cbrown24 – Introduction to Digital Publishing

When deciding which social media platform to use for this assignment, I thought Twitter would be the best medium. This is because Twitter is a platform that revolves around words as that is the staple of the posts, with pictures and videos to go along. A perfect way to promote my poem about the quarantine as it also is something a lot of users can relate to. Another benefit to using Twitter is the retweeting function allows my followers to repost it for their follows to see and so on and so on. Making this a medium to allow for a lot of interaction between myself and fellow users of the platform. Considering my poem revolves around my experience in quarantine, it may come across as relatable to other users who would share with others. And with everyone supposed to be staying home, people are on social media more so the targeted audience of other teens and young adults would be more likely to see it.

As a good way to use the platform, I would use the 280-character limit with my caption being the title and the first stanza of my poem as that is only 250 characters. The caption reading, “’Quarantine, Trapped inside with my family and my dog, / all these walls feeling my blank stare. /The memories of hanging with friends is becoming a fog. /How I long to be out again in the fresh air.’ If you like this first stanza, check out the whole piece”. In the scenario that I had a real post to link it to, I would add it in the caption at the end. Aside from changing my keyboard on my phone, the font can’t be altered but emojis can be added, however for a serious topic like this I chose not to use them.

For the media aspect of the promotion, I decided it would be best to use a photo of my dog that I took while in quarantine. It is a cute picture to accompany a matter that can be sad for people, so it can hopefully act as a little pick-me-up for them. Also, it is fitting with the excerpt of my first stanza so it gives a visual to what my dog looks like for the reader. The photo could act as an attention grabber for users scrolling through their timelines as well since most people are intrigued by animals. On Twitter, the format of a photo and text to accompany it is very common so it works well with my desired design.

I thought that the best time to post would be around 7-9 o’clock in the evening. This time would work best as for most people they are unwinding for the day and relaxing on their phones using social media. Therefore, if they were to come across my post, they would be more willing to read the full piece now that they are not doing anything else like work or school work. And as I mentioned earlier, Twitters retweeting function will be very helpful in spreading word about the post and getting other users to interact with it.

Final Poem

Quarantine

By Cordell Brown

Trapped inside with my family and my dog,

all these walls feeling my blank stare.

The memories of hanging with friends is becoming a fog.

How I long to be out and about again in the fresh air.

Watching movies and staring at a screen all day.

How much longer will this be?

Listening to the government and health officials for what they say.

How I long to have family over again to see.

Listening to music on my phone is what fills my ears,

calling my friends is the only outside contact I can safely get.

For those poor souls in Italy, the world sheds their tears.

This will be over soon, we all thought, nothing to fret.

The days blend together like it’s a school break,

not sure how much longer this will take.

Immersive Pedagogy

Trying to edit this document under the formatting guidelines of the style sheet, it was quite difficult. One factor is because I was unsure of whether I was editing too much or too little. This made me hesitate a lot on my edits as a result since I had to go back and forth between the guidelines and the document. Another reason it was difficult to me was because it was an unfamiliar style of writing. Along with the fact that I obviously did not write it myself so it feels foreign to begin with and hard to tell the proper way it should be. Especially considering the expertise differential on the matter from myself and the authors. Learning to adopt and apply the guidelines given was a good lesson on having the ability to analyze writing deeper.

Immersive Pedagogy: Developing a Decolonial and Collaborative Framework for Teaching and Learning in 3D/VR/AR

Lorena Gauthereau, Jessica Linker, Emma Slayton, and Alex Wermer-Colan

ABSTRACT:

In June 2019, a cohort of CLIR postdoctoral fellows convened Immersive Pedagogy: A Symposium on Teaching and Learning with 3D, Augmented and Virtual Reality at Carnegie Mellon University. The symposium sought to bring together a multidisciplinary group of collaborators to think through pedagogical issues related to using 3D/VR/AR technologies, as well as to produce and disseminate materials for teaching and learning. This essay presents the Immersive Pedagogy symposium as a model for interrogating and developing pedagogical practices and standards for 3D/VR/AR; we offer a decolonial, anti-ableist, and feminist pedagogical framework for collaboratively developing and curating humanities content for this emerging technology by summarizing the symposium’s keynotes, workshops, as well as its goals and outcomes. Workshops, keynotes, and participant conversations engaged with decolonial and feminist methodologies, practiced accessible design for universal learning, offered templates for humanistic teaching, and illustrated the possibilities of using 3D/VR/AR to extend critical thinking. While 3D/VR/AR technologies demonstrate real possibilities for collaborative, multidisciplinary learning, they are also fraught with broader concerns prevalent today about digital technologies, as well as complex issues specific to 3D/VR/AR. There is a clear need to assemble academic practitioners on a regular basis in order to facilitate an ongoing discussion about 3D/VR/AR technology and its responsible, meaningful use in teaching and learning.

