From 5f4e8d7262a3e0d3c78471a5fa110492d1c2dede Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Holden Rohrer
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2020 12:52:56 -0500
Subject: wrote versions of everything
cover essay is very partial (needs 1200 words) and the reading response
essays are limited in the analysis
---
markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html | 113 ++++++++++++++++
markley/portfolio/01_first_week_video.html | 98 --------------
markley/portfolio/02_first_week_video.html | 102 ++++++++++++++
markley/portfolio/03_digital_reading_journal.html | 136 +++++++++++++++++++
markley/portfolio/04_reading_response.html | 145 ++++++++++++++++++++
markley/portfolio/05_medical_object_video.html | 158 ++++++++++++++++++++++
6 files changed, 654 insertions(+), 98 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html
delete mode 100644 markley/portfolio/01_first_week_video.html
create mode 100644 markley/portfolio/02_first_week_video.html
create mode 100644 markley/portfolio/03_digital_reading_journal.html
create mode 100644 markley/portfolio/04_reading_response.html
create mode 100644 markley/portfolio/05_medical_object_video.html
(limited to 'markley/portfolio')
diff --git a/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html b/markley/portfolio/01_cover_essay.html
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+
+
This English 1102 course asked students to consider how health functions
+as a social ideal and regulates our actions based on the norms,
+attitudes, and ideas that prevail in our culture.
+In addition to this course-specific theme, there is a set of common objectives that this course was designed to
+teach, developing a Writing Process with revision, synthesis, and
+drafting and rhetorically effective presentation for distinct audiences
+and contexts.
+Revision and research play a large role in developing ideas and
+arguments and making the arguments robust.
+While this recursive, iterative process played a role in every
+assignment, the digital reading journal is the primary source of process
+documents.
+
+
Assigned prompts in the reading journal correspond to class readings
+and ask students to develop arguments and ideas based on course
+material.
+Sourcing and eventual finetuning of these ideas both play a role in the
+journal: in most entries, we were asked to use quotes and references
+from both class material and pop culture or general research.
+This is especially visible in the final post ("Medical Devices, the
+DMCA, and the corporate profit motive"), where I used links to other
+websites to make it a better document to refer back to later.
+Images and analysis also emphasized the role of the digital reading
+journal as a process document for my analysis of specific works or
+the overall health theme.
+But each entry also marks my progress in the general skills of analysis
+and rhetoric, especially.
+The electronic form factor has unique norms and options to elaborate,
+like a less formalistic style and heavy image presence, and these can
+change the rhetorical strategy I use when sectioning and emphasis are
+much more fluent than an essay.
+
+
+The use of images actually enhances my analysis, too, because I'm
+responding to the ideas that another work provides, and if I can
+directly include that work, it becomes much easier to speak about since
+the audience is meant to refer back to it and familiarize themselves.
+When the audience is me, this anchors my ideas to a specific factual
+reference, like the timeline in "HeLa and Henrietta."
+
+
+
+Quotes and the use of photos to highlight what's important is particular
+to the electronic medium, and it's particularly valuable when creating a
+personal reference piece.
+This is one example of shifting language and presentation towards the
+desired audience and situation, which is one of the major points of the
+Rhetoric Learning Outcome.
+
+
+
+
Category
+
Outcomes by the USG Board of Regents
+
Outcomes by the Council of Writing Program
+ Administrators
+
Additional Expectations of the GTWCP
+
+
+
+
+
Rhetoric
+
Rhetoric focuses on available means of
+persuasion, considering the synergy of factors such as context,
+audience, purpose, role, argument, organization, design, visuals, and
+conventions of language.
+
+
+
+
Adapt communication to circumstances and
+audience.
+
Produce communication that is
+stylistically appropriate and mature.
+
Communicate in standard English for
+academic and professional contexts.
+
Sustain a consistent purpose and point of
+view.
+
+
+
+
+
Use a variety of technologies to address a range of
+ audiences.
+
Learn common formats for different kinds of texts.
+
Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure
+ and paragraphing to tone and mechanics.
+
Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation,
+ and spelling.
