Final Project: Steelettos Finished

Countless hours, interviews and coffee pots later: Steelettos!

Attempt At Descriptive Writing

She's smarter than you, and she knows, it but she's very gentle about how she makes you aware of that knowledge. Her intellectualism is betrayed by her musical tastes: Amanda Palmer, the Decembrists, musicians with lyrics that require dictionaries for comprehension. She finds wordplay hilarious. Her extended metaphors and elaborate pranks are to die for. Frequently when conversing with her it is as if she's mid-delivery of a standup comedy segment. "I think you'll appreciate this" she'll say before launching into a well-placed, frequently even semi-relevant anecdote.
She's always dressed well, a wardrobe reflecting the difference between fashion and style. She's one of those people who dress up particularly when they're feeling down, clothing-and-accessory pick-me-ups.

Check out the audio of Adelia's interview with one of our sources!

Raw_CV_Interview_Clip by AMo73

Final Project: Steelettos

Our final project will be linked to here as soon as it's finished, but here is a sneak peek!

I'll tweet the website as soon as we put the finishing touches on it.

Podcasts on Writing

Podcasts on writing technique? Cool! I'm having trouble getting the audio to embed but I downloaded it to my iTunes; I imagine it could be a better use of time to listen to writing advice on my walk to work than See No Evil (not that I don't love my local Pittsburgh bands).

Parallel Structuring With Semi-Relevant Facts

For a project in another writing class I'm working on interspersing technical language and descriptions into the narrative of the piece, finding metaphors to relate the clinical definitions (in this case the science of audio engineering) to the topic (an individual audio engineer). To get a better feel for how to make this work I'm teaching myself the basics of ear training and pitch identification.

The tricky is not to take research to the point of procrastination but to get just into it enough to have a solid grasp on the material.

I'm not sure this is a technique that lends itself to our current nonfiction project, but is worth considering for future pieces that are difficult to structure.

Not What "Death of the Paper Industry" Conjures To Mind

Reverse product placement to sell paper? Not newspapers, literal sheets of printer paper? Interesting.

Single Topic Tumblr: Eula Biss

My Life Which is Also My Crime

Storify: Rebecca Skloot on Creative Nonfiction

Byliner.com: Who I'm Following and Why

Create a Byliner.com account. Find and follow at least three dissimilar writers and write a post explaining which three main writers you’re following and why. (None may be from the Pitt faculty.) Post by the start of class 11/9.


Malcom Gladwell: I don't think it's going too far to say that Gladwell made nonfiction trendy again. His works are exhaustingly well researched and I think brilliantly structured, the way he can weave disparate stories into a coherent narrative simultaneously instructive and enthrallingly entertaining. 


Joan Didion: Didion is why I started writing nonfiction. I've read many of what are considered her classic essays from the 1960's but four decades later she's still writing- I'd like to be able to keep up with what she's publishing these days and Byliner presents an excellent way to do that by aggregating many of her works across the web. 


David Sedaris: A longtime favorite. Hysterically funny yet frequently poignant memoirist. There are certainly lessons I hope to be able to learn from each of these writers but I've always been particularly inspired by Sedaris' handling of difficult and painful experiences, turning them into literary art free without inciting pity. 

In Class Lab: Stories Sans Print

Think of three different ways—other than print—to tell a story. (We’ll assume that your piece has a print component.) Give a descriptive one-paragraph summary for each. Post idea by the end of class.

1. Charts and Diagrams. Graphically represent relevant information, or bits of interesting trivia that aren't necessarily intrinsic to the story but help flesh out the topic. Maybe a bar chart of how much time it takes on average for a drag queen to get dressed up for a performance versus for their daily life versus a biological woman, or a pie chart of reactions from passersby a drag king says he has experienced when in drag, or xy graph charting number of drag shows and pride events versus gay rights legislation or homophobic attacks. 

2. Audio Clips. Conduct and record interviews, edit for quality soundbites, embed links to digital home of the project in an attractive manner. I'm envisioning maybe photos of various sources and when you click on them you would hear them speak a sentence or two- would emphasize how many different voices -literally- and perspectives there are at play.  Or similarly have the text of an interview question and then below 'What Marcia Said', 'What George Said", etc. and clicking on the sources name would trigger the audio of their response to that question. 

3. A game, of some ilk. I don't know for sure how this would work, and probably don't have the coding skills to make it a reality, but some sort of interactive mini flash game? Could that be a viable method of story-communication? Or some kind of choose-your-own adventure? I don't know how that's really useful or how it could be applied to our topic, but interactive things are so trendy right now. 