Introduction

As access to three dimensional (3D) technologies has become increasingly available in academic venues, the desire to teach with these emerging technologies, particularly augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), has outpaced digital humanists’ abilities to provide meaningful support for immersive projects. There is a growing and ongoing need to produce shared and open pedagogical materials adaptable to the needs of teachers in various professions and disciplines and are accessible to students without significant coding experience. This need is partially driven by the contingencies of relatively new and rapidly updating technologies, as well as the fact that support for commercially-available immersive tools are tailored for industry purposes. Game-driven tutorials, for example, do not always take into consideration the needs of humanities practitioners seeking to integrate critical thinking with technical mastery. Problematically, contemporary contexts for emerging technologies can structure our interactions with 3D/VR/AR. Though not always visible to users, these can have the effect of naturalizing problematic historical and political narratives through selective access to resources and functionality.

Nonetheless, game engines that offer free educational licenses have been repurposed for academic inquiry and teaching over the past decade. For example, Unity Technologies’ Unity 3D game engine is utilized by over 4.5 million users and has been at the forefront of historical and archaeological 3D visualizations in scholarly research. First available in 2005, the Unity 3D game engine has been used to make approximately 60% of all AR/VR applications and is used by 90% of AR/VR companies (“Public Relations” 2019, np). Educational licenses are available for students and educators seeking to use the engine for scholarly or creative use. Its main competitor, the Unreal Engine, while initially inaccessible beyond professional and academic moneyed institutions with licenses, dropped its paywall for educational use in September 2014. VR headsets, once a hypothetical fantasy or niche short-lived technology, are now commercially viable and relatively inexpensive for institutions to purchase, if not students. In a few years, the financial barrier for individuals may diminish, while Google Cardboards and other less expensive stereoscopic viewers with fewer interactive features currently provide alternatives for undergraduate students with access to smartphones. However, students are also increasingly able to make use of 3D/VR/AR technology within dedicated spaces in academic libraries, maker spaces, media studios, and community outreach centers. Yet, we would be remiss not to point out that access is still mediated by other social hierarchies; the technology is still not accessible in much of the Global South and in marginalized communities across the world. These aforementioned developments still privilege students at institutions who have dedicated staff or faculty to maintain and encourage use of 3D/VR/AR technologies and facilities.

This is all to say that in our current 3D/VR/AR moment, digital humanists have a lot to navigate. Current 3D/VR/AR pedagogy and projects can pose problems related to accessibility and long-term preservation of projects and assets, and often run afoul of minimal computing recommendations. Yet, the technology offers rich possibilities for multidisciplinary research and collaboration; many virtual reality projects combine art production, computing, archival research, network theory, and data visualization, among other practices. Given its potential for scholarship and teaching, understanding how to use the technology responsibly seems to necessitate engaging with current or learning practitioners to get a sense of what is now possible and what still needs to be done to facilitate productive use of 3D/VR/AR. As many key problems are likely to persist through subsequent permutations of the technology and its use in educational settings, this conversation needs to be ongoing and open. What humanists within and beyond the academy have to say about 3D/VR/AR will probably not be unique to humanistic inquiry. This dialogue will provide crucial critical approaches to the emerging technologies’ advantages and limitations that will be of use to industry professionals as well as the casual, creative user. A vocal contingent of humanists seeking to think and learn with 3D/VR/AR may, in fact, fill a wider sociocultural need.

This is the context in which a small cohort of 2017-2019 Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellows organized Immersive Pedagogy: A Symposium on Teaching and Learning with 3D, Augmented and Virtual Reality at Carnegie Mellon University on June 26 and 27, 2019. The CLIR cohort included Lorena Gauthereau (University of Houston), Jessica Linker (Bryn Mawr College), Eric Kaltman (Carnegie Mellon University), Emma Slayton (Carnegie Mellon University), Neil Weijer (Johns Hopkins University), Alex Wermer-Colan (Temple University), and Chris Young (University of Toronto). The goal of this symposium was to assemble a wide range of stakeholders to develop teaching materials and strategies that considered problems inherent and specific to immersive technologies, as well as to address problems that affect but are not unique to 3D/VR/AR. It is for this reason the symposium was so attentive to decolonial and feminist methodologies in thinking about appropriate pedagogical applications. Building on the previous work of scholars such as María Cotera, Elizabeth Losh, Tara McPherson, Angel Nieves, Roopika Risam, and Jacqueline Wernimont, we have advocated for an intersectional digital humanity that interrogates a wide range of technologies through the critical methods developed by the fields of ethnic and feminist studies. Such methods, we argue can highlight the ways that technologies often leave out marginalized people by replicating colonial hierarchical structures including race, ethnicity, class, gender, and disability.