+
+
+
+
+
+
Create artifacts that demonstrate the
+synergy of rhetorical elements.
+
Demonstrate
+adaptation of register, language, and conventions for specific contexts
+and audiences.
+
Apply strategies for communication in and
+across both academic disciplines and cultural contexts in the community
+and the workplace.
This video is a short (1m30s) personal introduction and a discussion
-of which element of WOVEN I expect to struggle most with in this course.
-I expect to struggle with visual communication more than the other
-forms, which will manifest in several places but will probably have the
-most significant effects on videos or the blog design.
-This video also includes how I plan to develop my skills with this
-modality (I plan to focus on design and aesthetics of presentation).
-
First-Week Video
-
-
-
Goals
-
Through this assignment, I familiarized myself with the
- WOVEN elements and set a goal for self-improvement throughout
- the course.
- I also worked on video production and presentation, to practice
- some of these elements.
- I expect to target this in assignments throughout the course.
- I also better understand the value of targeting multiple types
- of communication for rhetoric and in different works.
- This assignment was also directed towards the course material,
- and I better understand the assignments that we will be doing
- throughout the course (like the reading journal or final video
- project) because I will probably want to put extra effort into
- using the visual and design aspect of my content effectively.
- The reading journal, especially, will benefit from extra design
- work.
-
Purpose/Prompt
-
This video includes a short introduction to me, including my
- name, "major," and hometown and the theme of this course (health
- as a social construct) and the teacher (Dr. Markley).
- The First-Week Video asks about a potential struggle with WOVEN
- based on previous experience with trying to communicate in the
- medium.
- In addition to previous experience with the medium, the
- assignment asked me to develop a goal and a way to reach that
- goal based on that previous experience.
- I did this by talking about a focus on revision and the specific
- component of graphic design, but I didn't match these with
- previous experience.
- I could have talked about better, simpler presentations I've
- made on topics I've known more about, where I can tell most of
- the story and the graphics were improved through a couple of
- rounds of revision, based on the content.
-
Audience
-
The audience is faculty members and other first-year
- students who are familiar with WOVEN, this assignment, and the
- objectives of the course in general, like rhetoric.
- Because of this familiarity with the objective, I explicitly
- connected the visual mode to my difficulty with speaking
- briefly, but I tried not to overexplain the mode or visual
- design.
- However, I did give my personal experience of how the need for
- brevity and dense language collide.
- PowerPoints and posters are my most common interactions with the
- visual mode, and my audience should be familiar with both.
- However, I barely included one anecdotal example under the time
- constraints, possibly because I explained too abstractly: I
- could have talked about a revision or the impact of a poor
- design and better shown my point about brevity and still had
- time to talk about the digital reading journal.
-
-
Design for Medium
-
Because this is a video, I focused on engagement.
- For content, I wrote out a script that I would read, rehearse,
- and edit down into.
- I used a high-jumpcut vlog style to make the video seem more
- energetic, and I tried to keep my voice upbeat because my voice
- is the primary content in this style.
- I chose not to use another production style like a time-lapse or
- slideshow because I think my image and a direct explanation of
- my ideas is important and best delivered talking straight to the
- camera.
- I included music (the instrumental of White Town's Your Woman)
- because I think that it better covers up breaks in talking and
- maintains a central element throughout the video.
- I did try to keep it quiet relative to me talking because the
- music itself is unimportant.
-
Revision
-
Another type of video may have fit my argument better, but
- given the style I chose, the video could have been improved on
- the script and on the presentation.
- The script could have been much more personal by extending the
- anecdote and possibly including a visual representation for the
- product I created.
- I also probably should have chosen music not under copyright,
- and possibly faded it out at the beginning and in at the end.
- For the final product, cutting away to an image might have made
- it more engaging.
- The way I filmed it could also be improved: I held the camera,
- so it shook a bit, and I read the script for part of the video.
- If I had mostly memorized the script and propped up the camera
- to get a single shot between cuts and to stabilize it, the video
- would probably feel higher quality.
