Hi all! I’m happy to share my final project, called Contos Maravilhosos (Wonderful Tales).
Link to project: https://contosdatereza.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Final project rationale:
Contos Maravilhosos (Wonderful Tales) – Final Project
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Author Archives: Raquel Neris
Final project updates
I’ve been working on my final project, called Contos Maravilhosos. I’m following the project plan I defined in my proposal with a few changes which I will explain here.
For now, I already have the website with all of the tales and instructions on how to collaborate. The stories are in Portuguese, but I’ve activated a plugin to translate them into English, Spanish, and German.
Instead of uploading only a few stories, I uploaded all of them so that users could choose which ones they wanted to illustrate.
These are the stories that received contributions until now:
The following steps for my project are:
1 – Populating the website with more contributions, which can be in the form of text, illustrations, or audio;
2 – Create at least one audio version of one of the stories, exploring different audio effects. I should also create an audiogram and post it on Youtube;
3 – Create an interactive map using Kumu to present differences and similarities between the tales, similarly to what I’ve created to the Manhattan Transfer project.
I should also write a rationale about the project, analyzing the contributions, the audio versions of the stories, and the interactive map.
Final project proposal: Contos Maravilhosos
Contos Maravilhosos is a WordPress website that reimagines how children can experience bedtime stories. The website presents a selection of eighteen bedtime tales written in Portuguese by Tereza de Castro Callado, a Brazilian writer, teacher, and philosopher. As a bedtime story is a traditional form of storytelling, where a story is told to children to prepare them for sleep, Contos Maravilhosos is presented in a multimedia format. Each text has an audio version, which is displayed on the website as an audiogram.
As Contos Maravilhosos follows a fantastic genre, a literary style characterized by fictional narratives centered on imaginary elements, distant from reality, they easily incentivize children’s imagination. Therefore, we engage children to create their own illustrations, providing guidelines on how to develop and share them as notes and comments on the website.
To help children create visual elements for the stories, we present two tools: Dreamstudio, an online platform that generates illustrations using AI, and Animated Drawings, an online tool that creates animated versions of simple sketches. We also have a chapter on the website that showcases a collaborative album of illustrations shared by the audience.
In addition to these elements, we have a special section on the website with the author’s story. We present it as an interactive timeline using Storyline.
What I plan to present as a final project
For this project, I plan to launch an initial version of the website. This version will be developed in two phases:
Phase 1: Text and audio only
November 16th – November 27th
In this initial phase, the website will present only three stories with their respective audio versions. We’ll share the website with a small audience and ask for their collaboration in illustrating each story. We should collect their feedback on their experiences reading and listening to the stories and their thoughts on using the tools we suggest to generate illustrations and animations.
Phase 2: Illustrated tales with audiograms
November 28th – December 5th
Based on the contributions and feedback collected in Phase 1, Phase 2 will present the three stories with illustrations created by the audience. We should also develop audiograms with these images, which can be shared on other platforms, such as Youtube.
Inspirations
This project was inspired by the Manhattan Transfer project, a digital annotated version of the book written by John Dos Passos. Similarly to Contos Maravilhosos, this project also uses a WordPress website to present the story, which is illustrated by AI images. It also engages collaboration by using Hypothesis, a plugin that enables users to share their thoughts on the reading.
Manhattan Transfer Project Reflections
In the last few weeks, I have been developing the Manhattan Transfer project, a WordPress website with a multimedia and collaborative annotated version of Manhattan Transfer (1925), a novel by John Dos Passos. My role in the team was more technical as I built the website structure.
Using an Academic Commons WordPress website as a tool was an excellent choice for two main reasons. First, it utilizes open-source technology that enables users with no coding skills to develop websites. Second, it provides a flexible environment to explore different interactions with the narrative. By installing the Hypothesis plugin on the website, we created a collaborative space for note-taking. We could also embed videos and images that transformed the reading experience into a more interactive and engaging experience.
Along with the website building, I also created some multimedia elements. For example, I used Kumu to develop an interactive map based on the character’s map created by Miaoling, as you can see here.
I also created audiograms for the project, which are graphical representations of sounds. I used Headliner to develop videos with sound waves based on free audio files I downloaded from Freesound, a collaborative database of audio files released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.
However, the most exciting experience was illustrating the reading with illustrations generated by artificial intelligence. Our team used different tools to create them, but I used Dreamstudio in most cases. It was fun to play with keywords and excerpts extracted from the reading and see what the AI would generate. I created an image for each chapter based on short descriptions created by Nadin. By doing that, I could see some AI biases, in which one single word would deviate from visually representing the excerpts. For example, every time that I used the word “Congo”, which is the name of one character, the tool would provide me with images black people:
However, in almost all other pictures, which by the way, did not have any keyword related to race, the AI would only generate white people:
Final thoughts
I would love to see this project’s final version, with all chapters enriched by multimedia elements and collaborative comments. It made me reimagine how a book can be transformed and reinterpreted, not only by people but also by Artificial Intelligence. It also made me think about how AI is biased and how it reflects social inequalities.
