CodEXposition

Navigating Codexposition Course Tumblr

Welcome to the course blog for the Fall 2018 section of Advanced Exposition at the University of Florida! This course is designed to practice public writing, digital rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Most of the required course assignments and readings are in the schedule. In addition, all required course tools are free for students, including Canva, Arduino, Instructables, Cura, and Tumblr. Assignment prompts and student responses are all tagged and searchable for future educational purposes.

(This course Tumblr is designed as a closed, secondary group blog, meaning that students need a Tumblr account and an invitation to access, and no external replying is allowed.)

Please contact the instructor, Emily Brooks, at emilyfbrooks [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions!

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Posts

- You can scroll through all of the instructor- and student-generated posts in reverse chronological order.

Syllabus- This page has all of the course information including description, goals, policies, and resources

Schedule- This page has a course schedule outline with daily, weekly, and unit topics, links to assignments and readings, and homework (HW) assignments

Archive- This page allows you to view the course posts at a glance; you can select options in the dropdown menu to organize by Month and Filter by Post Type: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video

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Additionally, you can search the posts with the following links:

codexposition.tumblr.com/tagged/<tag>

codexposition.tumblr.com/search/<searchterm>

Activity Tags

Speculative Introduction #gradcap Playdoh Instructions #playdoh Testing Printrbot Plays #3Dprints Bookmaking Activities #bookmaking Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Movable Books Visit #UFlib Post-It Notes Stack Flip Book #postitflipbook Animated GIF #animatedGIF Light Up Paper Circuit Cards #papercircuits Arduino Pseudo Theremin #Arduino

Reading Response Tags

Gamebooks Internet Archive Collection #Chooseyourownadventure Interactive Fiction Theory excerpt “Thinking Into the Box: On the Use and Deployment of Puzzles #Thinkingintothebox Sensing Success, Touch, Tactile Fictions #tactilebooks Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns #criticalmaking Dialogic Objects in the Age of 3-D Printing #dialogicobjects Zines Then and Now #zinesthenandnow The Margins of Print #Marginsofprint Picturebooks #Picturebooks Zoetropes, Phenakistoscopes & Flip-Books Were The Original GIFs #originalGIFs Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday #Bibliocircuitry

Assignment Tags

I signed up to take Advanced Exposition because I believed that it would help me with my expository writing skills that I wanted to develop. I didn’t realize how much this class would expand my knowledge of the formats of books and how to manipulate that format to different extremes. When we worked on the 3D printed books utilizing braille I realized just how important it was to try and understand the codex in a much looser way than our society traditionally defines a book. I realized that only by rejecting the traditional notion of a book would blind children be able to interact with their texts and learn about things in a book they would be otherwise unable to read. A big part of this class was creating things and it was the first English class I have taken at UF that gave me as much creative freedom as I wanted. I really enjoyed learning about how to make new books or read about how some graduate student had subverted the idea of a book by making something that needed to be destroyed to be read. When I think about the value of this class, I always think of the creative process that we constantly used in class. As a writer, I am always trying to get myself into places where I am forced to think of creative solutions that allow me to expand how and what I create. The idea that a book might not be bound by physical space (the interactive fictions we worked with on the computer), might not be bound by a finite space (a series of letters contained within a book), or that it might be something that has moving parts that add new meanings to the text. I knew that some of these aspects of the codex existed prior to taking this class, but I never put all of it together about how meaningful it is to dissect what we know about the construct of books and examine how, as creators, we can move beyond those constraints. The way that we change our definition of books and creative content allows us to create new meaning and interpretations from audiences. A story made of letters is a much more interesting one than the traditional codex allows. Overall, I believe that this class allowed me to see just how important it is to avoid strict categorization of books and I certainly believe that it will help me with my future career. 

This is my FlipBook

I was very excited to take this course after hearing the course’s pitch: “You are being taught to be able to explain a variety of things to a 5 year old.” I always want to find ways to improve my writing and appeal to as wide of an audience as as I possibly can, and the pitch for this course made me really excited to be able to accomplish just that. 

