HANS 320: The Documentary Across Media, Class 2

The Documentary Across Media

Introductions
Setting community norms
Contexts: Brief background about McLuhan, Coles, and Bolter & Grusin
Discussion: What are the key ideas from the readings for today?
Application: How can we apply these ideas to the three web sites assigned for today?
Synthesis: What are the characteristics of a successful digital documentary?
Optional Dreamweaver Lab.

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin
Scholars and practitioners of hypertext. Descendents of McLuhan; the subtitle of remediation is Understanding New Media.

How does McLuhan define media? What does he mean when he says that "the medium is the message?"

What are the key features of electric culture as opposed to mechanized culture? (Think Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?)

Mechanized	Electric
Fragmented & linear	Creatively configured & structured
Rational	Mythic, romantic
single point of view	Cubism: interplay of planes
Continuous and uniform	Simultaneous

What does McLuhan mean by the terms "hot" and "cold"? How might you apply these terms to new media?

Hot	Cold
Radio	telephone
Movie	TV
Photo	cartoon
Alphabet	Ideograms
High definition, closed off	Low definition, participatory

Key Quotations from McLuhan:

"But the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence along, but only in constant interplay with other media" (McLuhan, 26)
"Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes." (24)

What do Bolter and Grusin mean by the following terms:
- immediacy
- hypermediacy
- remediation
Is the "wire" a documentary media?
Bolter and Grusin argue, "In collage and photomontage as in hypermedia, to create is to rearrange existing forms. In photomontage the preexisting forms are photographs; in literary hypertext they are paragraphs of prose; and in hypermedia they may be prose, graphics, animations, videos, and sounds. In all cases, the artist is defining a space through the disposition and interplay of forms that have been detached from their original context and then recombined" (39). Does the documentary likewise create by "rearrang[ing] existing forms"--pieces of taped or filmed interviews, photographs selected from several rolls of film, etc?
What's so new about new media?

How does Coles define "documentary"?
What is the relationship between the documentary and similar fields?
What are some of the important tensions in documentary works (e.g. reality vs art, etc)?
Must documentaries always be "objective"?
What does it mean to "do documentary work"?
What is the purpose of the documentary?
What are the responsibilities of the documentarian toward his or her subjects? For example, does she have an obligation to aid subjects in need? To pay them? To take a stand--or not take a stand--on their plight? Who owns the documentary--the maker or the subjects?

How is this website organized? Does it matter which story you listen to first?
What do you think of the way that the site uses animation: for example, moving text, zooming in and out on photographs, etc?
What different forms of media are incoporated here (e.g.., photography)? How are they used? Why?
What message does this site convey? How?
Would you call this a documentary? Why or why not?

What is this site trying to achieve? What tools does it use to accomplish this mission? How successful is it?
How do the various parts of the website--stories, timeline, resources, dialogue, dynamic data--relate to one another?
How is the story of Cristel's crime told? What do you think of these techniques?
Would you call this a documentary? Why or why not?

Listening:

Sara Vowell, "Trail of Tears," This American Life, http://www.thislife.org/pages/archive98.html#107 [Listen to whole documentary]
Soundportraits, Witness to an Execution, http://soundportraits.org/on-air/witness_to_an_execution
Charles Hardy III & Alessandro Portelli, I Can Almost See the Lights of Home: A Field Trip to Harlan County. http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lights.html Read Hardy's and Portelli's accompanying essays; listen to enough so that you have a sense of its structure and purpose, probably at least up to Ch. 4, "Survival."
Community in History Project, The Heights Remembers: http://wwii.rice.edu Visit the sections on Evelyn Parker, Charles Inglis, and Billy Miller.

Reading

Ira Glass & Jessica Abel, Radio: An Illustrated Guide [on reserve; read pp. 1-17]
McLuhan, "Radio: The Tribal Drum" (CP; 297-305)
Jay Allison, "Interviewing Tips." From the Radio College Web site. http://www.radiocollege.org/rc/rj7.html [Recommended]
"Tips for Interviewers." From Willa K. Baum, Oral History for the Local Historical Society. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/ROHO/rohotips.html [Recommended]

Assignment:

Ira Glass says that every story on This American Life follows a structure: "there's an anecdote, that is, a sequence of actions where someone says "this happened then this happened then this happened--and then there's a moment of reflection about what the sequence means, and then on the next set of actions." Select one of the documentaries assigned for today and describe its structure. Do you see actions followed by reflection, or did the producer use some other structure? Prepare your thoughts in a Web page, and add it to the class Web site to the projects folder by Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. (Details to follow)