Fun Home Response

The autobiographical graphic novel, "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel, is a very interesting and emotional story that brings out some very important qualities that people possess and struggle with. She portrays her point of view of life by exposing many things about her father, Bruce, a suspicious but unique man who is an English teacher.

Throughout this novel, Alison is challenged with facing the reality of who she really is as a person. She has the tendencies to dress more man-like with short hair and wearing boyish clothing. She struggles with this because of father's strict attitudes and strange personality. Alison often talks about memories she has, but is not sure if they are accurate to what she remembers. 

Alison's family lives in Bechdel Funeral Home, also known as "Fun Home," which is obviously not an ideal place for a family to live. We learn that Bruce has an obsession with fiction and artifice because he is constantly trying to be someone he is not, but wants to be. Bruce is very specific of how the decor around his home looks and decorates it all himself, refusing help from anyone else. This is just one strange thing we see about him in the story. We soon learn that Bruce has been seeing his guy friend who was the babysitter for the Alison and her siblings as well. This is a huge turn in Alison's life as she slowly starts to realize the true sexual identity of her father, similar to herself. 

What we learn towards the beginning of the story is the most tragic part of the whole novel. This is when we learn about Bruce's apparent suicide. Alison learns that her father got hit by a truck and this really gets to her. At first, she can't believe it and just laughs it off, but after time passes she realizes the seriousness of this tragedy and how it will effect her further on. Alison eventually comes out as lesbian and isn't ashamed of it anymore. She knows that she had to be her to live life happily and not held behind bars in her own mind of struggle. 

My Photo Essay

My name is Darren Brautigam and I am 19 years old. I have an older brother, Kurt, and sister, Morgan, of the ages 22 and 24, but today will primarily focus on my brother and I. Below are pictures ranging from 5 years ago to photos from about the last year two. I will start with the earliest picture which is Kurt and I scuba diving in Mexico in the resort's swimming pool. This was a pretty fascinating experience that me and my brother got to see while already on a phenomenal vacation trip. 

The next two photos presented below are a couple from a time my two cousins and I went up to Erie to visit my brother at school. The first one simply shows all of us sitting on Kurt's couch in his apartment. The four of us have become really close to each other throughout the years and enjoy spending time all together when we find a chance. It is harder nowadays because we are all in college in different places. The second photo was taken at the same time as the first picture. It's me and my brother sitting below a bridge that crossed a gorge up in Erie. During times when we are both free and back at home, we enjoy finding places that are interesting and fun to explore like abandoned buildings, houses, etc.

This final picture of my brother and I is from the day of my high school graduation. This specifically was a special time for me and my brother because I am the youngest in the family and was finally done with high school. Two years prior, Kurt graduated and I also attended his ceremony. My brother was a big influence for me throughout high school and helped me get through a lot I dealt with, even when it wasn't about school or education.

Photo Essay Response

In a post written by "The Guardian," it talks about a brave and courageous swim done by a group of young girls across the English Channel to raise money for Child Poverty Action Group. What amazes me most about this is that some of the girls who completed this swim were as young as eleven years old and that they did the swim across more than once. During the time of this swim, the waters were very cold and full of jellyfish. I find it amazing that even in these types of conditions, the girls were still fully willing to continue they're dangerous and treacherous journey ahead of them. One of the girls, specifically, said that only five weeks before the swim, she had her appendix removed but still pulled through with completing the swim. 

 A quote from one of the girls while swimming was, "It was kind of scary jumping in for the first time because I was cold and there were three jellyfish right next to the ladder. It was cold the entire time and there was one part where I was swimming through this mucky greasy part and there were jellyfish that kept stinging me, completely surrounding me." This description gave me a clear understanding of how irritating it would have been and almost makes me feel bad for them doing this. Overall, it was amazing to see the different ways people organize these type of events for good causes, even if it goes as far as this did. 

Photos from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/26/the-sea-gals-swim-the-channel-photo-essay

Erasure Poem

This is a poem I found online and have made into an erasure poem. Hope you enjoy!

Had he and I but met

    By some old ancient inn,

We should have set us down to wet

    Right many a nipperkin! 

But ranged as infantry,

    And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

    And killed him in his place. 

I shot him dead because--

    Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

    That's clear enough; although 

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

    Off-hand like--just as I--

Was out of work--had sold his traps--

    No other reason why. 

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

    You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat, if met where any bar is,

    Or help to half a crown.

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-man-he-killed-by-thomas-hardy

Voyant/Ngram Observations

On the left is a screenshot of after inserting all of my blog posts into the section in "Voyant." It gave me a group of words of which I used the most and the ones that were used more than others will be bigger compared to the ones used less throughout every blog of mine.

Below are two screenshots I took of the program "Voyant" that show some other pretty interesting information about my blog posts. On the left it showed me what phrases I used the most throughout all posts, although since my posts consisted of mostly paragraphs, there weren't too many phrases being used multiple times. If there was a phrase used more than once, the highest amount it got to was only being used twice. The screenshot on the right portrays a different way of visualization with a type of line graph to show how many times a word was used and also when, in my documents, it was written.

The other program I used to get deeper information about my blogs was Google's "Ngram." This program is used to see how much a certain word was used in different time periods. For mine, I used a few of the top words written in my blogs that I thought would be relevant with each other. Two of the words I chose have been used since even before the 1800's, unlike three other words I picked that weren't used nearly as much in the 1800's and all the way up until now. I believe this is because the two words I picked that had a lot of usage were very common words that were and are still used much today. On the other hand, the three words that weren't brought up too much are more specific words that have more relevance to times closer to now rather than earlier dates.

