March 23rd, 2018

Discussion Post #4

I’ve been spending time looking through The Pudding and Motion Poems, and they’ve easily become some of my favorite collections of multimedia essays and have been inspiration for the type of writing and design content that I hope to one day produce. (I don’t think anything like that will happen this semester; despite what I’ve been learning about website design, I have no idea where I’d begin with coding my own scrollytelling site or developing enough videos to give them their own space).

I really enjoy the essays published on The Pudding works because, based on the pieces I read and viewed, the combine elements with popular culture with real numbers/statistics/sometimes off-the-wall and unexpected information. The site is good at categorizing the pieces. Many seem to be pretty narrow in terms of the audience- there is an article that looks at all of the lines of Hamilton, for example, which I’ve never seen- so some of the essays can be hard to relate to. Despite my lack of understanding about some subject, the movement of the site and its articles engaged me and my attention to what the author says. I think that some of the most interesting articles are the ones that utilize easily accessible data right on any Internet browser. This makes me wonder, though, how often that data changes and where to find the most up-to-date statistics. For example, one of the articles on this site looks at the increase in slang word usage, based on Internet searches. I feel like this could be the sort of article that is updated frequently or else it could become irrelevant or outdated quickly. I wonder if there is an opportunity to create a bot that complies this information and updates- like the bots that automatically tweet at certain times or bots that respond to user-generated questions, bots could update Internet statistics-based articles such as those presented on The Pudding!