Wednesday, May 6, 2015

ENGL685 - Something, Something, Giant Hat



Hey everybody you wanna give me money for my web analysis research? Click here to see my proposal!

If I Could Do It All Over?

Honestly, my biggest regret for this semester is I waited too long to admit that my first idea was failing. It's hard to tell, when you feel at least a little like all your projects are failing when you're in Grad School! With things like inadequacy in discussion in class, you stick with it. If you keep saying words to the best of your ability, and you listen to the observations others make and attempt to be like then, you improve over the semester for all your struggling. With my project too, I thought the scholarly discomfort I experienced while having trouble coming up with good resources on syllabi, or reconciling the lack of international composition perfective I had was all just my own inexperience. I thought that, with time, I would finish the trial by fire stronger for having endured it.

Boy, was I wrong.

Still, a lesson is a lesson, and this methodology class has been one of the lessons best taught so far in my grad career. The pacing, the constant accountability, everything was a well crafted live-in research experience. That includes the suffering and the failure! I have gained a huge appreciation for work done "in process" and how even when you think you've finished, you haven't /really/ finished. Next time (although I hope for my sake, there is not a next time) I will let a dying project go peacefully into that goodnight. I don't know if I've come to terms enough to wish it well, but I will certainly at least let it go.

Thanks to beginning all over again at the last second, I actually managed to re-do one of my other big regrets: annotated bibliography entries. These are hard for me, as I often am unsure where to stop at "useful" details, and when a little is a little too much. This left me writing vague summaries a lot of the time, which /later/ left me having to re-read the articles all over again because my notes didn't have any useful information. In doing the mass posting of the ABs I was due on my new subject, I made a much better attempt at putting the right stuff in. There was only one entry I was less than perfectly satisfied with, and considering I posted 11, that is a much better ratio than before. I hope that I will continue to be diligent and keep the habit of synopsis-ing everything I read from now on, but that still feels like a definite "maybe". I'm not sure- ABs are very time consuming on the front end, even if they save you time later!

So far, this is my favorite class I've taken in grad school. It was the only one where I really felt like ti was okay to be overwhelmed, and that I felt like the professor was actively instructing me on what I was expected to do, rather than telling me what I was supposed to end up with and letting me figure those small middle bits out for myself. I guess that's how a process-based class is supposed to be, but either way, I'm very thankful. Thank you, Shelley. My only regret is that I won't get to spend more time with you until you ascend to heaven like that one hobo cat in the Broadway musical Cats. Ah well. Memory, right?

ENGL685 - We're All Alone Now, Gimmie Somthin' to Blog About


Today at midnight is the beginning of the end. All that will be left behind is the waiting.

Do I wish I had some things differently? Yeah...there are always things you wish you had done, I guess. I wish I'd somehow made more time to read, and to understand. I wish I'd been able to be the ideal student, or even the amazing students that some of my peers are.

Still, I do leave this semester behind knowing that almost all of the time, I did the best I could. I don't think anyone can be "on" 100% of the time, nor should they be expected to be.

In the end, all that you can really talk about is what happened. Even if it's not what you wanted, you can at least look at it, acknowledge it, and move on with the plan to do better.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

ENGL685 - I Fell Into A Burning Ring of Fire


If I can just make it two more days I'll get to rest and even have a birthday. I'm a lucky luck boy. That is me.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

ENGL685 - Sing Alleluia, Clap Your Hands

1. Bernard, M. (2003, March 3). Criteria for optimal web design (designing for usability). Retrieved April 29, 2015, from http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimal/international.htm

The biggest issue with Bernard is I cannot, for the life of me, find out who he is. I Googled him and I see lots of other websites recommending his design series, but he could have published these from a Starbucks in between bussing tables. We just don't know. He does fully site his information, and since so many other sources cite him, I feel like it's okay to take that hit. This particular page in the series addresses the use of regional language and customs, color meaning as it varies by country (including the US and Japan), and four of Hofstede's "dimensions". The cultural relevancies listed are things like how Coca-Cola, in the Chinese syllabic alphabet, is "bite the wax tadpole" and how the "shopping cart" in the US is called a "basket" in the UK. The only color-meaning similarity between the US and Japan is the color red. Both mean "danger" (though in the US it also means anger). The top two elements will be most useful, since Hofstede is addressed a little more thoroughly elsewhere, so that will likely be what I use the most from this short piece. His reference list will also be a point of interest as i click through more and see what else he has to see RE: US specific web design.

2. Mirocco, R. (2015, February 16). Big in Japan: Web Design in the Land of the Rising Sun. Retrieved April 29, 2015, from http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/big-in-japan-web-design-in-the-land-of-the-rising-sun--cms-23290

Mirocco is a lot more forthcoming about where he's getting his information, and that is a total blessing. He has lived in Japan 5 years and is a Communication major, and he interviewed his two designer friends for the perspectives offered in the article. The first reason he gives for Japan's sudden switch from minimalist to as cluttered as possible is their high level of uncertainty avoidance (which is another shot at Hofstede- the guy is e v e r y w h e r e). Thankfully, he soon moves past what I do know into what I don't. For instance the next thing he mentions is that the bright colors often found on J-Websites mimic the bright colors of the big city streets, and that these sites are often meant to take the place of a face-to face salesman. The section that follows talks about how a lot of businesses in Japan are still COD and that's absolutely worked for them, so there's something to the combination of the desire to replace a physical presence and then a high level of uncertainty avoidance. Mirocco also looks at international companies. Toyota's Japanese and US page are both uniquely zen and uncluttered, and while the slightly smaller big-brand company Uniqlo is still a little bunched up, it's a lot less chaotic than its Japan-only companions like HotPepperBeauty.

