Visual Communication and the Digital Turn

I am very excited about the Digital Turn on multiple levels as a way of expressing ideas in visual form and making them more accessible and finding different ways to tell stories. As Joan Didion wrote, “we tell ourselves stories to live,” and I live and breathe that phrase. For this presentation, my aim is to show you the new forms of communication that excite me to no end, and then talk about how our relationship with new media content producers has drastically changed. If you have never heard of SnowFall, an incredibly impressive piece of interactive media that the New York Times produced in 2012, please allow me to show it to you. As you can see, as I am scrolling down all these cool things are happening and you are learning all these amazing things about the mountain. You are reading while somebody is skiing by you. It’s just an extraordinary example of this new kind of technique called “parallax scrolling; and this piece “Snowfall” made such an impact that “snowfall” has become a verb among multimedia news producers, as in ‘shall we “snowfall” this story?’; perhaps now so many people are “snowfalling” now that the technique will soon wear itself out

A Review by Karen Mitchell and Bettina Fabos of Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University, by Anna Neumann

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to solve budget problems by dramatically cutting public education funding has once again sparked heated debate over the figurative and literal “value” of education. As other state governments consider similar proposals, educators feel increased pressure to justify how they go about the important job of teaching. Never before has research on academics been more important, especially in higher education where so little is publicly known about what professors do in their day to day profession. This is true of all ranks of professors within academia, but perhaps most critically of professors with tenure. In Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University Anna Neumann presents the results of her interviews of 78 participants from five universities in the years just following their tenure and details the many demands that are layered onto a professor’s plate as one gets into the middle ranks, “without any recognition that you already have a lot of them” (p. 31). With anti-intellectualism on the rise in mainstream public discourse, the purpose of tenure (to guarantee academic freedom) is rarely defined or defended, although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired on February 28, 2011 did an excellent job of critiquing the misconceptions circulated by media pundits critical of public educators

Introduction to Library Trends 53 (4) Spring 2005: The Commercialized Web: Challenges for Libraries and Democracy

published or submitted for publicatio

Fortepan Iowa

In 2015, four university faculty UNI (Bettina Fabos, Leisl Carr Childers, Noah Doely, and Sergey Golitsynskiy), launched the “Fortepan Iowa” project. The ambitious public photo archive showcases curated Iowa family snapshots of everyday Iowa, taken between 1860-2000, and situates them along an easily searchable, image-centered timeline. Fortepan Iowa’s overall mission is to crowd-source public memory of rural and small town Iowa life, and foster a robust, shared, collective history of Iowa. UNI’s Fortepan Iowa team works with numerous college students in our Digital Culture classes, who work with volunteers to scan, curate, and collect metadata and stories about Iowa life, and then make these photos and associated data available for public enrichment. The expanding collection of photographs (approximately 15,000 and growing) captures a state identity that is quite magical--most images connect to Iowa customs, rituals, and ceremonies that Iowans recognize. Other photos can be jarring, and complicate our understanding of Iowa and Iowans in a way that is refreshing and invites alternative stories about Iowa identity. Because all Fortepan Iowa photographs are arranged chronologically, not by individual collection like typical archiving interfaces, the juxtaposed images immediately tell a story about practices and happenings at particular moments in Iowa history or across a particular decade. Because the images will soon be equipped with tagging and public forum capabilities, enabling community members to foster a permanent dialogue about each image, the archive encourages multi-generational participation and a publicly shared collective memory of our state. And, because all images are scanned according to FAGDI standards and released to the Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) for immediate download, Fortepan Iowa enables an even deeper and active level of community participation, especially for K-12 students, artists, seniors, and local historians. The Fortepan Iowa project is, above all, conceived as a public-facing archive for the public, not for archivists (although it has great value for archivists, too). As such, the non-profit archival platform is setting a new standard for how we should be viewing and experiencing our community’s photographs.Our Digital Culture and Communication students learn about the importance of the Creative Commons and public web projects in general--through their participation in Fortepan Iowa

Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialization of the Internet

Offers a critique of the role of the Internet in American schools. Investigates the advertising campaigns and other corporate maneuvers that got schools online, as well as the way that educators use the Web in the classroom. -- Provided by publisherhttps://scholarworks.uni.edu/facbook/1267/thumbnail.jp

Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication

The #1 introduction to mass communication text, Media & Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, is at the forefront of the ever-changing world of this dynamic course, addressing the most current issues of our time—including the proliferation of fake news, the #metoo movement, the use and abuse of social media platforms, consumer privacy, and the role media plays in our democracy. The Twelfth Edition of Media & Culture digs deeper than ever before into the worldwide reach and ethical implications of today’s media by highlighting global issues, such as foreign interference in social media and the effect of international box office revenue on decisions made by the domestic film industry, and ethical considerations, such as the fight against sexual harassment across the media industries and the coverage of recent mass shootings, throughout each chapter.https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facbook/1505/thumbnail.jp

Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication

Breaking the mold of traditional mass communication textbooks, Richard Campbell’s Media & Culture goes beyond the basic facts and presents students with a critical and cultural perspective on the media. Campbell uses a unique five-stage critical thinking process to help students examine the forces that shape the mass media and become active participants in the media. Media & Culture’s integrated cultural perspective focuses on the reciprocal relationship between the mass media and our shared culture — how cultural trends affect our media and how historical developments, technology, and key media leaders have shaped our society. Completing the full picture of the mass media is the text’s in-depth coverage of the history, structure, and economics of each industry. Continuing the tradition of cutting-edge content, the 2009 Update includes the most current media trends and developments. -- Provided by publisherhttps://scholarworks.uni.edu/facbook/1265/thumbnail.jp

Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication

https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facbook/1523/thumbnail.jp