Schedule

March 29

Select 3 posts from 3 different blogs in the Blogs and Commentary folder representing the buildup to Katrina through the present.
For each of the 3 posts, write 1 page (250 words) connecting it to 5 unique documents in the basket, assessing its factual reliability, listing what remains to be verified, and proposing a story that it suggests.
Email the URLs to Jonathan Hall (jh2203@columbia.edu) by the evening of April 2.

Present and discuss the selected posts. Discussion of these posts will be used to generate ideas for your projects.

Continue presenting the blog posts.
Guest: Peter Kovacs (Managing Editor, The Times-Picayune)
Guest: Laura Kurgan (Director of Visual Studies and Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation)
You will be divided into two teams (see Assignment). Begin working on the web and print projects on your own time. Your first group assignments will be due April 17.

On an individual basis, select and collate demographic data from the Federal Government and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center folders and interpret it to support a thesis related to your developing project. Demonstrate the thesis graphically — in a chart or graph — and in words, with an extended caption.

On an individual basis, select 1 photograph from the Visuals folder that impacts your group’s project and prepare 2 divergent extended captions. Select 5 additional photographs and, along with the first photograph you chose, sequence the 6 images in 2 different ways so as to suggest 2 entirely different, yet viable readings. You may but do not need to use text. For each design, write 1 headline that affirms the desired reading and select 3 documents in the basket that support the conclusions.

Be prepared to inform the class of your roles and to defend the division of labor.
Be prepared to present your web and print projects according to the requirements specified in the Assignment. Be prepared to state your starting hypotheses and alternate hypotheses, to explain how you plan to support them, and to describe how they will potentially be addressed through each medium (web and print).
For each proposed article, visual or graphic, collectively prepare a list of at least 5 other elements in the basket that either support or shed doubt on your hypotheses. In addition, prepare a list of at least 5 sources outside the basket that do the same. Be ready to identify the questions that all of these elements and sources address.

Team A presents: “What Went Wrong?”
Team B grills Team A on its presentation, attempts to falsify its hypotheses, and challenges its consideration of material.

Team B presents: “Whither New Orleans?”
Team A grills Team B on its presentation, attempts to falsify its hypotheses, and challenges its consideration of material.

Print project: Focus on defining your approach and the infrastructure of the project as a whole through sample layouts and a table of contents. Define your design sensibility regarding photos, graphs, charts, illustrations, captions, headlines and treatment of text.
Web project: Focus on the nature of the web piece by creating a site map (a non-hierarchical family tree of how pages relate), considering how elements are accessed, and determining how the webpage relates to the print piece.

Team A presents: “What Went Wrong?”
Team B grills Team A on its presentation, questioning it in terms of the choices made, juxtapositions of texts and image (or voiceovers with footage in the web piece), sequencing and sizing, and the ways in which these choices address the hypotheses and manipulate the viewer (and is that bad or is it working and justifiable?).

Team B presents: “Whither New Orleans?”
Team A grills Team B on its presentation, questioning it in terms of the choices made, juxtapositions of texts and image (or voiceovers with footage in the web piece), sequencing and sizing, and the ways in which these choices address the hypotheses and manipulate the viewer (and is that bad or is it working and justifiable?).

Team A presents: “What Went Wrong?”
Team B leads the critical and analytical discussion, though there may be other guests.

Team B presents: “Whither New Orleans?”
Team A leads the critical and analytical discussion, though there may be other guests.