Well, nothing. But the action in my last post reminded me of a guerilla art performance by Sarah Maple a couple of years ago. To protest against the 40th anniversary of Page 3 girls, feminist Maple and her friends got up early to slip 1000s of photos of her wearing fake breasts into The Sun, surprising people who bought it!
I think this was a really good idea as she took action on an issue she felt strongly about, rather than just moaning about it. She got her 'art ninja' friends involved and it looked like a lot of fun - she made a protest and caught people's attention without hurting anyone or getting in trouble.
Obviously my aims are a lot less political, and even more harmless; I just want to teach people something. Lazy people, who'd rather skip reading a book and learn its main ideas quickly. In short, I want to spread information that, like Maple's targeted Sun readers, don't necessarily want to know it.
Continuing on the path of springing this visual help on people unexpectedly, I wondered what this would equate to in the real world.
I thought about printing them off and tucking them into books in a library. The reader would pick it off the shelf, wondering what on earth it was about, and then find the images there to help them get started! I could put a link to the site I'm proposing to make so that, if they found the print-out helpful, the reader could access more guides.
Finding them would be a pleasant surprise and would look something like this:
I did the same for Book 2, on the same webpage as 1; on Sparknotes, books are grouped into pairs. E.g. Book 1-2 Summary, Book 3-4 Summary. Though my images aren't made for this site and I'm only using it as an example, I just thought I'd adopt this pairing of books as a good way to pace the guide.
I repeated the experiment I did with pasting my images into Sparknotes.com to see what they'd look like on an actual study guide site. Rather than a really detailed cartoon of each book with lots of boxes, I chose two main events from each book.
Rather than replacing all the text I have left the image ALONGSIDE the written summary, for people to have both options and to add variation to a previously text-dominated page. My images even include small bits of text, it would be too ambitious to say so much without them when names* and places are so important.
Here's the Book 1 summary in more detail:
*In Homer's time 'kleos' (or identity) was hugely important and was passed down through generations of men (like surnames now) - you earnt good kleos through being a good fighter etc. Odysseus makes a huge sacrifice in Book 9 when discards his name, telling Polyphemous he is called 'Nobody'.
Going back to the research I did at the start of the project looking at blogs, I looked on Tumblr for posted tagged 'The Odyssey' to see how a site like this deals with a work of literature. I thought doing this would help me better understand the kind of opposition I face trying to bring the book back into common knowledge. As I expected, the posts varied a lot, here were some that stood out:
Mainly the posts consisted of peoples favourite quotes from the Odyssey amidst miserable students holding the book up to a webcam with a look of disgust. Perhaps I could use Tumblr (or a similar blog site) to link my visual study guide to those who seem to be in need of it! What a good Samaritan I would be.
For example (to the girl below) I could post a comment saying something like 'You seem to be having difficulty with this book, I think I can help. As a Tumblr user you obviously respond well to images: try this visual guide!' (and then a link to it).
This would be a good use of technology (the Internet) to spread my cause to help people, particularly as the girl could potentially have thousands of followers on Tumblr (like one of the guys I interviewed in part 1 of the project) and some of them would use it too and tell their friends.
Or I could just send her the image of the male model reading The Odyssey...
I have been thinking a lot about the format of my images - what I should draw to make them most effective for learning. As well as the plot summary I made a list of characters and thought about using colours to represent different attributes (good/bad, people/gods, men/women etc) as colours help a lot with memory.
(Main) characters in the Odyssey, this would be really helpful as part of a guide to reading the book as there are A LOT of characters/places, they all have difficult Greek names, and some names are very similar to each other
When researching the Simpsons episode a few posts earlier, I saw this and I thought about making a poster of the characters in cartoon form, perhaps alphabetically. It helps when reading to be able to picture the people in the book.
I have found very few examples of The Odyssey in the media, hence choosing it as a challenging book to tackle, but here are a couple I found that portray it successfully(?)
D'oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Homer Simpson plays Odysseus in the episode 'Tales of The Public Domain' (2002)
Much more people have heard of Homer Simpson than his namesake Homer the poet!
This retelling makes more sense if you already know the story of The Odyssey, but the way the episode is written means the story is being told to people (the Simpson family) who don't know it so it's told in a way the audience will understand.
In this film by the Coen brothers, George Clooney is 'the damn pater familias' Ulysseys Everett McGill, a crafty convict trying to get home to his family. This clip references the sirens that tempt Odysseus with their song.
Sound familiar? Maybe only to those who know the Odyssey well! Though the film is claimed to be based on The Odyssey, you have to look closely for similarities and it's definitely enjoyable without knowing the original story.
However, the fact the story has been adapted into a successful Hollywood movie suggests it's an exciting tale which is still relevant today. The use of songs in the film ties in well to the Odyssey originally being sung to audiences, not read from a book.
If the study guide idea doesnt work out, perhaps I could use modern storylines that come from the Odyssey to show people how the story affects us today without us realising...
The most recent example I found features viral video character, Sassy Gay Friend; "are you familiar with the oral tradition"?
Again, this is more amusing if you're familiar with the story already. But this video fills you in at the beginning, and perhaps even provokes interest in the Odyssey by making it funny.
The images in the last post are tiny and don't really show what's going on, they just work as a reference for me so I can develop them.
However, a vague storyboard like this might be useful to test students on what they've picked up, after they learn it. For example:
What is going on here?
a) Odysseus is learning to surf in Hawaii but there's a storm and he has to go back to Kalypso's house to fix his surfboard.
b) An angel has come to tell the goddess Kalypso that Odysseus must leave so he gets on a ship and sails home, avoiding a storm sent by Poseidon by talking his way out of it.
c) Kalypso swears an oath to Hermes that Odysseus may leave the island where she has trapped him, so he departs but Poseidon is angry with him for blinding his son and sends a storm to wreck his raft.
d) Odysseus wants to leave Kalypso's island but Hermes comes to tell her she musn't let him leave. He escapes without her knowing and she sends a storm to destroy his boat.
Quizzes/ multiple choice questions are a useful learning tool in revision and study guides often use them. With this in mind for later, I will continue developing my images and ideas.
(C is the correct answer in case you were wondering)
Perhaps I was a bit too ambitious in how much I condensed the story, these images don't really read well at all. However, this is only a reference for me to develop further and making it made me realise a lot of things I need to consider, like how colour-coding characters would make it easier to understand, and using speech bubbles (rather than chunks of text) works better.
