Kristina Perkins
Remediating
an Argument
:
an effort in contextualization
Step 1: A Search for Ideas
Our remediation assignment asked us to convert our repurposing paper in a new, multimedia form. Unsurprisingly, this presented a host of new challenges—indecision the top among them. Deciding exactly how to remediate felt like searching for answers in an abyss: there was simply no obvious way to turn a paper about hyperreal cultural appropriation into a multimedia project. My first attempt is a shot in the dark: an attempt to summarize the progression of arguments through a series of distorted images: from “reality” to “disneyfication” to “hyperreality” to “appropriation” to “uncertainty,” and back again. But I struggled to find a balance between making a prose-based argument and letting the images speak for themselves—being direct seemed too heavy-handed. In the end, the attempt felt shapeless, without direction or purpose.
Step 2: A Quick Change of Direction
Ultimately, these problems became insurmountable. The Google presentation was too static, too reliant on text; I wanted the remediation to communicate my thoughts entirely with images. I decided to begin again. I’d say my first attempt was a failure, but it gave me perspective: the remediation project was not a summary but a supplement, a means of filling in the holes I’d left in my repurposing paper. In this way, my final remediation process supplements a rhetoric-heavy paper with tangible images and statistics, working to illustrate the reductive process that naturally occurs when we encounter cultural texts. Here, the largest challenges became the confidence to change my mind, the relatively short time I had to conduct comprehensive research, and the tedious process of infographic-making: each required considerable patience and persistence.