Description

The idea behind this project is to introduce digital writing to someone who doesn’t know what it is. Since most people who would care to know about digital writing already have access to some form of technology, explaining it doesn’t require a primer on computers and the like, so the video uses familiar activities as examples of digital writing.

I put this picture together by combining several different pictures, mostly photos. I used GIMP to remove each element from its background, then arranged them on the wood texture background by treating each as a separate layer before I exported the image. I cited these images by listing the creators and linking to each image in the video description, because a random person seeing the video on YouTube would look there if they wanted to find that information.

The audio is brief enough that a viewer/listener would not get bored, so they listen to the whole message. By listing a number of common things people do that counts as digital writing, it conveys that it’s not some scary, complicated concept because they probably do it every day. It’s also easy to understand—the audio isn’t muffled, distorted, or drowned out by music—which makes it easier to absorb than a written version might be.

The image is centered around the final line of the video: “If you used one of these, it probably qualifies.” They’re devices that most people use or have used, possibly without realizing that what they were doing was digital writing. Most of them are easily recognizable, with the possible exception of the Mac computer tower, so the viewer quickly makes the connection between these devices and digital writing, helping them understand that they do digital writing all the time. Placing them all together also helps convey the idea that there are many ways of being a digital writer, and that they are easily available to the viewer.

Reflective Letter

I suppose it’s a minor detail, but I’m sort of proud of the way I cropped the images because it was my first time doing something like that. The camera and the computer tower, especially, because they had some details that aren’t even noticeable when they’re scaled down so much, and I was pretty precise in cropping around them.

If I had more time to think about it, I could probably have included some more digital writing activities to include in the script to fill some of the pauses, but I think the pauses do help emphasize each one I did list. I would also like to have gotten someone else to record the audio, too, because I don’t like my voice, but at least I didn’t have to sing my message. That would have been terrible.

Aside from the internet I used GIMP, Audacity, iMovie, and YouTube to create this project. The elements of an audio postcard are an image and some audio, so GIMP and Audacity, being image and audio editing programs respectively, make perfect sense. I really just used iMovie because it’s the video editing software that came with my computer, but it also makes editing simple: you just drag and drop the images and audio you want into the project. YouTube was an ideal choice because it makes uploading a video quick and easy.

The only place I really got stuck on this project was in my own head—in that I let a bunch of work pile up and got started on the project late. There’s not much to do for that except to stay up late getting work done, and that’s what I did.

I learned little about myself as a digital writer, because I’ve always been a procrastinator, and I’ve usually been able to pick up and learn new software with relative ease—at least, learn how to do what I specifically need to do with it. I knew these things about myself already, and the project didn’t really break any new ground for me in that sense.

The course outcomes I worked toward were play, performance, and appropriation. I used play in order to learn GIMP and a little bit in getting the video to upload properly to YouTube, but much more the former. I edited the images while listening to music, and it was by far the least stressful part of my day. I’d try one thing to see if it worked, and if it didn’t, I started over. Once I got the cropping and layering down for one image, the rest were easy. Recording the audio involved a bit of performance—I suppose I didn’t adopt another identity per se, but I don’t normally do voice-overs and I tried to speak more clearly and breathe more carefully than I normally do. The appropriation is obvious—I found a bunch of images that I could legally alter, and remixed them into the audio postcard.