-
-
diff --git a/markley/portfolio/02_first_week_video.html b/markley/portfolio/02_first_week_video.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2dec99
--- /dev/null
+++ b/markley/portfolio/02_first_week_video.html
@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+
+
Introduction:
+
This video is a short (1m30s) personal introduction and a discussion
+of which element of WOVEN I expect to struggle most with in this course.
+I expect to struggle with visual communication more than the other
+forms, which will manifest in several places but will probably have the
+most significant effects on videos or the blog design.
+This video also includes how I plan to develop my skills with this
+modality (I plan to focus on design and aesthetics of presentation).
+
First-Week Video
+
+
First-Week Video Script
+
+
+
Goals
+
Through this assignment, I familiarized myself with the
+ WOVEN elements and set a goal for self-improvement throughout
+ the course.
+ I also worked on video production and presentation, to practice
+ some of these elements.
+ I expect to target this in assignments throughout the course.
+ I also better understand the value of targeting multiple types
+ of communication for rhetoric and in different works.
+ This assignment was also directed towards the course material,
+ and I better understand the assignments that we will be doing
+ throughout the course (like the reading journal or final video
+ project) because I will probably want to put extra effort into
+ using the visual and design aspect of my content effectively.
+ The reading journal, especially, will benefit from extra design
+ work.
+
Purpose/Prompt
+
This video includes a short introduction to me, including my
+ name, "major," and hometown and the theme of this course (health
+ as a social construct) and the teacher (Dr. Markley).
+ The First-Week Video asks about a potential struggle with WOVEN
+ based on previous experience with trying to communicate in the
+ medium.
+ In addition to previous experience with the medium, the
+ assignment asked me to develop a goal and a way to reach that
+ goal based on that previous experience.
+ I did this by talking about a focus on revision and the specific
+ component of graphic design, but I didn't match these with
+ previous experience.
+ I could have talked about better, simpler presentations I've
+ made on topics I've known more about, where I can tell most of
+ the story and the graphics were improved through a couple of
+ rounds of revision, based on the content.
+
Audience
+
The audience is faculty members and other first-year
+ students who are familiar with WOVEN, this assignment, and the
+ objectives of the course in general, like rhetoric.
+ Because of this familiarity with the objective, I explicitly
+ connected the visual mode to my difficulty with speaking
+ briefly, but I tried not to overexplain the mode or visual
+ design.
+ However, I did give my personal experience of how the need for
+ brevity and dense language collide.
+ PowerPoints and posters are my most common interactions with the
+ visual mode, and my audience should be familiar with both.
+ However, I barely included one anecdotal example under the time
+ constraints, possibly because I explained too abstractly: I
+ could have talked about a revision or the impact of a poor
+ design and better shown my point about brevity and still had
+ time to talk about the digital reading journal.
+
+
Design for Medium
+
Because this is a video, I focused on engagement.
+ For content, I wrote out a script that I would read, rehearse,
+ and edit down into.
+ I used a high-jumpcut vlog style to make the video seem more
+ energetic, and I tried to keep my voice upbeat because my voice
+ is the primary content in this style.
+ I chose not to use another production style like a time-lapse or
+ slideshow because I think my image and a direct explanation of
+ my ideas is important and best delivered talking straight to the
+ camera.
+ I included music (the instrumental of White Town's Your Woman)
+ because I think that it better covers up breaks in talking and
+ maintains a central element throughout the video.
+ I did try to keep it quiet relative to me talking because the
+ music itself is unimportant.
+
Revision
+
Another type of video may have fit my argument better, but
+ given the style I chose, the video could have been improved on
+ the script and on the presentation.
+ The script could have been much more personal by extending the
+ anecdote and possibly including a visual representation for the
+ product I created.
+ I also probably should have chosen music not under copyright,
+ and possibly faded it out at the beginning and in at the end.
+ For the final product, cutting away to an image might have made
+ it more engaging.
+ The way I filmed it could also be improved: I held the camera,
+ so it shook a bit, and I read the script for part of the video.
+ If I had mostly memorized the script and propped up the camera
+ to get a single shot between cuts and to stabilize it, the video
+ would probably feel higher quality.