The Immersive Pedagogy symposium offered an early, if not first-of-its-kind opportunity to have productive conversations about what critical approaches to 3D/VR/AR could look like from a multidisciplinary and multi-professional perspective. Additionally, the symposium sought to seed collaborations within and beyond academic institutions and stand as a model for future conversations on these topics. In recounting our experiences with different applications of 3D/VR/AR technology in pedagogical spaces, the group tackled a number of thorny issues, while acknowledging that we would need to continue the dialogue by reconvening in person and in digital venues. We sought to develop teaching materials collaboratively with the long-term plan of sharing these resources through a variety of means, including open-access publications by organizations like the Digital Library Federation. In the remainder of this essay, the Immersive Pedagogy organizers describe the symposium’s theoretical foundation and methodological approaches as a model for structuring communities around 3D/VR/AR, summarize some of our group’s findings, and invite digital humanities practitioners to help us to continue this work.

Structuring a Symposium on Decolonial Models of Immersive Pedagogy

Because the initiative was organized by CLIR postdoctoral fellows, the symposium emphasized diverse ways that libraries participate in creating, curating, and preserving 3D/VR/AR pedagogical materials. We considered faculty, staff, and students as equal partners in 3D/VR/AR projects, and aimed to include early career researchers at the table. Overarching goals for the symposium included teaching faculty and librarians how to support and enable learning for students using 3D technologies, but also to help students to disseminate skills within their own communities. By bringing together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and professions, we addressed problems while identifying new ones. Participants had the opportunity to share links and descriptions to their projects (current and in progress) with each other prior to the symposium, via a Slack channel and Google Docs. They also shared information on their work during a lightning talk round as examples of the kinds of humanistic projects 3D/VR/AR could cultivate. The symposium began and ended with keynotes from experienced practitioners whose work modeled creative and responsible uses of the technologies.

Our opening keynote speaker, Angel Nieves (Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities at San Diego State University), presented “Developing a Social Justice Framework for Immersive Technologies in Digital Humanities.” Nieves’s talk outlined strategies for achieving social justice through digital-supported inquiry, highlighting his own work on Mapping Soweto, a 3D reconstruction of apartheid South Africa. Nieves emphasized the need to ground digital work in women of color theory and argued that fields such as ethnic studies have developed a foundational structure that would benefit the field of digital humanities as a whole:

If we brought the sorts of methodological and practice-based questions about power, privilege, and access from ethnic studies to our work in immersive technologies, we might begin to see new ways of harnessing these tools–that originated as part of the military industrial complex–to serve our social justice needs. (Nieves 2019)

Mapping Soweto draws from Belinda Robtnett’s (1997) work on social movement theory, revealing the often messy, multilayered narratives of social movements by visualizing a map of spatial liberation. This 3D representation shows what Nieves terms an “intersectional cartography,” or a network of social activists–especially networks of women and young girls–across townships “and how those activist networks were embedded into the physical geography and vernacular architecture of individual houses, streets, and neighborhoods” (Nieves 2019). Attention to intersectionality further reveals the ways multiple identities–township, gender, sexual orientation, class, and race–came together to form a cohesive activist movement, whose complexities are often lost in the official retelling of history. In particular, Nieves identified immersive technologies as one way to “re-establish coalition-building potential” (2019) with local communities and reminded us that the important work of recovering marginalized histories for social justice is often messy.

Figure 1.

Figure 2. Angel Nieves presents, “Developing a Social Justice Framework for Immersive Technologies in Digital Humanities” at the Immersive Pedagogy symposium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsJQg69nB90&list=PLbkhiRA2P3qIPV5hrdVmIwWN3lcEiKzy8

Our closing keynote speaker, Juliette Levy (Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside), presented “How Not to be a Replicant: Working Towards a Useful VR.” Working with a team of women programmers, Levy has developed VR simulations for teaching abstract concepts related to historical thinking, interpretation, and writing. Levy’s keynote presentation focused on the question of gaming and interactivity; and she traced the origin of her experimentations in VR from teaching large lecture classes numbering in the hundreds in hybrid and online courses. Rather than approach VR in the mode of cultural heritage projects, reproducing a historical location, to deal with pedagogical problems commonly experienced in online learning, Levy’s team built Digital Zombies, an abstract simulation meant to introduce students through game-based learning to the hierarchy of library information and assessment of primary and secondary resources. Levy envisioned a VR environment for her historical research methods class that not only encouraged students to follow a written outline of research steps, but to extend their library experience in a more immersive, playful way by completing a series of game-like missions related to research that students would be more likely to remember. Levy argued that the cognitive effect of a VR experience has a lasting impact on users: “What matters about doing something in VR isn’t about what happens in VR, but what happens outside of VR, after the VR experience” (Levy 2019). Yet, despite the advantages of VR, Levy warned that a lack of critical conversation and pedagogy around digital literacy can have dire consequences, as increasingly ubiquitous immersive technologies become exploited to misrepresent historical events. The stakes for fomenting critical conversations between technology creators, consumers, and scholars, therefore, are quite high, as they could have lasting effects on how people choose to build and interpret virtual representations of historical events and people.

