Angel's Cover Memo
Within this portfolio are my research website, proposal, annotated bibliography, and works cited page. For my research project I, as well as my partner Megan Cardone, are analyzing anime and manga and the woman’s place in it. Women are portrayed in many different ways, using stereotypes and genre to dictate the types of roles that they play. Using books like, Understanding Manga and Anime by Robin Brenner and Anime * from Akira to Princess Mononoke by Susan Napier, I will attempt to show just how women are gaining their freedom in manga and anime and branching into different roles. The stereotypes that used to be common are changing, and women are being given more personalities than they once had.
When we were given this assignment we immediately knew what we wanted to do. Megan and I paired up to create a website that would be informative as well as entertaining. The technology with this website gave me some hang ups. Weebly is a very sensitive website and if I even looked at it wrong, it would exit out of itself. The website has a mind of its own. Another problem I encountered with this site was its constant rearranging my text. No matter how I pasted it, it still changed my paragraphs. It would separate sentences and put unnecessary spaces between words.
Weebly created a variety of problems for me. It would not upload pictures I posted, or mover pages around on site. It would unfix things I had just adjusted, and therefore knew were being moved. Were it not a machine, I would assume it had something against me. There was always a loading sign in the middle of my screen, and I had to work around it because it wouldn’t go away no matter what I did.
Something that was both a hindrance, but also an asset was my love for anime. As I was going through pictures that I wanted to use for this project, I had more than enough to accomplish my goal. The problem was I have too many pictures. I had to sift through hundreds of pictures to get to the ones that would work for the circumstances. I could not just throw any old pictures into the spots. They had to mesh with the words like in manga. Using multi-genre pieces to compile our research was no accident. The pictures, videos and articles were all important to tell the story, and present the information in the way that we wanted.
These pictures and video’s took hours to get through since my ADD wanted to have nostalgia moments about parts of the anime’s. Since school started I have not had time to watch anime, so going through my pictures brought up feelings of longing to pop in a DVD and re-watch a series all over again. This was certainly a problem because I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing this for a school project and not for fun. By going through the pictures I was teasing myself by looking at something I knew I could not have until the semester was over.
The pictures were not my only distraction. When I had to explain what things were, or why they fit in with the topic of conversation my mind would once more wander to the anime I was discussing. I had to force myself to be brief and to the point instead of describing every moment of the anime like I wanted to.
Another thing that I have difficulty in is grammar. My grammar is not what it should be. I am alright with it, catching silly mistakes when I’m actively looking for them, but I’m a conversationalist. I write the way that I speak and that is not always good for me. It certainly does not help me academically. I have been trying to get a handle on this and work harder to write grammatically correct even if it is not the way I would speak.
What came easy to me was writing about the animes. I knew them very well, having watched everyone that I quoted and used examples from. Having been such a big fan for such a long time, I had a number of anime/manga stashed in my head, and also my room to draw from. I did not have to look up as many things because I had all the answers in my head.
Writing these pieces to put within the webpage was a process. It started with just throwing idea’s on the page, to get something down. Next I had to go through and see what was necessary, or what was just too much information. Once I had all the important things together, I cleaned it up, and added pictures and videos to emphasis my points.
When the draft was cleaned up, it was posted to Weebly. Since we only want to post the final product on Weebly, there is not much drafting to be seen. We took screen shots of the first webpage before we changed some things around and did our editing. We added more and fixed it up so the webpage was professional and easy to understand. This is hard to demonstrate in drafts on a webpage, it’s just something that happens as you are going through it.
While writing my drafts I realized that my word choices were crucial to how my project would come together. Some Japanese words were necessary to convey the topic and explanation of these words important so the audience could understand without being a member of the ideal audience. The language choices within this website were intentional and given great though t before they were put into the project.
Writing was an important part of this project, but so too was the reading. The books and web articles used to give this project credibility were important too. They showed that other scholars shared our opinions and we were not simply stated our opinions blindly. Without these readings, the audience may not give us so much as a second glance, before moving on to more academically sound articles.
Reading these texts was indeed helpful, but quoting what I had read, was also key. Some of the authors were saying exactly what I was thinking and that was important to note. By adding these authors into my project, our voices were mixing to discuss one topic that was important to all of us.
Working together, was like incorporating the author’s voices. Megan and I worked together for hours at a time making sure that what we were writing could flow together and mingle well. We did not want our writing to be on too opposite ends of the spectrum. Our classmates also gave us helpful hints by surfing through our webpage and telling us what was confusing, asking good questions and giving us good ideas on what we should add or subtract from the project.