I didn't list photo essay because that seems like the most obvious go-to thing but I do think that with this topic it could lend a really neat edge. Maybe like a series of photos interspersed between the text... say after a paragraph about something like what kind of wigs drag queens wear have three shots of the same individual from different angles putting on a wig. 

What If You Put Together A Magazine in 48 Hours? What If You Put Together A Proposal For A Magazine In A Few Minutes?

The answer to the latter question can be found here.


Seceding from Steelers Nation

The edition is a focus on non-Pittsburgh sports fans in Pittsburgh and/or on a distaste for Pittsburgh sports fans. We’d aspire for 20 stories, graphics and pieces of art in total.

· A Shirt of Another Color — A story bundle, talking to fans about experiences they’ve had wearing jerseys of other sports fans
ART:
Photograph portraits of the fans in their shirts

· Black and Yellow Cult — Stories of excessive fandom, stalking, chasing down, crying, mass hysteria over the sports.
ART:
Chart — cost of supporting your team — a break down of the money people spend on season tickets, parking, food, etc.
Poll — How many dates have you gone on to Black & Yellow games?
— Rate these in terms of importance: Food, Shelter, Water, The Steelers, and Beer

· “Fan” Art — Art satirizing black and yellow players either for their physical attributes or for their public personas.

· Diary of a Jersey Chaser — Chronicling the events of a woman’s life as she pursues black and gold clad players.
ART: Girls in craftily cut jerseys converted into “sexy” outfits.

· Photo essay — tackiest Steelers paraphernalia

· Police Records — pull public records of athletes’ police records and compare them to other teams in their leagues.
SIDE BAR: Chronicling fan disturbances.
SIDE BAR: Fans behavior at other stadiums

· Game day eating — a graphic of the caloric intake of popular game day food — complete with recipes.
ART: Photos of the food above each description

· Fan cheers — recordings of popular cheers with an explanation of their origins.
SIDE BAR: Lyrics from the cheers

· Photo Essay — a montage of people with sunburns around their body/face paint

· View from the outside — Talking to people from other cities and people new to Pittsburgh about their opinion of “Steelers Nation” and the Black and Yellow Cult.

· Philosophical analysis of the Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” — hint: despite it’s prevalence at sporting events the actual words have little to do with Pittsburgh athletics.
ACCOMPANYING: Montage of fans’ videos where they’re singing black and yellow (with permission, of course).

Social Media Pages for Slate and Grantland

Slate Home
Slate Facebook
Slate Twitter 

Grantland Home
Grantland Facebook
Grantland Twitter 


Continued list and links forthcoming, internet connection in Boston is significantly sketchier than one might have hoped.

Digital Research Scavenger Hunt

 Audio of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. You must include one correct, accurate quote from Faulkner in your post.

"The young man and woman writing today have forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." 

January 1, 1644, fell on which day of the week? What was the weather like that day in Philadelphia/Pennsylvania?

Gregorian calendar? Friday. Cloudy and rainy weather, with occasional sunshine and somewhat warm. 

Where and when did the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history occur?

Great Galveston Hurricane, Texas 1900, Death toll: 8000

Lake Okeechobee Florida 1928, Death toll: 2500

Katrina 2005, Death toll: 1200

Cheniere Caminada, Louisiana 1893 Death toll: 1100-1400

Sea Islands, South Carolina/Georgia 1893 Death toll: 1000,2000 

A blueprint for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

Ernest Hemingway’s 1923 passport photograph. Make five factual observations about the document.

1. Hemingway's passport number was 359666

2. There appears to be a stamp crookedly applied over the photograph.

3. Hemingway is wearing a suit and tie and not yet sporting his signature beard. 

4. The photograph appears to have been embossed with a circular insignia in the upper lefthand corner.

5. The background paper reads 'United States passport' repe

Facebook, Twitter, and Nonfiction: Useful Interactions?

Find Facebook pages and Twitter streams for one credible nonfiction site and one credible nonfiction writer of your choice. How do the publications/writers interact with readers? Does it work? Why or why not? How much is too much? What is effective and what is noise? Write a short post.


