CTW 1-Dougan

So I’d just like to leave this here to describe my thoughts on my takeaway’s from the course as far as research.

I know, I know I’m hilarious.

In all honesty I think there are some things that I’ve learned that can relate to this masterpiece of a song and video by Pink Floyd.

This class has been somewhat centered around specific concepts of the course that we have been expected to use.

Concepts like BEAM, Archival Research, Hunting vs Gathering and so on and so forth.

When I first heard about this course and everything that we would be learning about I was slightly disappointed to be honest. I thought that we were going to have to strictly use templates, writing styles, and research styles to get our points across.

I don’t do well with structure.

(Or so I thought)

As the course went on through winter and now through spring quarter I’ve learned a lot of things. And instead of seeing this structure as a bad thing I’ve come to the realization that when used in moderation this sort of structure and technique can be very beneficial to my writing.

I’m the kind of writer who sits down and lets the ideas flow.

From Pinterest

They often come out jumbled and sometimes I’m even confused by my thought process.

The writing/research process for me is a process of refining the edges.

I like to think of it like a clay sculpture.

When I begin the sculpture is just a large lump of clay waiting to be made into something. After a little while the clay becomes formed and molded until you can start to see an object, but it’s still not quite clear what that object is yet. It takes a lot of molding and scraping away at the edges to reveal the beautiful sculpture that was there the whole time.

I admit my writing isn’t always beautiful, but it always takes this sort of a process.

I don’t usually like sticking to a set of rules or a format while I’m writing, but I’ve learned through taking this course that it often can help me scrape away and refine my ideas and arguments.

Through meta-commentary or by using a method of grouping sources such as BEAM, I’ve found that my ideas are formulated much clearer. I can understand what I’m trying to say much quicker.

Also, what I say ends up being more organized and purposeful.

I know that I will use these strategies in my future writing and all jokes aside, this class wasn’t one that makes me want to sing Another Brick in the Wall.

Here it is.

My masterpiece.

My Mona Lisa.

A true work of art isn’t it?

Well I hope so, but there are a lot of things I would change about this video project/drawing/final translation of my researched argument.

But first a bit of background on why I chose to do this project the way I did. My researched essay and argument was on the impact of the Catholic church on abortion and health care policy at Catholic universities: specifically Santa Clara.

I focused on the decision of SCU president Michael Engh to cut elective abortion from the faculty health care plan back in 2013. I mainly talked about the implications and dangers of the Catholic church having such a large influence and how the specific influence of the Catholic church was not in line with Jesuit Philosophy in this instance.

It was long and winding and as much of an adventure to read as it was to write.

From Tumblr

And so when this final project was announced and explained I wanted to find a way to simplify the behemoth of an essay that it was.

I’m not sure why, but I immediately thought of a drawing.

If you don’t care about my history as a drawer then skip the next italicized part.

See a quick bit history, I’m not a great drawer. I didn’t ever really love drawing until I took an intro to drawing and painting class my freshmen year of high school.

Now on most of the projects I was very average and nobody was hiring me to draw their portraits, but on one specific assignment I knocked it out of the park. I wish I could find the actual image of my drawing to show, but anyways I’ll sum it up.

So it was a self portrait of me and it was larger than life size. We were drawing off of images of ourselves and I continually was surprising myself at how well I was drawing.

I spent about 3 hours on the eyes alone and the drawing turned out quite well!

To this day I’m very proud of this work of art.

From Giphy

Anyways back to the topic at hand. I thought for this final multimodal translation I could draw something!

I initially thought about drawing a comic type thing that might be found in the New Yorker. But then I figured it wouldn’t really be multimodal at all other than drawing (which I guess counts? I couldn’t tell you).

So I decided on a drawing anyways and I’d film it to make it multimodal!!

Except when I sat down to film the damn thing it was so difficult to find a way to position the camera in a way that the viewer could actually see what I was doing.

I promise I tried.

So I decided on taking pictures at each stage of the drawing and seeing where to go from there.

I think it ended up working out quite well and I’m happy with the result.

It’s not quite as good as my original drawing of my face, but it might be added to my portfolio.

I thought it would be cool to put together a bunch of photos of different places all across California that I’ve visited while here at school.

Muir Woods

Cypress Groves

Marin Headlands

Santa Clara Valley

Lake Tahoe

Ross

San Jose Valley

As I was looking back through my blog I saw my post on tobacco and advertising and it got me thinking about the current tobacco industry.

I’ve noticed a recent fascination with E-Cigarettes. Mostly by teens around my age and to me it feels a bit like history is repeating itself. I decided to compare old tobacco advertisements to more modern depictions of tobacco.

