Multiple Presentation Ideas

As I begin to invent scenes for the multimodal presentation, I find myself choosing between multiple options of visuals and various levels of technical difficulty. Since I’ve never created a film before, I want to limit this endeavor to something I can accomplish in a weak and to a topic that will represent my entire proposal in five-minutes. Below I’ve sketched some initial ideas that I will turn into a storyboard over the weekend, but I would appreciate any advice or suggestions about how to create a persuasive presentation that catches the attention of the audience and highlights the main points of my proposal.

The profiles I want to examine are already multimodal, so the most obvious choice is to construct a film around existing profiles. I could use screenshots to turn web-based profiles into images and then transition through these images like pages in a book, a pseudo-viewbook of sorts. As a result, this presentation would resemble an admissions publication. While admissions are part of the strategic communication of a university, I want to show more than just this perspective.

However, profiles, in the traditional sense of the term, show a side or a perspective, and I think I want to play up this history in the multimodal presentation. Specifically, I want to include silhouettes as the visual manifestation of the original spatial profiles. To connect this representation to the university setting that I plan to analyze, I could create silhouettes of iconic university buildings (see silhouette of Clemson's Tillman Hall). These silhouettes would symbolize the university’s identity, and I could read descriptive profile passages to overlay the individual voices that construct this identity. Through this creative composition, I hope to convey the personal profile in conjunction with the university context of strategic communication. Specifically, I think the main point of this presentation will be to emphasize the construction of profiles and the construction of organizational identity. To make this connection more explicit, I could use some sort of transition that builds or deconstructs the image into pieces. Then the next image would display the actual profiles that partially construct the identity.

Another option is to interview my supervisor who edits the profiles I write for the Office of Publications and Promotion. She would be able to describe the current situation from a professional standpoint and perhaps explain why universities use profiles strategically.

Executive Summary (draft 2)

As members of organizations, we continuously construct stories about our experiences, and in turn these stories construct the organization and its culture. Specifically, organizations choose to feature individual stories or profiles of community members, vignettes of personal experience that epitomize the culture. Whether internal or external communication, these profiles offer the opportunity for others to view and identify with the organization, and as such the texts are part of the organization’s strategic communication about what it is and what it wants to be. Though both narrative and strategic communication are subcategories of organizational communication, their connection has not been fully explored. This thesis will investigate the use of narrative as a form of strategic communication though the profile genre.

By combining theories of rhetoric and linguistics, genre ecology and activity systems, and visual communication and information design, I hope to conduct a comprehensive analysis of profiles within one industry or longitudinally for a short period of time. The print or web-based profiles will be analyzed using textual or discourse analysis, with a focus on rhetoric and identification. The textual features will be described, analyzed, and finally explained in relation to the social context, and with consideration to overarching issues of identity, ideology, and power, though the theoretical and methodological lens of critical discourse analysis. In addition, I hope it will increase my knowledge of profiles from a writer’s perspective and also lead to suggestions for other communicators and the future of the profile genre.

Executive Summary (draft)

As members of organizations, we continuously construct stories about our experiences, and in turn these stories construct the organization and its culture. Specifically, organizations choose to feature individual stories or profiles of community members, vignettes of personal experience that epitomize the culture. Whether internal or external communication, these profiles offer the opportunity for others to view and identify with the organization, and as such the texts are part of the organization’s strategic communication about what it is and what it wants to be. Though both narrative and strategic communication are subcategories of organizational communication, their connection has not been fully explored. This thesis will investigate the use of narrative as a form of strategic communication though the profile genre.

Project Plan
By combining theories of rhetoric and linguistics, genre ecology and activity systems, and visual communication and information design, I hope to conduct a comprehensive analysis of profiles within one industry or longitudinally for a short period of time. The print or web-based profiles will be analyzed as the following:
• Rhetoric – including Aristotle’s distinction and emphasis on examples or narratives and enthymemes
• Auto-communication – specifically Cheney and Christensen’s concept where external communication turns inward and vice versa
• Image – both the external image of the organization and the images connected to the profiles
In addition, I might consider overarching issues of identity, ideology, and power through the theories of Bourdieu, Burke, Fairclough, and Foucault.

Conclusion and Contributions
This research will describe the features of profiles, while examining their persuasive power in terms of identification. In addition, I hope it will increase my knowledge of profiles from a writer’s perspective and also lead to suggestions for other communicators and the future of the profile genre.