Figure 3. Juliette Levy presents “How Not to be a Replicant: Working Towards a Useful VR” at the Immersive Pedagogy symposium.

The symposium included five workshops that centered theory, methods, and practices significant to and capable of incubating pedagogy related to US Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies, which we prioritized when considering applicants. The workshop topics were: 1) Decolonial Methodology and Theory, 2) Accessible Immersive Pedagogy, 3) Integrating Immersive Technology in the Classroom, 4) Critical Writing for Immersive Tech, and 5) Collaboratively Designing 3D/VR Experiences. The Immersive Pedagogy organizers, joined by Jasmine Clark (Temple University) and Juliette Levy, led the participants through these interactive workshops (“Program” 2019). Pedagogical content crafted by participants before, during, and after the symposium included a bibliography of 3D/VR/AR-related readings, an archive of workshop slides, video recordings of keynote presentations, adaptable templates for pedagogical activities, and working models of 3D/VR/AR pedagogical applications. For example, Kat Hayes and Samantha Porter submitted a video walkthrough of their IOS app Virtual MISLS that explores historic buildings at Fort Snelling, while Meaghan Moody and Carol Salmon submitted a description of their work with students using a virtual map of historic Paris to better understand life under German occupation during World War II.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Libraries hosts the symposium’s materials on its institutional repository, Kilt Hub. Kilt Hub provides stable, long-term global open access storage for 3D/VR/AR assets, and functional applications, as well as pedagogical and technical documentation. Materials in this repository are held for a minimum of ten years, ensuring that what is submitted will remain available past typical terms of software updates. The teaching materials produced during and following the symposium will also be published in the Digital Library Federation’s Pedagogy Working Groups open-access series, the DLF Teach Toolkit. The materials will be revised and tested, including during a pre-conference workshop at DLF’s Annual Forum 2020.

Figure 4. Immersive Pedagogy Symposium participants in discussion.

The following essay sections explore the key components of the symposium, which outlined the theoretical foundations to decolonizing development and curation of 3D/VR/AR tech. Before guiding participants through workshops on decolonial critique and accessible design, on integrating immersive technology into the classroom and beyond, and on collaboratively designing 3D/VR projects.

Decolonial Foundations: Critical Approaches to the Development and Curation of 3D/VR/AR Technologies

To practically introduce the decolonial methodologies and theories crucial to our workshops on developing and curating 3D/VR/AR materials, the Immersive Pedagogy Symposium opened with a workshop, led by Gauthereau and Youngon the “walkthrough method” (Light, et. al. 2018, 881-900), a critical analysis of technology using the Unity Asset Store as an example. This exercise was contextualized through a theory of decolonial pedagogy and a discussion on the critical analysis of the game platforms that curate content for 3D modeling and representation.

Coding Exercises Reflection

When I first looked at the amount of work that is involved in this assignment with coding, which I have never done before, I was daunted by the lot of sections and the multiple pieces each section had. Because of this, I tried to break it up by doing two to three sections each day so I wouldn’t tire myself out too much with an overload of new coding information. It took me a little bit to comprehend each of the sections as this is all new information to me. But after a couple of try-it-yourself attempts I started picking up on how the whole coding thing works. Each section wasn’t overly hard but the challenging part was properly writing the necessary coding where and how it was supposed to be. I found it especially hard with the quotations as my mind is so accustomed to typing as if it were in sentence format, but the spacing and breaks in the coding section felt unnatural. I was able to overcome this the more I did it and just had to really make sure I was using the proper spacing and punctuation that worked, even if it looked a little off in my head. I think if I were to be given a refresher course on what exactly a company wanted me to do with coding, putting these HTML applications on my resume isn’t a too far off thought. But if it were simply off knowledge already possessed, I think I would struggle trying to apply those exercises to real applications if I were asked to. Though I’m not to secure in my abilities as of now, looking into improving my skills is a possibility for the future as I know that these skills are becoming increasingly desirable and having a sister who works in systems engineering, I see first hand how valued that is and how complex it can be.

