This document outlines objectives and strategies for creating digital exhibits to critically analyze media representations. Students will collect images and videos from sites like Flickr and YouTube to identify patterns in how different groups are portrayed. They will then remix and annotate these media to explore how representations are socially constructed. Theories of connectivism and situated cognition are discussed as frameworks for seeing knowledge as networked patterns. Students will also explore how different systems in society like government, education and media interconnect to maintain existing power structures.

1. Creating Digital Exhibits for
Critical Inquiry of Media
Representations
Richard Beach, 2009 NAMLE
Google Docs version of handout:
http://tinyurl.com/kk6zky

2. Objectives
 Infer patterns in media images and video
 Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, digital maps
 Mount exhibit as museum curators
 Construct own media collages
 Flickr, VoiceThread, YouTube, iMovie,WMM, Web
Poster Wizard, Gliffy
 Reflect on how media texts are constructed:
 “Production, representation, distribution, reception, and
socialization” Paul Prior

3. Theories: Making connections
 Situated Cognition Studies: James Gee:
 humans—like connectionist computers
—look for patterns in the elements of
their experiences in the world and, as
they have more and more experiences,
find deeper and more subtle patterns,
patterns that help predict what might
happen in the future when they act to
accomplish goals.

4. Stephen Downes:
Connectivism learning theory
 We need to look at networks, not as physical
systems, but as semantical constructs, where
the organization of links is determined as
much by similarity and salience than by raw,
epistemologically neutral, forces of nature.
Knowledge is a network phenomenon, to
“know” something is to be organized in a
certain way, to exhibit patterns of
connectivity. To “learn” is to acquire certain
patterns. This is as true for a community as it
is for an individual.

5. Collecting images/videos
 Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, etc.
 Identifying key terms/categories
 Search strategies: Uses of tags
 “attentive noticing”/“informed
seeing”  tagging

6. Flickr badges
 (html or Flash collages to post on a blog or
wiki) http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne
 Harry Potter:

7. Digital collages/scrapbooks
 Shutterfly Studio
 Smilebox
 Clipmarks
 Plum
 Tabblo
 Ulead Photo Express My Scrapbook 2 (Windows only)
 HP Creative Scrapbook Assistant (Mac and Windows)

8. Jeff Rice: Digital Detroit: Digital
tagging of spaces in Detroit
 By imagining the urban environment as one of
encounter rather than fixed place, we can begin
to conceptualize a city like Detroit as a network.
 My call is for a plan of information tagging,
where residents, working in digital spaces,
reimagine the city through their own
conceptualization and actualization of tags. In
place of tagging the bypass or the stop sign with
graffiti, they tag the city itself as an encountered
name or moment within a digital, interconnected
space

9. Jeff Rice: Digital Detroit: Digital
tagging of spaces in Detroit
 Imagine, then, the city as a network of tags.
Residents, who tag themselves simultaneously as
writers or non-writers, mark the city through
memory maps, weblogs, delicious tags, and other
related tools in order to reconstruct the city's sense
of urbanity as a digital experience. The tagging
generates a number of assembled taxonomies,
some recognizable, many not. Through the
assemblages, we find new Detroits to engage. We
find new Detroits emerging out of our own
discursive constructions. This reworking is social
in ways capital investment has failed to generate.

10. Decontextualizing or
defamiliarizing images

11. Decontextualizing or
defamiliarizing images

12. Parodying/Altering/Remixing
of Images
 TinEye: reverse image search engine

13. Parodying/Altering/Remixing
of Images
 Remix America: Remixed videos
 Adbusters
 My Pop Studio: Magazines

18. Collect videos on YouTube
 Search topics: Select images or videos:
Hollywood representations of teachers
 Inductively define patterns/deviations
 School of Rock: provocateur
 Dead Poet’s Society/History Boys:
deviant
 Dangerous Minds/Freedom Writers:
savior
 Half Nelson: relationship with students

19. Comment/annotate
 VoiceThread: add oral or written
comments to slideshows
 VoiceThread resources
 VideoAnt: add written
annotations to specific points in
a video

20. Remix: Copyright
 “Transformational” fair use of
images/videos
 Center for Social Media: Video:
Remix & Fair Use: Best Practices for
Online Video

