I fell off the blog for a while this spring. I blame the emergence of nice weather, cross-Atlantic excursions, and finishing coursework for my degree! Granted, I do still have a ton of independent work to do this summer (including getting my video web logging study ready to submit for publication! more on that later), but I don’t have to physically sit in any classrooms. This makes me happy.
One of my projects for this quarter was a rhetorical design analysis of the New York Times home page. Overall, I’m glad I took the class that this project came out of, but I’ve found rhetorical analysis of design a little empty. I will completely own up to the fact that mine is no landmark study, but I did spend a fair amount of time looking at the NYT from the analytical lenses we were given by the prof and I came up wanting. I can definitely see the usefulness in a straight-up functional analysis of design as in human computer interaction and usability testing. I can also see the value of a cultural/rhetorical study of the NYT home page as a “text” having all sorts of layers of political meanings, inclusions and exclusions, frames of discourse, etc. Separate the rhetorical examination and the design analysis and it’s easier to digest.
But we were supposed to look at the rhetoric of the design and I ended up sort of lightly treading through various authors’ semiotic frameworks (the icon is a sign, a picture, a symbol, etc.) and talking about Gestalt, which is de-bunked at this point…
I guess I didn’t come up with anything particularly constructive using the analytical tools we were directed to use. But this isn’t really my area of research and we get out what we put in… Anyway, I’d be more interested in looking closely at the relationship between the print and online versions of the paper or alternative methods for presenting information such as the interactive map I talk about in the project (in the Verbal Codings, Visual Codings section). This is a great example of leveraging the web to present information in a useful way and in a manner that could never happen in print.
