- Makers: Carlos Rodriguez Rosa, ‘Aolani Robinson, Bilal Amodu
- Genre: Website Copy
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Multimodality & Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2021
Description:
This project builds on the News & Events and Resources pages of the fictional grief support organization Where We Go Now. The website is a paratextual artifact set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe between the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. The organization is centered on the support group Steve Rogers led at the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, exploring how an organization of this kind would operate within the fictional world. This project also serves as an extension of a previous endeavor in the Transmedia Theory and Production course.
The aims of the organization’s website are to both inform what events or stories the organization deals with, as well as provide holistic resources for those who are grieving. The development of the pages serves as examples of various genres of text/communication that do exist out in real-life support websites such as this one.
The Resources page has multiple stand-in resource pages that could be developed for such a website. For this project, we delved into developing resources for Communicating Grief with Children.
The News & Events page informs visitors of the different activities and initiatives the organization takes on. It’s a page that, in many ways, documents the organization’s activity and interaction with their communities. For this project we have developed the following pieces:
Reflection:
Our process for this project differed significantly from traditional writing assignments due to the collaborative and multimodal nature of the project. For example, many of the articles included images, video, and text that had to work together in order to form a cohesive unit. Specifically, some of the articles for the news and events sections followed conventions set forth by other mainstream news outlets such as CNN and existing grief organizations. Such conventions included the creation of short videos and the careful selection of relevant images to represent the article. By following these conventions, these articles mimicked their writing style, typical content, and structure. This approach reflected the call to go beyond what is considered acceptable for composition and find multimodality in innovative ways.
The development of the Resources page project was a significant challenge for the members of the group who had limited knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The development of the children and grief section was guided significantly by efforts to integrate two audiences, the fictionalized audience of people in the Marvel Cinematic Universe attempting to help their children cope with the aftermath of the Blip, and the audience of people in the real world attempting to help children cope with the loss of a loved one. Given limited understanding of the Blip, the author of that section devoted much of their attention to the latter audience, though also made several subtle references to the MCU. The St. Krayont Institute, the fictional organization that collected the data visualized on the web page is an anagram for Tony Stark, while Dr. Ivana Sport is an anagram for Pepper Potts.
One major challenge in this project was employing the different modes to represent the information and guidance presented on the page. We relied on images of storybooks and hyperlinks to videos read-aloud of children’s books pertaining to loss and grief for the “Resources” section, and poster infographics to represent the information in the “Fast Facts” section. One stylistic choice that guided our manipulation of the stock photographs, all fair use images collected through Bing image search, was color. The photographs in the featured image and ”Fast Facts” section were formatted in grayscale, in an attempt to represent the state of mourning or solemnity users may experience. The images in the “Strategies section,” were included in color, not as an attempt to subvert the solemnity established by the earlier images yet rather represent an effort to resume life after the tragedy of personal loss. The juxtaposition between grayscale and color in the images is an effort to represent the transition from grief to healing and thereby provide a subliminal assurance of recovery to prospective users.
The final piece of this project was formatting the content onto the website itself. The site was built with the free website platform Webnode, which provided freedom of design and organization. The platform is easy to use, however, there were some limitations in terms of formatting. For example, images cannot be aligned left or right, only centered. Therefore, considerations concerning design depended on what the platform allowed to be done. In the end, we do feel that the three pages created work well within the constraints of the platform.
All in all, we believe to have created content that, while directed for a fictional website set within a storyworld, work as individual pieces transferable into real-world contexts.
