Means of social discourse: GIF stories

Note: I wrote this post for my webdesign class, but I think GIF stories are an interesting trend. While it doesn't really fall under the purview of language learning, it does have to do with discourse analysis, so I think it's fair game for this blog.

GIFs have been enjoying quite the renaissance on today's web. I've started noticing a trend in telling stories with GIFs interspersed with text. Before I get to far into this concept, I want to share this interesting video in the history of animated GIFs that was released this month by PBS.



This video is so great in describing a brief history of the format and their current usage. I especially like the concept of a "post-modern GIF."

That said, I want to discuss what I'm terming as GIF stories. These are a variant in digital storytelling in which the storyteller uses GIFs to express an emotion or idea that is either not clearly expressed in text, or is expressed better through visual media. I think these stem from this idea that the GIF is relating a feeling in a way that the author cannot convey except in the most florid of prose. Most people on the web, frankly, do not have the writing prowess to commit their thoughts and emotions to the "page" quite so expertly. Thus, by my estimation, are GIF stories born.

GIF stories range from simple explanations of annoyances like getting called in to work on one's day off to a full on explication of one's efforts to reconnect with an ex--and the subsequent renunciation of said ex [NSFW language]. What ultimately drew me to acknowledge the awesome potential of this trend was this GIF story posted in honor of International Women's Day [also NSFW language]. This story leverages a number of pop-culture references as well as pointed text to explain what's wrong with the current political situation in the U.S. regarding women. What is so great about this GIF story is that the GIFs use really do transcend what the author might have expressed in writing and allow the reader to experience different facets of this issue. Yes, absolutely, some of the GIFs are just silly, but several of the GIFs make an excellent visual point that corroborates what the text describes. I think it's a very effective piece and an exemplar of this trend.

Books of the Year: 2011

This is the 4th consecutive year that I've kept track of what books I read. Unfortunately, this is the only year where the number of books decreased from the previous year (last year I read 51 books). I attribute this to grad school and being a new teacher. Despite reading less books in their entirety, I know I spent tons of time reading this year. Last semester, it seems like all I did was read. So, even though I apparently read less, I probably read at least the same amount, or possibly more.

Anyway, the books. It goes Title author, date I finished reading it

1. Children of God, Mary Doria Russel 1/2 (don't worry, this is a sci-fi novel)
2. The Rise and Fall of Languages, RMW Dixon 1/5
3. The Forever Machine, Mark Clifton 1/11
4. The Art of Teaching Spanish: Second Language Acquisition from Research to Praxis, Salaberry & Lafford 1/14
5. Double Star, Robert Heinlein 1/16
6. What to Eat, Marion Nestle 1/26
7. The Big Time, Fritz Leiber 1/28
8. Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov 2/17
9. Seedfolks, Paul Fleischman 2/23
10. The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi 2/28
11. Starship Troopers, Robery Heinlein 3/13
12. Foundation, Isaac Asimov 3/21
13. Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov 3/22
14. Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov 3/24
15. Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov 4/2
16. If I'm so Successful, Why do I Feel like a Fake? Harvey Katz 4/11
17. Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov 4/21
18. The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, Tony Attwood 4/25
19. Aspergirls, Rudy Simone 4/26
20. Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson 4/30
21. Prelude to Foundation, Isaac Asimov 5/18
22. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins 5/21
23. Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins 5/23
24. Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins 5/26
25. Asperger's Syndrome and Anxiety: A Guide to Successful Stress Management, Nick Dubin 5/31
26. Omnilingual, H. Beam Piper 5/31
27. Containment, Christian Cantrell 6/3
28. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, H.R. Ellis Davidson 6/15
29. Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov 6/17
30. The Passage, Justin Cronin 6/26
31. This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, Marilyn Johnson 7/1
32. The Wild Things, Dave Eggers 7/2
33. Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, Alex Wright 7/14
34. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger 7/19
35. Hyperion, Dan Simmons 7/28
36. Ambient Findability, Peter Morville 8/9
37. Crash Course in Public Library Administration, Wayne Disher 8/15
38. The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War, Michael Shaara 9/17
39. The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons 11/5
40. A Fire upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge 11/24
41. The Lightening Thief, Rick Riordan 11/25
42. California: A History, Kevin Starr 12/28

Trends:

• I didn't manage to get through any books in languages other than English this year. Sort of horrifying, but I think this is indicative of how all-consuming it was to finish my credential/get a job/maintain my job/start my masters
• I started reading through Hugo Award winners, of which I read 8 this year.
• 30 of the books I read were Kindle books, which means I'm reading a lot more digitally. 
• 15 were non-fiction. My non-fiction doesn't seem to follow much of a trend. Once again, I seem interested in everything.

