Unit 2 Introduction

I wanted to introduce Unit 2, the rhetorical analysis of a cultural artifact, where a cultural artifact might be a visual artifact, an image like a meme, or a particular genre of a photograph that might appear frequently in your community, or an object where your community might be purely text-based, and there might be a cultural object that the community comes together around, like a football for the NFL, whereas an image might be a category of humorous memes, or serious memes about, say, depression in a community about anxiety. So this assignment asks you to look back to your selected discourse community, which we were working with for Unit 1, and conduct a rhetorical analysis of a cultural artifact that is relevant and significant to this group. So you can think of a cultural artifact as any image or object made, modified, viewed, shared or used by people who belong to this community. For example, a student who’s examining a DC Comics fandom community, they might examine an action figure or a particular genre of Batman memes, while a student looking at r/CoronavirusMemes might examine a genre of online school photo memes.

So in conducting this work, you’ll again engage with your community to identify communal values that are represented through associative artifacts. So objects not only embody cultural values, but also function as tools that shape how community members see and understand themselves, how they interact and engage with other communities, and why they have elected to build relationships with specific groups of people within that community, or in a larger sense outside of that community. In doing so, you’ll gain insight regarding how arguments are made visually, whether it’s an object or an image, and explore the connection that exists between your cultural identity and how that influences the manner in which you read and thus make meaning of the world. So we’re looking at members in specific online communities, but the knowledge that we take away is equally applicable to ourselves and how we move in the world around us. You may also notice that this assignment is very similar to the Unit 1 assignment, and the major difference is we’re shifting from textual analysis, where we were looking at units of language, of lexis, and we’re shifting away from that and looking more at images or objects.

So this assignment is designed to extend your understanding of rhetoric beyond the textual to include the visual, it calls for you to act as equal parts archaeologists and historians, where you’re mining and excavating for both the cultural artifact and its meaning or representation, whether that meaning is explicit or implied, while at the same time functioning as contemporary cultural critics in a way. With issues of identity in mind, you’ll explore how the artifact embodies a visual argument and what that argument tells us with regard to the community’s values and goals. You’ll also consider the wider sociocultural ramifications of these texts, kind of like the “so what? who cares?” question that you tend to answer at the end of an essay, given their semi-public or public circulation. As such, this genre of writing requires you to consider the rhetoric embedded in and conveyed through artifacts or objects, allowing you an opportunity to understand how meaning and cultural identity are developed or constructed through textual (as in Unit 1) and visual (as in this unit) discourses.

Some pitfalls to be aware of: videos are very difficult to analyze for an assignment like this, because analysis is very, very close to the text. So for a video that’s even 30 seconds long, you’ll have to go frame by frame by frame and the paper will end up being extremely lengthy. It’s often better to, if you’re looking at images, just to stick to one or two, or two still images from a video if you must. The images can be memes, again, it can be a certain genre of photograph, or a very exemplary photograph. You should try to avoid selfies as it’s difficult to look at things like author and audience. You don’t want to choose too many artifacts or your paper will again end up being lengthy. For a cultural object, you really only need one. And you can choose either images or object. There’s plenty of visual and cultural associations to analyze, generally speaking, with a single artifact. If you require two cultural objects, and that may be the case, you can check in with me and I will approve or veto and ask you to sort of revisit and rethink what you’re trying to do in your project.

The learning outcomes for this essay are: you will define and understand visual rhetoric as a framework for how communities make meaning about themselves, and how visual rhetoric informs and persuades community members and non-members. you’ll select to describe and analyze, again, maybe like two artifacts, target audiences, rhetorical purposes and spatial visual designs. The assignment guidelines do say you can go up to three but generally speaking, two is more than enough. So if you get to two or three, and I tell you to only focus on two, that’s fine. Describe the cultural, social and political impacts and the visual rhetoric employed in the visual artifacts–and this is pretty central to the assignment. You’ll be looking at the connections between the visual and the cultural associations that we have with certain visual signifiers. You’ll examine how individual identity determines how visual artifacts are interpreted, and using an expository method–we’re moving away from narrative completely–you’ll continue building a critical and analytical framework for later projects that will entail what we’re calling blogging, but it’s really more like field notes that you’ll be posting to Slack and work with other ethnographic methods.

The requirements for the essay include that you’ll identify the significant cultural artifacts or genre of cultural artifacts, so like an action figure or a category of memes, in the community that you’re studying. You’ll develop a complex controlling idea. So Phase 1 will again really focus on that: you’ll create a clear organizational pattern and structure between Phase 1 and Phase 2, you’ll describe and analyze the composition of the artifact, whether it’s an object or an image, and its visual rhetoric and cultural significance. And you’ll describe and analyze the cultural, social, political and or personal impact of the artifacts, visual rhetoric and cultural significance. As usual, by Phase 2, you don’t have to worry about it so much for Phase 1, but by Phase 2, you’ll use MLA format, which is the double spaced 12 point font, one inch margins, Times New Roman, etc.

Don’t forget the Writing Center remains available to you. And while you can use the Writing Center during any point of the brainstorming writing process, in past semesters, writers who have worked on this assignment have found it useful to have sessions about making sure they’re analyzing the sources, not just summarizing them. So you may want–you may want to go in, bring your artifacts to your appointment, kind of go over and make sure that you’re analyzing the visual rhetoric, you’re analyzing the cultural significance, not just describing. The Writing Center is also useful for identifying your audience. So the audience being the community, as well as, um, what community values are encapsulated in these artifacts. And you’ve already made moves towards this in your first essay when you looked at values and how language constructs those values. The Writing Center can help you develop a controlling idea or a claim. And this is a step that usually occurs after some preliminary analysis of the images, which we will be working on in class and outside of class. And they can also help you brainstorm ways in which the rhetoric used in the images has cultural, social or political impacts in that community. Or since images and objects circulate more widely outside of that community. So Phase 1 at minimum should include your controlling idea or claim much like our last essay, this controlling idea will consist of the conclusion you draw about this, one or two cultural artifacts with significance to the community. So you can consider some guiding questions like: How does this represent the community? Why might the community self-select the artifact as representative of it? Try to identify visual features, obvious meetings, or pop culture references, and any hidden or communal and cultural meetings for future analysis.

Another tip for image analysis, and we’ll talk more about this later, is that generally, you want to be as specific to the image as possible. So you want to look at every little visual detail. More is often better. If you need to cut back you can cut back, but begin by looking at what all these visual features might indicate what the connotations might be, what references might you get naturally that an outsider might not get? What does the community seem to get that you don’t get? If it’s a meme, what’s the connection between the text and the image, if it’s an object, you might want to consider other senses as well. modalities like tactility touch. So in Phase 2 after we do Phase 1 with the controlling idea, and any notes or bullet points you want to include, Phase 2 will be you continuing to improve and explore your controlling idea. It will be you engaging in analysis of all of the visual features you’re looking at, generally two to three, and two to three associated communal meanings and usages rhetorical usages of the artifact you’re examining. So again, two or three images, or a single cultural object, you may find that again, fewer images, fewer cultural objects. Less is more in that sense in this assignment, because you will be doing a hefty amount of analysis for each thing you’re looking at. And in doing this analysis, you’ll consider how elements or qualities of the image or object accumulate to give rise to cultural meanings together visually representing the community. Next week, we’ll be talking more about how to conduct yourself in this assignment. And we’ll be doing a lot of brainstorming, preparing for Phase 1 as you finish up with Phase 2 of Unit 1. As always, if you have any questions about this assignment, we can discuss it in class or in one on one meetings. And for quick questions I’m always available on Slack or via email.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai