Graphic Novel Librarian’s New Logo – Daily Create Week 16

Daily Create #tdc1581 challenged users to use online text logo design tool MarkMaker to create a personal logo. I have been so engaged in the development of my digital ego – the graphic novel librarian – that I thought it would be cool to have a loge. Playing with the MarkMarker tool was fun – it is interesting to choose some interesting designs and have the tool produce new options based off your choices. I found many elements that worked for me that I wanted to incorporate into the final design of the G N Librarian logo and hundreds of other elements that were cool but did not work for me. That is the strength of this tool the number of elements make simple to choose a randomly generated but stylish logo. Where the tool became less user friendly was went I wanted to mix and match elements I had seen in a non-randomly generated way, I found that in the editing space specific elements were not labeled and finding specific styles of elements became guess work.

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Supporting the mission of my Digital Story – A Response to Chosen Text Week 15

*THIS POST IS PART OF A CONTINUING SERIES OF RESPONSES TO SCHOLARLY TEXTS FOR LEARNING WITH DIGITAL STORIES, A MASTER LEVEL COURSE I AM ENROLLED IN AT UC DENVER.

For my digital project that I have launched for ILT5240, I am using twitter to create a dialogue with a community around making recommendations for graphic novels. I have launched the twitter account @G_N_Librarian and a website to archive the 4 tweet recommendations I have been making. I am happy so far with what I have made but it has not been the interactive experience I envisioned. I was hoping that my twitter followers would reach out to me with their other interests and that I could make recommendations for my followers; fostering a digital community and that that would, eventually, lead to community members contributing their own reviews and recommendations. I looked this week for texts with insight into making my twitter feed more engaging and interactive. Hoping to find some strategies to bolster the Graphic Novel Librarian community. I found three texts that provided the best advice for me:

• 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement
• Twitter Cheat Sheet to Increase Engagement and Followers
• A Scientific Guide to Writing Great Tweets: How To Get More Clicks, Retweets and Reach

Each of the articles shared their findings different ways. The 10 Twitter Tactics to Increase Your Engagement is produced by the Social Media Marketing Society as a compact and informative list of strategies with explanations of why they work. The Twitter Cheat Sheet is an infographic that is very engaging. Created by search engine optimization firm LinchpinSEO, the infographic provides a nice view of strategies that are similar to those from the Social Media Marketing Society and accessible for visual learners. Finally, A Scientific Guide provides the most in depth analysis of what make a successful tweet and provides not only general tips but also how to craft tweets for specific purposes and was written by social media blogger Courtney Seiter.

Each of these articles provided valuable advice for increasing followers and engagement for my twitter feed. To develop the community I have envisioned for Graphic Novel Librarian I decided to focus on incorporating the most common and/or powerful ideas from each text. I will apply these promotional tweets that I make between the standard my standard updates of 4 tweet graphic novel reviews, for the time being. The four strategies that stood out the most to me were:  

1. Keep tweets short – shorter than the 140 allotted characters – this frees people to retweet you without needing to edit the tweet
2. Tweets should come out often but not too often. Making sure you have a twitter presence most days keeps your account in your followers active memory but limiting tweets at at most two tweets a day keeps your account from becoming stale. Because of the size of my 4 tweet graphic novel reviews I am shooting for four tweeting periods a week – twice for 4 tweet reviews and twice for promotional tweets.  
3. Ask for viewers specifically to retweet you or to mention you in their tweets and reward, these rewards could be public mentions or retweets, private thank you messages or even tangible rewards and prizes.
4. Mentions, hashtags, and linked content such as video or blogs attract attention and increase engagement (retweets/likes). These tools, however, can interfere with each other if overused. Focusing on just one specific tool per tweet will keep viewer focus on your content and not overwhelm them with links, and more will make them more likely to retweet.

Here is my original promotional tweet, exactly 140 characters and no image:

“Tweet me your hobbies, likes/dislikes, preferences in literature and entertainment and I’ll personalize a #GraphicNovelReconedation for you!”

Here is my new promotional tweet:

“Tweet your interests, get a personalized #GraphicNovelRecommendation! Please retweet!”

Only 119 characters with a request for retweet and an image of the G_N_Librarian 4 tweet review banner (not pictured)!

Please check out my digital story and let me know what you think, also please send me a tweet with your interests so that I can craft a digital comic review for you! AND be awesome and retweet my promotional tweets.

A Networked TV Commercial – Digital Story Critique Week 14

*I HAVE BEEN READING AND CRITIQUING DIGITAL COMICS, FOR MY MASTER LEVEL STUDIES, IN A CONTINUING SERIES TO DEVELOP MY EXPOSURE TO AND UNDERSTANDING OF THIS NEW LITERACY

I found something that is so much fun for my digital story this week. I have been thinking of interactive digital comics sense reading the Alexander chapter about networked books and have been searching for a comic that is more interactive. I also wanted to explore what is being done with comics on media platforms. I was drawn to Instagram as a possible platform because of its natural connection to static images. Also for some reason I feel more connected to social media I access from my phone. Maybe It feels cozier because I can read it on my couch. What I found was not what I expected. I thought I would find a lot of one off comic strips that set up and deliver a punch line in one panel, much like Gary Larson’s Far Side but did not find as many as I thought I would, what I found blew my mind, and surprisingly it was a promotional comic for the Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty.