3. Cyr, D., & Trevor-Smith, H. (2004). Localization of Web design: An empirical comparison of German, Japanese, and United States Web site characteristics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1199-1208. Retrieved April 29, 2015, from EBSCO.

This piece is the first to define both "localization" and "internationalization" which is a nice change. According to Cyr and Trevor-Smith, localization "is the process of adapting a product or service to a particular language, culture, and desired local "look-and-feel." Total sample size of 90 websites.

(The keyword "e-commerce" is starting to become a more common occurrence now, as well. If this is a common limiter, should I also toe the line? What constitutes e-commerce? YouTube doesn't have a shop, per-se, but they do sell through their content creators and advertisements. Does that make them a site of e-commerce? What about companies that have their information on a website, but no place to purchase things except on site? To look at later.)

Other defined terms:

Satisfaction - "stickiness" (Holland & Baker, 2001), "the sum of all the Web site qualities that induce visitors to remain at the Web site rather than move to another site" (p. 37).

Perception - "the degree to which participants feel the site is appropriate for their home country based on three variables of media perception - social presence (i.e., transmission of information rich in socioeconomic content), communication effectiveness, and communication interface" (p. 1200).
.

Culturability - (Barber and Badre, 1998) is the merging of culture and usability and represents a relationship between design elements and culture (also see Badre 2000, p. 2 for alt. definition). Attention to culturability also includes how pictorial in-formation is presented and organized, preferences for text versus graphics, directionality for how the language is writ-ten (i.e., right to left), help features, and navigation tools,among others (Marcus & Gould, 2000).

List of mentioned scholars:

  • Holland & Baker (2001)
  • Barber and Badre (1998, 2001)
  • Marcus & Gould (2000)
  • Badre (2000)
  • Sun (2001)
  • Del Gado & Nielson (1996)
  • Cheskin (1999)
  • Fogg, Soohoo, and Danielson (2002)
  • Fogg & Tseng (1999)
  • Fernandes (1995)
  • Lee, Kim, and Moon (2000)
  • Picard (1998)
  • Dempsey & Sussman (1999)
  • Robbins & Stylianou (2002, 2003)
  • Yu and Roh (2002)
  • Huizingh (2000)
  • Hall and Hall (1990) ((yes, that's not a typo))
  • Beamer & Varner (2001)
  • Bernard (2002)
  • Simon (2001) ((contradiction of color theory from above article))
  • Boor and Russo (1993)
  • Hofstede (1980) ((no way in no way out))

Language Variables: Translation available, headlines, point form, paragraph, left to right, top to bottom.

Layout Variables: Banners on left, banners on right, banners on bottom, banners on top, banner in middle of page, static banner, use of frames, menus [sic] on the left, menu on right, menu on bottom, menu on top, search top left, search middle left, search bottom left.

Symbols Variables: Use of local or culturally specific symbols, Asian symbols, passive pictures (i.e., maps), Symbols for currency, Easily understood.

Content/Structure Variables: Help functions available, help online, help via e-mail, help via telephone, help in live chat, is there a user sign-in?, index features, site map features, commercial banner ad.

Page Layout by Percentage Variables: Commercial advertising, navigation, content, graphics.

Navigation: Navigation tool symbolic (nontext), dropdown menus, vertical menus, horizontal menus, return to home button, keyword search, search available in other languages.

Links: Internal links, external links, symbols used for links, text links, changes color.

Multimedia: use multimedia, streaming video, sound, animation.

Colors: Red, orange, ochre, sunflower, yellow, light green, green, teal, blue, dark purple, bluish purple, merlot, white, grey, black.

Badre and Badre and Barber's studies individually seem to be pretty close to what I was thinking of doing. They looked for cultural design elements ("cultural markers") that were common between different cultures. Another researcher named Sun did a study in 2001 focused on visual design elements that also seems really interesting. One conclusion of that study was that for consumers, usability > culturally sensitive design.

This one has so much that for the sake of space/time, I'm going to move ahead.

4. Hu, J., Shima, K., Oehlmann, R., Zhao, J., Takemura, Y., & Matsumoto, K. (2003). An empirical study of audience impressions of B2C web pages in Japan, China and the UK. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 176-189. Retrieved April 30, 2015, from ScienceDirect.

Defined terms:

B2C -  Business to Consumer

Electronic Commerce (!) - "the delivery of information, products and services, or payments via telephone lines, computer networks or other electronic means". Restricted for this study to mean "business that is processed by the World Wide Web" and includes "online shopping, online securities, and online banking".

Culture - A collective phenomenon, learned patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting from living within a defined social environment, usually typified by country.