This is an excerpt from one of my earlier blog posts on the advertisement strategies of Tobacco companies in the 1960s:

…

Towards the beginning of the newspaper years, around 1960, most of the advertisements were cigarette ads and they depicted them as a product for adventurous folks. In order to be “cool”, you had to smoke.

From Healthcare-Administration-Degree

Additionally, advertisements like this portrayed smoking as healthy habit – not at all bad for you!

This didn’t come as a shock, I feel like most people are aware of the decent amount about the rise and fall of the tobacco industry. It was still interesting, though, that the Santa Clara University newspaper would advertise a product now banned from campus.

…

Here’s a Tobacco advertisement from this past year:

From Advertising Age

Now obviously the advertisement styles are extremely different and the way that they depict tobacco is also different, but some of the core concepts of both of these advertisements remain the same.

In the older advertisement above, cigarettes are depicted as healthy and something that even the most educated and well respected members of society use.

In the bottom advertisement tobacco is being branded as “hip” and cool and there’d be no way that a cool sleek technology like that could kill you right? I’ve talked with some people who use Juul’s and they’re always shocked to realize that what they’ve been doing (which may seem harmless) is actually just as harmful as cigarettes.

I don’t care if people understand the consequences of cigarettes or e-cigarettes and still choose to use them, but it frustrates me when something like this is pitched as a safe alternative, when in reality it’s almost just as bad.

History repeats itself and we still as a society have not managed to learn that tobacco in any form is extremely harmful to people’s health.

We always think our generation is different or better or that the things we do have to be more informed because we’ve seen all of the previous generations mess up so much.

But we’re not really. Hopefully the next generation will finally catch on to the fact that tobacco is bad.

For this post I will paraphrase from different sources, using the BEAM method, to show why Polar Bears are the best animal on the earth.

Background

All of the following statistics were found here.

From Natural World Safari

Polar Bears are a large white bear. The adult males usually weigh between 770-1500 lbs. The females weigh half that size. The polar bear or Ursus Maritimus, evolved from the brown bear a very long time ago.

Their home is in the arctic circle. They spend most of their time at sea because they are a marine mammal, but they are also unique because they are experts on land as well.

Due to their climate they are very insulated, but they overheat at temperatures above 50 degrees celsius which makes them very susceptible to global warming.

Exhibit

Exhibit A: Polar Bears are not only the coolest animals, but they are also the cutest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyXn4chXcqY

Now don’t be fooled by their cute looks, Polar Bears are vicious hunters who can run for many miles at a time in order to find their prey which is typically seals or beluga whales.

Polar Bears are also the best because they know how to have a good time.

For more statistics like the following go here.

Polar Bears clean themselves by rolling around in the snow and they cool off by jumping into the cold water. Also they have no natural enemies and they can swim over 60 miles in search of food without rest. Their nose can smell a seal 20 miles away on land.

They also like naps and rest up to 20 hours a day when not hunting.

Argument

Polar Bears are the best because they are so unique and gifted with many physical tools.

They’re just a little slower than Usain Bolt at running as they can run 25 mph and Bolt was clocked at running 28, but that isn’t the only statistic that’s insane. They also can swim faster than Michael Phelps and for a whole lot longer too.

From Tenor

These special physical tools make them a unique predator.

Method

Now I love Polar Bears if you hadn’t figured that out by now, but they are in need of our help. It seems ridiculous that an animal so amazing could need our help, but global warming is causing Polar Bear’s habitat to shrink.

I can’t believe that some people still don’t believe that climate change is a major issue that needs to be addressed. The facts are clear and the ice is going away.

There are lots of simple steps we can all take to help the environment such as conserving energy, carpooling, buying a more energy efficient car and using our votes to help this cause.

I don’t want to live in a world without these magnificent creatures.

Read more about how Climate Change is affecting Polar Bears here.

For class we had to form an annotated bibliography based on the sources that we found and we had to link them together and find what was missing.

My research led me down very interesting paths.

I started out with the research idea of Political apathy at Santa Clara University. This was what my survey was about and I was interested to find out if people on campus were involved in demonstrations or protests or intense political discourse.

I found some kind of meh answers, and the data from my survey told me that maybe this topic didn’t have a conclusive answer. (also almost all of my surveyees were freshmen so that skewed the data)

So I took a new strategy and decided that censorship by SCU would be the better call. I heard about the Vagina Monologues and how the school was not super down with the play being performed on campus.

(I learned way too late that this was due to the fact that the Vagina Monologues as an institution is pro-choice!! which would’ve been super nice to know before I wrote all of these papers because it could’ve been an interesting source!)

I quickly realized this too could lead me to a dead end.

So I pivoted yet again and searched for a new topic.

From Giphy

This is where my sources come in.

The sources I found told a story about Catholicism, Higher Education and Women’s health care.