Story

This is one impressive advertisement. By setting up multiple user accounts on Instagram and then linking those accounts through tags, Adult Swim has created a choose your own adventure set in the strange universe of Rick and Morty. This piece is full of Easter eggs that showcase the non sequitur humor of the show. The narrative is not overly developed beyond finding the hidden Easter eggs but with vast number of worlds to explore and user participation this promotion frees uses to build their own narratives on the foundation of rick and Morty’s zany university.

Project Planning

The attention to details in Adult Swim’s promotion is impressive. There are so many pictures that are unique but match seamlessly with the the pictures from the next stages in the chosen story line. Animation was strategically used as a reward for finding hidden Easter eggs. Finally the trailers that were hidden in the worlds to explore were subtle reminders of who was producing this awesome simulation but not so over powering to make the project feel like a commercial trying too hard to be cutting edge. I also found a similar example of this type of choose your own adventure Instagram feed from Old Spice but it was not as robust as the Cartoon Network endeavor and never shook the advertisement feel.

Media application

Adult Swim has done a great job creating a digital story that is entertaining and convey their product in a favorable light because they use the tools of the Instagram platform in a creative and new way.  This is such an engaging way to use the Instagram platform and inspires me to develop my digital story in a way that uses established web 2.0 tools in unconventional ways.

Digital Storytelling Project: the Research – A Response to Chosen Text Week 12

*THIS POST IS PART OF A CONTINUING SERIES OF RESPONSES TO SCHOLARLY TEXTS FOR LEARNING WITH DIGITAL STORIES, A MASTER LEVEL COURSE I AM ENROLLED IN AT UC DENVER.

For my digital storytelling class I have begun developing a digital project of my own, I don’t know the final way that I’ll deliver my message but I want an ongoing series where I review graphic novels and make suggestions for viewers based on their hobbies, interests or preferred genres of literature or entertainment. I often have suggestions for my friends and family for graphic novels they should enjoy based off their other preferences and I want to offer that to a larger audience. I do not have a background in the reviews will need to write so I took the opportunity this week to to research some articles about creating book reviews to support my project.  I found four particularly helpful pieces that I am going to use to support my crafting of the graphic novel reviews in my series. These articles are:

• How to Write a Book Review by Bill Asenjo from Wiriting-World.com
• Book Reviews Handout from The Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill
• Tips for Writing Book Reviews by Luisa Playa from BookTrust.org.uk
• Writing Book Reviews from the Writing Tutorial Service at Indiana University

Each provides text information on the how or the why of reviewing books, by synthesizing these lessons I can create engaging and informative graphic novel reviews. Summarized below are the lessons I took from each article.

How to Write a Book Review

Asenjo’s article is mostly a list of questions to what a reviewer should ponder to support in the development and writing of a review. The questions are organized by the steps of the writing process and aim to keep the review informative and engaging. These questions will be very useful for keeping in mind before, during and after reading my chosen graphic novel and during the prewriting and writing of the review. It was especially good to be reminded to preview the book (something I always tell my students to do but never bother doing my self) and develop opinions about what the title means, what I can learn from introductions or prefaces and how the book is organized. For my reviews this would also include previewing some art work and determining what tone it sets for the narrative.

Book Reviews Hanout

This handout from the University of North Carolina provides some background on what a review is and made a point to highlight that a reviewer’s purpose is to make an argument not just to summarize the author’s points. For the university writing center this means determining if one agrees or disagrees with an author and providing evidence as to why, in my reviews I will argue why my viewers should read a particular graphic novel and then support my claim by connecting the narrative with my viewer’s interests, hobbies or preferred genres.

Tips for Writing Book Reviews

First I want to state that I did not realize, until linking to Luisa Playa’s article above, that it is written for teen writers. Playa’s article, however, is concise and is a useful outline for making sure that a review is covering all bases the intended audience will be expecting.  Also I am using this project as a springboard for having students create their own reviews of graphic novels and so it is nice to have manageable reference guide that they can follow and to have created exemplars that follow the same model. Playa’s tips are to start with a brief description of the first half of the book or so, no spoilers! Next share what you liked, anything you disliked and a wrap up with an optional rating.

Writing Book Reviews

This how to guide from the Writing Tutorial Service at Indiana University provided similar tips as the UNC handout but had a great reason for why reviews are useful for the reviewer. In education it is important for students to understand why they are participating in a learning task. So I want to share this quotation with my students and keep it in mind myself when I am writing graphic novel reviews. “Reviewers answer not only the WHAT but the SO WHAT question about a book. Thus, in writing a review, you combine the skills of describing what is on the page, analyzing how the book tried to achieve its purpose, and expressing your own reactions.”

The ideas I found in these four text have given me plenty to think about and use to scaffold my own graphic novel reviews now I have to apply what I have learned to take the next steps in my digital project.