21. Autobiographical connections
 childhood photos or video: artifacts,
events, places, family members, places
 Agnes Varda, The Beaches of Agnes
(2008)
 American Memory Project
 Family tree/heritage projects:
 MyHeritage
 Geni

22. Representations of Race
 Power of white hegemony in film/media
 Predominating control/portrayal of
whites
 People of color not shown as
subservient and not engaging in
“human”/complex practices
 Chinese Hollywood
 Black People on YouTube

23. Construction of Femininity

“Beauty industry”: appearance, slimness, or
attractiveness as central to identity
http://www.bodyimagesite.com
http://www.edap.org/media1.html
http://www.aap.org/advocacy/hogan599.htm
 Kasi Williamson: Representations of feminism in
the media
 Jennifer Budenski:
The New Cult of True Womanhood: the Monolith o
f Disney’s Princess

24. Representations: Masculinity
 Traditional masculinity: aggression,
competition, domination as portrayed in
men’s magazines
http://www.theory.org.uk/mensmags.htm
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol5.htm
 Matthew Ferrari, FlowTV: Mixed Martial
Arts’ Burgeoning Wild Kingdom

26. QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

27. Representation of Class
 People’s desire to be perceived as
“middle class” by adopting class markers
of dress, language, social practices
 PBS: People Like Us
 Representations of “working-class”
 “White trash”
 Center for the Study of Working Class
Life

28. Teachers in films
 Caretakers, saviors, drillmaster, keepers
of wisdom, facilitator/guide-on-the-side,
technician, agent of social change, or
underpaid unionist.
 YouTube collection
 Up the Down Staircase, Dead Poet’s
Society, Dangerous Minds, Good Will
Hunting, Finding Forrester, The History
Boys, Freedom Writers, The Wire

29. Students
 Reality TV
 Ivy: Spoof on RTV: college
students

30. Representation of urban vs.
suburban vs. rural worlds
 Urban worlds as dangerous, crime-ridden, poor
http://www.newmediastudies.com/art/city-
med.htm
 Suburbia as bucolic, safe escape from urban
world or as shallow, conformist, uniform “cooker
cutter” world
 Rural worlds: news stories focus on crime
 few stories dealt with issues of agriculture,
despite the loss of jobs, and the decline of
family farming
 Gina Nelson: Homelessness

31. Connecting the Dots between
Systems
 Analyze how systems serve to each other
to protect the status quo
 Government, military, school, justice,
business, media/entertainment, health
care, transportation
 How media functions to
represent/perpetuate these systems

32. Mark Lombardi: Maps
Osama bin Laden support

33. Food industry
 Agri-business/corn lobby <-->campaign
donations <--> government farm
policies <--> Manufactured food <-->
advertising <--> High fat food <-->
obesity <--> health-care costs
 Documentary: Food, Inc.

34. Michael Pollan
 I think Obama gets the issues. He's a great
dot connector. He connects the dots
between the way we grow food and the
health care crisis and the climate change
crisis and the energy crisis. He understands
that and he's spoken about that eloquently.
The question is how much political capital
he is going to put into changing the system.

35. Obesity <--> Health care <-->
advertising
 CDC: 36% of black Americans, 29% of
Hispanics, and 24% of whites are obese.
 Medical costs of obesity could have risento
$147 billion per year by 2008.
 Children see 7600 food commercials a year;
35% and 45% of commercials are for food.
Almost all advertised food is unhealthy.
 “African Americans are consistently exposed
to food promotion and distribution patterns
with relatively greater potential adverse health
effects than are Whites.” American Journal of
Public Health

36. Connecting the dots: Health
care reform
 Insurance/pharmaceutical corporations
(50 million ad campaign)  lobbying
Congress   campaign donations
 bills without “public” options-
competition  cost of running for
reelection  high cost of TV
advertising  McCain/Feingold
campaign finance “reform” (no free TV
ads)  TV networks lobbying

37. Reducing Future Campaign
Costs: Web Campaigning
 Movement away from reliance primarily on
expensive TV ads
 Strategies for effective uses of online
campaigning
 Engagement of younger voters in campaigns
 Media literary: analyzing/producing online
political ads
 Frank Baker, Political Campaigns and Political
Advertising, Greenwood Press