The following is the reflection, written when I finished this project

Now that the final draft has been completed, I have that my  partner in the remediation workshop was a lot of help, after reading her feedback, as well as Dr. Davis’ I was able to go back and truly evaluate what I had done. Upon reading back through Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid article, I got some ideas of what I could do to improve my website. Carr stressed the importance of making things easy to read, so I went back and worked on the layout of my site. The color scheme now has continuity to it, and the text itself is easier to read as well. Reading Carr again also made me realize that I needed to give my reader more of a reason to click through my site so I made sure that the titles in my navigation bar were interesting as opposed to boring and plain. Reading the first chapter in the Creating Websites That Work text helped as well. While it was more about portfolios, it helped me to remember to keep things simple as opposed to jumbling up each page with large pictures and other unnecessary things.    

One of the things this project has allowed me to do is to have the sketch available to watch after the paper is read. My paper references the sketch a lot. Even though I detail the sketch in my paper, it is still a better experience for readers to be able to watch the sketch themselves. In doing so, they can better see my points and draw their own conclusions as well. Instead of beating them over the head with my own views, they can watch the sketch. I feel that this is very important because as J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin point out in “Remediation” any potential reader of my website will be placed “in a moveable point of view.” It is my hope that after a person reads my website, they will be motivated to change their viewpoint on race. After all, such remediation may motivate and liberate the reader as never before.

I felt it was important to have my “Just Because I’m Blind Don’t Mean I’m Dumb” paper in its original format because as Ong points out in “Writing is a Technology,” writing is still a very important technology that allows people to communicate with one another. I worked very hard on this paper, as the author I want to keep it in its original format. Technology is growing and changing at a rapid pace. I want to make sure that writing and word processing does not get lost in the shuffle. Although I also believe what is stated by Marshall McLuhan in “The Medium is the Message” All of these new forms of media are becoming “fixed charges” so it can only help my paper read a larger audience if it is up on the web. Fixed Charges means that people have come to expect certain things from a given medium, as they did from cotton. As technology has become more advanced, just having something available in print is not enough. Now that I have made it available online it can reach a larger audience.

As I read back through it, “Understanding Visual Rhetoric" also helped me improve my site. We went over this piece in class and did our own bit of analysis on websites in class. That experience reminded me of some helpful things I could do to my site, such as making it easier to navigate, and making it much easier to read with a different color scheme. I also hyperlinked websites that I had previously only sited in ordered to make things easier for readers and to allow for connectivity between my site and the sites that I used as sources.

 

My remediation project reproduces the original on a larger scale by being having it be made into a downloadable PDF. This project also really adds to the value of the original, because the website I created has a lot of background information on the show before introducing the sketch. Before, readers were just given a paper and expected to read. Now that it has been remediated, one can watch the sketch as I pointed out in the previous question. I have also added an interview with Dave Chappelle himself that was done by Bravo and posted on YouTube. Chappelle gives a lot of insight into what he thinks about Hollywood after what he has experienced. One of my goals in adding a lot of background information before presenting my Re mediated paper was to give the audience a more thorough experience.  Dave Chappelle did not just invent Clayton Bigsby to make everyone laugh, he truly wanted to touch people and make everyone stop and think. Most readers should get a sense of that if they pay attention.

 With just the paper, I felt like my job was incomplete. With the internet and this new medium, I was really able to go back and finish my job, and put a more complete effort into everything.

To that end, I think if one only reads the paper, they do not take it seriously at first because it came from such an entertaining sketch. That is what I do not want. I take this paper very seriously because it discuses a very real and very prominent issue in this country. By putting this paper on a new medium, I think that my message gets across better. I am able to clearly state my motive, and the video of the sketch is just to show people what I am referring to.  After all, according to McLuhan, “The medium is the message.” One of the limitations I could see is that a reader may not read and analyze the paper; instead they may just skim over it. I’m hoping that once a potential reader sees what the website is about, they will be curious enough that they will HAVE to give the paper a fair read through. Also, at this point, that sketch is almost five years old. It is nice to have the video to refresh one’s memory about the sketch and there may be some who have not yet seen the sketch.