+
+
diff --git a/markley/portfolio/03_digital_reading_journal.html b/markley/portfolio/03_digital_reading_journal.html
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0dfb832
--- /dev/null
+++ b/markley/portfolio/03_digital_reading_journal.html
@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
+
+
Introduction
+
The Digital Reading Journal focuses on the
+Process Outcome of the ENGL 1101/1102 program.
+During the semester, I responded to various prompts connecting course
+material to contemporary issues and other media.
+Through these posts, I learned that I can tell that I need to understand
+the material better if my sentences become long and unwieldy.
+This journal helped me improve my writing process because transcribing
+my thoughts on course content required me to sufficiently support those
+ideas, and when my support was thin, I stretched out the ideas.
+This was exacerbated by several rounds of information-adding revisions.
+I am including an early post that shows my least developed writing and a
+later post with my best writing.
+These two posts are my "process documents" for this assignment because
+they show how, as I understood the material better, I was better able to
+avoid rambling sentences devoid of content.
+The supplemental imagery also changed between these two posts.
+In the first, it is pretty generic and reiterates the more vague points
+I'm making, but in the second, my images are in fact directly relevant
+to the content and increase the value of the article more than just
+visually.
+
+
Digital Reading Journal
+
+
+
Goals
+
This assignment has two goals: the first is to assess and
+ improve understanding of course material, and the second is to
+ develop a writing process and reflection skills.
+ The assignment has asked me to relate the course material to
+ other things I read, watch on television, or see on the
+ Internet, in various weekly prompts.
+ These prompts ask me to develop a relationship with medicine and
+ the normative idea of health, so that I can develop ideas about
+ this social construction outside of course material in popular
+ culture.
+ Developing a writing process is a major goal of the program, and
+ this reading journal represents a more sustainable writing
+ process.
+ I can transfer the practice to other projects, writing out my
+ ideas semi-formally before I create the final work.
+ I will use this strategy when I'm working on larger
+ communication projects to think out the connections with
+ other cultural or analytic ideas.
+
Purpose
+
The reading journal is a blog organized into weekly prompts
+ about class readings and the course theme of health.
+ The prompts are open-ended questions about course material like
+ "...explain how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+ Hyde represents the moral dimensions of health..." that
+ require critical thinking and assess understanding of the
+ material (as a replacement this year for in-class discussions).
+ This writing process also creates value as a reference: in my
+ essays and in the final video, I reused ideas, quotes, themes,
+ and concepts that I've developed in my journal entries.
+ These ideas are particularly focused on popular culture and
+ modern issues because "health" is a general lens for social
+ issues and language.
+
+
+
Audience
+
+ This is a personal journal, so I am the main target for my
+ writing.
+ Formal writing is, however, still required because writing out
+ ideas where they make a cohesive argument or at least are
+ individually valid.
+ Proper argumentation or presentation enhances its value as a
+ reference because I can directly reuse the analysis I've already
+ done.
+ Because of the fact that strong rhetoric can make it easier to
+ develop strong rhetoric in the future, I have written in this
+ journal to an imagined academic audience familiar with the
+ course material.
+ I also see value in practicing argument, particularly with
+ health and the standard course material being reused in the
+ Reading Response Essay artifact and the theme in the Medical
+ Object Video.
+ That's why I try to develop a convincing case in each post
+ rather than rattle off a list of ideas for future use (which
+ would make for less interesting posts).
+
+
Design for Medium
+
There are three ways in which this medium is distinct from
+ other written media, like an essay or an article.
+ Firstly, I control the surrounding design and theming: Wordpress
+ is a great tool for background visual design.
+ I chose to go with black-on-white text and a pretty standard
+ theme because I don't want the colors to get in the way.
+ I also didn't use anything other than the plain blog as the main
+ page because the project is for personal use.
+ Secondly, the blogposts are much more visual than a standard
+ essay.
+ I reused (with proper credit, of course) Creative Commons
+ licensed photos from Flickr and Wikimedia to enhance my writing
+ and interject other points or have a visual reference for the
+ entry.
+ Lastly, the web gives different techniques for a website to be
+ passable, like alt text for accessibility and the ability to
+ link out to sources (a boon to the quality of each entry).
