Description: Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.

I think out of all the projects this one was the most fun

Newspaper Blackout Poetry is  Visual Assignment 11. It was submitted by Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy  on twitter). The assignment description is to:

“Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.”

Blackout Poetry existed prior to becoming a ds106 assignment. Austin Kleon has been blogging newspaper blackouts for such a long time that he’s been able to publish a book on the topic. The book’s title: Newspaper Blackout.

Looking over the list of past entries for this assignment category, I was drawn to three in particular. I appreciate how each person has taken the basic assignment and reinterpreted it in a personal and unique way. They are all worth checking out:

•  Giulia’s “Newspaper Blackout” is typically amazing work from the ds106 archivist. Using a digital version of a newspaper instead of an actual paper certainly works, though it might not follow the assignment description to the letter.
• Sarah on the other hand used an actual black marker on a current newspaper to provide a poetic angle on events of the day. This was from last Spring when events in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world were very much in the news.
• The most recent entry is from CUNY York student Marissa. She too used pen on paper but this time it was with a book instead of newspaper.

As should be clear in looking over the great work above, there is really a lot of freedom to present the ds106 assignments as you see fit. In fact, if you don’t see something you want, you may submit your own.  For my submission, I decided to use a digital version of a newspaper. Now that we are in the 21st century, I see no need to handle real newspapers.

I began with the four words you see in the image. I came up with “teacher of the year” as an inspirational prod for your Prof. Lockman. I wonder if this will inspire him to live up the greatness which some on the internet seem to feel he is capable. I’m not going to hold my breathe on that one.

With the search terms “teacher” and “year” in mind I visited the Library of Congress Online Reading Room. From there, I clicked the link to the  News Archives on the Web which is maintained by Ibiblio. From the vast list of old and current newspapers maintained in digital form by Ibiblio, I chose the Brooklyn Eagle. The search terms then took me to an article from January 27, 1902.

Getting around this archive is a bit tricky at first. I will hope to create a video tutorial on how to do this someday. For now, all I can suggest is spending some time digging around. It’s kind of amusing and perhaps even informative to read the newspapers from long ago.

Here then is  quick summary of the steps I followed once I found the article:

• Each of the articles are a series of GIF images so all I had to do was download the one which contained my search words (this was done by right-clicking and downloading to the desktop)
• Once the image was downloaded, I opened up Aviary and uploaded the image to the free web-based image editor.
• I enlarged the image enough so that the text would be readable on this blog (about a 60% enlargement through “resize image”)
• Then I selected a black brush and made adjustments to hardness, opacity and flow so that some of the original text would show through
• As I was a bit concerned that the word “the” came after the word “year” I then added a yellow trail with circles to guide the viewers eye through the message of the poem

Newspaper Blackout Poetry is  Visual Assignment 11. It was submitted by Tim Owens (@timmmmyboy  on twitter). The assignment description is to:

“Grab a marker and today’s morning edition and start blacking out sections to create a new story. It could be a poem, a picture, or a novella, all drawn from the words of the latest news.”

I didn’t use an actual paper but an online archived version from the a January 27, 1902 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle that I found at Library of Congress Online Reading Room.

All of the articles on the Brooklyn Eagle’s site are image files so I downloaded this one and painted out the words in the free online image editor Aviary.

The poem I created from the article might not be very poetic. And I didn’t follow the exact instruction to use today’s paper. But this is ds106, the assignment description is just a starting point to spark the creative energies.

I have always enjoyed the power of images to influence what we interpret from words. I remember getting so frightened of a picture in a book as a child that I was absolutely unable to finish the rest of the text until I had come to terms with the picture. The rest of the book retained some of that initial horror that I had gotten from the picture.

Anyhow, these two poems were suggested as assignments for the digital storytelling class I’m currently enrolled in. I thought they looked like fun, so I completed them.

First: Newspaper Blackout Poetry

I had fun with that one, but it wasn’t as interesting to me as analyzing what came out of the Media Player poem assignment. (I’m currently listening to this playlist and find that the heavy synthesizers at the start of the poem is a very odd way to start a Saturday.)

Media Player Poem:

^-^