Throughout this course I learned so many things. Not only did I learn how to improve my writing to appeal to a variety of demographics, I also learned how to make an interactive narrative, 3-D print cool and interactive designs, an infographic, little golden books, GIF’s, really interesting but very complicated arduino computer coding, and so much more. I honestly do not believe I would ever learn all of these, let alone one, in one semester course. This course also made me realize some strengths and weaknesses I have in my writing. While they are things I can improve upon, it was nice to be able to be cognizant of these tiny little mistakes that I would make that would drastically make me improve my writing skills. Its a work in progress, but I will get there! ]

The tumblr portion of the course was a very interesting, but very scary concept that (sort of) pushed me to make my work public. Anyone can stop by to see it. You don’t need to be a UF student to see my work online. That’s totally scary and nuts, but very rewarding. I remember when I got my first comments on my instructables project which made me realize that there are other people in this world searching for the content I was creating. Someone is bound to find my work, and I just have to accept that it is now out there, and I somewhat enjoy that. 

I got so much from this course. This course taught me so much about sharing my work and not being afraid to let my ideas go out there. It also taught me many ways I can improve my writing. I always strive to improve my writing in general, and having a class that dedicated portions of time to that felt very rewarding. I feel like so many new things and ideas came up throughout the time of the course. Now I am viewing books differently and redefining what a book is. I also want to expand my genre palette when considering reading new books. 

This class definitely helped out with a lot of things involving my writing and my view on literature, and I deeply enjoyed every class, every lesson, and every moment I spent being in that classroom. I don’t think I will ever take a class that is this jam-packed with content and learning. I really enjoyed this course. 

With this being my first semester at UF I was nervous taking a 3000 level english course.  I thought this class was going to be me staying up into the long hours of the night analyzing 500 pieces of advanced literature.  Me being pleasantly surprised is an understatement.  I thoroughly enjoyed all of the hands on activities that we did during the semester.  I would have never considered all these alternative mediums as ways to create books.  This class definitely opened my eyes to a new definition of   the codex.  

One of the most interesting assignments for me was the instructable.  When this project was first introduce I didn’t understand the use of it.  Once I began actually writing out the instructions to my 3D printing I finally stared to realize just how difficult it was going to be.  If I didn’t know exactly how to do it, it was hard to explain is simply.  This forced me to take my time and learn the ins and out of my 3D model.  

I thought the variation in the class was perfect.  It never kept us doing the same thing for too long. I think if we did all the field trips at once and then all of the blog post it would become boring.  One of my favorite things to do were the field trips.  I loved learning about all of the resources on campus that I would have never thought to seek out myself.  The maker assignments allowed us to have hands on learning, whereas the blog post let us share our personal thoughts and gain a new perspective on them. 

Personally I would like to expand on the narrative code assignment.  I have never heard of a choose your own adventure book and I thought it was so exciting.  Bringing in the use of technology by writing our stories through twine took it to the next level.  Honestly I rushed my project and didn’t take the time I wanted to make it good.  I believe if i had took my time the story could have been very interesting.  There was a lot of opportunity to show your creativity in these books.  

When I first found out that we were publishing our writing on a public platform I was a bit concerned.  I thought that my writing wasn’t good enough and people would jump at the chance to correct any small mistake I made.  However, I quickly learned that other people being able to give feedback would only help my writing skills. 

I had lots of fun love you all!! 

Paper Circuit GIF

Examples of Zines from Civic Media Center

Personally, though this was one of the first readings we did for the class, rereading it again now has brought a new perspective to me. This is mostly due to the fact that I have been influenced in many many of our projects by gamebooks and interactive fiction. My final project was a gamebook in itself, and I was constantly intrigued by this seemingly old fashioned yet still relevant form of literature. Gamebooks represent a way for science fiction and thrilling adventure stories to be brought to reality for those who open its pages. Being reintroduced to the concept of gamebooks has lead me to wonder what certain stories would be like as gamebooks. How would Chris Van Allsburg’s  Zathura or Jumaji play out as a gamebook? Or Lord of the Flies? What if you could choose which adventures Huckleberry Finn went on? Gamebooks connect the reader deep into the story instead of allowing them to view from the surface, and it makes them the author. Gamebooks seem childish and like pleasure reading, but I think they could easily translate to adult literature and very much tell you something about yourself by the choices you make within the story. I am very much inspired by gamebooks and hope to continue my research of them.