B2C web page -  A web page used for business to consumer (transactions) in the world wide web.

Web page design - the visual style of a web page based on available design factors such as title, background color, etc.

Impression - "describes and emotion state or feeling of an audience, which is elicited by a B2C web page" on the user's first visit. Synonyms include "emotion" and "feeling".

Impression factor - terms to describe a web page include awkward, brief, boring, charming, cluttered, soulful, unpleasant, consistent, epochal, exciting, likable, opulent, progressive, reliable, simple, vibrant, and witty.

Usability - "the extent to which the product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use". Major attributes include learnablitiy, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.

Design factor - the visual elements a B2C web page is made of. Specified as title format, title position, menu size, clip art size, main color, background color, color brightness, and color harmonization.

Choice - "the available selections or options included in a design factor".

For all its operationalizing, this study doesn't conclude anything too ground breaking. It says that it was confirmed the visual design choices made by the web developer to effect the impression of their user. The end recommendation is basically that the web designer know their audience when localizing, which isn't particularly groundbreaking. Still, it's nice to have an idea how they broke up their study, and so far, they do the best job defining the terms they use and operate under.

5. Cho, C., & Cheon, H. (2005). CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS OF INTERACTIVITY ON CORPORATE WEB SITES: The United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea. Journal of Advertising, 99-115.

This study is one of the first to focus, more generally, on corporate websites rather than just e-commerce. A great deal of the background discusses web design as focused on effective marketing, so letting the scope of the study widen a bit allowed the researchers to assess a better sized data sample (and one a little more relevant to what I'm trying to do in my own project). It's also the first to include a table with figures for online users, ad revenue by platform, and total population. While these numbers have no doubt changed in the last ten years, having them definitely helps situate the scale of the claims their research makes. Actually, they hit a full-on home run with their tables- the next list not only the definitions for their interactivity terms, but also the studies and scholars who coined them, along with the year (p. 103). This study is also /very/ heavy on numbers and data. I still need to decide to what purpose my study will be, but when I arrive there, I'm sure having this "hard data" to back up what will most likely be "soft analysis" on my part will be great.

6. Okazaki, S., & Alonso, J. (2003). Right messages for the right site: On‐line creative strategies by Japanese multinational corporations. Journal of Marketing Communications, 221-239. Retrieved May 1, 2015.

This is the first study I've evaluated with a specifically "Japan vs" lens. Thusfar, it's been more popular to center none of the evaluative cultures, but to use a framework and series of criteria to evaluate all websites on their own terms and then compare and contrast the finding s and what these may mean in a cultural context. What this study does instead is look specifically into how multinational corporations based in Japan change (or don't change) elements of their web design on their content created for the US and Spain. They assert that the debate between whether companies should standardize or localize still goes on. Standardizing and changing nothing but the language for web content is the most cost effective method, but studies have shown that localizing beings more consumer traffic.

Their website-limiting criteria:

(1)    A parent company engages in foreign production through its affiliates located in more than five countries.
(2)    A parent company exercises direct control over the policies of its affiliates.
(3)    A parent company implements business strategies in production, marketing, finance and staffing that transcend national boundaries.
(4)    A parent company possesses home pages in Japan, Spain and the USA
With such specific criteria, only 50 companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange could be used for the study. A lesson in setting good terms!


To make the comparisons fair, the companies were then grouped by the product sold category, which were: household electronic appliances, electronics and equipment, cameras and videos, industrial product, automobile and accessories, musical instruments, home entertainment supplies, clocks and watches, misc.

There were evaluated for:

(1)    Soft sell approaches: celebrity endorsement, curiosity arousal, emotional/psychological appeals, entertainment and symbolic/visual metaphors.
(2)    Hard sell approaches: brand repetition/familiarization, comparison, habit starting by trials/simulations, rational reasoning and special incentives.
This study is MORE NUMBERS. Unlike the last study, though, they do a pretty good job explaining how the math works and what everything is, so I could follow along much better. They conclude that Japanese companies localize for their markets, but also that their difference in approach is still limited in success. They middle when it comes to soft/hard sell techniques (although their numbers on US sites were notably higher). This suggests that even in the 2000s, localizing was still a huge, unknown area.


7. Singh, N., & Matsuo, H. (2002). Measuring cultural adaptation on the Web: A content analytic study of U.S. and Japanese Web sites. Journal of Business Research, 864-872.

Website Internationalization as building a template for a company that can be easily augmented depending on the local audience (localization) is actually a pretty neat concept,l and the first time I've cone across a study asserting that this can even be accomplished. They assert that cultural values are the best barometer to gauging how web content should change when grossing community and country lines. A random sample of 50 companies from the Forbes 500 list of domestic and international companies was the basis for choosing which websites to analyze. Their framework uses Hofstede's cultural dimensions, and then places sub-categories under the dimensions to categorize the data collected. While their conclusions are mind-blowing (they conclude the East and West do have different cultural values, shocker) their framework, and specifically their sub-categorization is a hugely useful tool for deciding along which lines I'd like to break up my own categories.

