Research

Serge Bouchardon's Ability to Engage Our Senses

Digital literature and electronic poetry allow for an individualistic experience for a reader to obtain while reading, watching, listening, and even interacting with these genres. A vast amount, not inherently all, of e-poetry, would lose its meaning if it were transferred to a piece of paper and printed. The beauty of the internet and electronics is that readers can navigate and explore these digital medias at their own pace and explore what intrigues them. Some works of electronic poetry require reader engagement and interactivity to further progress the poem and learn its hidden meanings. French poet Serge Bouchardon’s poems, “Toucher,” “Loss of Grasp,” and “Do It,” utilize a mix of digital elements, poetry, and sound to engage the reader with interactive poems and explore a select few of our senses: sight, hearing, and touch.

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Three-Ingredient TikTok Recipes: A Usability and Accessibility Study

Recipe sharing has been an ongoing occurrence for centuries, trading notes, tricks, and ideas verbally or written in church or family cookbooks, miscellaneous notecards, or an unsent email draft. Cooking shows and recipe blogs began circulating once the internet was born, providing faster communication and food sharing. With so much technology at our fingertips, it’s a wonder how people are still creating shareable content that is not accessible to all people. Social media users have the technology accessible to them, many platforms having the option to write captions, add text, or include a voiceover so that it can reach a larger audience, and yet people are still ignorant. Most of these recipes will lack usability simply because they are quick and simple, and nothing is fully explained. It’s hard to bake when a recipe is difficult to follow, limiting who can rely on it or making it illegible for anyone coming across it. My goal with this case study is to see how practical and tasty these “three-ingredient” recipes are, whether or not they are only three ingredients, and analyze the delivery in which they are being shared through voice-over, caption, or text. This study aims to determine whether or not these recipes are accurate in their marketing, if they’re user-friendly, and how they can be improved.

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Ambiguity and Coping Mechanisms: The Dubious Consent in Richard Wright's “Long Black Song”

Richard Wright’s book Uncle Tom’s Children contains multiple short stories depicting life for black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. This novella sheds light on the issues that the black community continued to face regarding racism, discrimination, and oppression. Each short story has a central theme encompassed within it. However, looking at Wright’s story “Long Black Song,” a questionable scene occurs between a black woman and a white man that creates a sense of ambiguity due to its vagueness. Personally, this initial read-through felt like there could only be one explanation: that Sarah was raped. However, her behavior contradicts our idea of how a survivor—someone who has been sexually assaulted—would behave after the fact. The sexual encounter between the black woman, Sarah, and the white man is ambiguously consensual or non-consensual, with some scholars attempting to discover Wright’s reasoning, if it was intentional or not.

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Complicating Derrida's Notion of Nudity in Nature through an Analysis of The Epic of Gilgamesh and “The Boy and The Deer”

In Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” he argues that animals cannot experience nudity in the same way that humans do. Animals are unaware of their nakedness since nudity does not exist in nature. The concept of clothing, which conceals our bodies, can be traced back to biblical descriptions of Adam and Eve. Our consciousness about nudity and wearing clothes distinguishes us as “human” rather than animals. In his book, Derrida examines the differences between humans and animals. He argues that animals cannot experience nudity and, therefore, do not experience shame like humans. However, two older texts, The Epic of Gilgamesh and “The Boy and The Deer,” offer counter-examples that complicate Derrida's approach to nudity and what separates us from animals.

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YouTube Persona Shane Dawson and His Political, Rhetorical Representation

The exponential growth in social media influencers has created an environment that allows low-grade “celebrities” to share and document their lives with their followers. However, due to an influx of people trying to become breakthrough influencers, the urge to be the most “unique” or “real” content creator grows as well. Everyone wishes to stand out, especially those with a high social media presence. These influencers put their lives on public display, placing them in uncomfortable or foreign circumstances to gain “views” or turning their private spheres into a public spectacle by documenting their daily lives. Many influencers aim to market themselves as relatable content creators, but the reality is that the majority of these established influencers are much wealthier than they claim to be. By using a new materialist perspective and an aim to flush out the discourse behind the growing blur of our private and public spears, Dawson and his channel can be analyzed to discover ways in which social media influencers draw in their audience and establish a performative persona, creating a cover for their true selves.

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Visual Culture: Robert Mapplethorpe and the First Amendment

As stated in the name, visual culture is a set of images that holds key importance, resemblance, or meaning to a particular culture. These images may share commonalities with other cultures or societies. Still, these differences and distinctions are important to consider when analyzing works of art, literature, film, images, etc., to allow thorough exploration without our biased cultural assumptions. Learning about various cultural concepts —including cultural processes, personal and cultural awareness, and the role of context—intercultural interactions and representation is extremely important to consider when interacting with a piece of media that is derived from a culture, society, or history not native to your own. Visual culture allows for the study and analysis of images through an exploration of the cultural influences and significance reflected from within them to open a gateway to exploration.

CONTENT WARNING: Mention of nudity, sexually explicit images

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Multigenre Writing Project: Vincent van Gogh

This project is intended to inform you, the reader, about the wonderful life of Vincent van
Gogh... kind of. The post-Impressionist painter had a rough childhood, feeling as if he was a disappointment to his parents for not being able to fill his recently deceased older brother’s shoes. He tried numerous times to bond with his father, to create a relationship, though his efforts were for naught. Being the song of a priest, van Gogh assumed that going to church, praying, and learning to become a priest himself would make his father proud, though the attempts at creating a father-son relationship had ended. Fortunately, the artist had a positive relationship with his brother, the two staying in touch regardless of van Gogh’s whereabouts via letter. Van Gogh’s life was riddled with depressive episodes, even being sent to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum twice to help the distressed artist; however, van Gogh’s mental health never improved. It never improved, even after self-mutilation and staying at the asylum. The artist’s life ended at the hands of diseases and infection from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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Virtual Intimacy and the Persuasive Powers of Social Media Influencers Through Social Media

Social media is a helpful tool for connecting people worldwide. Because social media acts as a mode of communication, it is crucial to understand how rhetorical strategies develop parasocial relationships—a one-sided emotional connection— between viewers and content creators. How we interact with social media contributes to our visual culture, yet our collective reliance on the internet and social media platforms can alter our perceptions. This is often attributed to how viewers, consumers, and producers interact with themselves and social media influencers (SMIs)—people who have established reputations and regularly post on social media to uphold their status. These content creators and influencers utilize rhetorical strategies, even if unconsciously, to gain followers, interactions, and popularity. SMIs equip rhetorical strategies to create a bond, a connection between themselves and their audience. Their audience can range from targeted followers and viewers to others they may try to relate to and welcome into their social sphere. By creating a personable, friendly, and welcoming persona, SMIs can gain popularity, turning their private lives into public speculation. Some SMIs are even granted special attributes such as monetization—payment for advertisements, promotions, and subscriptions. Through connections with their audience, SMIs welcome a new label such as “micro-celebrity,” which implies that SMIs are a step above typical social media users while still having a lower status than high-ranking celebrities. To maintain their connections and status with their audiences, SMIs may unconsciously develop gateways through their social media engagement that welcome the development of parasocial relationships. These relationships are one-sided and seemingly harmless; however, through the persuasive power of social media, the reliance on these influencers can be detrimental to social media users.

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