Recently, I emceed a colloquium featuring textual scholar and Melville specialist John Bryant and intellectual property and First Amendment expert Wendy Seltzer. Over the course of the colloquium, these amazing scholars covered Moby-Dick, Edward Said, Shepard Fairey, fan fiction, Creative Commons, YouTomb, and how they talk about plagiarism and fair use with their students. This was a fun and fascinating conversation, and well worth the listen. I'm posting John's and Wendy's bios below.

Happy Election Day! Don't forget to VOTE!

Keeping with the theme, I would like to highlight a few videos that have been floating around the internet that show young people engaging in the election and using Project NML skills to boot! (shout out to Nick for showing me two of the links!)

Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

Students at Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, GA were recently highlighted on CNN for their remix of the hip-hop star TI's song "Whatever You Like." The students' song, "You Can Vote However You Like," appropriates the background track and melody from the original, but changes the lyrics into a debate between the McCain and Obama camps.

Here's the original performance on CNN:



You can watch an interview with the students here.

How can one media be seen to influence another? This week, I'm looking at this issue for our Teachers' Strategy Guide for the unit "Adaptations and Translations." This unit focuses particularly on the transmedia properties of both Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, and a modern theatrical remix of this story, "Moby Dick: Then and Now" created by the Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, RI. In general, the NML skills (as discussed in our NML whitepaper) we are focusing on in this unit are appropriation and transmedia navigation.

I've been thinking a lot about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick lately, and not just arbitrarily. A big piece of my job here at NML is to head up development of a teacher's strategy guide for use in the high school English classroom. The guide emphasizes the new media literacy skill of appropriation--the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content--and uses Moby-Dick as the sample text and a theater adaptation by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley called Moby-Dick: Then and Now as an example of a contemporary appropriation and adaptation of the novel.

Before I came to NML, I had long lived among the multitudes who for many reasons--actually, for me it was mainly out of guilt and the heavy weight of cultural duty--keep a copy of Moby-Dick on a bookshelf with the really truly honest intention of getting through it some day. My guilt was compounded by my personal history as first an English major and then a student-writer in an MFA program. Every time I looked over at that fat little book sitting plumply on my bookshelf, I got just a little miserable all over again.  But then I thought, you know, it's a very long novel. And hard. And word on the street is that it's kind of...boring. But then I joined NML and started in on this teacher's guide and I figured, okay, it's time to end the shame. And I took a deep breath and I jumped in.