8. Mikitani, H. (2013, November 1). Rakuten’s CEO on Humanizing E-Commerce. Harvard Business Review, 47-50.

While not a robustly operationalized study, this interview with the founder and CEO of the 3rd largest online retailer word wide offers a a personal confirmation of some of the cultural practices described in the previously evaluated pieces. Mikitani continuously asserts that the personal aspect of brand building is what's important to customers. Although he doesn't ever say that this only goes for the Japanese market, a lot of his piece focuses on the growth of the Japan based business, and so hints that that is the market in question. One of the most amusing stories is of the first vendor to sell food on Rakuten. The man wanted to sell eggs, shipped overnight, and laid by chickens fed an organic diet (which produced, in his opinion, superior eggs). Mikitani gave the vendor a chance, and found that the vendor's constant posting of "personable" updates (pictures of the chickens, the secret behind his quality assurance testing) made consumers not only give his eggs a chance, but continue paying the premium for his product long after the novelty factor would have worn off. I believe having this native opinion will be a nice supporter of those common industry claims illustrated above.


9. Yang, H. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND WEBSITE LOCALIZATION FOR JAPAN. (2003). MultiLingual Computing & Technology, 16(8), 35-38.

This is the first to make a case for Search Engine Optimization, defined as "the process of fine-tuning the content, structure, coding, design and other elements of a website so that it can be ranked in the top positions in search engine results for certain query keywords". What a mouthful! The first thing they address is the difference between human-based search directories (Yahoo) and crawler-based search directories (Google). One has a human element and depends on editors assigning keywords to websites that allow them to show up on a search engine's results. The other auto-generates these keywords based on an algorithm and the page's contents.

What is best about this article is it touches on the language difference that makes localization in Asian countries so difficult. The example they give is an attempt to sell a product that in its English presentation is called "natural soap". In Japanese, the term "natural" can be represented by tenen, nachararu, shizen, or mutenka. Then there's the word soap, which can either be printed in Japanese as sekken or in its Romaji counterpart as so-pu. To compound this issue, "sekken" can be represented by all 3 Japanese alphabets in at least 5 ways, each being a hybrid between systems to write the same word. To combat this, the article recommends taking HTML tags very seriously, and making sure all bases are covered to increase the likelihood that one's page will get picked up by the search engine.

The article goes on for a while, but its value really lies in categorization. Generating traffic is bound to be important to any Internet business, so I'm sure the techniques described here are in practice now and effect localized web design.

10.  Kemper, S. (2009, June 1). Localizing websites and software for Japan. Retrieved May 2, 2015, from http://www.multilingual.com/articleDetail.php?id=1438

The first thing Kemper does is advise businesses to localize from the gate, and I think that's a great assertion to make. What's even more helpful though is that he mentions that YouTube did start out fully globalized. You can type Japanese into the search engine, tags, and titles of videos and it all indexes and displays properly. He mentions a book from Ken Lunde titled CJKV Information Processing that was supposed to put out an updated edition in 2008, which is noted here for me to look up later. There's a lot of time talking about how the advent of Unicode has made going international simple, but what really stands out is the care paid to Japanese text differences. It says that Japanese characters are usually 30% taller than English characters, and that a Japanese sentence can be much longer than its  US counterpart once translated. Additionally, it confirms that the limited JP font choices usually do not include bold and italic options, and that when they do, it is best to steer clear of these for readability's sake. I had seen this asserted some in the scholarly research on syllabi I did, but this is a nice reassuring.

11. Suri, V., & Sawhney, H. (2008). The internet and its wireless extensions in Japan: The portentous interface between chaos and order. Info, 10-21.

As of 5/2/15, I'm not yet sure how to address mobile access in the view of web design in either the US or Japan. The platform greatly changes the layout and contents of the mobile environment- does that mean I should attempt to fold them into my framework and make a system to analyze both at once? Should I limit myself to desktop sites only and add a footnote that the mileage may vary with mobile content? Either way, assessing this article still feels like required reading since it covers the whole history of the mobile Internet market in Japan. There are some differences between Japan's "pocket wifi" and the current 3G system in America. For example, DoCoMo, the largest mobile provider in Japan, curates its net content by having "official" and "unofficial" web partners. This is a direct result of the phone manufacturer and the service provider being the same institution. Those who have gone through DoCoMo's approval process are given direct billing through the company, sharing int he proceeds, but automatically receiving better promotion and optimization than the "unofficial" sites. Still, most of that "Curating" is a result of the 2G Japan business model and is fading from relevance as technology allows content to me more universally accessible.





Engl685 - Pain and Panic, Reporting for Duty!


Grad panic is so unique from Undergrad panic! They say that at a certain point, you can't feel fear anymore because the fear level is too great for your senses to handle. I think this is like that. Aside from a little shake in the fingers, there's really not a whole lot going on, despite the fact that I am grossly unprepared to hand things in beginning on Monday.

Today, I put a stake in the annotated bibs I am behind and begin to move forward. Godspeed, future me.

Friday, May 1, 2015

ENGL685 - It'll All Be Over Soon




















Some days I feel like Mr. Perlman speaks for all of us. What have birds ever done for me?

I think I'm in the delusional part of the semester. I keep getting thoughts like 'If I could just NOT sleep or leave the house this weekend, I could be done with my final papers by Monday!'

