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Images of students. Are you in there somewhere?

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English 1010
Visual Assignment
Rough draft due: Friday, Nov. 11
Final draft due: Wednesday Nov. 16

Purpose: the purpose of this assignment is to look at images critically, and to practice writing about abstract concepts.


Overview: Your primary task is to compare related images, describing them in detail, and then providing us with a conclusion that creates a synthesis of your observations.

Here are some possible applications:

- Compare images used by different parties of a particular campaign

- Analyze album covers for a specific band, over time

- Analyze the use of images in advertising. Specifically:

How are ads targeted towards different audiences?

How do the advertisements in a particular magazine reflect their target demographic?

How is the same product presented in different magazines?

You may also analyze a website, using the same methods. For example, you could look at a website for a corporation and try to determine who their imagined audience is, based on the images used on their site.

Another possibility: Look at ads for a particular product, then create your own advertisement that breaks with conventions.

Page 226 has a checklist for analyzing images. You may also find the discussion of marketing segments on page 228 useful.


Please put all of your notes, images and drafts on your weblog as you work on this paper.

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news @ nature.com - Electric currents boost brain powerbreaking science news headlines: "Connecting a battery across the front of the head can boost verbal skills, says a team from the US National Institutes of Health.

A current of two thousandths of an ampere (a fraction of that needed to power a digital watch) applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, according to data presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects.

Meenakshi Iyer of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, ran the current through 103 initially nervous volunteers. 'I had to explain it in detail to the first one or two subjects,' she says. But once she had convinced them that the current was harmless, Iyer says, recruitment was not a problem.
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frontline: coming soon: the persuaders | PBS: "FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar 'persuasion industries' of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public. In this documentary essay, correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (correspondent for FRONTLINE's 'The Merchants of Cool') also explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves and how the techniques of the persuasion industries have migrated to politics, shaping the way our leaders formulate policy, influence public opinion, make decisions, and stay in power."

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Wired 12.11: Don't Hate Me Because I'm Digital

Images of digital people.

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How to think about prescription drugs. | Metafilter: "Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece in The New Yorker
The emphasis of the prescription-drug debate is all wrong. We've been focussed on the drug manufacturers. But decisions about prevalence, therapeutic mix, and intensity aren't made by the producers of drugs. They’re made by the consumers of drugs.
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