Major Project 2:
Remediation and Rearrangement
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Due Dates
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Proposal for Project 2 due October 18, submit to Moodle
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Slice of your Project 2 due October 25 , submit to Moodle and bring to class on October 27
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Draft of Project 2 with the Statement of Goals and Choices due November 1, submit to Moodle or host on your website and add a link to Moodle
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Final Project 2 will be included in your Final Portfolio, due December 18
Why Remediation?
As we will discuss in this unit, media is constantly remediated. Some creators go so far as to argue that everything is a remediation, as Kirby Ferguson does in “Everything’s a Remix.” In addition, as composers, creators, and writers, we are always building on our past work. My goal in asking you to remediate a past project is to give you a chance to apply your multimodal knowledge to existing material, either by expanding the number of modes the project operates in, or by more fully consider how and why you are drawing on each mode. My hope is that you use this project to develop your ability to decide what genre and mediums work should be presented in to accomplish your goals and reach your intended audience. As many academic assignments require you to create new content, this project is designed to create space to revisit previous work from a new perspective, focusing on transformation and revision rather than the creation of original work.
“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
-Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
We encounter remediation all the time. Our favorite books are turned into films. Films are turned into television shows. Films are turned into videogames, and (often regrettably) videogames are turned into movies. Some people have accused Disney of becoming a remediation factory, churning out live-action versions of animated classics that no one (okay, maybe some of us) asked for.
Remediation is also a crucial part of education and many professions. You’re asked to turn a term paper into a presentation. You turn your class notes into flashcards for studying. You dig up an old story that you wrote, make some adjustments, and post it on a blog for friends to read. In your work, you may be asked to take someone else’s content and fit it for a new medium. Transform this flyer into a bus ad. Take our notes from this meeting and send out a memo about what we discussed. Make a diagram that represents this content. Use this script to make a film.
Yet remediation can be more than rehashing content in a slightly different way. As clever creators, we can do more than copy-paste Word documents to websites, or remake a classic in a less endearing way just to serve as a star vehicle. As you work on this project, consider how you can draw on the transformative potential of remediation.
Step 1: Choosing the Project to Remediate
Here are some considerations to keep in mind when choosing a project to remediate:
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It should involve research in some way. This may not be extensive citation in every case, but you should be drawing directly on academic research, or a mixture of popular and academic sources. You can also approach this by taking a project that did not previously involve research, but doing research now to help re-contextualize that project. (For example, how can research into the psychology of an artist's creative process help you reevaluate a painting your created?)
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You should aim for a project that you've spent a fair amount of time with, where you have substantial material and background to draw on. Although there will be variability on this point depending on your field and creative background, an extended work like a longer paper, art installation, or performance will give you more material to work with than a short piece or assignment.
Beyond these points, my suggestion is to choose a project that you’re interested in returning to. This may be because you had a lot of ideas of where you could take that project when you created it, but didn’t have time to develop them. Or maybe you felt constrained by the original requirements of the project, and feel you can accomplish your goals more effectively with more modes open to you. Or perhaps you can envision a new audience for the project by switching to a new mode, or accomplish a new exigence by drawing on new technologies.
The choice of project is entirely up to you, but I recommend that you give it a good bit of thought at the beginning of the process, as you’ll be articulating your reasons for choosing and remediating your project later on in your Statement of Goals and Choices.
Step 2: Choosing How to Remediate Your Project
When remediating your project, consider how you will expand it beyond its original form to account for all five modes. As we’ve discussed before, some of these modes may be backgrounded or foregrounded, but you should give some thought to how each is operating in the remediated version of your project. You can build on your work in the interactivity unit by creating a project that consists of a string of interconnected pieces of media, rather than a single narrative, or you may choose to delve more deeply into one form of media that you want to explore. I strongly encourage you to go beyond the modes, media, and technologies that you already drew on in your first major project, both because that flexibility is one of the goals of the course, and because it is helpful for building skills and portfolios. Plus you may find a new medium that you enjoy working in!
When choosing the materials, technologies, and media that you want to draw on to remediate your work, consider how the changes you’re making contribute to the exigence of the project. For instance, perhaps you want to draw on a kind of media that allows you to reach a new audience. While a research paper may be more accessible to college students and professors, you could represent the same content in a children’s book to reach a younger audience. Perhaps you want to make it possible for a reader to choose where to engage with your project rather than needing to read through it from beginning to end, so you transform it into a wiki, or a website.
As you imagine the possibilities, think about what can be gained or lost through each remediation. What does a podcast offer that a Powerpoint presentation might not? How do the constraints of a video essay differ from those of a lab report?
Step 3: Make Your Remediation Transformative
My main expectation for this project is that your work should be truly transformative. In other words, the experience of interacting with the new version of your project should feel distinct from interacting with the old. At the end of your process, you should be able to clearly argue for the transformative nature of your remediation. This will look different for each person, but it may include broadening your goals from the original project, tailoring your work to fit an audience with a different background or expertise, updating your argument to reflect new research, or experimenting with new technology that changes your organization completely.
Every project will be a mix of old writing and new, and part of the choice-making process is deciding what content to keep, what content to revise or remix, and what content to leave behind. If you’re looking for a guide to help you work through the rhetorical tools and multimodal resources of your remediation, take a look at the table in Multimodal Response 5.
Recommendation for Statement of Goals and Choices
In fitting your Statement of Goals and Choices to this project, you should consider how your goals shifted in remediation, as well as how you had to adapt your choices when working with existing material. Ultimately, your SOGC should demonstrate how and why you transformed your original project using new media and modes. In other words, the new product should accomplish something that the original did not, and you should articulate what that is in your SOGC. Use the choices section to point to particular shifts in the use of each mode, and explain how those choices fit your new goal or audience, or more fully accomplish your original goals in a way that the original form did not.
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