Consider these ideas as starting places or inspiration. You don’t have to do any of them as they are listed. The goal is simply to think through some of the possibilities and give you some more examples for your own project.

1. Author’s Inspiration: Capture how the text might have been composed by pinning artifacts an author might collect while composing a text. As an example, what would Steinbeck collect while working on The Grapes of Wrath? Think about inspirations and research!
2. Character’s Special Event: Create the pinboard a character would make while planning a special event, like moving to a new home, planning for the birth of a baby, or going on a trip. For instance, what would Hermione Granger pin as she was thinking about returning to Hogwarts for her second year?
3. Figure’s Hobby or Research: Gather pins a character or historical figure might collect to focus on a special interest, like a hobby or favorite subject. Think about how the collection reveals the person’s changing or growing knowledge about the topic. What would Betsy Ross have pinned as she thought about her work as a seamstress?
4. Essayist’s Evidence: Collect the resources that an essayist might gather while working on a particular piece. Think about illustration and evidence for the piece and create a sort of multigenre version of the essay. Imagine, for example, what Thoreau might have collected while working on Walden.
5. Witness’s Momentos: Take the viewpoint of first-person witness to an historical event, and create a pinboard that illustrates what you saw and noticed. For instance, what could you collect if you were on Wall Street during the week of the stock market crash in 1929?
6. Missing Details: Build a pinboard that fills in missing details for an event in the story or that provides the missing details on how something came to be. For a fictional story, work within what you know about the character and the situation; for a nonfiction story, stay within the facts and details that are established (that is, don’t make things up).
7. Figure’s Goals: Think about what a character wants to achieve, and create a pinboard the character would make while thinking about those goals. You could focus on the career that a fictional character might want to pursue. If you focus on a real person, think about the things that person might collect that would show his or her interests. For example, what might Sally Ride have pinned as a child (assuming Pinterest existed then)?
8. Fashion: Focus on a character’s fashion sense, and build a pinboard of clothes and accessories that the character would like. Think about key events in the story and collect potential outfits that might work for the different events. Search for clothes that fit the time period of the story you are working on.
9. Recipes: Compile the recipes that a character would save or that a group of characters might save. What would go into a fairy tale cooking pinboard, or the collected cooking pins of Sleepy Hollow?
10. Scrapbook: Design a scrapbook that a character would make after a trip or event. Think about the places that the character goes and the things he or she would see, and find ways to capture the high points and some of the less obvious moments. Be sure to stay true to the time period of your story.

Worth 25% of your course grade

Important Dates

• TBD: In-class pitch of your topic (2 minutes)
• Nov 18: Project 4 Peer Review
• Nov 30: Project 4: Remix due by 11:59 PM
• Dec 2, 4, 7, & 9: Project 4 presentations
• Dec 9: End of grace period for Project 4. No work is accepted after 11:59 PM.

Goals

write and design web content, use digital images (and if appropriate, video and audio), and recognize basic HTML and CSS syntax.

explore how linguistic text (words), images, and layout combine to communicate with an audience.

recycle an existing story into something new and interesting.

 
The Project Assignment

You will take an existing story (fiction or nonfiction) and translate it into a new, digital, multimodal version. You will present your new version of the story in class at the end of the semester.

The idea of remaking an old story in a new way should be familiar to you. Anytime a movie is made that is based on a book, those involved are creating a new multimodal version of the original. You are not limited to making a movie-version of your text however. Nearly anything goes. You need to use at least three modes of communication. You may stick closely to the original version of the story or event, or you may reimagine the story from another perspective. Your options are open for this assignment. Choose something you want to explore. You should enjoy this project.

Step-by-Step Details

Step 1: Choose a form and approach.
Choose a format that will use at least three modes of communication, and decide what aspect(s) of the original you will remix. Check the Story Remix Possibilities and the related links on that page for more ideas. Remember that taking risks matters, so you can choose a format that you want to learn. The one guideline is that you have to be able to publish the finished piece in your WordPress portfolio. Check the possibilities for embedding whatever format you are thinking ahead of time.

Step 2: Pitch your project.
You will explain your plans for your project, relying on the ideas in Writer/Designer, Chapter 3 (especially pp. 54–56).

Use the questions on p. 56 of Writer/Designer to plan what you want to say. You will need to identify the original story, your remix plans, the genre you are planning to use, and how you are incorporating risk.

Step 3: Develop and refine your project.
Following the resources in Writer/Designer, Chapter 4, 5, 6 and 7, you will collect sources and assets, design your citations, develop mock-ups and storyboards, and draft and revise your project (from rough cut to rough draft to final project). You can find full details on all these tasks in the textbook, and we will discuss them in class.

Step 4: Present your project.
Following the resources in Writer/Designer, Chapter 8, you will deliver and present your remixed story. You will have approximately 5 to 6 minutes for your class presentation. In your presentation, you will focus on sharing details about how you worked and the decisions that you made. Use the information on pp. 132–135 of Writer/Designer to determine what information to include.

You will create a digital presentation, using Google slides, Prezi, or a similar tool. Email me the URL to your Google Slides by midnight on the day before your presentation (no grace period).

Step 5: Submit your project.
When you are finished with the project, you will submit the URL to your project in the Assignment tool in Canvas. Details on how to submit your work will be included in the post for the due date (November 30).

You are free to choose whatever genre and format you want to use for your remixed story. The only requirements are that your project needs to be digital, it needs to be published online, and it should use multiple modes of communication.

Because the options are so open, I wanted to provide some example ideas for you. This is not an exhaustive list, just a collection of ideas.

• a series of cartoon animations
• a series of comic strips or a graphic novel (Shakespearean Web Comics)
• a video
• a digital scrapbook
• a documentary video
• an online museum display
• an infographic (Shakespearean Infographic, Peter Pan enters the job force)
• a Harry Potter-style newspaper (with embedded animated gifs/videos)
• a Facebook-style profile and timeline (If Facebook existed during WWII)
• a series of text messages or Tweets from characters in the story (28 Snapchats From Harry Potter, Hamlet: The Meme Edition)
• “live” blogging/reporting of an event from the story by a character/participant (Rep. John Lewis Tweets Dramatic Recounting of Selma March)
• a pinboard by a character, author, historical figure, etc. (Pinterest Ideas)
• a collection of digital artifacts found on a character’s USB drive (e.g., letters, “to do” lists, data, and poems written by the character for his or her eyes only)
• an episode of a reality TV show
• a video of the story told in a different genre (like this example for The Shining or this version of WILLY WONKA – Recut Horror Trailer or If FROZEN Was A Horror Film)
• a photo essay
• documentation or instructions
• something amazingly hard to predict (like A Guinea Pig Pride and Prejudice trailer)