Greetings Traveler.

Today in this blog I will attempt to tackle one of the more abstract skills I have been tasked with learning for this course, visual representation of texts.

As I write this blog I am watching the referenced episode of Archer from John Laudun’s blog (I highly recommend watching it, its pretty good). I bring this up because the episode, “El Contador” is heavily influenced by Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” This and many other shows have taken to referencing classic texts or using them as sources of inspiration. This phenomenon of taking older works of literature and working them into pop culture media to appeal to newer generations is nothing terribly new, I have listed some of them below.

Apocalypse Now – Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness set during the Vietnam War

Castle in the Sky - steampunk cartoon loosely based on the Laputa subplot from Gulliver’s Travels

Independence Day (1996 film) - H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

Frozen - inspired by Andersen’s Snow Queen, set in a generic Scandinavian country in the late 19th century

Gnomeo and Juliet – a self-referential adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet wherein the main characters are enlivened statues in two adjacent garden displays in modern England

Sherlock – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, now set in modern 2010’s London with the main characters utilizing modern technology such as the internet and smartphones. Watson is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan as part of Operation Herrick.

The Lion King – William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an animal fable

’* For the full list refer to the wikipedia link in the works cited

With about 99.99% certainty I can say that anyone who reads this will either recognize or know the majority of the modern versions I have listed. However, I cannot say the same for their classical counterparts. I feel that the reason for this discrepancy is a result of the method in which each is conveyed to the viewer. For instance The Lion King, parallels William Shakespeare’s Hamlet almost perfectly when regarding plot points. So why is it that people would rather watch The Lion King than read Hamlet? The answer, visual representation. The method in which the story is delivered is much easier to understand in a shorter period and requires less effort from the “reader”.

So, now that I have covered why visual representations of texts are useful, how can we create our own visual representations to help our own understanding? Without being able create a full blown movie or television show to describe what any given text is trying to convey to its reader I run into problems of not knowing how to simply and quickly visually represent texts. There are the usual suspects for visual representation (i.e.: Various types of graphs or word clouds), however these are over used and are often not eye catching and can still bore your reader. So how do we summarize a text and cover all of the important parts without boring our audience or missing something important.

Trick question! There is no right or wrong answer, although certain methods may be more appropriate for different kinds of text. Word clouds or simple comic strips maybe fine for pieces of fiction, but it is probably not in your best interest to do such with a scientific journal and you may be better off using a graph or the like. This discretion of what is appropriate is largely up to you and is the most important part of creating a visual representation of a text. I couple weeks back I had covered what tone to use when writing and this was determined by who your target audience is, visual representations are no different. Once you have determined who your audience is you are free to represent the text in any way you see fit. I will quickly go back to my list I provided above and point out that two of the ones I listed are made by Disney. When we think about Disney, children and cartoons immediately come to mind, however when looking at The Lion King and Frozen’s literary roots we cannot say that Hamlet and Andersen’s Snow Queen were meant for children. However, the method Disney used to represent these classic tales perfectly fits their target audience and quite masterfully as well. Their use of cartoons characters and bright colors appeals to the younger generations, however the movies’ inspiration from a classical work of literature creates appeal for older audiences as it is something that they may recognize.

In short when creating a visual representation of text do not immediately focus on the text itself as the broadness and creative freedom can be quite overwhelming and make it difficult to think clearly. Instead determine your audience and work from there on what you believe may the most effective means to communicate to that audience.

Well thanks for listening to me stumble through another one of these blogs. I hope this was slightly helpful and didn’t bore you too much and that I can expect to have some of you to come back next week for another one of my blog posts.

Works Cited:

“List of modernized adaptations of old works” Wikipedia, 17 Sept. 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modernized_adaptations_of_old_works