What a Data Visualization Is

Data can be portrayed in various types of ways such as writing out sentences about your data, pictures of data, bar graphs, etc., but a very efficient way of doing this is by using data visualization. This method is a way to look at a chunk of data in a way where you don't have to read much, but just look at it and get a pretty good sense of what is it telling you. The main way of doing this is usually by a graph, chart, table, etc. to portray the data you have collected.


One specific type of visualization I looked at was called tree mapping. This was an interesting way of portraying information to people because it uses different sizes of shapes such as squares or circles to show how much more or less one thing is compared to another. For instance, one piece of visualization that used tree mapping was one where it showed popular fake news throughout the years 2017-2018. The bigger the square was, the more times that news was viewed or spread.

Above is an example of a tree map showing the amount of votes each candidate got in different states

Another type of tree map I viewed that was interesting was one about the amount of breaches and hacks that happened in big companies and organizations throughout the last few years. These include some pretty popular ones such as Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Apple and more. This tree map is a bit different than the usual because of the use of circles all around each other rather than squares all lined up perfectly together. In my opinion, this doesn't make the visualization easier or harder to look at, but just a different, interesting way of showing collected data. With all of these different sized circles shown, you can also hold your mouse over it to give the user a brief description of what happened with the hacks and breaches. Below are a couple of screenshots I took of the tree map I described. The one of the left just shows a portion of it, and on the right side it shows an example of a brief description about Facebook and the breaches it has had in 2019.

Data Proposal

For this set of data that I will be tracking and recording for the next two weeks is gonna show me how some of my every day routines affect me and how they change day-to-day.

The categories I will be adding to my report is the amount of sleep I get, how much/what I eat every day, and what type of music I listen to throughout the day. 

For this study, I will track the hours of sleep I get each night and determine if that affects how much I eat for the next day and what type of music I listen to as well. I feel like sleep is an extremely important part of your life and could have big effects on how a person functions each day. Even if it is as little as the kind of food they eat or what type of music in playing on their phone each day, like in my case, it could be interesting what this project shows me about myself and how I react differently during these two weeks.

Sleep

In order to track the amount of sleep I get in the two weeks of tracking data, I am using an iPhone application called "Instant." This app allows me to track where I have been, the amount of steps I have taken each day, and, of course, the amount of sleep I get each night. This will keep a nice and organized log for a pretty accurate recording of the time I spent sleeping.

Food Consumption

For this part of my data collection, I have made notes of what I have eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day during these two weeks. I am trying to get a sense, mainly, of how my sleep would affect my appetite and how much I consume during the day. This may help me figure out the correlation between my sleep and eating habits. 

Music

As a lot of people do, I listen to music every day, multiple times a day. I do not prefer any specific genre of music, but am not a fan of them all. People usually listen to the type of music that matches how they feel at the moment or just in general, so I wanted to see, if together, my sleep and food consumption affect my mood by observing how much and what kind of music I had been listening to throughout two weeks.

Thin Blue Line Analysis

This documentary I watched, titled "Thin Blue Line," is about an unknown man that shoots and kills a police officer during a traffic stop, but a man named David gets convicted anyways. It includes many different ways of visual words and images to give the documentary suspense and even sometimes a sense of clues as to who the murderer might be. For example, one of the scenes in the film shows a map of the area where the murder happened with all of the street names, buildings, etc. and then slowly fades into an areal view of the actual spot in real life. This gives the viewer a good sense of what the area looks like in perspective of where places are located and what the area would look like to be there in real life. Another example of these dramatic scenes made by the producers is when the film talks about the murder for one of the first times. The camera does a close up shot of some words like "murder," "death," and "witness." This gives the watcher a feeling that this is a very mysterious event that has happened in the town and that all of these things have occurred.

Not only do the producers create these senses with words, but with images as well. For example, there were a couple scenes of the camera showing sketches of the courtroom while some of the suspects were on trial for the murder. I feel like showing this helps lets the viewer get a sense of how dramatic and serious this trial was by showing the different images from the room. There are many other times when images or short clips are used to portray a sense of intensity and drama. These would be things like close up shots of police sirens, the barrel of a gun, and a shot from the ground up of the electric chair. Two important and very interesting clips, in my opinion, is when the camera does close ups of a couple suspect cars, including the lights and license plate, to show what kind of car may have been involved with the murder of. The other important clip is one being a close up of the cassette tape during the interview with David. It shows the tape in the middle of the cassette just spin over and over while they talk. I feel like this also helps the reader understand the intensity of the interview and situation as a whole.  Overall, I think that the producers of this documentary did a very good job at portraying different words and images to help depict the feeling of the horrific event that took place in Texas.

Who I Am

My name is Darren and I am a sophomore attending the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown studying a major known as Multimedia and Digital Culture. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh, so UPJ is not a long way from my hometown. I come from a family of five including my older brother who is 22 and my older sister who is 24. These are some pictures I took/created that describe me and the kind of person I am.

This is a picture of me and a few of my friends after high school graduation. I added this picture because I enjoy spending time and hanging out with them. We will do things like go biking or play sports like basketball and hockey together.

I added this picture into my collage because it is a photo of myself that I edited in photoshop. I have been a fan of graphic design for a long time and edit different types of pictures like this when I have some free time.

Above is a picture I added of my hockey team and I because I really like watching it on T.V. and started playing it in third grade as well. It is something I really enjoy doing with my friends as well as being able to verse other opponents I don't know. It is a great stress reliever as well as just being a fun, recreational sport I love to play.

This last picture that I have added to my collection is a picture from a few years ago when my family and I were on our way to Mexico. I added this because of my fascination in traveling and seeing different places other than the place I grew up. I have never travelled out west but am hoping to go some type of national park like Yosemite or Yellowstone National Park.