Goals for 2012?

I can't really bring myself to set any goals because I know this year is going to be crazy between work, my MLIS and getting my clear credential. Other things being equal, I hope to read at least 50 books, some of those should be in languages other than English (notably Spanish and Arabic). I want to keep reading through Hugo winners because that has been interesting so far.

My non-reading goal is to write and blog more. We'll see how that goes, too.

It begins

It should be noted by readers of this blog that I'm starting my first year of teaching on Monday. I'm a bit anxious about it but also a bit excited. We've had a lot of teacher in-service and time to prep so, in theory, I'm completely ready. In practice, well, we'll see.

So, school hasn't started but I've already received my first parent complaint. Apparently, I'm not being a "good role model" by not sitting in a chair properly during the parent orientation. I'm the first to admit that I could be unprofessional, but then again, I challenge anyone to find a comfortable position in those little, hard-backed chairs. My principal called me in to discuss it. He said, what I will generously paraphrase as, "haters gonna hate." And on the one hand, I do think it's silly to complain about a teacher in the back of the room not sitting still, it is a good reminder that teachers are constantly being scrutinized. So, fair warning. The game is afoot.

On teams, appropriateness of online learning

One of the main reasons that I wanted to do the MLIS program at San Jose State is because their program is 100% online. The thing that I've always hated most about school is always the actual, physical necessity of being in class. I felt like it would be more effective for me to just stay home and read the book. Unfortunately, many a "participation" grade prevented that. I just get really bored in an actual class, as my teaching cohort, in particular, can attest. I think that I absorb information faster than most people, so classes feel slow for me. I'm always in the back, reading a book or something in a class.

The SJSU School of Library Science has this checklist to help determine if online school is "right for you." I laughed when I read it because I am like a check + for all of those. As readers of this blog doubtless know, I'm always taking up languages and learning them on my own time. I'm (usually, barring everything in my life happening at once) really good about keeping up on them. Readers may also recall that I have tested out of language classes more than once through a self-directed summer of studying. Take that, elementary Persian.

My introductory SLIS class has a segment that is meant to prepare everyone for working in teams. Apparently, I'm not the first person to dislike teamwork. Probably the best advice from the slew of information about how not to completely fail at teams is that the group has to set up clear rules and goals at the very beginning. This is to prevent one person from doing all the work while the rest do only some work. I'm still a little skeptical about that, being someone who always does the work. I am, however, willing to give it a go. And hopefully, people at the graduate level are the sort who really have their shit together and take care of business in a team situation. We shall see.

And now for something slightly different

As usual, I have overestimated the amount of things I can do at one time. Now that I'm starting my teaching job and my MLIS (masters in library and information science for those who haven't been paying attention), I don't think I'm going to have a lot of time for language learning, and hence, blogging about language learning. However, I will definitely blog about that when I do it. For the moment, let's talk about information science.

Being the--I hesitate to say over-achiever so,--early-achiever that I am, I've already read 4 of my textbooks for this semester. I hope they aren't representative of the whole thing because, while they were interesting, I found the information fairly repetitive. The possibility exists that I am, actually, over-achieving and don't have to read the entirety of all these books. In which case, I guess it's my own fault for reading repetitive things. So far, I've read This Book is Overdue, Glut, Everything is Miscellaneous, and I'm about halfway through Ambient Findability (thank you, Kindle editions!). The first three (and to a small extent, the fourth), dealt a lot with the history of information and information management, which was interesting the first time, but less so the second and third. They all seem to use the same anecdotes as well. There's one about Borges making up a ridiculous system of categories for a Chinese emperor, which, I suppose, is used to illustrate the point that categories are only useful to us if things that make sense are grouped together and if the categories are functional. This feels self evident to me. In fact, a lot of it felt self evident to me. I guess it's because I've grown up as a "technological native," but long discussions of  the usefulness of tagging or that information is no longer limited by physical space just make me say, "duh."

