Think back to our silly group activity in which we chose an item or character from Harry Potter and analyzed what literacies were used to communicate this concept or person in both literature and film. Now that you have all (ok, most:) the literacy theory we’ve traveled through this semester, it’s time to apply all that you’ve learned to multiliteracies using Harry Potter as your root text. We’re going to trace translatios of this cultural text through at least three different modes of communication and produce an argument about the literacies and affordances/constraints of various modes and genres of storytelling! Sound fun but vague? Not to worry, here are the steps we’ll take to accomplish this inquiry into digital literacies:
- Choose whether you would prefer to work individually or with a small collaborative team of 1-2 colleagues.
- Choose one theme, concept, character, plot moment, or location from the novel and/or film as your root text. I’m open to any idea you have here, so follow your heart. 🙂
- Research! Finding various translatios you want to analyze in conversation with the root literary or film text (or both) will take some time, and we’ll do some of this work together in class. You’ll want to scour the internet for chat rooms, fan fiction, memes, gifs, fan art, merchandise, and advertisements. Also, you might want to think about materiality as well. Theme parks, costumes, swag – all these items do count as modes of telling and retelling Harry Potter, so have a blast searching for the 3-5 translatio examples you want to use in your analysis.
- Once you’ve gathered your translatio examples, you’ll compose an analysis in the mode of your choice relying on your Available Means (we will address this in class). This analysis can be visual, auditory, alphabetic, etc. But it MUST substantively address the following questions/requirements:
- What specific written/genre knowledge, cultural knowledge, and lexico-syntactic knowledge is required to understand each different translatio?
- Who, from a critical literacy perspective, is empowered or disempowered by each translatio and why?
- What functional, social, or cultural purpose does each translatio fulfill? How do we know this?
- What does all this tell us about digital and multiliteracies? What does all this tell us about how culture and stories are told and retold? Why does this matter?
- Analysis should be the equivalent of 2,500 to 5,000 words
- You can present this in any mode/genre of communication you like:
- Infographic
- Presentation
- Youtube
- Webspace
- Blog Post
- Podcast
- Once your project draft is complete, we’ll workshop our project drafts and submit our final project with a Writer’s Memo briefly explaining our choices and work! We will go over Memo and Project grading rubrics next week. 😀
English 213 