I mean I guess I could.

That's feasible, right?

I still feel like an Undergrad that signed up for the wrong classes and it's making it really hard to start anything concrete, because it all feels wrong. This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.


Thursday, April 30, 2015

ENGL685- -Where Is Your Little Son Lost, John?


#spring2015

Seriously, though. One more week and then it's over, briefly. Thanks Jesus and Tom Cruise.

Monday, April 20, 2015

ENGL706 - Blogging Queen (as long as you want complaints)



Young and sweeeeeeeeet onnnnnnnnly tweeeeeenty-threeeeeeeeeeeeee~


Bringing my learning into what I do is probably one of the most challenging parts of post-grad I’ve been expected to perform. There’s usually not a 1 to 1 correlation- like ‘oh, I learned about social networking, so now I can tutor using social networking’ or something like that. Usually, at best, classes often introduce me to an array of tools (like Popplet!) that I didn’t know existed and those tools help me get ideas across, or are excellent for me to share with my students who need them.




(that tiny blip is supposedly a PHD in contrast to global knowledge. So tiny. Wow!)

As a tutor and sometimes technical writer, I assume the majority of the information I produce or share day to day is transmitted visually or auditory. Visually through the learning supplements and flyers I make and auditory because tutoring is mostly me giving verbal instructions and the student acting them out. Although we put out surveys, most of the tutoring feedback comes in-session from the satisfied (or agitated) student. Likewise, my flyers don’t affect event attendance nearly as much as the method of distribution for them, so it can be difficult to tell if I’m using the best methods.
I stopped centering things on my flyers, though, and now I use serif fonts pretty much exclusively, so that’s a definite start. When working on a tight deadline, those to ideas are the first that come to mind!

Invention is likewise a bad time for me. Probably because when you start an MA, you realize there’s just…such a large gap between you and everyone else. You and PHD, you and Professors, you and technical students- it’s a self-confidence nightmare!


That’s why invention has become kind of…not good for me. You can do a project on anything in the world you want (usually, if you can sell it) and starting out asking “well, what do I like?” usually ends in things like My Little Pony, social justice, and gender studies. All of these are great, valid areas that could be looked into, but when it comes to getting a job or paycheck, the gap widens between there. This leads to disasters where you make a sensible choice, only to figure out you don’t like something nearly as much as you thought you would, or that the scale of it makes successfully finishing it less possible and probable all at once.

Not to mention that whole “it’s all been done” thing. Yadda yadda.

Visual rhetoric (so far) hasn’t really helped me cope with any of these feelings yet. What it has (sort of) done is make the pool of study to pull from a little wider. Before, I would have never thought you /could/ study something like album covers academically. Delivery methods are a work in progress too- I still have some trouble working my mind around the idea of a website as a final, even though it sounds super neato.


Not that I necessarily /didn’t/ know it before, but I do feel like this class has happened home how multimodal approaches really are best. I know I learn best when a course tries several different approaches. Of course, you always end up hating some, and loving others, but getting out of your comfort zone is always embarrassingly educational. I may not have loved Popplet, but I did love learning about using it, and can definitely see how that could be useful one day in the future.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

ENGL685 - From The Ashes...














Come on, Spring. This'll be an AB and a "bonus" post. YOU GET THE BONUS FIRST AREN'T YOU SO LUCKY.

So I guess as a kind of "upd8", I'm starting over. Again. 3rd time's the charm.

More and more, I'm seeing how hard it can be to not be discouraged when doing postgrad education. It feels like there's always too much to do, and even when you do your best, it feels a little impossible to do it all. It's been nearly 2 full semesters now and I still don't feel settled in or adjusted. There's also been a lot of failure, from the 'I failed to read the schedule and what we had a reflection due right now??' to the 'this is the second time I've tried to pick a thesis topic and 6 months later it is burning and so am I'.

It reminds me of when my Mom used to tell me why she never wanted to be a research chemist. She'd say it was so unforgiving- for your whole career, all you do is go in and every day do experiments that fail. You set them up and do equations for weeks, and then run the trial, and the trial fails. All you can do is hope that the next time, it doesn't, but you never really know. All you can do is your best. I guess the MA so far kind of feels like that- you do your best and you get good grades, but in the end, it all feels a lot like failure. Failure to transfer                                                                                                             that sensory overload into long term                                                                                                         memory storage, failure to connect                                                                                                           what you're learning with exactly                                                                                                             where you want to be, etc.

Things are starting to feel simultaneously overwhelming and without much purpose, which is a bad combo for me, since it shoots my motivation right in the foot. I'm like the learned helplessness dog in the cardboard electric shock box- I just lay down and nap because I'm too tired to focus, and because hey, whatever's coming is inevitable right?












Ah well. Nothing to do but keep working.

Gilbert, D. (2014, February 14). Why Japanese Web Design Is So... Different - Design Made in Japan. Retrieved April 19, 2015.

This article's a shorty, but a good-y. It has a lot of issues in it that point me in some good investigative directions for future research. One of the things it pointed out that I didn't know going in was that Japan had a large smart (flip) phone culture going on before the US did, and the cramped, overcrowded pages of popular sites like Rakuten were actually designed that way on purpose. Small text meant that the maximum amount of content was packed onto that tiny mobile screen as soon as the page loaded. Maximum advertising quick is definitely a business strength.