This is the Facebook page for The Atlantic. It currently has 54,308 followers and appears to update regularly, but most posts by the page owner seem to be aggregating Atlantic articles rather than providing any additional content or reader interaction. Likewise with the magazine's Twitter account, which is posts short blurbs and links to its own articles online. The Twitter account could be useful for notifying readers of articles that might interest them if they aren't consistent readers of the magazine, but doesn't seem to do much in the way of engaging with readers or soliciting interaction. 


Malcolm Gladwell has not one but two Facebook pages, neither of which provides any content beyond his wikipedia biography blurb, leading one to suspect Mr. Gladwell himself is likely not actually operating either page. Lacking any additional content or interaction the main function of the pages seems to be enabling FaceBook users to link to an author page, which has limited utility but isn't entirely useless (i.e. A status reading "I'm loving Malcolm Gladwell's new book!" that links to one of the author pages would eliminate doubt as to the identity of Gladwell as an author rather say a friend who had lent said user a book- a trivial application.) While a Twitter account exists for Gladwell it should be noted that it doesn't have Twitter's blue check mark of authenticity and thus cannot be relied upon to be operated by the believed entity. 

Cross Training

My Political Science Capstone class is going to require a mammoth research effort which at this early initial stage means scouring the web for leads on viable sources, consequently compiling a vast array of links I'd like to be able to refer back to.
While I'm still experimenting with the best application for this (Delicious perhaps?) it's definitely going to be a multi-platform endeavor. Why not trace my progress on researching Golan v. Holder while practicing my digital nonfiction writing skills? The end result will hopefully be a storify piece tracking not only the development of this Supreme Court case (dealing with public domain intellectual property rights and thus even more relevant) but my own researching and academic writing process.

Digital Resources: Drag Culture

Less a digital resource than a sort of supplementary resource of places we might go to conduct first person research: http://pittsburgh.gaycities.com/

University of Pittsburgh's Rainbow Alliance website http://www.pitt.edu/~sorc/rainbow/

What's the Facebook community like? http://www.facebook.com/dragqueens

Storify III: Me. Everywhere.

Storify II: Scalia!

Storify: How Cool Is This?

Curate social media from across the web. Any social media: tweets, facebook posts, YouTube videos, blogs, any user generated content. Create a narrative sequence for an event or present a 360 view of a topic. Neat storytelling opportunity or technological kerfuffle? 

Troubling: (Mis)Representation of Female Sexuality in Comic Books

This piece explores how female sexuality is portrayed in modern comic books. Well written and heartbreaking. While I personally don't care to read anything published much past 1986 (unless Joss Whedon wrote it), I love the comic book medium and I'm troubled that with the freedom given by abandoning the Comics Code this is the way women are being portrayed and all the various messages that sends.

On a positive note, I like the way Laura Hudson constructed her article with images that -literally- illustrate her point and a myriad of appropriate hyperlinks. I think she fails to address that the issue isn't new and maybe could have looked into the history of women in comic books a bit more to create a fuller picture.

Hybrid Websites Case Study

Perhaps one of the best examples of a traditional form of media hybridizing to contend with the changing times is Paste Magazine. Formerly a print magazine, Paste made the transition to online as a method of coping with financial difficulties, eventually going fully digital and ceasing to produce a paper product.

Prior to that they'd attempted a non-technical but still modern strategy of inviting subscribers to pay whatever they wanted for a year's subscription, a la Radiohead. While this was fairly successful it ultimately wasn't enough to sustain a print publication especially amid the economic downturn of the late 2000's when revenue from advertising was at an all time low. The move to web-only was a last ditch effort following a fund-rasing campaign.

In May the magazine announced that it would bring back it's weekly subscription service in a digital layout available for iPad and Android tablets- getting on the bandwagon of smart phones and other digital media applications that seem to be spreading like wildfire.

The publication's content and quality appears to have remained much the same (A level of quality attested to by multiple National Magazine Award wins.). Articles (see this one on R.E.M. breaking up) include widgets to enable readers to share content to social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter. Although there may be an argument to be made about the prestige of being a paper publication versus purely digital, for most intents and purposes Paste appears to be thriving in its digital incarnation.

New Twitter Feed Subscriptions (In Progress):

-Margaret Atwood (writer)
-Neil Gaiman (writer)
-The Atlantic (magazine)
-APStylebook (as opposed to FakeAPStylebook, which I was already following and adoring)
-PittTweet (University account)
-Paper_Cuts (Editors of the NYT Book Review)
-KeepCalmandCarryOn (British propaganda is never not relevant)
-fuggirls (Nonfiction writers of a sort)
-HuffingtonPost (newspaper)
-NBC News (...NBC News)

Credible Online Sources

When my group discussed the feasibility of researching drag culture in Pittsburgh we came up with multiple first person sources and leads, but researching online proved a little more difficult. 


