing press, introduces the need for more complex equipment and initial set-up time in order to produce physical text, but provides exponential savings in time and effort for texts that are intended to be replicated multiple times. My preference would depend on the purpose I intend to fulfil with my writing, and which method would best suit that purpose.