I think the remediation project was a good learning experience, both as a group and individually. Remediation made us think critically about our choices and how to best go about our task in regards to audience, purpose, mode, and delivery. Because our original speech, Hypocrisy of American Slavery by Frederick Douglass, was delivered about a century and a half before our time, the audience of our remediation is very different Frederick’s. Although the specifics are now different, the core message of his speech still applies today, and thus our purpose was arguably the same as Mr. Douglass’: two bring light to the racial inequality that often goes unacknowledged. As far as mode goes, ours was obviously quite different from that of the original speech. As we remediated the text into our new modes of presentation and delivery, it challenged us to think carefully to make sure we were staying true to the message of Frederick’s speech.
The constraints (and advantages) of print and digital media shaped our rhetorical choices in a number of ways. While the constraints such as the time limit and the avoidance of usage of the original text were somewhat confining, I found the use of digital media to be somewhat liberating. Having worked with images, sound, text, and video by point in the term, we were able to employ them all in the ways that we saw fit. Because we decided to represent what we considered to be the most important pieces of the speech through images on a chalkboard, some of the most significant choices that had to be made involved choosing the sketches and phrases that best represented what Frederick was saying in his speech. In doing so, I think we improved our abilities to be as concise as possible.