From Huffington Post

Politicians and citizens have debated this issue for a long time and it’s even a platform for many Republican’s to run on. Instead of the women having a say in a women’s rights issue, old white men have taken over this issue, but that’s for another time.

This is obviously a huge issue in our current political climate and I was intrigued by the specific correlation that this has to Santa Clara University.

The sources I found correlated quite a bit, but many of them told the issue of abortion from different perspectives.

But the main perspective that I want to fill was the perspective of catholicism’s influence on university health care plans and what this does.

College is a transition. I remember back when my brother was making his own transition to college across the country my seemed to continually repeat the phrase, “there will be bumps in the road”.

See school has always been my brother’s thing, but my mom wanted to explain that college is more than just going to a new school across the country. College is the first time most students really feel independent from their families.

Also the first time that most of us college students really realize how much our parents did for us. I know in my own personal experience that I was jumping at the thought of leaving home and getting away from the “oppressive” team that was my parents.

From Giphy

I thought my parents were the strictest parents in the history of earth, but it wasn’t until I got away from home that I realized how much I missed their guidance and although I’m not saying I want to move back home, life’s different on my own.

I’ve learned a ton and my mom was so right when she said there would be bumps in the road. Life’s exciting and fun and fresh on your own, but it also can be really scary. Independence is a great thing, but with it comes a lot of responsibilities.

Some days I love the feeling of being free and out in the world on my own, but other days I really wish I was back in lower school where my main worries were what would be in my lunch box.

From Shopify

There’s a give and take, but there’s also no going back. Or as Dory would say,

Just keep swimming.

For class we read an article by Margaret Kantz on the different ways of reading a text and how texts can mean extremely different things in context.

Surprisingly, I have a decent amount of knowledge in this area because this past fall I took a religion class called Texting God. The class delved into how different people and different cultures read and perceive biblical texts.

We studied all the historical texts that influenced the bible as well as certain texts that were left our or ignored.

The class was fairly interesting and the one thing that it certainly taught me was how to read a text with a skeptical eye. I learned that the bible that we know today and historical texts that we read as fact are a product of their environment.

This class shocked me in a sense because I was used to reading history textbooks and sources as objective and factual sources.

I never took the time to read between the lines in a textbook on America’s treatment of Native Americans or how textbooks treated material around slavery.

This class shocked my world view in a sense. I’ve always known that different news sources use their platforms to report the news differently and they all have a slight bias, but I didn’t think of it ever in terms of how facts could be portrayed differently.

Take for example you read on the Onion something about Donald Trump compared to something you might read on New York Times. Very different right?

But sometimes it’s much more complex than this. How we read news and different texts can completely change the meaning of the texts or facts. In research and in any sort  of reading or any sort of citation we must pay attention to where it’s coming from, the slant of the source, the intended audience and it’s original purpose.

In class I found myself saying that a KKK influenced source was a credible source on MLK Jr.’s life! So this is important to learn how to do and how to spot the signs of a credible or non-credible source.

The following video does a very good job of showing how this can happen in advertising:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYy8oBUscmU

By paying attention to these things we can learn more about what is a credible and reliable statistic and what should be questioned.

For my class we had to find an article that relates to our research topic using database search methods.

I’ve had a whole tutorial on databases in high school.

Like hours and hours of library people telling me what a database is and why it’s useful to research. Now in college I’m going through the same sort of tutorials, but for some reason we’re learning these magical new ways to search a database.

From Tenor

Why didn’t we learn this in high school? I understand that college is supposed to be a step up and it’s called higher education for a reason. But the research I did in high school could’ve been expedited by learning these simple ways to search key terms.

The librarians at my high school did nothing.

About once a day they’d do a short presentation in a class on the effectiveness and format of a bibliography. The rest of the day they’d spend sitting, waiting for students to ask them questions in the library.

Students didn’t really ever ask the librarians because the things they knew were so straightforward. Now this is not a shot at all the hard working librarians out there.

From WordPress

I love libraries and I believe many librarians are proactive and helpful.

I think librarians play an extremely important role in our society and even though sometimes it’s annoying to listen to yet another talk about bibliographies, librarians are vital in order for our society to become more literate and educated.

Although, I do believe that my specific high school librarians could’ve been much more helpful and this would’ve given me a much better view of librarians in general.

Instead of learning just one tool in the research toolkit, if my high school librarians gave me the whole tool kit that’d be much more helpful. Why only give us bits and pieces of what we should know if it’s just as easy to give us the entire picture?

My research foundation could’ve been much stronger going into college if I had learned these necessary tools such as the little * that goes after a search term or how different synonyms of the search terms can often bring up many more results than the search term that one might expect.

Libraries are the best and librarians work at libraries, so they can’t all be that bad.