Edit a childhood photo of yourself to include a more recent photo of you in a pose that makes it look like you were part of the original scene. Pay attention to matching pose, detail, shadows, and color values to match the original. You can go back to your past, at least in your own edited photo!
Based an example of Before and After Pictures with a Twist spotted in Buzzfeed. See also more exquisite examples in Woman Photoshops Present-Day Self into Childhood Photos.
Wouldn’t webpages be more interesting if the author provided commentary on the contents and went on tangents about entirely unrelated subjects? Or if a story suddenly appeared in the middle of the page? Or what if a website became self-aware?
The concept for this assignment is simple: Insert a story into an existing webpage. You don’t need to replace anything or remove anything. Just add your own content in whatever way is appropriate to the story. You can easily do this with Firebug (https://getfirebug.com/), or download the page and open it in a text editor. This shouldn’t require modifying formatting or layouts, unless you want to use a specialized font to make the story contents stand out (e.g. http://wp.me/p2IgNY-2K).
Take an existing movie or television show and change the writing of the synopsis in a way where it’s still factual correct, yet the storyline feels drastically different.
From the Spring 2011 ds106 class came the idea of changing up an existing web page to tell a new story ” you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site, but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site—though you can photoshop particular images on the site. Essentially you alter the content of a web page (content, images) to make it tell a new story.
Originally we recommended doing this using the Firebug extension in the Firefox browser, which does work, but is unfortunately easy to lose your work. We currently recommend Mozilla Hackasaurus — install the X-Ray Googles in any browser and use it to re-cast the content of any web page.
When you blog it, include both a screen capture in your post, but you will also need to upload the web files (HTML and media files) to your own site so it can exist as a stand alone URL. (see our older Firebug Tutorial)
Consider using news sites, social media profiles, product pages, movie review pages etc. The simpler the design of the page, the easer it will be (think Craig’s List).
Too bad Facebook was not around for most of history! Use the Fakebook tool to make a Facebook profile for a historical figure and make a fake tweet for the same character using the Twister tool. See for Abaraham Lincoln the example of a fake facebook profile and what he might have tweeted.
Make sure what you create is coherent with the person’s background, and explain what it might have meant for that person to use Facebook and twitter “way back then”. Include screen shots and links to what you created, and elaborate on what their use of social media might have been like if it existed for them.
Your challenge here is to inject a story into the comment space of a product a web site such as Amazon or ebay much in the vein of the Three Wolf Moon t-shirt on Amazon (see the back story). More examples include the BIC for Her pen reviews or the Diamond Braided HDMI Cable
Find an item that is ordinary and has not been given this treatment by anyone else. The point is to see if a comment can carry the essence of a story and if others will feed into it. Now when you do this, do not be a jerk, the comment needs to be subtle, ironic, but have a real feel to it, and really be added to the original site (not marked up as a copy web page). Include a link to the product, what you added, and describe how it acts as a story embedded into another web site.
“Significant Objects, a literary and anthropological experiment devised by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively.”
The project involved finding low cost objects at garage sales and thrift stores and creating stories about them that might enhance their value, as proven in auctions on eBay.
See if you can replicate a web page of the same kind that includes both the artifact, a story, and make it look like some kind of auction site.
Sometime the photographs we choose not to take are the most powerful images- in this assignment choose not to photograph a subject but write out the image in text (or maybe describe in audio), and share why this is a more appropriate representation.
This is based on the Unphotographable site : “….a catalog of exceptional mistakes. Photos never taken that weren’t meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished I’d taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.” and see also examples done by the phonar participants
Inspired by the Return to the Scene of the Crime assignment, comes a related idea which asks you to digitally mix the past and the present. This was done exceptionally well by Shawn Clover in his series 1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend, “featuring photographs captured during the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake blended into views of what the city currently looks like.”
Use a photograph from the past and digitally blend it with an image of the present. And for five thousand bazillion extra stars, blend the past and present photos with a digital concoction of the future.
Inspired by the animation series, Mysteries of the Vernacular:
http://mysteriesofvernacular.com/
Tell the story of the history of a favorite word. Mysteries of the Vernacular uses animation, but feel free to use any form of media to tell your word’s story.