Potential Sources of Online Information for Group Research Project: 


Publication: Cue Pittsburgh, LGBTQ publication covering western Pennsylvania, Ohio, D.C. and West Virginia. 
Blog: Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Pittsburgh blog. Not updated terribly frequently but could be a resource for tracking down other relevant sources. 
Expert's Bio: RuPaul's autobiographical timeline, tracing her journey into drag culture. 
Audio/Video: There are numerous YouTube recordings of Pitt's previous drag concerts, a handful of documentaries on cross-dressing culture not relating to Pittsburgh such as Paris is Burning, but I didn't have much luck finding media that fit our topic's criteria. 
Research Resource: Pitt's library system offered a wealth of resources, one of which is the eBook Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. 
Source of My Choice: An acquaintance (former Tae Kwon Do instructor's niece, as it were, not precisely a friend) who is heavily involved in the subculture in question and could direct me to additional first-person sources. 

Credibility or Lack Thereof

Classic example of dubious reliability: Wikipedia. But that isn't to say it's never an appropriate tool. To avoid sifting through excessive amounts of legalese jargon in original documents (I'm narrowing down which Supreme Court case to research for my poli sci Capstone class) I find that Wikipedia is useful to establish basic information. While I can't exactly cite facts directly from it, the links at the bottom of an article are often more legitimate, such as The United States Court of Appeal Federal Circuit. It's a government run site, so while whether you can trust the government or not is a deeper question than I'm seeking to explore I believe the facts found on this page are overwhelmingly likely to be accurate. 


Another somewhat less obvious source lacking credibility?  The social media outreach branches of otherwise reputable sources. In the rush to update in real time on events still unfolding fact checking sometimes falls by the wayside, necessitating later revisions and retractions. And are the same people undertaking the actual journalism and research for these sources doing the tweeting, tumbling, FaceBooking and blogging for these sources themselves, ensuring correct information is disseminated? Probably not. It may well be staffed by unpaid interns, a contingent not exactly known for their diligence.  Even more alarming is the possibility of those accounts being hacked to intentionally disperse false information for various nefarious reasons, such as the recent NBC scandal. 

Public Relations vs. Beauty Journalists

BritishBeautyBlogger Jane brings up another controversial component of beauty journalism. There are probably better ways the PRs could handle the transparency of the tier system, but are there issues at play other that slighted feelings?

Hello Topics in Nonfiction

Like every other course I take I need this to graduate (two majors and two minors = no electives), but of course there were other Topics courses I could have taken. I chose this course because it offers a chance to develop a skill set in social media that I feel will prove valuable to virtually any career path, as well as perhaps personally enriching. That the professor came highly recommended was not an inconsiderable factor. 


I hope to learn more about crafting written work for online consumption and how to utilize social media for less frivolous purposes than surreptitiously catching up on my friends or keeping close tabs on Doctor Who spoilers. 


What kind of writing I'd like to do: The kind I'll get paid for? Hmm. Although I've worked in a few other nonfiction genres I haven't had many opportunities to explore magazine writing, which I think seems to require a sort of blending of skills from journalism and from creative nonfiction. 


Two Favorite Nonfiction Writers:

1. Joan Didion "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Didions prose is powerful through it's sparseness and precision, a good example for someone prone to flowery and circuitous phrasing (...see?) 
2. Tom Wolfe New Journalism is the writing equivalent of coloring outside the lines. If five semicolons and some gratuitous s p a c i n g or tangential exploration will enhance your story, go for it. 

Daily Online Reading Habits:

• British Beauty Blogger. First and foremost. I used to work for Murad UK. 
• Domestic Sluttery. Provocative name for a fashion/cooking/interior design blog. Staves off homesickness for the UK. See here. 
• More often than not my entire Tumblr dashboard
• Texts from Last Night. I can't not. 
• Cracked.com 
• Glance at my FaceBook feed 
• Glance at AOL homepage before checking emails (No, I'm not sure either why I still use AOL).  

Where I Am Online: 

• I Tweet @SarahSimkin
• I Tumble at saneliving 
• I FaceBook at, well, Sarah Simkin. 
• I blog here (well, yes) and at shalompittsburgh.wordpress.com