Note-taking tools for collaborative work
In Note-taking as an Art of Transmission, Ann Blair makes us think about note-taking’s fundamental role by allowing knowledge transmission, which most people take for granted. In her words, “notes recorded from reading or experience typically contribute to one’s conversation and compositions,” and it perpetuates a “cycle of transmission and transformation of knowledge, ideas, and experiences.” (p.85) Note-taking was and is a crucial factor for us to evolve as a society. For me, that became very clear in Blair’s explanation of how learning practices based on note-taking enabled us to access cultures based on oral knowledge transmission:
“From earliest antiquity, teaching was mostly oral; what we know of ancient teaching is largely dependent on the notes that listeners took. What we call the works of Aristotle, for example, are thought to be mostly composed from student notes.” (p. 91).
As I am a learning experience designer and often use digital tools for collaborative note-taking, the most interesting thing I found in the reading was her argument on how our tools shape note-taking, and that current digital technologies are still to be better analyzed by scholars. Based on this call for action, I will share my thoughts comparing two tools for note-taking that I often use in my professional routine: Mural and Google Jamboard. I will share their main characteristics and use the authors’ framework with the main functions of note-taking (storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting) to reveal their affordances, especially in how they enable collaboration and flexibility in adding notes.
Mural
With a free and paid version, Mural is an online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work with digital notes.
In terms of storage, users can write text and upload images as files from the computer or the web. After creating whiteboards, users can keep them online or export them in different formats (PDF, PNG, PPT, HTML and CSV).
Users can organize their notes using templates, such as “user journey template,”” brainstorming template” etc. Inside each of them, they can outline a way to read the notes, as we can see in the picture below:
Mural workspace
The tool has a search bar, which is a helpful tool for finding specific information inside the notes. Whiteboards can also be arranged in different rooms, which is essential when working with different teams or projects.
As sticky notes are good for short texts, it naturally makes the writer summarize information. However, as Mural enables users to add hyperlinks t the notes, summarizing becomes easier.
Anyone with an account can create, share and join boards with other users, take notes simultaneously and organize them, changing their position, size, format, and color. As each board enables a good level of zooming in and out, users can insert a good amount of notes and organize them easily. Users can also add different media, such as images, icons, videos, and audio, and use hand drawings instead of text. It provides excellent features for synchronous activities, such as timer and voting tools.
Google Jamboard
Jamboard is a digital interactive whiteboard developed by Google to work with Google Workspace. It is free, but to use it, you have to create a Google Account. Users can draw, create shapes and lines, add text, use sticky notes, and turn their touchpoint into a digital laser pointer. In terms of storage, users can keep their files online or export them in PDF and PNG.
Users can organize their notes using different colors and sizes and also divide them into different whiteboards, which are pretty similar to slides, as we can see in the images below:
Google Jamboard
Jamboard facilitates summarizing note-taking not just because of the post-its but also because the zooming is a bit limited. Users can’t add too many sticky notes, drawings, and images on only one board.
Final thoughts
Both tools are excellent to collaborative note-taking. People can use them for free and on different devices.
However, Mural usually requires an extra step which is having people sign up if they want to create their own whiteboards. Sometimes that can also be the case using Jamboard, but as many people already have a Google Account, the signup step is less frequent.
In terms of flexibility, Mural is way ahead of Jamboard. It is a much more sophisticated tool, providing more options for adding media, facilitating groups, and organizing content. On the other hand, Jamboard is a simple, easy-to-use tool, and I prefer to use it when I have to work with people that are not so tech-savvy.
Reflections on group project #1
“The Story of an Hour and The Box Social into The Yellow Wallpaper”
Our group’s goal was to create an original audio piece by splicing and rearranging three different texts: “The Story of an Hour”, “The Box Social”, and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” These texts were chosen because all three had the same theme of women finding a response to their oppression and wanting to take control of their lives.
As we didn’t want to turn the final story into a play, we decided to use only voice acting, without other background elements. In my perception, adding sound effects would be interesting to engage the audience, but it might cause interference in focusing on how the stories were combined.
My role was to record the voice for “The Box Social.” Written by James Reaney, the story is a concise narrative about Sylvia, a young woman that designs a box to present in a rural farming town’s box-social. I had never read this text before, so I started my work by researching information about the author and the piece. As the narrator, I understood that I had the duty to do some diving into the context of the story. That way I would be able to express the characters’ emotions adequately.
However, when I started narrating the text, I got stuck with pronunciation difficulties. I had to rehearse several times to produce the final recording. Some expressions were new to me; therefore, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce them. As English is not my first language, I tried avoiding errors using a text-to-speech tool. It was helpful, but as it produced a robotic reading, I couldn’t rely entirely on it to do my work. In the end, I decided to read in a way that I felt comfortable with and in which I could express the characters’ emotions. In other words, I just embraced my accent and decided that this element was necessary for the listener to experience how a foreigner interpreted the story.
This experience also made me think about the work of a narrator in producing meaning while reading a story. I felt like a co-author in a certain way, as there is no such thing as being neutral in making an audiobook.
When I finished my work, I had no idea what the final result would be. As we didn’t discuss how each reader should interpret their texts, I didn’t know if my contribution would be very different from the rest. However, the sound editors of the team mentioned that our pace and volume of speaking were quite similar, and therefore the final result was good.
