Chapter 3: Overview Tour (.txt version)

[Video: text on screen reads “Chapter 3: Overview Tour”; transition to screencast with inset video of Jason; screen activity described in narration throughout]

Jason: Welcome to chapter 3. This chapter is really just a big old collection of graphs that we invite you to play with. For example, here’s the first graph we’re going to see. It’s a timeline of all articles. I can click on “All Articles” here, and I can start to notice—wow, there were articles about new media in just about every decade, except for right here [points to 1920–1921 with cursor]. There’s this interesting spike happening in the thirties, and some spikes happening later on. But let’s say I want to zoom in a bit more and look at how production pedagogy fared up against reception pedagogy over time. So I can click on “All Articles” again—that line’s gone. Now, here’s blue, “Reception.”

[Audio: meow (offscreen)]

And if you heard in the background, that was my cat. Anyway, here’s blue, “Reception.” You notice a pretty persistent presence. Now I’m going to turn on orange, “Production.” And here, I notice some interesting things. It seems like in a lot of points in the corpus, reception is predominating production. But, hmmm, what’s happening here in the late thirties that makes production really take off? What’s happening here in the eighties and nineties and our current century that seems to lead to a boom in students making projects with new media? It’s intriguing, and if I wanted to just get back, I can always just reset the graph.

We visualize this production versus reception question in a multitude of ways. Here’s a donut chart. We can see that over time, reception predominated slightly, but production was really holding its own. When you look at radio, that trend seems to hold. When you look at film, reception predominating a bit more, but there’s still quite a lot of production here. When you go to television, woo!—production, a much smaller part of that corpus. When you go to computer, and things radically change. And it’s clear that the computer was very much seen as a production device, though primarily for alphabetic forms of production early on.

Okay. Now let’s take a look at topoi. That’s one of the things that we coded for. What are some of the common arguments that keep coming up about new media over time? So, one of the ones that probably isn’t surprising is: new media have been engaging for students, I can’t say since the beginning of time, but I can at least say based on our data since 1912. And then, let’s look at a surprising one: the idea that new media are harming alphabetic literacy. That didn’t really show up very much in our corpus—much less than we expected. So that’s something that we asked questions about.

Okay. Now, let’s take a look at radio. We have the option to again compare production and reception. So I’m going to turn the reception line on first. And I’m going to see that, hmm, it seems like the heyday of radio was really the thirties through the forties—the real Golden Age of Radio—that makes a lot of sense. Although I get intrigued by what some of these other blips were [indicates later in the timeline]. Now I turn on production: hmm. Things look a little bit differently. One of the things I want to do, and you can do this on any of our timeline graphs, is zoom in. So I’m going to double-click here, and now I can just look a little bit more closely at what was happening here in this time period. And what you’ll see, too, is that if I get curious about what was going on with production in 1939, I can hover over the dot, and all of a sudden I get authors and titles. And I can actually go and look at one of these. So I click on this, and there you have it! “Students Like Radio Writing” by Mildred Carson—one of my favorites. You can go read it yourself and see how it might help you reinvigorate ideas for your own digital audio teaching.

Okay. And then finally, we have a series of visualizations that demonstrate word frequencies across the decades. You can click through and look at word clouds as they evolve decade by decade. You also have the option to play around with our Ngram Viewer and compare two terms. But I’m not really going to say much about these visualizations, because we got so excited about them that we made you some more extensive video tours of them, in which we engage in a dialogue with each other about some of the most exciting trends we noticed and some of the most interesting questions these graphs compelled us to ask. Mostly what I want to say in closing is: we made these graphs not to be definitive forms of data, but rather to be inventive heuristics for play. And so we invite you to play with the graphs, see what you notice. Ask your own questions. And feel free to be in touch with us and tell us what you find.

Have fun!

[Video: text on screen reads “Graphs made with Voyant and JavaScript D3. Shot on location in Cincinnati, Ohio. Edited in ScreenFlow and iMovie.”]

Media assets used in this production listed in Production Notes.