I liked the Almjeld article a lot! I enjoyed rethinking the idea of curation. I'm still torn on whether or not pinning on Pinterest is an act of curation... I think that it is not, but it is a sort of intentional collecting. After reading Almjeld's article, I went on Pinterest and made some new boards and tried not to think too hard about what I was pinning. It was really freeing to produce an identity far from my own, but also one that I enjoyed inhabiting virtually. The shallow critique that people make, that Pinterest "tricks" women into adhering to gender stereotypes, does not take into account the pleasure of exploring identities that Pinterest allows. It takes away women's agency. It also draws the real world and Pinterest too close together. I think a lot of people use Pinterest as an imaginative space, not as space to actually purchase things...
The cool thing about Pinterest is that you can find some really amazing things, especially when you break out of the mainstream. When I searched Vanessa Bell, Pinterest provided a really beautiful, engaging feed of Bell's artistic work. I started creating a Bloomsbury board. All of a sudden my main feed had images of Virginia Woolf and quotations... all of the makeup and dresses disappeared.
I liked that we were scraping data from Pinterest. I have no idea how that works behind the scenes, but I would be curious to learn more. The word clouds were useful as visual aids in the videos, but I had a hard time interpreting them for my script. I would have enjoyed having some numerical data as well. Another interesting approach to the data could have been looking at sponsored posts. Or following some of the marketing guides to see if you could boost the popularity of your pins using their strategies.
I really like composing in the vertical format. I agree with what Shawna said in class that I had to go back and re-record stuff because I didn't have the foresight to make the browser 16:9. I thought that the vertical format made me think about Instagram stories and I kind of thought of each scene as a separate Instagram story. This was helpful for me to think about what kind of things get my attention vs. what kinds of images I might skip over. I had a lot of fun designing graphics in photoshop for the quotations and word clouds. For some reason when we did the horizontal videos I didn't think to do this... possibly because the horizontal format makes me think of movies and not info-graphics. For the horizontal videos I definitely was afraid of making it into a PowerPoint with narration- whereas with the vertical format it didn't feel like that was a risk. I think it would have been interesting to download the Pinterest app and screen record on my phone.
In general, I really appreciated the chance to compose in a vertical format because I never would have done it on my own, but it feels useful.