+
Revision
+
+ Each post is a process document, so they are meant to have
+ developing ideas, but there are still improvements I could make
+ to the posts and the design.
+ Firstly, I think I underused the electronic medium.
+ While I included some photos in each post, they didn't always
+ develop my ideas further, and I could have looked further than
+ just highlighting the points I had already made.
+ Three other electronic-specific tools I underused were links to
+ other sources and bold and italics.
+ Both of these would increase my rhetorical strength by
+ highlighting a central theme.
+ For an academic reader of the arguments I'm putting forth,
+ emphasizing the thesis or key terms might give them a clearer
+ understanding of what I'm presenting, and a better resource to
+ review for myself.
+
+
+
Process documents
+
Earlier Post
+
This earlier post shows how I used very long sentences to deflect the
+need for clear, substantive arguments and used similarly insubstantive
+image supplements.
+
+
Later Post
+
In this later post, my writing has grown and the text and images are
+coherent and build on a single argument, and because of that, my
+sentences are shorter and more focused.
This artifact includes three reading response essays and revision
+activities corresponding to each one on different structural strategies.
+The Reading Response Essays assess critical thinking and rhetoric by
+asking questions about "health" through the books we read in class.
+Health is a set of social ideals generally designed as "preventive
+medicine" but deeply influenced by the culture that created them.
+The reading response essays (without revision activity updates) are
+listed below along with the corresponding revision activities
+
+
+
Reading Response Essay One
+
Prompt:The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde, as the title indicates, refers to Dr. Jekyll’s experiments,
+behavior, and transformation as "strange." Likewise, The Sign of Four
+ends with a chapter entitled "The Strange Story of Jonathan Small."
+Explain what "strange" means in these two texts, using direct quotations
+from both texts, references to historical context, and ideas we have
+discussed about "health" to support your argument.
+
+
Uneven-U
+
The Uneven U asks me to choose two paragraphs and look at each
+sentence to see how "abstracted" it is from a direct quote up to a
+general statement about health.
+I commented on each sentence and then rewrote both of the paragraphs I
+chose to get a desired "somewhat abstract to most concrete to very
+abstract" curve.
+
+
Reading Response Essay Two
+
Prompt: Claude Bernard defines the experiment as "an
+observation induced with an object of control." Discuss how
+experimentation relates to the social ideal of health. Use direct
+evidence from The Island of Dr. Moreau and Medical Apartheid, historical
+context, and ideas about health to support your argument. You may
+include examples from other texts we have read, but your primary focus
+should be the readings from the past two weeks.
+
+
Reverse Outline
+
This is about creating an outline from what I've already written that
+tells the main argument: the main idea and how a given paragraph
+advances the central argument is enough to tell when a paragraph's
+message is muddled, which is the point of this argument.
+I have continued to focus on this cohesiveness within a paragraph in my
+writing because of this activity.
+
+
+
Reading Response Essay Three
+
Prompt: In the first lecture on health, I discussed
+how new technologies that help to measure and perceive the the "health"
+of the human body create new rules, regulations, and norms that govern
+"health." Using either "The Yellow Wallpaper" or The Immortal Life
+of Henrietta Lacks explain how new technologies, treatments, or
+ideas for measuring "health" lead to new rules, regulations, and norms.
+I strongly encourage you to refer back to the first lecture to help you
+consider this relationship between technology and health.
+
+
Active Voice Revision Activity
+
This revision activity asks students to review their third essay for
+sentences written in passive voice and change them to active voice.
+This makes the writing more clear and correct.
+This one is pretty simple, so I want to keep up avoiding passive voice
+in my future writing.
+
+
+
Goals
+
These assignments ask students to develop a strong academic
+ argument about how health and other social constructions like
+ experiments or technology relate.
+ Developing these ideas is part of the
+
+ Critical Thinking learning outcome, in the sense that they
+ require analysis of the indirect statements literature makes, like
+ Jonathan Small's "strangeness" referring to his nonconformance with
+ social norms.
+
+
Purpose
+
This assignment asks students to write a formal essay about
+ health and readings related to ideas about health.
+
+
Audience
+
The audience for these is a general academic audience, who is
+ very familiar with the course material, including the variety of
+ concepts of health.