Usability Poster

dyslexic poster 3

For my usability poster, I chose to focus on those who live with dyslexia and overcome those every day challenges. For dyslexic people, they struggle with being able to properly process what their eyes are trying to send to the brain. This can manifest in different ways, some are simply just reading the words, others can be through sound and sometimes it is even the struggle know left from right. In this piece, the focus will be on dyslexia that causes the reader to see letters and words move around and become a jumbled mess. Following this will be ways in which websites can effectively design websites to help those individuals out a little.

When looking at the Greenspring Review(GSR) website, initially it does a good job of being dyslexic friendly. The single big image in the middle of the screen along with the title in the left hand corner and the navigation bar in the right corner, clean and simple. And the navigation bar continues that idea, it is short and sweet in regards to the amount of text used, which is important for dyslexic users in particular. This applies to Hick’s Law, which states, “When the users are overwhelmed with options, they may as well not choose anything at all” (2019). This is certainly applicable to dyslexic users as if they can’t read the options, they will move on. The site also uses the basic design of using black text against a white background, which is the easiest for dyslexic users as this provides great contrast for the text. They also do a good job of making the titles for the pieces bold, all capitalized, and in a bigger sized font. Allowing the dyslexic users to easily identify what is supposed to be the titles and know what else is supposed to be the description. Another very helpful aspect to the site that often gets overlooked is the amount of spacing between the lines of text. In the GSR they use good spacing between lines that allows the reader to easily track which line of text they are on, and especially for those with dyslexia, it is important for them to be distinguishably separated. The last positive of the poster concerning the GSR is the fact that they used a consistent two column layout throughout the site. Like stated in the do’s and don’ts article particularly for dyslexia, “keep a consistent layout” (2016). Having a set format makes it easy for dyslexic users to navigate the site when everything is constant and aren’t being inundated with style changes. But at the same time, the GSR does have some flaws that wouldn’t be too favorable for those with dyslexia. First one being the fact that their font color for the description of pieces is way too faint. The site uses a light gray font color against a white background and in a smaller sized font too. This is difficult for the average user as it doesn’t stand out against the background very much, but is especially troublesome for those with dyslexia as those letters begin to blend together since they’re so light. And to piggyback off this, the smaller font of the descriptions and tags are also a challenge for dyslexic users to efficiently browse through and read about pieces of work the site has to offer. Next, depending on the screen being used to view the GSR, there are way too many words for one screen at a time. When visiting the site on the Macs, there are six pieces of work visible at a time when scrolling down the section. Even for me, someone without dyslexia, I feel like I can’t decide where to start reading first, meaning the sea of words is even worse for those that are afflicted. And lastly, the about section on the site is helter skelter and the text wrapping around the poorly placed images creates a difficult reading layout. By the bottom of the page, the spacing between lines is not consistent and the breaks in descriptions are hard to decipher between a break in someone’s own bio opposed to moving on to a whole other person.

As I started to come up with my approach for the poster, I wanted to try and make it as though the poster was split in half and each side represents the good and bad. So for that reason that is how I chose the layout for doing two columns. And then in the title I wanted to reflect the sides by making parts of the title on the right side reflect bad designs for those with dyslexia as the bright colors would be difficult for them to read. The same reasoning is applied as to why I chose to make the word “bad” red, to be indicative of how the changing colors is unappealing to those with dyslexia. I also added an image of one of those tests that are used to indicate that a real user is not a computer bot. The text has a wavy effect on it and has a line through it, which really makes it a struggle for someone with that impairment to decipher. Outside of that, I wanted the poster to be telling of what dyslexic people appreciate, which is why it is a fairly bland poster, not to pull their attention away from what’s important.

Work Cited

Pun, K. (2016, September 2). Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility. Retrieved from https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/

Tyrkiel, K. (2019). 7 Psychological Principles for Better UX. Retrieved from https://livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/

Accessibility Article Summary

For my summary from the list of articles, I chose “The Embodied Classroom: Deaf Gain in Multimodal Composition and Digital Studies”. This article challenges the thought that being deaf in school is a hindrance, but rather he thinks it is advantageous in ways. Through the lack of hearing, deaf people are better able at reading body language and other nonverbal cues that hearing people don’t focus on because they are relying on the audible factors to comprehend. An example used in the article of hearing getting in the way of learning is when teachers have students read aloud, because the focus is on listening to how the reader sounds, the students listening don’t fully comprehend and retain what is actually being said. And this issue happens in other aspects of learning that are heavily dependent on listening, like when a teacher gives a lecture. If the students are solely relying on listening to the speech, they can lose focus and lose sight of the important points of the lecture without proper body language. Deaf people use their bodies and faces to express a tone change when telling a story or in everyday conversation. Hearing people rely on their voices to portray their tones, which weakens their ability to fully convey a message in the in-depth way a deaf person can. In her own teaching style, Leeann, the author, uses nonverbal skits to aid her audible teaching as she sees it as a way to keep the students focused on how the information is being shared along with the information itself. And having both senses, sight and hearing, working together to encode the material being taught to them leads to better learning than just relying on hearing.