When our class first began learning about zines, I was familiar with them, but as a sort of test, after reading the article, I happened to be talking to my brother, and I mentioned them. He immediately asked me what it was, and was confused when I explained. “But who reads that?” I had to sit and think for a moment. Zines, from what I have seen and read, are not concerned with who reads them, but what the reader will take from the experience when they do. Zines are not easily defined, but they all have the common theme of a sort of education. For the Riot Grrrl movement, zines might educate on third wave feminism. I have friends that make zines about the products they create to sell and their inspirations. I have seen zines that fill in gaps of history that you won’t find in the textbooks. Overall, zines allow anyone to write themselves into media they might feel left out of. It is an education on the experience of a person, any person, and it allows your perspective to widen further than a true magazine, aimed a specific group of readers and their confirmation biases, might.

For this reading, I am particularly interested. Fanfiction has long had a sometimes bad rep in the world of literature, and I have at times shared this bias. When I was about fourteen was when I first discovered it on the internet. As someone who had no context for what fanfiction was, I was intrigued, I saw it as a creative outlet based off a story I already knew. What this reading brought to me was the long history of fanfiction, zines, and the like. A particular quote stood out to me. “Today's home or self-publishing is now considered among the least respectable forms of literary endeavor, with fan fiction even lower because it is written for pleasure rather than profit.” This both made sense and frustrated me. If all published works were for profit or simply knowledge and not pleasure, we would be missing a massive portion of our society’s literary codex. Fiction in general has long brought knowledge through it’s plots and characters, and made new ideas a reality that would be unfathomable otherwise. I see the codex being much larger than the margins of widely published or profitable works, and would be frightened to know what the world would be like if we did not read for pleasure.

When reading this article, I at first very much agreed with the authors in how flip books and phenakistoscopes were the first GIFs. Phenakistoscopes in particular are very reminiscent of what we use everyday on social media platforms and in text conversation. They represent a very short period of time of a moving image, that we can imagine would be part of a larger scene, in the exact same way a GIF does. Though this comparison seemed simple enough, I was completely thrown by the zoetrope videos. Personally I have never seen a zoetrope before, or if I did, I was not aware of what I was looking at. I was honestly mesmerized by them for a good 30 minutes, and it took me almost that long to figure out how they work. After I finally reached that lightbulb moment, I saw the connection between zoetropes and GIFs extremely clearly, the way all the images, or in the case of zoetropes, statues, coming together to produce a video type image for the audience were quite parallel. Overall it’s interesting to see how tangible objects can imitate graphic elements and I wonder where this will lead in our future of ever advancing technology in the cybersphere.

I can’t believe this semester is already over! It seems like only yesterday that I was scrambling around campus looking for my classes and anxious about what this new chapter in life would bring. Well, now I am here and I can say that taking this class this semester has made me a more confident writer, increased my ability to digest scholarly papers and boosted my confidence for treading in sensitive areas when telling a story. The format of the class really pushed me out of my comfort zone which I can already feel the effects of in my ability to create. Thinking about reading and writing in terms of form and function as well as design has opened doors for me in my mind freeing me to just write and see what happens. The revision process we learned is really helpful as well. I used to try and make it perfect on the first draft, but now I write and reflect and then edit and write again. This new approach allows me to look at things I want to tell a reader but think of how I can do it symbolically, allowing the reader to make the connections themselves. This method of show don’t tell is more rewarding for the reader and for the creator as well. One thing I really enjoyed this semester is the reactions I got to my writing. It is very hard to create something personal and let others look at it, but the looks on everyone’s faces whether disgusted, surprised, or happy, let me know that my intent was felt and that my work was having the desired effect. One thing that pushed my boundaries was all the crafting! I love words and I love playing with words, but as is evident in my final project, I came to enjoy (slightly) working with my hands to craft an interesting and memorable experience for my reader. Going to the libraries and seeing the different books from the special collections played heavily in some of my design decisions, and I would love to play more with different builds and methods in the future. I want to mix adult themes into the children’s book space and create something like pulp fiction the pop-up...it would be hilarious. At the end of the day though I am sad that this class has come to an end (even though I am ready for the semester to be finished!) I enjoyed growing as a writer with this class and I hope to see you all around campus.