As of right now, Rich and I still need to do a lot of work on our portion of the project (faculty section). Much of the content needs to be researched and written, with also searching for qualified images to use to represent the staff. It seems like a video for the faculty page doesn’t seem like the best way to go considering we only have a week left in the project. Focusing on getting good content on the page and then solving how to make it interactive/hypermedia-centric. Rich and I need to sit down and work on the word doc together in order to create a good idea of what our page will look like. Other than that, it seems like the project as a whole is making good progress.
Author: Ben Peterson
Final Project Collaboration Duties
For the final project, in which case for me, it’s the DTC handbook project, I have been tasked with creating content for the faculty section. Rich and I are planning on making a video about the faculty, who they are, and where to find some of the most important faculty members, such as Greg’s office. Along with this page, there will need to be written content such as their names, a quick description, the classes they teach, as well as their contact information. I will also be helping with overall design, HTML, and CSS. Additional help will be given for anyone who may be struggling with their section, etc.
Multimodal Website – Learning Differences
Here is the link to my group’s project!
Multimodal Website Project – Learning Differences
My contributions for this project was most of the initial website design, structure, and function. Rich helped finalize the overall look and styling of the site. My job was to implement all the content into html, add the visuals that other members had collected, and add styling. There was constant tweaking and changing of the content on the pages that I was in charge of taking care of. I provided much of the content for the page I was in charge of (Dyslexia), though my groupmates also helped when I needed it. For the end of the project, I was also the person in charge of uploading the site to the DTC servers.
Multimodal Project Design Elements
First off, the typography was a huge aspect. The levels of hierarchy regarding our title text on each page, to having the headings smaller, and then of course the body text, as well as the ordered and unordered lists. I think the template lends itself well to having a hierarchy of content, where the right side of the screen is where all the content goes. “The most important content is the largest or takes the most amount of space on a webpage” (Oxford Digital). We even implemented a background color behind the main div element so that the content has a white background and will stand out from the colored backing. We also prioritized using lots of visual elements in order to provide a more hyper attention environment. “An image can communicate your ideas much faster than text.” These breaks will help with digestion of lots of information as well as make it more fun.
Multimodal Project Draft
My Favorite Podcast
My favorite podcast would have to be The Colin and Samir Show. I don’t really consume it on podcast streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, but I consume their video podcasts on YouTube. Colin and Samir are a YouTube channel of two dudes who give advice on creating content, and they also interview big creators and talk for more than an hour about their story, success, and the current creator economy. The main reason I love it so much is because it’s educational for my interests, but even more than that, they tear down the veil and get into the nitty-gritty of what it’s actually like being a content creator. Lots of YouTube videos you would just casually watch, but they really show the details of the business side of YouTube, which is extremely interesting as it’s a growing industry.
I think that podcasts specifically are one of the most lucrative forms of media right now. The thought that you can start a podcast network from just talking with your buddy every week is a real possibility. TMG Studios is a great example of that. But podcasts are great because if they’re filmed, you can upload that to YouTube as a video podcast. You can also upload it to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can get lots of sponsors because of the length of the episodes as well. But the best thing about podcasts is that there is so much content produced that it could be edited down into highlights and clips that can go on short form platforms as well, building your reach. Video blogs are also a great style of content, since it makes you feel like you’re a part of someone else’s life. Audiobooks are similar to podcasts, but don’t have any of the benefits that I laid out above. The only benefit to an audiobook is that it is immediate payment of the content.
Audio is a great side of digital publishing that still has tons of potential in the market. Right now it seems like everybody has a podcast, but it is easy to succeed if you take the right steps in promoting yourself outside of the podcast streaming platforms. Everyone who drives to work has three options: Drive in silence, drive with music on, or drive with a podcast or audiobook on. For me, I love spending long drives or long periods of monotonous work while listing to a podcast. And with more hyper attention media on the rise, consuming podcasts can be the thing to do while doing something else, if it isn’t already.
The Art of the Book
“To make a book is to actualize its ideal space-time sequence by means of the creation of a parallel
sequence of signs, be it linguistic or other.” (Carrion)
Two lines before this quote, the author also mentions how in books, the old art is just written text, but the new art is making books. These section of the reading really solidified what we have been learning since the beginning of this course, and how a book is more than just words on a page. It can be much more than that, and for this upcoming project, I’m excited to make it feel more like flow of information, or more like a symphony of words. That sounds melodramatic, but I think I’d be more interested in books nowadays if they had a greater arc and flow of a story than just chapter after chapter. In the project, you can use multimedia to help convey your topic, and myself and the other group members are excited to incorporate those elements into our site in order to make it more interesting. There are so many details that many people don’t even think about when consuming a piece of media (or art rather). For example, the editing in a video or film can really make the story. Another example is that most music today is far more layered and complicated than people realize, all because they don’t listen to it at a loud enough volume. The amount of times I’ve been in a car with a friend who doesn’t want to turn the music up because “it’ll be too loud,” but they won’t end up hearing all the artistry that the producer and artist have intentionally put in the songs. This is connected to the project because the group can turn this into an immersive experience while also being educational. I’m excited to work on this project and see what the finished product will be like.
