Module 5

More than Words

Your professor in 1981 at Four Corners

When I was growing up in California, my parents would plan a summer vacation every year to some place in the U.S. These were always road trips because my parents didn’t have a lot of money and we were a fairly sizable group, my two brothers and me, my parents, and my aunt, uncle, and cousin all taking the journey. My dad and uncle would take pictures, mostly if not exclusively of the scenery, and then, when we would get home, we would gather around the screen and slide projector. My memories of those vacations were as much of those images as they were the actual memory of being in the place. Images, sounds, recordings are the way we share a place with others who haven’t been there.

We can describe a place, but it’s a richer experience if we can show it as well. In the last module, I described the travelogue as a media presentation as well as a narrative of travel. The Travel Film Archive has collected many of these old newsreel and silent movies; my favorite is The Call of Colorado from the 1960s. They are amazing videos of the world in the last century.

Other visual media that have come to be used quite a bit is the infographic, another portmanteau, this one a mash-up of Information and Graphics. Infographics have been around for hundreds of years, although the visual web that allows scrolling makes them suited for delivery there.

April 18, 1912, Denver Post inforgraphic showing relative size of Titanic

Techniques

Samples

Assignment

  • Multimedia [NOTE: You will be doing editorial reviews in Flipgrid this week. I will email the link]

Due dates

  • Multimedia draft due Wednesday, October 14
  • Editorial Comments due Friday, October 16
  • Multimedia revision due Wednesday, October 19