Browse Exhibits (3 total)
Contextualizing Art Through Everyday Writing
Most people are familiar with the saying “a picture is with a thousand words,” and while this may be true, sometimes a little more context is needed to evoke a complete understanding of a piece of art. Everyday writing can thus be used to provide this context, and this exhibit explores the ways in which people have used everyday writing in this manner.
The importance of establishing context in both everyday writing and in art, lies in its ability to stimulate knowledge creation. In her article titled “Writing is a Knowledge-Making Activity,” Heidi Estrem uses a definition of writing which asserts that writing is “an activity undertaken to bring new understandings,” (Estrem 19). It is about “mulling over a problem, thinking with others, and exploring new ideas or bringing disparate ideas together,” (Estrem, 19). This concept of bringing new understandings and bringing disparate ideas together are seen within the interrelationship of art and everyday writing in this exhibit.
In the next few pages, a relationship between art, everyday writing, and materiality will also be established, as the materiality of a work is just as important to its context as any other component. In other words, I will be taking a scenic/contextual approach to analyzing these artifacts, where “writing is not only words on the page, but also concerns the mechanisms for production,” (Porter 386). The methods by which the creator of these artifacts composed both the artwork and writing of their piece attests to the purpose, audience, and overall meaning of the composition. The materiality also portrays the character of the creator while defining the composition’s intimacy and capacity for interaction, performing both as “an expression of the self and a social activity,” (Yancey, 164).
The ontological view of writing maintains the “impossibility of ‘contextless’ writing,” (Lillis, 80), and this is a view I choose to uphold in this exhibit. The meaning of any composition is heavily dependent on its context, an idea I will further explore in the pages to come.
Sports through writing
Sport is always played out on the field. The field is where everyone focuses, but much of sports happens off the field and through writing. Writing in sports can help us to think through situations. As Heidi Estrem writes, "We don’t simply think first and then write. We write to think" (Estrem p.19).
If you miss a game, you go to the internet or to a newspaper to get a recap of a game. I'm a sports writer and much of my time is taken up by watching games and writing stories on them. People read stories about sports to learn about certain teams in players. I feel that many of these writings through sports are good examples of using things to solve real Issues. "Instead, teachers should be encouraging students to learn ways to use existing information to solve real, concrete issues' (Johnson-Eilola).
Another way writing is important in sports is through lineups. Everyday a manager or head coach puts together a lineup on paper and throughout games, that lineup is changed to dictate how that game will go. It's also important for other teams to set their matchups and know how they want to play the game out.
Writing in sports also has to do with stats and setting the narative of the game. Many times this comes through game notes and where players or teams stand in the nation or their conference by statistics. You're able to read a matchup and preview a matchup through these statistics. Writing lets us explore different ways of doing things. "Literacy is never one thing, with one pre-identifiable set of consequences for individuals or groups. We cannot taking 'writing' - what it is and what it means to do writing - as a given" (Lillis P. 79).
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, scouting is often done through notes. Scouts sit and take their notes down and teams make decisions off those notes. Notes during a game or a practice are highly important to remember what you saw, especially if video isn't available. The legibility of the notes is important and the most thorough notes are usually the ones that lead to the best moves. Through these scouting notes, we are able to go back and make educated decisions through reformed arguments. "The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument" (384, Sommers).
Sincerely, College Students
When's the last time you've written something down? Not for class or an obligation of some kind, but for you?
Once we graduate high school, we graduate from pen and paper to laptops and iPads. Most college students do everything on their computers, you won't find many who do notes or much of anything else by hand. It's even rare for someone to ask for a sheet of paper and a pen (even more so for a pencil), where it was the exact opposite in high school. As Yancey says in The Museum of Everyday Writing: Exhibits of Everyday Writing Articulating the Past, Representing the Present, and Anticipating the Future, "...some of these everyday texts seemed anachronistic if not foreign..." Handwritten things have become a rarity, foreign even, so this exhibit consists of the rarities I've found in my own home and beyond.
As I collected these, I've come to find out that they can fall under two categories; "For Me and Friends" and "For Strangers". "For Me and Friends" is the category of handwritten moments meant for me personally or someone close to me, all in a positive light. "For Strangers" is the category of things I've stumbled across in my time on campus that have been neglected or left for other people or things. All of the exhibits included can be considered as scraps, which are known for their " decontextualized, fragmented nature." according to Koupf in Scrap Writing in the Digital Age: The Inventive Potential of Texts on the Loose. Obviously, there are nuances to all handwritten things but the ones I've collected can be categorized into those two.