Anth 397 Multimodal Final Project (2023)
Creating Persons and Publics through Mediated Engagements

Online Exhibit of Previous MPP Students' Final Projects!

AV/Creative Consultants' Contact Info and AV/Zine resources

Schedule:

1) Weeks 1-4, browse online resources to consider possibilities for a multimodal project.

2) Week 3: Feb 9 in class workshop Introduction to media-making: ethics, planning, methods with Joe, Tony and Ann

3) Week 4, Mandatory office hours meetings with AV/Creative Consultants Tony, Joe, or Ann this week, in person or via Zoom: Beginning to conceptualize a final project; how to record/capture well; how to bring your ideas to image/sound/text.

  • 1-2 page final project rough proposal. Due Friday, Feb 17, 8 pm, upload to personal Moodle blog forum. (peer-reviewed)

4) Weeks 5-7: Go out and capture something addressing people's relationships to media/mediation, as digital file (drawing/painting, video, audio, photo); Attend office hours as needed with AV/Creative Consultants Tony Moreno (video/iMovie) and Joe Janiga (audio/audacity), or Ann (zines)

5) Week 7: March 9 in class Zoom workshop: Storyboarding and Editing hands-on/Q and A; You should have recorded/captured something to have in mind for editing.

6) Week 8: 5-7 page Final Project plan or Storyboard sketch with 3-page text, Due Monday, Mar 24, 8 pm, upload to personal Moodle forum. (peer reviewed)

7) Week 10 April 6 in class workshop: Student presentations, Audio-video effects, fine-tuning possibilities, hands-on/Q and A

8) Week 11 Mandatory office hours meetings with AV/Creative Consultants, Tony, Joe or Ann this week, in person or via Zoom: Finalizing your project plans; editing and fine-tuning.

9) Week 14: Final multimodal project, including 5-7 pages text. Due Tuesday, May 92, 8 pm, upload to Class Google Drive Projects Folder (in your own named folder). NOTE: digital file titles MUST be: Last Name, short Project Title, Semester Year [eg., Makley Montage Spring 2020]

Evaluation: I will evaluate the final projects based on the following criteria (listed in order of priority)

1) The extent to which you draw on readings from the course to craft a coherent vision for your project (is there a clear theme or driving problematic? and/or a credible argument about media and mediation? and/or a specific public or audience? and/or a compelling combination or integration of media forms?);
2) The creativity of your arguments, ideas, and means for integrating media forms (including 5-7 pages of text) and reaching an audience (what is the quality of the initial captured media and final production? Quality of editing and juxtaposition? Quality of techniques to keep audience attention?);
3) The accuracy of your claims (explicit, in-text, or implicit, via other modalities) about media theories and/or histories;
4) The specificity and coherence of your plan (is it feasible? is it focused?).

Format and Standards: The media forms and modes are open for you to play with (eg., text could be prose, poetry, caption-analyses of images, narrative or analytical essays, or some combination of those). However there are some general standards we want to maintain. Final projects should:

  • Combine text and at least one other medium (audio, video, photo/still images, graphic art).
    • Your final project should include at least 5 to 7 pages of text. Text can be integrated with your media, or accompany the media as a separate reflection and discussion of the topics/dilemmas/vision expressed in your media.  
    • All text should be free of spelling and grammatical mistakes.
  • Be submitted in a digital file, titled: Last Name, short Project Title, Semester Year [eg., Makley Montage Spring 2020]
  • If it is an analytic essay, it should be 12-point font, double-spaced, 1 inch margins.
  • Be accessible to an audience/public: readable, viewable, etc. Voice/modality should attempt to match the public addressed (eg., if an academic analysis, should not be blog-post casual/sarcastic).
  • Be responsible/accountable. All projects should be properly cited, such that other media-makers' work is credited, and you are not inadvertently engaging in plagiarism or claiming credit/status for others' work (eg., in-text citation, captions, acknowledgements, credits for pre-edited film clips/montages, subtitles: 'video courtesy of...' if have permission).
    • Standalone essays should use Chicago style, in-text citation (e.g., (Cooper 2001, 189). Citations should be complete, including web pages. See the AAA style guide online.
    • For audio and video projects, you will need to make it clear in some way what editing work is your own, versus what is the work of other creators (e.g., in pre-edited clips or montages you download and incorporate). 
    • If you choose to publish your work copyright will apply!
    • For audio/visual projects, credits should be in both the AV file and the accompanying text; they can be separated.
    • Provide credible evidence when making empirical claims.
  • Be ethical. Projects should not be gratutitiously spectacular, such that the premise or goal is just to garner attention, views or likes via shock or titillation. They should treat others' work, personas, and images with respect and dignity.