Deep vs. Hyper Attention
“AD/HD might more appropriately be named the ‘search for
stimulation’ disorder.” (190)
I try not to make my whole personality about my ADD, because I know a lot of people who do and it annoys the hell out of me. Like we get it, you just got your medication, I’m happy for you, but we don’t have to talk about it all the time. The section that the author brings up about AD/HD is very interesting and true however. The quote above really encapsulates what it is like to live with AD/HD. You’re constantly looking for instant gratification in forms of short bursts of dopamine, whether that be scrolling on TikTok, texting lots of people at once, or doing twenty different things simultaneously. You can’t focus on anything if it doesn’t fulfill your stimulation, which is why students with AD/HD tend to struggle in school since homework assignments can seem pointless at times. For me right now, I’m writing this blog while listening to a classical study music playlist on Spotify. It helps me focus while my hearing is stimulated because if I don’t then I’ll start to think about different things and get distracted from my schoolwork. Hayles also mentions how more and more young people are being affected by the media they consume, leading to AD/HD habits built in the brain. Lots of my friends have developed this, and some have even been prescribed medication for their struggles in school, yet choose not to take it. They never struggled with school before, but now they are. I think that COVID could have impacted this, since more young people are addicted to their phones and the social media apps that are on it more than ever. These apps rewire your dopamine receptors to always seek stimulation to keep you on their app, so of course kids are going to have trouble focusing in school.
I believe that hyper attention in media is essential to success in media. Multimedia, hyperlinks, and engagement is all crucial to the business of digital publishing, especially social media. But if it’s referring to only text based mediums, I’m not sure it will apply. One thing that may occur would be a decrease of a market for those mediums, since more people are flocking to hyper-attention mediums and platforms.
If we put hyper-attention aspects in traditional books, it will take away from the traditional reader’s experience. For some today, it could make a book more readable, since it would be more stimulating. But for traditional readers, a switch in the medium to include multimedia, hyperlinks, and engagement aspects would not be wanted.
For myself, I have an in browser extension that reads your page like text-to-speech. It helps me comprehend whatever I’m reading even more, and helps me not get as distracted.
Digital books for my college courses have been interesting so far. The online textbooks usually have good built in features like search, a table of contents side menu, hovering over certain words will give you their definition, etc. Those can help a good amount when you are trying to read a big chapter. Including videos can also be a good idea for digital books to try, that way you can have a break from reading a focus on the video, almost like a break.
The Death of Poe, a Short Story Collection Ebook
The people that contributed in my group were Devon Baxter, Jessica Unruh, Jianys Berrios, Rich Te, as well as myself. The process for collaborating ended up being pretty straightforward and simple. We shared a collaborative Google Doc, copy and pasted the story into the document, and added the heading tags to the titles of each story. We also worked on the content before the short stories, such as the publication info as well as the dedication page. From there, everyone went their separate ways, creating a copy of the master document for their version of the project.
On my own, I edited the format of the Google Doc, and continued with the process of converting the document to the finished product Epub file. Along the road, I used Dream Studio Beta and Stable Diffusion to create the base image for the cover, as well as all the artwork of the five stories. For the cover, I simply added some text that I thought looked appropriate and exported it as a jpeg. The more technical process was editing the css and html in sublime as you’re approaching the final version of the Epub file. I aligned all the headings to the center, as well as the images. For The Raven, I classified all the paragraph tags under class=”raven” so that I could adjust the left padding to make the text more towards the center of the page. Other than some font size changes, there wasn’t much more than that. I also decided to go with Times New Roman as the font, since it’s a classic, old-feeling font, and also because I felt like if I chose a different font I would have to work on the styling much more to make it formatted well.
A Tale For Halloween
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56420/56420-h/56420-h.htm
For my advanced search, I put in “Halloween,” and with the parameters I set, it gave me four options. This first poem is from one of those four options, entitled “MARCH. Man goeth to his long home,” out of Halloween, A Romaunt with Lays, Meditative and Devotional by H.S. Parsons from 1845. The poem describes a song like chant, backed by strange music, of the people who have died marching down to the dead. It has different iterations between each verse, but the constant line is “Going down to the dead!” This definitely feels like something similar to the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, or even a weird Tim Burton animated film.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35458/35458-h/35458-h.htm#Page_248
The second selection I made was a collection of short stories entitled The Green Forest Fairy Book, by Loretta Ellen Brady. I particularly was interested in the last story, entitled “A TALE FOR HALLOWEEN.” This story follows two children who when trying to find a jackolantern they carved the previous day, end up finding a whole patch of animated pumpkins and vegetables who lead them to witches. These witches are nice witches, however, and they all then proceed to sing and dance (even the vegetables). They flew on the witch’s broomstick and had a wonderful time until eventually being returned to their cottage. They were bestowed good luck by a black cat from the witches who decided to stay with the children. This story is more of a jolly take on Halloween, which I like because everything you expect to be scary ends up being nice and animated.