Greenspring Review Analysis

Team 3: https://greenspringreview.art.blog/

Good Aspects:

Has a”What’s New?” section on their homepage, this is helpful because it allows users to see new content right away as they enter the page.
Featured pieces are also beneficial as this keeps the site refreshing with new pieces to read or a new artist to look at.
The subscribe function allows fans of the site to get new content sent directly to them, building their connection to the different users.
Multiple ads for upcoming events on campus is helpful for students who want to become more involved in different activities and get all the information about it right there.
Along with the navigation bar, there is also a side bar further down the page which acts as a more focused navigation bar for other functions on their site.

Could Use Improvement:

The header image is low quality and the blurry text is very unpleasing to the eyes as it is difficult to read on the screen.
The aesthetic of the page is very minimalist and feels as though someone didn’t put a lot time into the color scheme to make it more appealing.
Navigation bar at the top of the site is very short and doesn’t have a drop down function to be able to focus your search beyond the given titles.
After clicking on the issues tab, there are only two options for either fall or spring of 2019 with a very generic photo which doesn’t give the user a hint about what they may find within those issues.
Homepage is very short and doesn’t offer a lot of content for the user to look at upon entering the site, not indicative of what else the site has to offer.

Team 2: https://jennaaye.wordpress.com/

Good Aspects:

Right away, once entering the site you are met with the logo and title of the website with a very short description of the website, good brand identification
Logo is unique and open to interpretation to the user, reflective of the versatile content there is to discover on the site.
Homepage has featured pieces from different types of content like journalism, creative writing, and visual art.
Simple and clean layout of the page which makes it very easy for the user to navigate the site with ease and no distraction from unnecessary clutter.
Within the navigation bar, the Issues tab has a drop down function so you can expedite finding the type of content you want.

Could Use Improvement:

A lot of negative space on the homepage, makes it feel empty and unfinished, despite it having the proper information one would expect on a homepage.
Categorical dividers and the titles for pieces are both in black text, though one is bold and the other is underlined, it doesn’t give an immediate indication of which is which.
The descriptions of articles is hard to read as the font is quite small comparatively to the other text that is used, and the light gray color doesn’t stand out very well against the white background.
When clicking on the archives subsection in the Issues tab in the navigation bar, you have to click on another link to be able to access it, not very user friendly as it creates an unnecessary step for the user.
The About tab is very vague and doesn’t answer a lot of questions that a new user could have, and the quotes from the editors feels like a hollow introduction to the new people coming to their site.

Team 1: https://thegreenspringreview.art.blog/

Good Aspects:

The logo is very unique and is reflective of the sites identity as it has the oak leaf from Stevenson’s tree, the oak tree, in an inkwell signifying the openness to writing anything.
The search bar function is important since sometimes students come on looking for a friend’s piece and instead of having to sift through all the content, they can search the writers name or title of the piece.
The incorporation of Stevenson colors into the site is refreshing and makes the site feel like it is attached to the school, as it should.
Main text box on the homepage as the newest content they have released on display so it is easy for new and returning users to see what the site has most recently dropped.
After clicking on the Issues tab in the navigation bar, the user has the option between spring or fall 2020 pieces, and those titles of a drop down function to further narrow your search for which pieces you are looking for.

Could Use Improvement:

The siding of the site, the book shelf, is too big and feels like it is taking too much attention from the content the site is offering.
Only one piece of content is on display on the homepage, not giving new users a lot to look at when entering.
In the short stories portion of the spring 2020 issue, the pieces are only title and author, a description is helpful for users to know whether that piece would interest them or not beyond an attention grabbing title.
No imagery to go along with the selection of pieces with the issues tab, makes the page feel dull and allows for the users attention to be pulled elsewhere.
For the Art section within the issues tab, the font is light gray for both the title and the author’s name, making it harder to read as it blends in with the light gray background it is placed on.

Livesession UX Summary

Kalina. (2019, December). 7 Psychological Principles for Better UX. Retrieved from https://livesession.io/blog/7-psychological-principles-for-better-ux/

After looking through the various articles on the website livesession, which serves to be a center for various tips to help people create better user experiences with their sites. In the article I chose, it focuses on several different ways to use psychology to the developers benefit. This stood out to me as I took a psychology class in high school my senior year and have been interested in it ever since.

