Production of Visual Texts as a Form of Analysis

Assignment

[Note: This oral assignment is intentionally vague to allow you to enter in different places. I also want you to run into questions and bumps so that we can think more about the questions your students will raise when you give assignments.]

Go to the CIA World Fact Book. Find list of countries. Each link has similar information: a map, background, geography, people, etc. Do some comparisons between countries. Sketch out some sort of layout using anything you want (photos, illustrations, etc.) that makes an argument about the best country for raising children right now. Use at least 5 pieces of data.

Questions in Doing the Assignment

How did you explain the purpose of this assignment to yourself so that you could choose among possible approaches to completing it? (The assignment intentionally didn't give a clear purpose.)

• Persuassion (to get someone to relocate)
• Making something that looked good visually that would highlight the data, but the data wasn't all that important.
• Switched from an emphasis on data to how to raise children
• Persuassion, but only for a select audience. Choose a match of country with audience. E.g. Denmark with Minnesota Lutherans.
• I didn't like the source and so interpretted the purpose as having nothing to do with the specific source.

What decisions, judgments, or choices did you make in order to complete the assignment?

• What information do I choose to present and not present? Are those choices ethical?
• What is the best way to quickly present the information? Text, table, creating graphics?
• To what degree do I tell an explicit story?
• What colors do I use?
• What images (pictures) do I choose to "background" and why?
• Because I didn't like the source, I "violated" the assignment and went to a different source.
• I narrowed in on a specific audience.
• I focussed on the adults (what makes them happy in a place raising kids) rather than on the children themselves (what would actually make for a good environment for the kids).
• Our cultural, gender, and other background characteristics repeatedly affected our choices.

What frustrations did you encounter in doing this assignment?

• Does this source have the information I want? Is it unbiased?
• The time spent on production tasks left less time for analysis. (form vs. content)
• I didn't feel that I had the space to hash out the ethical issues involved
• The answer is arbitrary so I don't need to get hung up on the selection process.
• The emphasis in on the visual so I can spend less effort on collecting/analyzing the data
• It isn't really about what's best (since we can't compare allcountries). I just need to make an argument that this country isgood.
• I was able to construct arguments for all sorts of places--arguments that looked pretty good--even though the arguments were ultimately faulty. That made me uncomfortable.
• Even if I had the data I really wanted, it would have been very labor-intensive to get that data out of the source given the website's construction.
• I felt like I could slapdash this together.
• The assignment was so ambiguous that none of us were doing the same assignment.