Topic: 

In this course, we bring interdisciplinary debates on the nature of new media and their implications for human experience into dialogue with theories and methods in linguistic and cultural anthropology on semiotic mediation and multimodality. This semester-long project gives you the chance to explore these issues by producing a short multimodal media analysis or reflection that will integrate 5-7 pages of text with at least one other medium of your choice (image, graphic art, video, audio/podcast, zine).

Drawing on readings from the course, and taking inspiration from the films or lecture, your project will investigate and illuminate or illustrate some aspect of people or publics' relationship to media/mediation in a particular context (including or exclusively your own media engagements if you so choose). Note that you should plan a project that is feasible in the time you have: keep audiovisual projects relatively short--editing can be very time consuming! (eg., no more than 10 minutes of audio, or 3-5 minutes of video). Consider these projects more like assays, or brief vignettes aimed at a particular audience(s).

All projects will be based on some form of empirical engagement (you will go out and capture/observe/record some thing or mediated interaction and then curate/edit/frame that recording or art), and this could be accompanied by some research (online, archival, face-to-face interviews with friends on their media use, a personal media journal).

Besides the general standards laid out above, there are no other stipulations on the format or the genre of either the writing or the media form. Final projects could be academic analyses taking a certain approach based on course readings and interviews, or they could be more artistic or poetic productions that combine prose and poetry with other media.

There are multiple steps to complete this project (see the schedule above and online). To get started, consider some of our most important questions for the semester:

  • What is "media" and "mediation"? How are we rethinking these phenomena in this course?
  • How does an anthropological approach to mediation help us understand the roles and implications of new media for human experience?
  • How do we understand the relationships between mediation and the creation and contestation of kinds of persons and publics (consider issues of language, race, gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, nationalism, the state etc.)?
  • How does an approach to mediation help us understand the relationship of persons and publics to material objects, technology, and infrastructure?
  • How are media and mediation entangled with colonial and capitalist histories and relations? Does the awareness or lack of awareness of these entanglements on the part of media users matter?
  • In what ways do processes of mediation and interactions with new media shape possibilities for power, agency, and resistance?
  • What are the specific aesthetic, semiotic, material, and experiential possibilities ("affordances") of different modalities of media and senses (e.g., hearing/sight/touch/smell, or text versus image versus video versus audio)?
  • What kind of public or audience do you have in mind (it doesn't have to be for academics)? How might you best address/reach them?

You need to get started early in the semester thinking about what you might do for this project. Consider particular media talents or skills you have (an interest in graphic art, cartooning, filmmaking, podcasts, a specific media platform), and browse the online resources linked to the syllabus. By the end of week four, you will produce a rough proposal for your project, with a five-item annotated list of references (look ahead in the syllabus: which course readings will most inspire you?).

There will be three in class workshops to help you think about methods and means for creating your project, as well as mandatory office hours with our AV/Creative consultants based on the kind of medium you want to work with. You can get started right away with the research part of your project, but after spring break, you will produce a more elaborate 5-7 page plan or mockup of your project. During the second half of the semester, you need to schedule time to conduct your research, and begin to work with your media. AV/Creative consultants will be available for consultation during that time. The final product needs to be a digital file of some form (analog media should be scanned in), which you will upload to our course Google Drive folder. Your files will then be archived and displayed on a course WordPress page, for sharing with the rest of the class.

Sample ideas for a final project:
Also see Online Exhibit of Previous MPP Students' Final Projects!

  • most basic would be a PDF or Word document with 5 to 7 pages of text and embedded images or links to audio or video.
  • a 3 to 5 minute video, recorded on your smart phone, and edited in iMovie, integrating text in subtitles or voiceover, etc.
  • a short podcast, recorded on your smart phone (the PARC lab in the PAB has digital microphones to check out), edited in Audacity and accompanied by a 5 to 7 page text contextualizing it and analyzing some aspect of it.
  • a graphic art piece, scanned in and inserted in a PowerPoint or Google Drive (always keep a copy on your computer!) slideshow that integrates image and text
  • a cartoon scanned in and inserted into a slideshow or other software, accompanied by a 5 to 7 page text.
  • A photo essay, with text in prose or poetry, created in Word or InDesign or animated in Powerpoint.
  • A paper or digital zine; with paper/glue then scanned in, or with free software make a flipbook zine combining media.
  • A song or rap/mash-up based on your captured/recorded audio or video, edited and or mixed/mastered/digitized in Audacity.