Syllabus

Spring 2004 , Tuesday/Thursday afternoons, 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. in Solon Campus Center 42. Section 001, #46780. Course home page: http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/sp04/3220/

Dr. Craig Stroupe, 726-6249, Humanities 424
cstroupe@d.umn.edu; Office hours Tues. and Thurs. mornings, 11:00-noon or by appointment

Purpose | Expectations | Resources Needed | Grades

Purpose

The Lock Ness Monster is our emblem for this course because "Nessie" exists only in visual culture. Since the 1960s, she has served globally as a visual rhetoric to express the yearning for the mysterious, the unexplained, and the mythic, as well as to support a minor tourist industry around Inverness, Scotland. Consider for a moment how many other hopes, fears, ideas, understandings and memories that we share as a culture exist in the life of the mind not as words but as visual objects or spatial maps.

In this class, offered through the Composition Department, we will explore the creative, rhetorical, technical and social possibilities of creating graphic projects. Our textbooks and other resources draw eclectically from many disciplines, including a digital art, statistics, childrens' literature, engineering, and software design.

In addition to learning the mechanics of graphic production, this class will give you an opportunity to become skilled in interpreting and directing the use of visual discourses strategically and intellectually. Ultimately, the subject matter of the class is not only the graphic work that you will do but also the ways you'll discover to conceive, describe and contextualize that work in words.

This course is designed to give you skills, practice and understanding to realize the following goals:

employing principles of rhetoric and design to create visual projects that convey information and insight;
creating projects that effectively combine visual and verbal discourses;
discussing graphic work in critically and historically informed ways;
working with teammates and clients in productive relationships;
using a variety of software to create graphic projects for delivery via the Internet;
engaging potential audiences of visual texts on a variety of levels;

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Expectations

Exercises and Projects

This course comprises a series of exercises and projects. We'll do the exercises together in class to learn particular skills or techniques, and you'll have 24 hours after the class meeting to complete and post each exercise to the Web for credit.

As described on the Assignments Page, the projects are larger pieces of work that you'll complete individually over a period of two or three weeks using the skills you learned from the exercises and insights from the readings and class activities. Four of the projects are graphic ones using Photoshop and the Web. Two of them are essays about visual culture.

There is a three-point penalty per day for late projects, including the annotations that are explained below.

There is a three-point penalty per day for late projects, including the hard copies.

Annotated Printouts

I will give you specific directions for submitting the finished projects and exercises. All Web-based projects should be posted to the Web, the URL sent to the Webx discussion board, and all the pages printed out and handed in. Be sure to number the pages of your printout.

You should also "annotate" the printout before you hand it in. This means typing up a series of comments about particular features in the project which you want me to pay attention to or understand more about.

Each of these comments should be labled to refer both to the page number on the printout and to a number you've handwritten on the page to point to the particular feature. For instance, the banner on the first page of your site's printout might have a circled (1) next to it, and, on your typed comment sheet, the annotation on that banner should be labeled 1.1 (page 1, numbered item 1). Annotate items that

show you understood and fulfilled the goals of the assignment, that
you are especially pleased with, that
show what you've learned in class, that
you had trouble with, or that
raise unanswered questions for you.

Other Writing and Design Work

In addition to the design, creation and/or writing of the projects themselves, you will complete

writings on our online Webx discussion board
plans and preliminary writings or designs for your projects,
peer critiques for workshops
other writings.

Readings

On days when readings are assigned, please do the following:

have the readings done by the beginning of class;
expect brief quizzes or guided reading responses at the beginning or end of class. There are no make-ups on these responses if you are absent, late or leave early.

Attendance

Since this class will function as a community of writer-designers, your regular attendance is absolutely necessary.

Absences in excess of 3 (over 10% of the class meetings) will deduct 3 percent each from your overall grade.
These 3 possible absences can be spent however you wish and so there are no "excused" or "unexcused" absences. Save your "free" absences for a rainy (or snowy) day.
If you are absent, you are responsible for all material covered in class.
In the case of absences or lateness, some requirements like quizzes and guided in-class activities cannot be made up when timeliness or group interaction is critical.
In addition to your budget of allowed absences, you also have 3 instances of arriving late or leaving early to use (with or without an excuse) if necessary. Instances in excess of 3 will decrease your overall grade by 2 percentage points each. If on some occasion during the semester you need to leave class early, even if it's one of your three allowed instances, please arrange it with me in advance.

Participation

A larger goal of this course is to establish a community or network of writer-designers--with a wide variety of backgrounds, expertise, and interests--to enhance your learning and enjoyment during the next sixteen weeks. The class is designed to provide a number of avenues for this community building, including peer workshopping and critiquing, in-class production work, support groups, and various Internet-based communications and collaborations. Your sincere and regular contributions to maintaining this collaborative environment will count in your grade, and of course will greatly benefit your final products in the course. Because your work is the subject matter for this course, turning in all projects and writings on time is critical; work turned in late will be assessed a 3% penalty per day.

Incompletes

Incompletes for the semester will be given only in the following very limited circumstances:

you must contact me in advance of the semester's end to make a request for an incomplete;
no more than one or two weeks of class, or one or two assignments, can have been missed;
you must be in good standing in the class (not already behind, in other words);
you must have a documented family or medical emergency, as required by university policy;
you must arrange a time table with me for completing the missed work that is acceptable to both of us.

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Resources Needed

Weinmann and Lourekas, Photoshop 7 for Windows and Macintosh, Peachpit Press
Molly Bang's, Picture This, Little Brown, 2000
Edward Tuft's Visual Explanations, Graphics Press, 1997
a UMD e-mail account
Zip disk or pocket drive for saving and transporting your work (at least 100 Mg.)
occasional access to a digital camera, or several high-density, IBM-formatted floppy disks for use in a digital camera to be checked out from UMD
access to a printer, or funds for printing

Grades

Your work on the seven major projects and various exercises (weighed according to the size and complexity of the project): 75% total
Participation in class generally, including in-class activities and contributions, online discussions, attendance, conferences, quizzes, peer workshop responses, Webx discussions, class discussion, promptness: 25%

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