It also confirms what a lot of Japanese culture pieces say- that Japan's red tape fetish knows no bounds. Once there is a set method for doing things, be it how a lolita is supposed to dress, how a salaryman is supposed to conduct himself, or how you design a website, no one really cares to deviate from that standard. Of course there are always exceptions, but whatever the "norm" is, that's what folks like to stick to, even if a better way comes along.

Additionally, this piece demystified a trend I had noticed visually, but couldn't put my finger on- a heavy graphics presence. This article points out that character languages like Japanese and Chinese that have thousands of characters must have each character designed individually in any new font creation. This is expensive and time consuming, so there aren't as many choices out there to make text stand apart. Additionally, bold and italics are uncommon in Japanese, so making text stand out with an image is much easier than differentiating with format in English.

Inspecting the elements turns up some pretty neat info, too. I never thought about it, but HTML source code was invented in English, meaning that to program using it, you have to know programming language (which is doubly non-native for any non-native English speaker!) The code I can get to on the wildly popular Rakuten.co.jp (this Japan's Amazon) is mostly in English, with the exception of a few lines with short bits of Japanese like "<!-- /おすすめ特集 -->" which after a quick run through on Jisho, I /think/ means recommendation report. No idea how it fits in, but it's definitely something I never considered before! I couldn't imagine having to learn Japanese coding language if I wanted to put up a website, so I think such a thing is probably a pretty difficult barrier and definitely affects how effective some designers can be.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

ENGL685 - UPD8

I am 10 behind. I counted. Please kill me.

So collecting and gathering data seems to be the hardest thing pretty much ever. Aside from submitting a proper IRB, maybe. There are tons of hidden pitfalls, like consent, and availability (made more difficult by a language barrier) and in general everything is pretty much awful right now. We just did project presentations in Dr. Romberger's class and it basically cut my ideas up pretty bad. Shanked 'em right in the kidneys.

Because I'd had such a hard time finding syllabi in English but written for Japanese students by Japanese professors, I decided to just limit my thesis: I'd decided to only look at the rhetorical differences between ODU and Kitakyushu University syllabi. I thought this would solve my problems and I could finally, /finally/ begin making some kind of forward motion. Baby Pilot is getting a rash on his bom-bom sitting on the hot tarmac.
















Well NOPE. That presentation ended in the phrase "we need to see if the data you've gathered is worthy of the questions you're asking of it".

Oh ok. I'll just be here then. Contemplating all the decisions leading up to this point in my life and how alcohol is relatively cheap and readily available. That's cool.

It's not that these things are natural, or valid...of course they are. If they weren't, it wouldn't be so crushing every time I feel like I have to start over. Or change lenses. Or find new questions. Again. If it were arbitrary things that I had to change just to make the grade (while knowing they were malarkey) then it'd be fine.

It's just the most frustrating process ever because it feels like I'm spinning my wheels. Every time I want to move forward, I don't think I know how. When I think I know how, I misstep and have to go back where I was.

It's like red light green light, but instead of game over when you get caught, you just have to go back to where you were standing one full turn ago.

Also, it's like red light green light if you were /really/ shitty at red light green light.

I will add the bibs later. All this ranting has made me feel sad. :(


Monday, March 23, 2015

ENGL706 - Belated Tidings of Annotation

I'm so sorry- forgive me Oprah, Jesus, and also Tom Cruise

George, D. (2002). Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 4(1), 11-39. Retrieved from JSTOR.

In this piece, George refers to the current culture as “aggressively visual” which is a term I adore. I want to use this as part of my basis when asserting that syllabi should have a visual design steeped in good rhetoric. Students may not be able to access the document in the multi-faceted layers that a practiced rhetorician can, but having been raised on images, they will come “pre-programmed” with the cultural brainwashing of good and bad visual design. The things that are well designed stuck, and so a good syllabus should join those ranks no matter its purpose or country of origin.

This idea of visual rhetoric being prevalent in culture also applies to online syllabi and calendars, which I would like to analyze on the ODU end of my project. Without the necessary visual literacy, how is a student to know a hyperlink on sight, or what the difference is between a menu bar and a context menu? This will be document specific, but those “moving parts” in e-syllabi are part of the visual culture that upcoming students are raised in.

On page 26, she makes the argument that web pages must be “navigable” and that this ties into graphic design heavily. Although an online syllabus need not necessarily be a web page, I would argue that it, too, must be navigable. Syllabi usually have several pages, and a student who struggles to find information in an ill-formatted document sans bolding, highlighting, or proper paragraphs and spacing, will not use the document for its intended purpose. While a little different than a web page’s navigation bar, I think the coherent thread of thought for “getting around” on them is similar.

