sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

It's a little sad to realize that, roughly 15 months since I switched my website over to Drupal, this is only my 66th node... which includes several static pages, some backdated entries from my livejournal, and some unpublished and deleted posts. I really need to blog more, both here and at gnovis.

The following video is my final project for my visual research methods course. I'll post more about it later on, once I've had time to finish the rest of my finals, and unwind for a few weeks, but I wanted to post it right away because, well, I'm really proud of it. Despite all of the animation work I did as an undergrad, and despite all of the design work I've done over the past few years, this was actually my first editing project, so I'm very pleased that it turned out as well as it did.

So here it is...

Probably the most uninteresting thing I wrote during my first semester at Georgetown was a short review of the Green Party's national website (www.GP.org). The assignment was pretty basic, and so the result was fairly bland... a blow by blow critique of the website, based on a set of criteria provided by the professor.

My final paper for my class in "Media and Political Engagement" was called The Baker What? - Examining the Brief Life of the Iraq Study Group Report. I'm noticing that I have a tendency to give my papers sarcastic titles. I'm not sure why. Anyway, here's a quote from the intro, which gives a solid explanation of what the paper does:

For my Intro to CCT midterm last semester, I wrote a paper titled "Podcasting and the Public Interest: Children's Programming on the Internet," which was a very feable attempt to discuss podcasting in terms of the historical debate over broadcast television and the public interest. It was possibly the worst paper I've ever written, so I wasn't horribly surprised that I was asked to rewrite it.

The final project for my "Intro to CCT" class was basically a glorified vocabulary test. We were encouraged to be innovative and creative in our approach to the project, even to have a little fun, but there was a great deal of grumbling outside of class. I was probably among the loudest grumblers.

However, once I came up with a topic, I completely nailed it, and the end result may be the coolest academic products I've produced.

For my class on Media & Political Engagement, during the first semester of my masters program, I wrote a very short paper called "The Internet News Effect?," which was an exploration of the effect of online news sources on political cynicism. This was partially a response to the article "The Daily Show Effect" (Baumgartner and Morris, 2006), which attributed cynicism among viewers of The Daily Show to the show itself.

The very first paper I wrote in graduate school was really just a writing test. It was assigned in the required introductory course for the CCT program, and was really just a hook for the faculty to identify which students might need to be referred to campus writing resources. Anyway, the assignment was just to discuss, in one page, a potential problem in contemporary media systems.

I've decided to start blogging about the papers I've written in grad school, after letting them sit on a shelf for a few months. I like this idea for several reasons...

First, it gives me something tangible to point friends and family towards, even though I haven't published any papers yet (and probably won't, during my masters, because my affiliation with the journal most likely to publish me prevents me from submitting papers).