+ Because the audience should already understand the basics I don't
+ include explanations of health and try to avoid book summaries.
+ However, niche terms with potentially multiple meanings are defined
+ if used, like "scientific racism" or "evolutionary Darwinism."
+
+
+
Dr. Markley or a general academic reader. more formal than blog
+ posts. designed to be practice with argumentative writing.
+
Design for Medium
+
The essay isn't very "multimodal," squarely occupying the
+ "Writing" communication mode, and it's formal writing at that.
+ This requires a fairly consistent structure, in the MLA format and
+ in the organization.
+ The MLA format is the 12pt, double-spaced Times New Roman required
+ of most standard essays, and there is the single MLA8 citation
+ standard.
+ This is because the essays lean heavily on direct quotes from the
+ pieces we're analyzing, so the regimented page number references are
+ useful to an academic reader wanting more context.
+ Structurally, these essays fit a pretty standard academic essay---an
+ introduction, conclusion, and body paragraphs divided up by their
+ topic.
+ As the revision activities show, this structure is somewhat flexible
+ (i.e. can be done poorly), but the organization matters, and I can
+ improve it by paying attention to whether each paragraph makes a
+ convincing point towards the central argument.
+ I usually don't do outlining when I'm writing, but I think I am
+ going to use the reverse outline to compensate for my rambling
+ tendencies.
+
+
Revision
+
Particularly in the first reading response essay, I struggled
+ with organizing my ideas.
+ Despite a coherent thesis that I still believe, I tried to
+ incorporate different information that did not correspond with my
+ argument (or at least I didn't develop how it did).
+ My mention of Holmes's cocaine addiction is not well-addressed or
+ contextualized in terms of Jonathan Smalls, but it seems to relate
+ to the idea of health, so I decided to include it.
+ Ideas like that could probably be trimmed down and replaced.
+ My paragraphs in the first reading response essay also don't follow
+ Uneven-U very well.
+ If I repair the sentence order to fully develop the central argument
+ about contradiction, they will probably come off as more insightful
+ than they are now, with a quote (the lowest level of abstraction)
+ as the second-to-last sentence.
+ The revision activities helped me to see what exactly "poorly
+ organized" refers to and how paragraphs can be deliberately
+ constructed rather than accumulate ideas based on topic.
+
+
diff --git a/markley/portfolio/05_medical_object_video.html b/markley/portfolio/05_medical_object_video.html
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+
+
Introduction
+
+The Final Video Project for this English 1102 course was about a
+"Medical Object."
+In each of the texts we studied this semester, there were several
+examples of medical objects that either had big impacts or were shaped
+by their cultural and historical contexts, and therefore are a lens into
+a larger social issue (similar to the concept of health).
+This video was about finding a medical object and digging into its
+historical context within the framework of health and social ideals.
+I chose to talk about healthcare and how politics has interacted with it
+by investigating a specific drug called insulin glargine/Lantus.
+
+This assignment was structured as the final medical object video
+artifact and three preceding process documents.
+The process documents are a proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a
+script.
+
+
+
The Medical Object Video
+
+
The Project Proposal
+
The Project Proposal
+
+
The Annotated Bibliography
+
This document came after the project proposal sequentially.
+It is a small subset of the citations I could have used from my
+research, and it includes some analysis of each source that was useful
+in developing my script.
+
+
The Medical Object Video Script
+
This supports the medical object video, and I read off of this for
+part of the video, but I changed some words slightly version because I
+didn't like how part of the script ended up sounding.
+
+
+
+
Goals
+
Recursive writing was a big part of creating this artifact;
+ the four layers in the process documents achieves the
+ Process
+ Outcome with repeated editing of similar ideas and an
+ incorporation of research into the process rather than something
+ occurring before the formal process.
+ The Project Proposal includes a segment about what research
+ needs to be done for the annotated bibliography and the script,
+ which is putting in writing the process of discovery and of
+ analysis.
+ The assignment asks us to write out this proposal and then the
+ annotated bibliography because it requires us to focus on
+ research and a filming/design plan.