Likewise, George’s ideas about what does and does not constitute a visual argument are lax without being nonspefic. She says “All sorts of visuals make assertions and develop those assertions with visual information” which is absolutely true of syllabi. Even in the JP syllabus, there is a visual argument made by the table the information is presented in (albeit a less hearty argument than some of the ODU syllabi I have):


Nanotech.png

The Japanese syllabus mostly replies on color usage and layout- two tools out of a full box to choose from. I look forward to seeing if the use of less stylizing comes with shifts in purpose, or if this is a cultural difference (since Japan has ways of emphasizing characters that the US does not). This in itself is a visual argument that only highlights the section headers. Down below this screen grab is a numbered list of sections that will be covered, which is also a part of the visual argument. Even then, since the list is not indenter, nor any part of it set apart from the others, it reads as a block of undistinguished text and implies no one section is any more important than the others.

All in all, although this text focuses on the composition classroom, and the history of visual argument’s growing importance in teaching, there are small pearls of wisdom RE: the importance of the visual argument, and of coherency that are extremely important.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

ENGL706 - Connect ALL The Things!

So Kress talks about different genres in the same "text" that take on different shares of the communicative burden, which is actually an interesting concept. I'd say any student who has ever written anything remotely hypertextual, or who has included an infographic/chart to represent something they've written about has experienced the singular pleasure of necessary appendixes. These vial elements often help make a point simply by existing as factual proof to support an argument that at least, in part, is visual. Kostelnick talks about Tufte's beliefs in his "The Visual Rhetoric of Data Displays: The Conundrum of Clarity" especially the "lie factor". This reminded me of the students, and how each of them diagrammed the onion slide in their lab reports in Kress' readings. After all, neither of the students aimed to be misleading in what they drew. Rather, one gave a more literal interpretation (still informed by the teacher's verbal instruction) and the other interpreted what she saw into a larger diagram that implied representation by being incomplete at the edges. If neither is intended to mislead (and most likely, objectively speaking, neither is fully "incorrect") then how can they be classified? Which is "more" or "less" clear?

Thinking more about these diagrams,  Welling's work on"Ecoporn"also comes to mind. Could the consumer produced diagram of the human eye count as a subgenre of Ecoporn? It provides its own brand of fantasy about the human body. The colors are saturated higher, the lines and layouts cleaner than a human body- often, when dissecting, what a chart looks like and what you find inside a once-living creature seem like apples and oranges. In this way, it is designed for the same kind of "quick, easy visual consumption" as pictures of sunsets and rainforests that casually leave the truth of the place out of frame are. Even if ecoporn isn't the correct term (although I feel like an argument can be made for human bodies and organisms to be self-contained ecosystems on a microscopic level) then I do believe that both of these concepts have similar themes when it comes to what can make them and their design problematic.

Ideas (in the form of questions)


  1. Can commercially marketed scientific diagrams be considered as a type of ecoporn, given that they are both constructed for the same type of consumption? I think this is a fascinating idea, since it contains the argument that purpose = grounds for classification. This might all come down to semantics in the end.
  2. Is there a way to negate textual power entirely and still have a functional document? Textual hierarchy dictates what is more and less important (like numbered lists, bullets, bolding, etc.) but is there a way to avoid this prioritizing of somethings over others without sacrificing clarity? (yo creo que no- I think in lists and outlines and see a world without them as anarchy. It'll be interesting to see what the classmates think).
  3. Has the advent of digital media brought on a new wave of text/image meaning sharing? Is it more pervasive now than it was 10 years ago? 20 years ago? (that's only the 1990s *shudder*). Images can now be created and shared much more quickly than before, so does something like a meme fall under this same umbrella of multimodal thinking? (MEME STUDIES. Bring it on.)

Questions (also in the form of questions)

  • Does delegating that all things have multiple layers of analysis in an effort to diminish the need to label mixed genre pieces make accessing multimodal messages more difficult for visual rhetoric scholars? A lot of VR is based on contextual and cultural understanding, so adding a two-tier layer system seems to add a lot of extra work into the equation.
  • When trying to get across a complicated message or concept, does splitting the meaning between a strictly visual and strictly textual delivery method make for good VR? That is to ask, does it usually get the point across better than strictly one method or the other? This may be a type of study that has been measure in a scientific way, but I'd even be interested in opinions here. Does the visual/textual aid combo help you, personally?
  • If the type of information is the same, but the delivery method is different (process list versus narrative account), is either one more or less accurate? I guess this depends on the instructions given, and the purpose. Is it also contextual? Like whether it's on a lab report or if you're explaining a lab experiment to a friend so they can do it at home later?

Thursday, February 26, 2015

ENGL706 - Heuristic In The Mud

It's really hard to make the 706 titles fun. Also I totally forgot this prompt was due. Ack!


Heuristic

Iconic Language

This is an image of a tree painted on the wall leading up to a hidden nook with acrylics. The ladder leading up to the loft is made of wood, as is the toy box at the base. I see an homage to childhood image here- to the tree house and to warm spring days. There's snow in the outside window's views, so perhaps they live somewhere that gets less than its fair share of warm days. I also see an attempt at making an indoor space seem more like a natural outdoor space.

Cultural Language

I found this image on Tumblr, in a post about "great" home design ideas. Considering it was a part of that post at all, it's assumed to be "great". Additionally, this post, at present, has 7, 469 notes, which means it has either been liked or re-posted by that many blogs. That's fairly popular! The audience, in this context, is usually a range of ages crowded in the teens, to mid-twenties age, and heavier in girls than boys. These are people that either own a space of their own, or are of an age where they're old enough to imagine how they'd like to customize their space.