After we presented the work, we discussed how it would be even more interesting if we could provide the listener with the agency to choose different ways of listening to the three stories. That, of course, would involve much more significant work in interpreting the texts. Maybe creating a tagging system would be a good way to start.
Blog Post 2 – Monólogo do Orfeu poem
About the poem
The Monólogo do Orfeu (Orpheus monologue) poem is part of the Orfeu da Conceição musical show, written by the Brazilian poet and playwright Vinicius de Moraes in 1954. It is an interpretation of the Greek mythological story of Orpheus and Eurydice that references the reality of the favelas Cariocas.
In Greek mythology, the son of the god Apollo and the nymph Calliope, Orpheus, was the most talented of all poets and musicians. His poetry enchanted everything and everyone. Eurydice was a beautiful nymph. Orpheus and Eurydice’s passion ends in a tragedy caused by Eurydice’s beauty and the excessive jealousy of Aristeus. A serpent mortally wounded Eurydice. Desperate, Orpheus tried to get his beloved back, only to meet death after he cried out for lost love and rejected all women.
In Orfeu da Conceição, Vinicius de Morais reinterprets this story by presenting the story of Orfeu, a samba player who lives in the slums and falls in love with Eurídice during the Carnival. Besides being a version of the original play, this is also a tribute to the Brazilian black man, a recognition of his value in Brazilian culture and the precarious conditions of his existence.
About the video/audio production
As Vinicius wrote this piece for a theater play, I don’t believe it requires any adaptation. In this video, the author reads the poem naturally without special effects or editing. However, Vinicius declaims it with intensity, representing Orfeu’s emotions very well. In the poem, Orfeu presents his feeling of loneliness as he remembers the joyful moments he had with Eurídice, who is no longer alive.
The nicest thing about this piece is the musical component that goes along with the speech. In one aspect, it references the lyre, a stringed musical instrument that dates back to ancient Greece (another reference to the Greek piece). In another aspect, it uses the Fado melody background, a Portuguese musical style characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the life of the poor and infused with a sentiment of resignation, fate, and melancholy.
From my perspective, this last component is perfect. Instead of choosing the Samba music, which is present in other parts of the musical show, I believe Vinicius chose Fado because what Orfeu feels is best expressed by the Portuguese word Saudade. This word means the feeling of permanent and irreparable loss and its consequent lifelong damage, with no perfect translation in any other language.
Other versions of this poem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcARp8p5Bpw (very spontaneous, Catarina Marques declaims the poem by a beach. It is a bit noisy, but the presence of the sea is also a reference to Fado lyrics since it is a common theme in this musical style).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98x3qQbxFnM (In this version, Maria Bethânia declaims the poem after singing Lamento do Morro, a very lively song. She decided not to use any musical background, and I think it works well because it creates a good contrast with the tune, making it more dramatic).
The future of books in the digital age
The suggested readings about the future of books in the digital age present the idea that we naturally tend to mistrust changes, considering that they have no precedent (the so-called “myth of exceptionalism” mentioned in Price). In Coady’s article, we can see what I believe is one of the most emblematic examples of this phenomenon. She gives the example of Socrates and how he speaks about the risks of the written word, how its discovery could “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls,” and that “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.”
I agree that this bias exists, and I tend to be pretty optimistic about the future of reading with digital platforms. However, I don’t think that the best outcome for these discussions is to condemn these fears (inherent in our survival instincts) but to use them as fuel for our critical thinking about how we incorporate new technologies.
From one perspective, becoming digital enables access, and not considering this in defense of the physical book is having an elitist and narrow way of thinking. Coady’s article mentioned how the Wattpad (an online, free reading and writing platform) enabled an older adult in a remote village in Africa with no structure that facilitated access to physical books, such as schools and libraries, to read using a mobile phone. Of course, a significant percentage of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to the internet (around 37%). Still, this episode exemplifies how a single piece of online technology can significantly mitigate isolation.
Adding to this topic-which the articles don’t mention-as digital technologies enable the assimilation of content in different modes, it allows access to readers with physical constraints. Audiobooks, for instance, enable people with visual disabilities to be autonomous in reading. We can say the same thing for illiterate populations or those that don’t have the privilege to have reading time (busy working mothers, for example).
That doesn’t mean, however, that the digital forms of reading are better than physical ones. Print books help us develop focus, critical reasoning, creativity, and many other intellectual properties through a synesthetic experience that the most common digital platforms, such as tablets and smartphones, cannot fully simulate. I agree with Pressman when she argues that the practice of reading physical books has a fetishization component (p. 259) and I agree with Coady when she compares it to a ritual (p. 40). There is something sacred in the reading experience that combines thinking and the senses, including the book’s physicality and all of the physical pleasures of the surroundings. From my perspective, I also think that reading physical books is liberating, since it provides a healthy alternative to having to spend so many hours surrounded by screens.
To summarize, I acknowledge that the digital has provided many benefits to reading culture, especially regarding inclusion. However, physical books are irreplaceable, brain food that doesn’t depend on having batteries or an internet connection.
