Assignment
For the last two quarters of Humanities Core, you have engaged with texts and ideas discussed in lectures by composing your own multimodal reactions, applications, and creations on your personal academic website. And during the process of researching and writing your Research Paper, you will use your website to share Research Blog Posts documenting and reflecting on your journey, with its challenges and successes. Your website will thus serve as a digital portfolio of your critical and creative engagement in the year-long course, culminating in your own humanistic research.
To present your new knowledge and interpretations to your online audience, you will employ the multimodal rhetorical strategies you have developed and create a capstone Multimodal Research Presentation. On a new page of your website, you will take advantage of the organizational and multimedia capacities of the platform (and any other tools you choose to use) not only to communicate to others what you have researched but also to convey why your analysis is interesting and how it contributes to scholarly conversations on your topic. A site visitor’s experience of your presentation on your website (watching, listening, reading) should be about 5-10 minutes long. The presentation will be worth 15% of the writing grade.
Learning Goals
- Demonstrate awareness of purpose, audience, and context in choices of style, multimedia, and textual and visual organization for online presentation
- Produce accurate, rhetorically effective, multimodal communication using the appropriate genres, stance, and citational practices of scholarly digital media
- Demonstrate information literacy skills by locating, evaluating and integrating scholarly secondary sources (academic books or journal articles) and primary sources from digital archives or institutional websites
- Practice active revision of form and content and demonstrate the development of flexible and ethically responsible strategies for generating and editing online writing
- Develop digital literacy and transferable technical skills through the design of a personal academic website
- Reflect critically on the experience of research, writing, and multimodal communication
Writing Process
In your own experience as a student, presenter, or curious online learner, you have undoubtedly encountered more and less successful modes of media use for digital presentations. You have seen that what is effective in slides accompanying a presentation delivered in person, such as ina lecture, may not be as effective in an online presentation for interested viewers to experience on their own and in their own time.
Reflecting on the multimodal strategies you have found rhetorically effective in your own and other students’ website activities, first consider the purpose of your multimodal research presentation, then think about the options for online presentational modes you might choose for this purpose. Your multimodal research presentation should inform your website audience about your research topic, communicate your interpretive argument and how it contributes to scholarly conversations, and convince your audience that your research is interesting and thought-provoking.
Options for the multimodal presentation on a dedicated page of your website include a polished, scholarly webtext combining multimedia on one organized page; an original video with movie clips and text titles or narration; a slide presentation with voice narration; a screen-recorded presentation with webcam video and images or enlarged text; and other visual or audio creations. (For more ideas, see the list of tools below.)
- See examples of past students’ multimodal presentations: “Exploring the World of Miyazaki: The Ecology of Princess Mononoke (1997), Ponyo (2008), and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984),” “Bloodstained Bison,” “Flowers for Algernon and the Importance of Empathy in Science“
Though the carefully detailed analysis and interpretive conclusions you will present in the final draft of your Research Paper will not yet have been finalized, you can already evaluate which multimodal compositional strategies you think would best suit the medium of your primary source(s) and which multimodal compositional strategies would best suit your interpretive methods and analytic stakes.
Whichever mode of presentation you choose, the presentation page of your website should include:
- Your research project’s title
- An introduction to your primary source and any historical context, theoretical background, or definition of terms necessary for understanding its significance
- What you are arguing about the primary source (a preliminary version of your thesis)
- How you are contributing to scholarly conversations on or around the topic
- Why it is interesting, particularly for anyone interested in the theme of Animals, People, and Power
Finally, as you reflect on your research journey in your last Research Blog Post, you should take the opportunity to refine the home page of your Humanities Core website to frame your digital Humanities work as you wish to represent it.
Tools to consider
All tools listed are either free or included on your Mac, Windows, or mobile device.
Presentation apps
Google Slides (in Google Drive)
-easy collaboration, embedding of videos hosted on Google Drive or YouTube, options for transitions and animation. See information on presenting with Google Slides, including setting automated, timed slide advance.
Google Sites in UCI Google Apps: Allow you to create and selectively share a webpage with embedded elements, for example a set of Google Slides or other media hosted on Google Drive
Tip: To record a screencast video of slides plus your voice-over narration:
QuickTime Player for Mac, Xbox App in Windows 10, or OBS Studio for Windows
Microsoft PowerPoint
-many themes, easy editing, not-so-reliable embedding of videos, some options for transitions and animation. See information on presenting with PowerPoint, including recording a slide show with narration and timing.
Apple Keynote
-extensive design options, including transitions and animation; files can be exported as .pptx; also available as an iCloud app
Adobe Spark platform (free option): Make a webpage, video, or slideshow
Mapping and Timelines
Google MyMaps Allows you to plot locations on a map and add descriptions and images.
Timeline JS Allows you to create a chronological narrative of events on a timeline, with multimedia.
StoryMap JS Allows you to present descriptions of events, with multimedia, plotted on a map.
Video editing apps
Your preferred mobile app
Adobe Premiere from Adobe Creative Cloud (free for UCI students)
iMovie on Mac/iPad/iPhone
DaVinci Resolve for Windows
Image editing apps
Your preferred mobile app
Photoshop and Illustrator from Adobe Creative Cloud
Audio editing and mixing apps
Audacity: Free, open source software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The manual includes tutorials.
GarageBand for Mac and iOS
Your preferred iPhone or Android app