Theoretical Language

In this context, the tree is a symbol representing a child's tree house and bringing with it all the imaginary potential that comes with a creative change in environment. It is part of an upper-middle class home in a snowy area, showing the affluence to "afford" creative inside spaces. The wood of the ladder and toy box help to cement the attempted tie-in with nature that is not immediately present outside, as well as to imply that this set up is intended for a slightly older child (who can safely ascend and descend the ladder, but still needs a toy box). The surrounding yellows further set the scene as a bright, sunny day and mood brightener.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

ENGL685 #9 - I Really Hate Methods Research

It is just plain ol' not interesting. Not even a little. Also it starts to all look the same after a while.

Creswell, J. W. (2013). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. SAGE.



George, D. (2002). From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 54(1), 11–39. doi:10.2307/1512100

Thursday, February 19, 2015

ENGL706 - It's Better If It's Documented Because Reasons

Did I somehow miss the first AB? I could have sworn I posted one, but now I don't see it. I'm going to do two here, just in case. Sorry!

Hocks, M. E. (2003). Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments. College Composition and Communication, 54(4), 629–656. doi:10.2307/3594188

Hocks' research question is, what visual rhetorical devices are in play behind digital writing that mixes passive and active participation in consumption and creation, and how do these function in different contexts? She defines three terms to conceptualize the visual rhetoric discussed in her evidence: Audience Stance, Transparency, and Hybridity. Audience Stance is how a document creates a feeling of camaraderie with the reader and encourages them to interact. Transparency is how a document sticks to preconceived notions of print layout, web layout, etc. that the user is already familiar with. Hybridity is how the visual and verbal are mixed. She then uses these terms to assess an essay posted on the Kairos journal website, a paper for an ethnographic study put online, and a William Shakespeare website created by students who aimed to make a resource helping other students. She concludes that, through making web content and having it assessed by users, students learn best how visual rhetoric functions (as well as what works and what doesn't). This is a point for the 'learn by doing' school of thought. For my own research, Hocks' three terms are definitely now in my database, and will definitely help me assess the usability in the layout of the syllabi I've collected. I think this piece could help the class in a similar way- it's a vocabulary expander. A lot of these concepts can be sort of "felt" just by looking at a document, so having the correct terminology when it comes to actually discussing it becomes very handy very quickly.

Sullivan, P. (2001). Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the World Wide Web. Computers and Composition, 18(2), 103–21.

The question this piece attempts to tackle is, 'what appeal does "safe" visual design have to students and teachers?' A lot of the sections' beginnings chronicle Sullivan's personal experience, both as a professor, and as a colleague to those who write professionally for a living. She'll give a small story, follow it by explaining how a trend towards "safety" played a role in the design happening in the story, and after that, explain what rhetorically drives the trend while generously padding with the names of the researchers whose data confirms her observations and the data they published their work. Sullivan concludes that there is no accurate yardstick for what is "safe" or "good" design. Every situation is contextual and dependent on taste on the web, and quite often, most design principles that aren't explicitly based in rhetoric don't concern themselves with rhetoric. She advises that design and rhetoric come together more often, and believes that fruitful theories for how to write "Safely" on the well will emerge from there. A lot of my sources are digitally rendered, and so I was hoping this would be a little more relevant, but unless I pull multimedia syllabi (not unlike Shelley Roderigo's Google Doc "Schedule") into my thesis, I'm not sure I can use too much from this one. That said, I certainly hope someone from the class can used the contents of this article for their project!

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

ENGL685 #8 - Here's How It REALLY Happened

Methods methods methods methods.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary

  • Jabareen, Y. R. (2009). Building a Conceptual Framework: Philosophy, Definitions, and Procedure. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(4), 49–62.
    • I went about this methods-finding journey by thinking about what I was already trying to do any working backwards. It seems like constructing a conceptual/theoretical framework seems to fit best with how I'm trying to apply rhetoric to a syllabus, so this was a good source to start out with. Jabreen begins with defining a conceptual framework and then goes on to give a standard methodology in 8 phases. It'll be between this or a theoretical framework for how I go about creating the ideas that I'll apply to my syllabi. Even if I end up using the other method, some of the 8 phases my be excellent supplementary recommendations to help me understand the framework building process in general.



  • Labaree, R. (n.d.). LibGuides. Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper. Theoretical Framework. Retrieved February 19, 2015, from http://libguides.usc.edu/content.php?pid=83009&sid=618409
    • I actually like this Library Guide from the University of Southern Carolina a lot! The layout is fairly clear, and broken up a little better than Jabreen's work, making it less of an evil wall of text and more of a "chunked" step by step guide for crafting a theoretical framework. Where Jabreen's source assumes the work of why you want to build your theory is already done, this guide does not. It offers several helpful questions for picking out the "angle" of your theory. It also says that, until you do a good lit review, it's pretty much impossible to pick out what theory you want to use to build your framework, which is totally true!

Next time I go hunting, I want to find more sources about "Frankentheories". Goaru Getto!