The projects included in this site issue from an undergraduate course at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The pedagogy of IML340: The Praxis of New Media represents a departure from traditional university-level courses in three key ways: it uses an original documentary as a core course text; it envisions remix as a scholarly practice; and it posits Web-based visual arguments as contemporary academic essays.

This site contains that original documentary, Iraqi Doctors: On the Front Lines of Medicine, along with 19 student projects that use the original footage as a springboard to investigation and representation of a particular issue raised in the original, extending and elaborating it. Students accessed the original film, as well as the over forty hours of extra footage, which they used as a starting point for their own research and production. The pedagogical emphasis is on developing proficiency with various components of multimedia authorship—text, image manipulation, video and web work—as students focus on one facet within the complex issues surrounding the global ramifications of US intervention in Iraq. Each project functions alternately as text and context, as one piece sheds light on all others in the series. Moreover, in order to see the video portion, you must traverse the textual abstract and citations. These projects are scholarly multimedia, then, and can provide a model for the type of research, planning and production necessary for scholarly digital work. Given the plethora of visually-mediated information that saturates contemporary culture, we have come to see this model as critical to fostering large scale literacy.

Project Site