Audience Choice Award Winners

Christian Arthur: “Chalkboard Ghosts” (Digital Photography) 
Undergraduate Winner
This project began with an impulse to make meaning out of partially erased chalk residue. It presents characters ranging from abstract to anthropomorphic. Humorous, curious, ugly, animalistic, they tease us into considering the multitude of sentences, equations, and symbols that grace school chalkboards over time. Lessons “live” their purpose, are smudged, then forever disappear.

Kelly Danckert: “Digital Culture and a Changing Media” (Webtext)
Undergraduate Winner
This project aims to explore the factors that are contributing to our changing reading habits in a digital world and what the news industry is doing to accommodate that and keep subscribers reading.

Lewis Feuer: “Annotation/Meditation (Waves)” (Web Archive)
Graduate Winner
Built as an ongoing web archive in conjunction with a feature length video project of the same name, “Annotation/Mediation (Waves)” collects ocean waves captured off the beaches of Block Island, RI. The archive traces the physical encounter with the wave into the fluid digital “dynarchive” (to borrow a term from Wolgang Ernst).

Undergraduate Student Projects

Jacob Aguiar: “Project 2: Remediation” (Video)

The goal of this video is to re-mediate the experience of riding a bicycle. The song and the audio book are meant to compensate for the sensations and experiences that could not be truly re-mediated. They are meant to demonstrate the freedom the mind has to explore when the conscious body is preoccupied.

Nicole Carpenter: “Power Combo“ (Blog)

This blog was created as a multimedia project for Advanced Non-Fiction Writing in the summer of 2014. I chose to focus on writing about video games from a diverse and inclusive perspective. The blog includes videos reviews, stories, and opinion pieces on race, gender, and sexuality in video games.

Bryan Kreusch: “The Circus School” (Multimedia Feature)

This project is intended to showcase the story of a local person and illustrate the type of creative and recreational avenues available to people they might not otherwise know about. It will also hopefully appeal to a larger audience outside of the Boston area by serving as an introduction into circus arts in general.

Kelley LaMan: “Digital In The Classroom: What’s Happening When We Give Wifi to Students” (Blog)

This blog explores what digital technology–specifically smartphones–means for students learning in classrooms. The blog takes up the question from a variety of perspectives: interviews with professors, commentary on articles on the topic, and government initiatives to incorporate technology into curricula.
Douglas Maccaferri: “The Hole in One” (Audio Short)

The goal of my project is to showcase how much some things can mean to people that may seem trivial to others. Some may scoff at a sport that is “old and slow,” but to others like myself, it contains a certain kind of beauty that is exemplified by its most hallowed of feats. It’s a sport that creates memories, and the retelling of hole-in-one tales and stories from the course shows how we are all  connected by a love of the game.

Joseph Mathias: “Advertising and Allston: The generation of ad culture” (Photo Essay)

This photo essay is about the effects of advertising in local communities. While the video is running, I narrate with a more traditionally constructed essay explaining background information about advertising in general, and I reach conclusions about the methods of advertising the unexpected consequences.
Casandra Najdul: “Merita”  (Audio Short)

This audio story focuses on another female veteran’s personal memories and life experiences as a veteran. I took the nearly hour long oral history interview and condensed it into a four minute “essence narrative” about being a female in the military. This involved taking short clips from the interview and piecing them back together in a way that creates a new mini story out of the overall essence of the original interview.

Ngan Nguyen: “North of the Border”  (Audio Short)

This story is how an undocumented immigrant made his way to America. The story tries to show how American citizenship—something many people take for granted—is what some others have lived for and died for. Produced in Writing for Print and Online Media,” Fall 2014.

Jaran Stallbaum: “Clearing the Clouds: A Working Digital Narrative” (Blog)

My project shows a short story being written from start to finish, and how all the pieces come together in the most unpredictable (and ridiculous) of orders.

Cady Vishniac: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Alien” (PowerPoint)

My digital literacy narrative explores the desire for companionship in social media, how social media motivated me as entrepreneur, and describes the realization that companies in journalism and related fields would pay me to be an efficient and knowledgeable Internet citizen.

Sarah Yellamaty: “Southpaw Alliance” (Website)

The main goal of this project was to build a community amongst a minority. It was designed primarily to target a left-handed audience, but anyone who is interested can tune in. There are fun facts, statistics, and a ton of links and really cool graphics that give the site life.

Graduate Student Projects

Theresa Dietrich: “Swing Digital Story” (Digital Story)

This video is a digital story combining photographs, voiceover, and footage which reflects on memories of my Uncle Pete. The voiceover narrates one memorable anecdote, and the on-screen typing that appears simultaneously reveals other, related, and competing stories.

Emily Jaeger: “Window Cat Press” (Web Zine/Tumblr)

Window Cat Press introduces emerging writers to the literary community. We work closely with promising writers to revise their pieces and we use our tumblr to direct our readers to resources for emerging writers. Our goal is that Window Cat Press will not only showcase seller literature by the best emerging writers, but that it will put emerging writers in communication with each other.

Rachel Meter: “Oldest Memories From The Boston T”  (Audio Archive/Remix)

I spent several hours riding the “T” and recording passengers sharing their oldest memories. Using the audio files, I wove these “T” riders’ stories together by overlapping common phrases between them. The product is this “Oldest Memories from the ‘T'” audio project—a digital composition of clips from each gathered story and formed into a completely new narrative.

Caleb Nelson: “What Happened at Camp Bucca on June 9, 2007?” (Audio Short)

A veteran at UMB shares his experience as a guard at Camp Bucca, a military prison located in southern Iraq, near the Persian Gulf. This podcast took shape in Prof. Erin Anderson’s class, Oral History and the Veteran Experience and comes condensed to you from our class interviews, which will be archived in the Healey Library.

Catherine Shaw: “Chimpanzees in the Entertainment Industry” (Video)

This project features archival video and audio footage of chimpanzees performing in a 1950s circus act. Throughout this video are audio clips from interviews with primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as interviews of other animal rights activists and philosophers. The video footage has been  fragmented and video clips have been moved out of order, slowed down, or sped up at  various points for desired effect. The clips used seek to work in ironic juxtaposition with the original video content and raise questions surrounding “speciesism,” keeping wild animals in captivity, and the use of such animals for human entertainment and profit.

Faculty Projects

“What Hadn’t Happened” (Multimedia Memoir)
Erin Anderson, Assistant Professor

In April 1934, my grandma’s sister Gloria drowned in a wash boiler on the family farm in northwest Minnesota. Gloria was 18 months old. My grandma Olive was not quite three. She was the only one there when it happened. This is the story of what happened after—the story of a story my grandma couldn’t forget, but could somehow forgive—told and retold in words, images, and voices.

“Expanding the Available Means of Composing: Three Sites of Inquiry” (Scholarly Webtext)
Matthew Davis, Assistant Professor

This born-digital academic article takes on Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric–“what are the available means of persuasion in a given situation?”– and, using three case studies across different digital and physical spaces, refocuses the question on “the available means of composing.”

“Postcard 2.0” (Scholarly Blog)
Alex Mueller, Assistant Professor

“Postcard 2.0” was the blog for two UMB courses, one held at Boston Public Library called “Social Networking in the Scriptorium” (Spr. 2014) and another held at the University of Bologna in Italy called “From Bologna to Blogosphere” (Summer 2014). This blog served three purposes: 1. As a platform for discussion of course readings; 2. as a “scribal” record of classroom activities and excursions; and 3. as a host to a digital exhibition of archival materials. Both courses were focused on the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the premodern epistle to the digital retweet.