My portfolio is filled with passion and enthusiasm for the topic of women in anime/manga. I tried my hardest with these things. I spent hours searching for the perfect compilations of pictures to mix with the words and I spent more hours searching for the right videos. The article’s that we wrote were written with our hearts and minds every step of the way. I hope that everything is satisfactory and the audience who surfs our website is pleased as well as informed with the information they uncover.
When we were given this assignment we immediately knew what we wanted to do. Megan and I paired up to create a website that would be informative as well as entertaining. The technology with this website gave me some hang ups. Weebly is a very sensitive website and if I even looked at it wrong, it would exit out of itself. The website has a mind of its own. Another problem I encountered with this site was its constant rearranging my text. No matter how I pasted it, it still changed my paragraphs. It would separate sentences and put unnecessary spaces between words.
Weebly created a variety of problems for me. It would not upload pictures I posted, or mover pages around on site. It would unfix things I had just adjusted, and therefore knew were being moved. Were it not a machine, I would assume it had something against me. There was always a loading sign in the middle of my screen, and I had to work around it because it wouldn’t go away no matter what I did.
Something that was both a hindrance, but also an asset was my love for anime. As I was going through pictures that I wanted to use for this project, I had more than enough to accomplish my goal. The problem was I have too many pictures. I had to sift through hundreds of pictures to get to the ones that would work for the circumstances. I could not just throw any old pictures into the spots. They had to mesh with the words like in manga. Using multi-genre pieces to compile our research was no accident. The pictures, videos and articles were all important to tell the story, and present the information in the way that we wanted.
These pictures and video’s took hours to get through since my ADD wanted to have nostalgia moments about parts of the anime’s. Since school started I have not had time to watch anime, so going through my pictures brought up feelings of longing to pop in a DVD and re-watch a series all over again. This was certainly a problem because I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing this for a school project and not for fun. By going through the pictures I was teasing myself by looking at something I knew I could not have until the semester was over.
The pictures were not my only distraction. When I had to explain what things were, or why they fit in with the topic of conversation my mind would once more wander to the anime I was discussing. I had to force myself to be brief and to the point instead of describing every moment of the anime like I wanted to.
Another thing that I have difficulty in is grammar. My grammar is not what it should be. I am alright with it, catching silly mistakes when I’m actively looking for them, but I’m a conversationalist. I write the way that I speak and that is not always good for me. It certainly does not help me academically. I have been trying to get a handle on this and work harder to write grammatically correct even if it is not the way I would speak.
What came easy to me was writing about the animes. I knew them very well, having watched everyone that I quoted and used examples from. Having been such a big fan for such a long time, I had a number of anime/manga stashed in my head, and also my room to draw from. I did not have to look up as many things because I had all the answers in my head.
Writing these pieces to put within the webpage was a process. It started with just throwing idea’s on the page, to get something down. Next I had to go through and see what was necessary, or what was just too much information. Once I had all the important things together, I cleaned it up, and added pictures and videos to emphasis my points.
When the draft was cleaned up, it was posted to Weebly. Since we only want to post the final product on Weebly, there is not much drafting to be seen. We took screen shots of the first webpage before we changed some things around and did our editing. We added more and fixed it up so the webpage was professional and easy to understand. This is hard to demonstrate in drafts on a webpage, it’s just something that happens as you are going through it.
While writing my drafts I realized that my word choices were crucial to how my project would come together. Some Japanese words were necessary to convey the topic and explanation of these words important so the audience could understand without being a member of the ideal audience. The language choices within this website were intentional and given great though t before they were put into the project.
Writing was an important part of this project, but so too was the reading. The books and web articles used to give this project credibility were important too. They showed that other scholars shared our opinions and we were not simply stated our opinions blindly. Without these readings, the audience may not give us so much as a second glance, before moving on to more academically sound articles.
Reading these texts was indeed helpful, but quoting what I had read, was also key. Some of the authors were saying exactly what I was thinking and that was important to note. By adding these authors into my project, our voices were mixing to discuss one topic that was important to all of us.
Working together, was like incorporating the author’s voices. Megan and I worked together for hours at a time making sure that what we were writing could flow together and mingle well. We did not want our writing to be on too opposite ends of the spectrum. Our classmates also gave us helpful hints by surfing through our webpage and telling us what was confusing, asking good questions and giving us good ideas on what we should add or subtract from the project.
My portfolio is filled with passion and enthusiasm for the topic of women in anime/manga. I tried my hardest with these things. I spent hours searching for the perfect compilations of pictures to mix with the words and I spent more hours searching for the right videos. The article’s that we wrote were written with our hearts and minds every step of the way. I hope that everything is satisfactory and the audience who surfs our website is pleased as well as informed with the information they uncover.