When starting to make a website, UX designers have endless colorways, layouts, and aesthetics to choose from. Using these psychological tricks explained in the article serve as a good guiding point to create an effective site. One trick in particular out of the list related to my rhetorical analysis, the law of figure/ground, which says that the brain either determines things as figures to focus on are whether things are the background. This relates to the decision of colors for obviously the background and then the text that the designer decides to go with. A decision like this is very important as the goal is to make the text stand out and is easy for the user to decipher as information warranting their attention to read it. Another one off the list that also stands out is the principle of least effort, meaning that users are attracted to interfaces that require minimal effort out of them to use the site. Focusing on the users attention span, making the site well organized and not cluttered with various bits of information or attention grabbing animations is to the UX designers benefit.

Along with the two tricks I mentioned above, this list is helpful for the Greenspring review when deciding on how to structure their site. Making the site friendly on the user’s eyes and using text that pops out and easily distinguishable from the background is an important place to start.

The Paris Review Analysis

Script:

For my rhetorical analysis, I will be focusing on the spatial aspect of the Paris Review. When first arriving at the homepage of the Paris Review, the user is met with this screen. Right off the bat, the navigation bar is the same color as the rest of the screen, which makes it harder to recognize that it is in fact the navigation bar. Though the website does a good job of breaking down their content into neat categories, the minimalist nature of the design looks too bland when first entering the site. And when having new users coming to your page, it is important for them to be able to immediately recognize important features of a website such as the navigation bar.

As you scroll down, there is a daily, rotating text block that has featured pieces for the day along with a picture for each piece. Having this daily aspect is good because it brings new content to the users attention each day that they come to the site. But past that there is a two column stack of articles to grab users attention to different pieces. Though the titles are in black text which sticks out from the white background, and are accompanied with pictures related to the article, below them are short synopses of the different articles but in pale gray text. Even as a young person with good vision, I feel as though I need to strain my eyes to read the faint text against the white background. The pink accent of the website is also unfavorable to the readers eyes as it is distracting because it is so bright but isn’t always pulling your attention to something of importance.

Now, taking a deeper look into the site, when clicking on the letters and essays portion within the reviews category of the navigation bar, this is what you are met with, a daily letters and essays text block. which functions similarly to the other daily featured part from the homepage, keeps the website fresh and up to date. But the color of the light gray text is too dull in comparison with the pale blue background. Here, using white text or continuing with the black color text, like in the titles, would have been better and easier for users to read. Then, next to this block is a neat index for the year and the authors name of various letters and essays. This is a good addition to the website as it allows users to efficiently find pieces of work that they are looking for. Along with this, the black text goes well with the white background and is easy to read. After the daily feature, there is a single column of letters and essays titles’ going down the rest of the page. Again, they use black text for the titles, which is easy and pleasant for the user, but continue with the light gray text for the synopses below each title. Though there is less pink here, which makes scrolling through and reader each title easier, the pale gray text is still difficult on the eyes for quick reading.

Yet, in comparison when looking at the Guernica website, the aesthetic of the page’s layout is much more soothing on the eyes. And the black background of the navigation bar makes it stand out and easy for users to identify right away what it’s purpose is. Though this site does not have a daily feature like the Paris Review, it does however do a better job with the display of their articles. They sized it so for the first couple the user only sees that article’s title, description, and an image to go along with it. Then as you scroll down it breaks into a one row, three column article suggestion with images and black text below it, which is easy to read. After that it goes to a single stack of articles with the black text next to an accompanying image for the piece. Overall, This site is more efficient at getting their main points across and in a visually pleasing manor too.

Rhetorical Analysis:

The Paris Review is a website for the dedicated and invested fans of the art world, one could even say they are the so called “one percent” of the art world. These are people who are well versed in the arts and come to this site for information regarding the niche world of higher-class arts. But the website tries so hard to cater to this audience through the design of their page that go overboard with it. So much so that their attempt pulls attention away from the important content they have to showcase. Such content that they have to offer includes interviews, podcasts, reviews, and much more. Which makes the Paris Review a good source for information for the niche group they are trying to garner attention from. But, even though the Paris Review has a lot of information and content, the layout of the website is distracting and pulls the users attention in too many directions.

