WRD320: Writing for Digital Media Rotating Header Image

Phenomenological approaches to reading digital media

Anne Wysocki provides us with two important and productive tools that we can use in our explorations of how people read digital media:

First, she applies the reading concept that we discussed in class on Monday — Phenomenology:

To indicate the differences between the two pieces of multimedia, I focus on several screens from the CDs where the pieces address similar topics, to get at how the CD’s makers have used visual strategies to create their assertions about relations between artists, collectors, and artworks. Using what would perhaps best be called a phenomenological approach to describe how I understand and respond to what is on the screens before me, I write about the openings and about the screens designed to help me move through the art of the collections; I am also going to write about the screens that present me biographies of the artists. I then write about the overall visual structure of the two CDs, in order finally to write about how these CDs “see” us, their “readers … ”

… By phenomenological approach, I mean that I am trying to reflect on my experience of moving through these CDs at the same time that I move through them.

She then attempts several schematic drawings of the media she is analyzing:

 

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “Impossibly distinct: On form/content and word/image in two pieces of computer-based interactive multimedia.”