Although people have said that Bootcamp was the hardest week in ds106, I found this week to be more challenging than any of bootcamp was. In part, this may have been because I did not start my work for the week until Thursday night due to other things going on in my life or because I really had to think this week.

I started off the week by putting storytelling into my own words. I think of stories as forms of art. Costumes can be a story, for example. When we build costumes for the theatre, we use them to explain more about the character who is wearing them. Stories can be abstract and are not concrete and can take on many forms. I used Little Wheel as an example of a story in my post. Little Wheel is a game in which you guide a little robot on an adventure to restore electricity to his home.

As a journalist and photographer, I am a storyteller which was reinforced this week as I learned more about stories. As a journalist who mainly does Feature writing, I tend to not do traditional news stories but instead write reviews. My reviews are stories on their own as they tell about things I have seen, heard or done. I thought more about my photography this week by what I learned with my storytelling. I know that photos can tell a story and while I like to shoot odd details of things, those details, like bricks covered  in a dusting of snow can still tell a story.

I used Kurt Vonnegut’s shape of stories to analyze the first three episodes of season two of Girls.

The shape of GIRLS Season Two after the first three episodes.

I used Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories to analyze the first three episodes of season two of Girls. The analysis was harder than I thought. I was forced to think of Girls more than I have in the past and came to the realization that the shape of the story is subjective in a way. I found Hannah’s adventures with cocaine, in episode three, to be one of the high points of the story due to it being the catalyst for most of the other major events in the episode. Many people would see cocaine use as a negative thing, and while it does cause many tensions as the episode progresses, it ultimately helps to move the story along.

I chose Ergon/Logos as an example of digital storytelling. I first looked at it for one of my English classes a few years back and it stuck with me. The ever changing nature of the story and the fact that it is hard to determine the shape of, as it can change with each reading really made me think of how digital storytelling challenges Vonnegut’s ideas.

I analyzed Bagman and a story in five frames entitled Good Eggs Gone Rotten from the collections of previous works. Both of these works told digital stories in different ways. Although both contained new, original characters, Bagman’s story had words that one could hear as well as movement while Good Eggs Gone Rotten was made up of static, wordless pictures. These works added to my understanding of works being able to take many different forms.

One of my favorite things about ds106 is doing the Daily Creates. This week, I did all seven of them and enjoyed that they were photography heavy. I often mention each day’s theme to my best friend during lunch or dinner and she has now started asking me about them, which in turn has lead to me at times, putting more thought into them. My favorite one this week was the blue screen of death one. I decided to use an ASCII art image of a hand holding a pencil over the words “How do you think people wrote papers before computers were invented?” to remind people that turning in papers typed on a computer is a fairly new practice.

After doing my five card flickr story, which I found enjoyable but challenging, I decided to do the story in five frames assignment. I chose to take pictures of food at the Super Bowl party I was attending and realized that it was harder than I had expected as I still have 10 or so good photos that would work well in the story I am telling. I also wanted to experiment with the ‘food photography’ setting on my camera and I think that the photos turned out rather well.

I no longer feel like I am “Dancing On My Own” thanks to my group!

I was excited to be put in a comment group this week, but in the end, it was not as great as I thought it would be. My group consisted of Cole, Tim, and Brooke. I loved Brooke’s layout and told her that. We are both using themes by Caroline Moore, whose themes are simple and girly with muted colors. After seeing her weekly summary, I realized that I had basically spent the week praising people and not providing constructive criticism, something I will try to change this week. I commented on Tim’s post about his use of gifs, the ones he made were huge and slow to load which he responded to by resizing them some. I found Cole’s layout to be a bit of a mess with unneeded items like a carousel.

I feel like I have learned a bit about my group mates and their favorite media through their posts. I am starting to notice themes when it comes to their favorite stories which everyone in my group used both in last week’s gif making assignment as well as in this week’s shape of the story assignment; Cole loves The Hobbit, Tim loves Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Brooke loves Wreck it Ralph. They are not alone in showing their passions, I showed my love for Girls in both my story shape post and in an extra post I made with gifs that I made in my free time.

In addition to receiving comments from my classmates, I received some comments from some other participants in ds106 including Michael Branson Smith, who teaches a similar course at CUNY and enjoyed my gifs and Brian Metcalf who suggested that I theme my posts more by including sewing puns into the titles. I slowly started to do that this week and while it is harder than I thought it would be, I feel like it makes my blog feel more cohesive. I liked their feedback and enjoyed hearing from people that were not just at UMW.

I found all the feedback useful and am hoping that next week it will be more constructive from my group mates. While I loved the ‘your layout is awesome’ comments, I wish that I’d been given advice on where to improve or how I could change up my work some.

I have been doing some storytelling outside of class as well. My photo of students skating on an ‘iceless ice rink’ during Winter Carnival was published in The Bullet this week. I have done photography before for the paper but I am mainly a features writer. I am trying to focus this semester on doing more photography for both The Bullet and The Battlefield, UMW’s yearbook which I also am on staff of.

This week I plan on getting a guide to the subreddit up on my blog if I can as well as cohosting the ds106 show with the amazing Miss Amber May.

While I have occasionally struggled with the coursework for ds106, I have realized that my limited html knowledge comes in handy when writing blog posts. I often find myself switching between text and visual mode, especially when adding stuff like images from flickr and have found that I can often fix issues with my posts by simply editing the coding of them and bypassing the visual editor. This has saved me some time, which is nice, because as you can see, my posts can get a bit wordy.