Upon first entering the website, the home page is done is such a minimalist fashion that it almost comes off as unfinished. The navigation bar blends into the background it is the same white as the background, which is counter productive as that should stick out for newcomers to immediately draw their attention to. However, despite the flaw in visual, the navigation bar does effectively do its job in breaking down the categories of content offered on the site into relevant categories. Below the navigation bar, there is a rectangular text box that is half image and the other half are titles of featured pieces for the day. The images rotate with the different titles as it cycles through to show the user what is offered. This function is very good as it keeps the website feeling fresh through suggesting different material each day. But past that are small square images with a title and description below them. The use of the images to grab the user’s attention towards that piece is beneficial as multimodal content is important for keeping the intrigue of users. Yet, the use of the light gray color for the text below the articles is a strain in readers’ eyes. Because of the white background, the faint color of the writing is hard to read unless the user really focuses their vision on those words. Along with that visual mistake, their use of the bright pink as the accent for the website is distracting from the content. Due to the attention-grabbing nature of neon colors like the pink used in the site, the color constantly pulls the users focus all over the page as it stands out in their peripheral vision. And even after going deeper into the website and looking at the letters and essays portion under their review’s category, the issue continues. In their daily featured section, similar to the one on their home page, the square text box has a pale blue background and is accompanied by light gray text. Here, the issue of the user needing to strain their eyes just to read the description is prevalent on another occasion.

For further analysis of the Paris Review, I looked at another literary website to see how they designed their page’s layout. The other website that I compared the PR to was Guernica. When arriving at Guernica’s homepage, the aesthetic of the page is immediately more pleasing to the user’s eye. The navigation bar stands out as it is black against a white background with white text. They also structured their article layout in such a way that for the first couple articles, the article’s image is a big square with the title and description next to it in black text, only showing one at a time. This allows the user to fully take in the content one piece at a time and fully ingest the information at their own pace before moving on to the next piece. This continues to be their style for article layout as you go down the page, besides for one row of articles that contains three of them along with an image and description respectively. And because they can move one piece at a time, it is much less overwhelming compared to the inundated feeling the Paris Review gives as it fits multiple pieces on the screen at a time. Even when clicking on the arts and culture tab in the navigation bar, the most articles they fit in one screen is six. With the format being two rows of three columns with pictures, titles, and descriptions with each of them. And the text below the articles is black, which pops much more with the white background than the light gray color used by the Paris Review. The secondary colors used on Guernica are also a dull maroon like color, accenting the website nicely without drawing an unnecessary amount of attention to it.

The Paris Review aimed for a chic and minimal design for the website to fit their aristocratic fan base but overshot the look and ended up with a distracting aesthetic. Through their use of bright pink as the accent for the site, it is a peripheral distraction that tugs at the users focus when trying to read the content they have provided. They also make the searching process harder on the user by lightening the color of the descriptive writing to light gray when it is against an all while background or a pale blue one. The minimalist design of the site also gives off the idea of lacking consideration to add more color that would better compliment the classy aesthetic they are aiming for. As seen in comparison, the Guernica competently uses accented colors to better the visual component of their site without being over the top. Using more neutral colors, or at least adding more colors to dull the bright pink accent would be in the best interest of the Paris Review.

Reference Page

Leon, A. de, Deshpande, J., Loeb, E., Machado, M. R., Baird, S., Wang, M., … Lutz, T. (2020). The Guernica. Retrieved from https://www.guernicamag.com/

The Paris Review. (2020). Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/

Villager Analysis

When arriving at the home page of The Villager, the pleasing aesthetic of the black and white lay out of the page is the first thing you see. With the name of the website in the upper left-hand corner and in green color is a nice way to accent the website with school colors but not going overboard. Having a clean and organized home page is very important as it will be the deciding factor for a lot of people if they want to keep looking through the site or not. Many people will click off a website if the visual lay out of the home page is too much for them and hurts their eyes. And the clear display of their navigation bar also bodes well for them as it shows newcomers what other subject matter they articles on. The Villager successfully makes their website a user friendly and visually appealing place for people to come to and learn about the good things Stevenson has to offer.

The Villager makes itself a very easy to use domain with a navigation bar easily visible upon entering the site. The bar contains categories that allows the information they must be nicely organized and focused on common topics people come to the site to learn about. Using the sports tab as an example, once clicking on it and entering the subset of the site, the articles are easy on the eyes as it doesn’t bombard the user with a bunch of titles right away. They do a good job of using an image for every article, so it is attention grabbing and gives a quick idea to the user what to expect in the article. The titles are in bold and a slightly larger font than the short synopsis they offer under every article. With this, it is pleasing on the eyes as it is not a brighter color and kept the lay out simple for all users. This is an effective use of multi-modal content as it allows for the user to have an image along with text to gather more information about the article rather than just an image or text.

As a website, The Villager does a good job of using their multi-modal content to better their website for users. By putting images along with articles, they make the site more user friendly with attention grabbing images accompanied by the text to give a preview into the article. This is something that I think more website should do as it garners a better connection the user by incorporating visual aids into commonly just text headlines. They also do a great job of using subtle colors that compliment one another well without trying to use too much of the green that is associated with the website.