+ This focus means that the final product will probably have
+ better-filmed and -researched content.
+
+ This is a synthesis piece, and the research is meant to be very
+ broad, so I observed several different disciplines and genres,
+ and the medical studies varied significantly from summary
+ histories and newspaper articles.
+ I was able to use these different accounts, which were all
+ biased towards reporting different parts (medical histories
+ preferred medical breakthroughs, newspaper articles preferred
+ sensational statistics) to build a cohesive narrative around
+ insulin glargine.
+
+
Audience
+
The audience is the general public, including my peers at
+ Georgia Tech.
+ This means that I'm not talking to an expert audience and can
+ assume very little knowledge about my topic like I would on an
+ essay about a book, so I need to explain a lot of the topic.
+ Most of the video is just this, me explaining the eventual
+ development that led up to genetically modified human insulin,
+ but I do have a "take."
+ This bias is deliberately embedded into the storytelling and
+ it's why I talk about patents so much even when I'm mostly
+ describing the technology's development.
+ Furthermore, this means that the product should be engaging.
+ A general audience isn't going to sit through a boring technical
+ summary like a niche audience might (although it should still be
+ avoided), and I tried to achieve this with my nonverbal tone and
+ body language.
+ Editing made sure that my speaking was decent and that picture
+ asides broke up more monotonous bits.
+
Purpose/Prompt
+
The final project asks students to create a 5-minute video
+ (I created a 7-minute video with a 1 minute end card) that
+ explains a medical object we haven't discussed in class.
+ "Object" is a really broad category, including procedures,
+ techniques, devices, medicines, models, or breakthroughs as long
+ as they are medical.
+ Originally, I was going to talk about some medical device
+ because there is a lot of injustice perpetrated by companies on
+ medical devices and information security, but I learned that the
+ FDA has allowed researchers to test implants with DRM for
+ security, which weakened my case.
+ However, I still wanted to talk about exploitation, which
+ brought me to insulin, "the poster child for [over-priced
+ healthcare]."
+ I chose to work on this project alone, and created a product
+ that explains what insulin glargine is (I used historical
+ context to do this), how it works, how it is used, when and how
+ it was invented, and the significant contexts that led to its
+ development and its current form (in insulin's case, patents and
+ massive conglomerate mergers).
+
Design for Medium
+
I used the video medium as an extension of a presentation
+ where things can be performed multiple times and modified after
+ their performance.
+ I "performed" the script in more of a news-show style than the
+ video-essay type I was looking for, but this is still a common
+ trope within the medium, so audiences are comfortable with this
+ sort of presentation.
+ I also used a couple of video essay tropes like section breaks
+ and overlain photos because I want there to be a sense of
+ consistent chronology even if I jump around some due to some
+ changes happening around the same time or being larger trends of
+ years or decades.
+ I don't have any self-made visual content, so the principles of
+ design (the symmetry, alignment kinds) are less applicable, but
+ I did choose my background to be mostly symmetric and well-lit
+ and I chose the titles based on the repetition principle.
+ I reused the wall color and the door color (lightened and
+ darkened, respectively, for readability) in the title to keep
+ color consistency.
+
+
Revision
+
On this video, the supporting documents were fairly
+ complete, so the content and citations (when used) were relevant
+ and fairly high-quality.
+ One thing I would have prefered to do with the script or the
+ annotated bibliography is to integrate health more explicitly.
+ I believe that, implicitly, medicine, underuse, and social
+ conditions have a lot to do fundamentally with health, but I
+ believe I didn't sufficiently explore how the norms we have
+ interact with social ideals and society (like the poor).
+ For the video, I didn't leave myself as much time as I would
+ have liked to edit it, and I don't think that it is as appealing
+ as it could be.
+ The solid-color titles are somewhat bland, and even though
+ they're sufficient, a redesign could be nicer looking.
+ Images were also somewhat hastened.
+ I didn't exactly establish a style for image placement, which
+ could have hurt their inclusion, and the images that I included
+ weren't particularly deliberate; most were to break up the
+ monotony of me talking, which is valuable, but I feel that had I
+ searched harder, I may have found a more valuable image set.