Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Andrea Ellickson, Timeline Project

1) Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Bantam Classics, 1982.

    Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a 14^th century collection of stories within a frame narrative of pilgrims telling tales on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket located in Canterbury, England. Written in Middle English verse, the collection of twenty-four tales each center around a specific character mentioned in the General Prologue. Ranging from a Knight, to a Monk, to a Miller, to a Physician, and so on, Chaucer reaches a wide array of English society. The springtime pilgrimage starts at the Tabard Inn at Southwark, England, where the narrator gives a socially organized list (from high to low class) of detailed descriptions including physical appearance, defining qualities, and flaws of each pilgrim in the Inn. The General Prologue ends with the Host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailly, making a proposal of a game: each pilgrim will tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. The pilgrim with the best tales will win dinner at all the other pilgrims’ expense. These tales are to be “Of aventures that whilom han bifalle” (Line 797). Chaucer did not actually complete this ambitious collection of tales; however, the Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories ranging from crude and humorous to estate satire to romance and gender relations. Our group will use the Canterbury Tales characters as inspiration for our blog exploration.

2) Livejournal. Six Apart. 13 Feb 2008 <http://www.livejournal.com>.

Livejournal is a free online member-based community for journaling and social networking. The creators of Livejournal state five core values that guide the site’s development: self-expression, diversity, creativity, community, and privacy. Livejournal provides a virtual environment to connect with other members. Not only can a member join interest based communities, but also a member can create and control his or her own community. Members can keep up-to-date on their friends’ thoughts and activities through the Friends Page feature, which places the latest friend postings on a single page. Further, Livejournal supports over 1,000 feeds to keep members informed of the latest events from daily news to pop culture. The key feature of Livejournal is of course the ability to broadcast one’s personal journal entries to the public sphere. Members have complete control over their privacy settings, from sharing thoughts with the entire World Wide Web to sharing with a small handful of friends. It can even be a personal diary with no viewers, but still have the benefits of Livejournal’s design format. Livejournal offers full customizable layouts that can even be overwritten using custom CCS. Various other media forms can also be integrated into a member’s customized page, such as pictures, videos, and music. Having this customizable resource allows our group to explore the notion of projected identities through the Canterbury Tales’ pilgrims that like the Livejournal community is from all parts of society. Also, we can explore the blog as a model of identity, where aspects of the identity (memories, personality, emotions, opinions, social connections, etc.) are reduced to chronological journal entries, photographs, page layout, color options, and so on. Livejournal provides a modern day medium to customize the Canterbury Tales characters.

3) Stern, Susannah. “Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Edited by David Buckingham. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 95-118.

This article investigates both the valuable aspects and the unfulfilling aspects of online expression. The author also looks at how youth self-present their identities on blogs and the audience’s influence on this self-presentation. Though identity can shift over time and social circumstance, Stern examines adolescence in particular, since they “frequently look to their social world for cues about what principles and traits to internalize” during identity development (97). Derived from interviews with adolescents, Stern reveals the process of “self-inquiry” and identity formation through their “decisions about what to reveal, exaggerate, and omit in their online communication” (97). Blogs, personal home pages, and social networking sites provide a virtual space to define and experiment with identity. On the other hand, blogs can be a space to present a “touched-up” (106) version of the self, which is more of an idealized self rather than a real self. The internet provides an environment for “strategic self-presentation” (106) through choices of content and page style. Blog users have the opportunity to manage their self-image and their impressions on an audience to a greater extent than real life. A very insightful statement Stern makes is, “the self-presentations that youth authors offer on their sites must be viewed as constructions, not mirrors, of teens’ emerging sense of self” (107). Other mentioned benefits of online journaling are self-reflection of personal growth, self-documentation, technological skills, release of emotions, artistic expression, and addressing an audience or the public sphere. Using the Canterbury Tales’ characters, our group will be able to experiment and simulate constructing models of self identity.

4) Hourihan, Meg. “What We're Doing When We Blog.” Web DevCenter O’Reilly Media Inc. 13 June 2002. 13 February 2008 <http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/2474>.

This article discusses the common framework blogs consist of to share experiences and promote social interaction. Hourihan describes the unique nature of blogs. Blogs are informal, conversational, and personal, which allows for an open conversing of issues rather than a set argument. Because blogs are in reverse chronological order, timestamped, and usually updated often, friends can comment on the current without having to search the page. Blogs allow for both keeping up-to-date and viewing thoughts in a linear progression. Also, as she states, “The weblog’s post unit liberate the writer from word count.” Personal blogs give the focus of writing completely to content, rather than quantity. Further, the article distinguishes three identifying features of a blog post: links, timestamp, and permalink (“the link to the permanent location of the post in the archive”). Awareness of time can connect the reader and the writer, as they become linked by commonality of time. Hyperlinks organize the content of blogs into meaningful associations that help convey information to the reader. Additionally, through this evolution of communication, the internet allows greater freedom from the limitations of paper and professional publishing complications. Blogs provide not only a medium for self-expression, but also a framework to help construct social networks. This article promotes a fuller understanding of the nature of blogs, giving our group a better idea of the format we are working with. Further, the timestamped reverse chronology of posts, gives our group a way of working with the idea of a timeline as a model of memory placed in a linear line. Since identity is also comprised of memory, the timeline can be incorporated into the overall theme of identity through blog experimentation.

 

5) Scheidt, Lois Ann and Wright, Elijah. “Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs.” Into The Blogosphere. 13 February 2008 <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/common_visual.html>.

This article explores the use of visual design elements as a form of non-textual expression. Visual design includes color, number of columns, font style and size, photo background, banners, and other subtle details. Additionally, a study of 154 random weblogs used “classical content analysis and computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA)” to analyze a code system of 23 elements of visual design and demographic characteristics. The article provides a helpful reference to the variety of visual design elements that a blog consists of. The gathered data revealed that 53.8% of females used standard templates, while 42.9% of males used standard templates. The data also showed that “Certain changes, such as the use of altered colors or of simple alterations to standard templates, dominate. We believe that this preponderance of altered color comes as a result of the simplicity of making those changes… The high frequency of image use is also related to the lack of difficulty of including simple images in weblog posts. More complex changes, of course, may require either extensive knowledge of HTML or programming skills.”  Since this study was completed in 2003, current customization of the visual features of a blog may have increased with the growing blog and social networking culture. Though this article does not deeply explore the implications of visual design elements in relation to the blog user, it provides another angle to investigate the notion of the blog as a projected self image/identity.