MIVC503 Conclusion

Following my unsuccessful first coursework, I took a new direction towards something I was personally interested in and could explore in depth. My ideas began with the technology of literature: from the oral tradition to the printing press to today’s e-readers. Through investigation of such technology I was able to gain a better understanding of the pros and cons of books vs. the Internet.

I looked at the way literary works have found their way online through Twitter and Facebook. I took this a step further, translating book extracts into texts and email, comparing the effects. These ideas helped my attempt to overcome my bias towards real books, which found focus in the online study guide phenomena. This is something that interested me as a way the Internet can help rather than hinder literacy. Eager to become part of this, I immediately noticed what these sites lacked: images. Noting the success of visual study guides in book form (Horrible Histories) I wondered why sites such as Sparknotes had not utilized the potential of visual aids. I showed through experimentation that just a few images and colour could be effective in combating boredom and being memorable.

Sarah Maple (source)
more detailed post

Not content with simply supplementing my images into the websites, contemporary artist Sarah Maple inspired me to take more guerilla-style approach. I experimented with pop up windows, attacking the reader of the study site with the images they were lacking, to compliment and aid their learning. I found this led me to ask further questions about springing information on a larger group than just students; why not the whole world. With this in mind I aimed to target gossip and social networking sites and I found the outcome both humorous and thought-provoking. All day we stare at a screen with the potential to teach us so much, yet we waste it looking at rubbish. Would my proposal ever change this? To find out I could have made the website itself to see what response I received. However, I think my investigation has effectively identified a problem and offered a solution.

Links to final animations:

http://i39.tinypic.com/35ml27d.gif

http://i44.tinypic.com/egr03s.gif

http://i42.tinypic.com/bi3tb5.gif

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v217/autumn_daze/gracebook.gif

Afterthought: A distraction FROM distractions?

Obviously posting Pop Up images on an existing study site would find an audience of people already in the mindset of being willing to learn. 
But what about those people who go through life ignoring art and literature in favour of mind-numbing 'x-factor culture'? Could I ever get them to care about books like The Odyssey?

I know a lot of people who'd rather read Heat magazine....

What about people who are students and do need to read, but spend their lives procrastinating on Facebook, and Tumblr (see the girls in the post below) instead?

Bombarding these kind of sites with my guerilla-style educating techniques might have a surprising outcome in sparking people's interest. Or they'll ignore it as they would any Pop Up, despite my efforts to make facts visually interesting and accessible. This is something to explore in the future, obviously the chapter guides I have made would be lost on people not seeking knowledge of them, but dropping minor facts into people's day would be great, they might be able to drop them into a conversation to sound clever or use them in a quiz!

Rosy Fingers

.gif of the factual pop up example (click to see it full size)

Target audience...

These are some of the people I found on Tumblr that might benefit from some help with The Odyssey!

"gotta read dis shit"

"fuck my life"

"someone tell me why"

Looks like my guides could be a big success...

Further steps...

Though I have achieved the message I wanted to put across, I have lots of ideas about where this could go next. I think as an idea, it has a lot of potential.


To start with I could finish making summaries of every book in the Odyssey and make more Pop Ups with just one useful fact on, like the epithet one. But why stop there? There are thousands different books provided for on the sites I have looked at. I could give the organisation a catchy title and every Pop Up could link back to this: a manifesto about supporting visual learning and technology and links to the study guide for every book on the database.

It never ends...

Students are constantly on the internet so it would not take long for this to spread by friends sharing it. I would like it to be used by everyone, not just students, encouraging the world to become familiar with challenging literature they may not have touched before. And I don't mean watching the film version.


The proposed site could have downloadable .PDF files to aid studies and posters to print off, utilizing the power of images in learning.

Gif version

I have struggled with Dreamweaver and it does not look as though I will be able to make actual web pages with pop ups. This gives a better idea of how the image would pop up, surprising the reader.

FULL SCREEN

I'm happy with the way this looks, it's how I imagined it.

Sparknotes: Pop Up Attack

Helpful!

Sparknotes: Pop Up Attack

Pop up summary of Books 1 & 2

Shmoop: Pop Up Attack

This is how I want it to look! Now I need to see how the book summaries would look.

Pop Up Development

Here is what the image below looks like now I've photoshopped it to look like an Internet window. Before I attempt to make this as a real website, I want to make an image to show how it will look.

The word epithet would lead to a fact page in the same style when clicked.

Design for Pop Up: Dawn epithet

Here is an image I have designed and drawn, using all the components I could think of (bold simple imagery, bright colour, a short and memorable phrase) to make this stick in someone's mind.

My decision to keep to highlighter colouring was to keep the colours bright and to immediately lead the viewer to think of education/facts. The handwritten text and loose drawing are to mark this out as not your usual pop up. A regression to past media can be powerful in making people stop and think. 

Also, this image looks contemporary and playful; the attractive antidote to a boring old book. I'd rather look at this if I was tired and needed information fast.

Pop up plan

Here are some doodles from my sketchbook to show I have thought about the layout and content of potential 'guerilla educating' Pop Ups. I'm sticking to The Odyssey for all the reasons I have mentioned previously.

I aim to make them brightly coloured, entertaining and relevant to today's culture so people don't close them immediately.

Shmoop

After attacking poor Sparknotes.com quite a bit, I've moved on to the similar Shmoop.com which I found out about when searching Tumblr

"lol if online stuff like this didn't exist then i would be failing english"

After choosing this site as the target for my pop up experiment (it has absolutely NO images except a page of fairly inaccessible classical paintings) I began to play...

How to spring information on people? Pop it up!

In light of Sarah Maple's unexpected, uncontrollable sabotage, I was thinking of more technologically advanced way to spring information on people: Pop Ups.

I thought this form would be especially interesting to explore as they always contain useless or false information for advertising.


But more often than not they use images...

What do Page 3 girls have to do with The Odyssey!?

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!

more info on her website

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.

What to do with these guides: atom world!

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:

...and Book 2 in detail

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.


Close up of Book 2: 

Continuing my guides: Book 1...

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'.

Highlighting the issue

I drew some more worked up images, still trying to keep them very simple to get the message across. 

I decided to use highlighters to add colour, as students tend to use these pens in their research and revision.

Unfortunately the orange and yellow highlighters didn't scan well at all, I made some changes using photoshop:

BEFORE

AFTER!

Tumblr: mixed opinions...

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...

Characters?

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. 

The Odyssey in pop culture

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.

Quiz

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)

The Odyssey condensed to 1 A4 page

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.