I am, however, hopeful that the MLIS program will be interesting. I really like information and I am looking forward to learning how to manage it. I just hope that things get more challenging soon!

Return to Blogging

The last month has been completely insane due to my extreme efforts in getting a teaching job. I put in over 250 applications, went on around 15 interviews, and probably drove around 5,000 miles, but the good news is that I got a job and I'll be starting on August 1st. Yay! So, amid all that I had little time for language acquisition, but now I am back at it.

Let's talk about my new favorite Spanish word: vagabundear. In English, it translates to "to drift around" or "to wander, to roam." It also makes me think of the English word "vagabond," which is a word that amuses me. It kind of makes me think of gypsies. Semi-non-sequitor, when I was a kid, and walking off to the bathroom or something, my mom always used to say "don't get kidnapped by gypsies!" So, there you have it, drifting, wandering, and don't get kidnapped by gypsies.

Here's what I want to work on for this week (okay, for the rest of this week).

• Read in Spanish for at least 30 minutes every day.
• Keep building my "Spanish definish" Anki deck and review those words
• Work on Remembering the Kanji
• Listen to some Japanese Pod 101
• Do some reading in Arabic

A trip to la ciudad de mexico

The last four days, I was on vacation in Mexico City because a) I'd never been to a Spanish-speaking country before, and I knew I needed to do that before I got a job as a Spanish teacher so that I wouldn't feel like a tool b) to test out my Spanish skills c) to look at things and d) to buy handicrafts. With those objectives in mind, I'd say it was a pretty successful vacation.

This trip made me feel simultaneously good and awful about my Spanish skills, which seems paradoxical. For the most part, I understand what people are saying to me and I can respond with things that make sense. This made me feel good. I learned, however, that when people speak to me in Spanish, especially if they're saying things fast, I need an extra moment to process what's been said. Most people will assume that if you didn't respond right away, they need to repeat or rephrase what they just said, which actually does not help. I also became aware of some gaps in my vocabulary (just how does one say "I knocked it over"? Me lo cayó?). Most of my vocabulary problems are regarding what to say in everyday sorts of situations in terms of how to phrase things. I think I need to get a speaking buddy to practice these sorts of things.

The good news is that after even a few days immersed in Spanish-speaking culture, my brain is already tending more Spanish-wise. More of the thoughts in my head are in Spanish, which is awesome. I think if I spent a few months living in a Spanish-speaking country, I would get to a spoken fluency pretty quickly.

I found myself frequently comparing my experience in Mexico City with my experience in Cairo, probably because it's the main non-English speaking urban area that I've spent much time in. I am definitely more competent at Spanish on this trip than I was at Arabic on that trip, so it's interesting for me to compare the amount of effort I'm making to understand what's going on around me. I have to pay attention to what people are saying, but I'm not having a lot of acute "what the hell is going on here?" moments, like I did in Cairo. I understand all the shop signs I see. While it still takes some mental effort to understand things, I can generally understand them. Whereas when I was in Cairo, people would say things and my friends and I would all look at each other and try to puzzle out what was happening. Frequent use was made of dictionaries.

Another thing that's interesting about Mexico City is, in my opinion, it's so hard to find anything. In the US, everything is labelled very clearly. Here, you kind of have to know what you're looking for a bit better. Since the city is old and everything is kind of stacked on top of other things, a lot of shops are set back from the street and tricky to spot if you don't know they're there.

In terms of the actual vacationing part, I am kind of a low-key sight-seer. I went to the National Art Museum, the Alameda Central, and Tenotihuacan. My hotel is right next to the Zocalo, so I saw that, too. I did a lot of walking around just idly looking at things and getting a feel for the place. I'd say the highlight of the trip was definitely taking a tour to Tenotihuacan, where I climbed to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.

If you want to see the rest of the pictures, you can check out the set on my flickr.