Post-Artifact Publishing
While reading Craig Mod’s “Post-Artifact Book,” several thoughts were racing through my head. One of them was about my sister, and how she is an author herself, and publishes her own books through Amazon. She stays up late every night, chugging red bulls and typing thousands upon thousands of words every session, while also balancing being a teacher during the day. It was surreal holding one of the first copies of her own book that she wrote, did the cover art for, and published herself through Amazon. This quote reminded me of her situation:
“So submitting that file to be printed is to place ultimate faith in the book. To believe — because you must for the sake of sanity! — that this is the best you can do given the constraints. And you will have to live with the results forever.”
Now, I’m sure that she has felt this feeling before, specifically as she is editing the final parts of the book and making sure everything looks right in the software, and then the big decision to press PUBLISH. I’m sure this is more of a reality with more popular authors, since the big time authors probably can’t make significant changes after just publishing the book. But, if you do publish yourself as a small author through Amazon, you’re able to change whatever you want to the book on the fly, and then the next person who orders the book will receive the edited version (though not knowing it had been edited). For a major musician, they have to give the okay of publishing their new album, and that they can’t really make any changes past that. I think there’s fear when you’re about to press PUBLISH on anything, since there’s a chance that anyone can see an imperfect creation, especially in digital media. Now, that’s not to say that it needs to be perfect, but just that the person publishing feels they did their best with what they made.
I think an impact of the digital age is that we get to hear everyone’s opinions and thoughts. Maybe in some cases it’s forced down our throats, even. But I know that just with looking something up on Google, you get so many answers, links, and ideas. I know there’s been many times that Google doesn’t provide a definitive answer, but Reddit does. Forums are a good example of this system, where you get to hear people’s thoughts on anything. For me growing up, I would always scroll through comment sections on YouTube videos to see what other people were thinking about it. It creates an additional world to the artifact, the world of the community it is consumed by, and also a personal world of the lone consumer.
Is This Anything? My Favorite Book
I’m a huge Seinfeld fan. I love the show, the writing, the bits, the start and end of every episode with stand-up. It is old, but there’s a reason it was #1 on TV (yes, above the comparatively weak sitcom, Friends). The show is just immensely funny, and I love putting on episodes for my family and friends and seeing them laugh hysterically at a show that came out over thirty years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction talking about the meaning behind the title:
Reading this book is similar to reading a book of poems, except they usually don’t rhyme. It’s a terribly easy read that will make you chuckle under your breath many times as you go through the sections. I think the book is a great example of a connection to the codex origins because Is This Anything? is based in the categories of decades.
Jerry Seinfeld wrote thousands and thousands of bits and put them all in chronological order more or less. It makes it really nice to get the feel of his comedy, since each decade feels different from the rest. In the seventies for example, there are more quick-witted observations, while in the nineties his bits are longer and more in-depth. Here’s an example of a bit from the book:
The Unique Imagination of the Reader
“If a book is a space-time sequence, it is also a kind of film. It can be animated, rather than static.” (144)
When I think of a book, I usually think of a story, if I’m being honest. Even though I know a book can be much more than a story or not even a story at all, such as nonfiction, I always think back to going to the library in school and checking out a novel. I’ve always thought about books in this way, and silver-screen adaptations of the books only reinforce that experience. A novel written by an author can be a fully fleshed out world that their mind has created, and given to the reader to experience. Now, they way the reader perceives the novel and the world inside it is up to their imagination. Everyone sees the story in their head uniquely. That’s what gets me excited about books, but with this quote above, it demonstrates that some people limit what a book could be. When a film studio takes a book and makes it into a movie, it can taint the world previously created inside the reader’s head. Some adaptations are great, such as The Lord of The Rings and Game of Thrones, but those are rare to experience. I only think that if we make books more digital, then we are welcoming in external media to influence the worlds the authors create. A digital book with different animated scenes as the background would only limit the imagination of the reader.
“While some e-books are simply liquid text, a number of authors and artists are using the medium to create immersive cinematic and game-like reading experiences that take advantage of the digital space opened by this technology and demand a more expansive definition of the book.” (244)
Immersive experiences are great. I love going to the movies and losing sense that I’m in a movie theatre looking at the screen. Being fooled that you’re in the movie is one of the highest achievements of any filmmaker. But like I was saying above, the book is already an immersive experience, one that is completely unique to each reader. They get to decide what the world looks like in the mind, what the characters look like, how they act, etc. When you make an futuristic book, it only limits what heights a book could be imagined to by the reader.
I will say that I think my view is pretty close-minded, since I’m sure many people love movie adaptations of books, and maybe they prefer to have some visual aid when thinking about the works of an author. It may actually make it more immersive for them. But for me, I love the idea of the freedom of my mind to construct the world to my liking, which can be completely different from another’s.
Introduction
Hiya! My name is Ben Peterson and I’m a fourth year DTC student. The area of digital publishing that I am most interested is video based social media and publishing on those respective platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. But I am also really excited to dive more into the text world such as accessibility on multiple devices, copyright methods, as well as the wide world of the metaverse and digital publishing in that field. I’m excited to work with everyone this semester!