Prezi Project Ideas

I spent a considerable amount of time thinking of how to approach creating a Prezi presentation. My main problem, I learned, was that I was trying to figure out how to tell a story related to the issues surrounding my accident space. I think that the zoom in and zoom out features and the ability to create paths from image to image in Prezi were suggesting to me that I had to link my ideas as a sequential narrative. My attempts to tell an underlying story in this manner was overwhelming the trope space--and in my mental Prezi presentations, the end results were too obvious, dogmatic, or simply cheesy. I kept reverting back to Kovitz's book and the way he uses structure. Kovitz finally made me see that I needed to choose subjects that had nothing to do with cancer or the accident space--this helped me to move out the sequential narrative space that seemed to be prohibiting my creative choices. The structure that I chose, I knew, had to have some relation to the notions of routine and repetition; it had to be something mundane so that I could diffuse the preachy-type approach of the ideas that I was coming up with.

I thought back to why Kovitz’s focus on architecture in the book kept making me think about information exchange on servers and in database systems. Kovitz, as we discussed in class, articulates a problem with logic-based mechanized (and efficient) systems by writing from within them, with them, and letting the information that comes through create a meaning that identifies a different logic or reality--a sort of secret embedded in the human response to practical (or otherwise) routine processes. Kovitz sharply critiques utopian socialism in his book, but I also took from his book the related idea that he was conveying the notion of a loss of meaning in society through the mechanisms that allow and establish order. It occurred to me in class two weeks ago that his book is about a mass slaughter of meaning. But mechanization and repetition are also positive; they relate to well-being. This led to the idea that I could experiment with database and database design in my Prezi presentation to say something about the accident space and policy decision-making issues surrounding cancer. I spent many years learning how to design databases and connect them to web interfaces using SQL queries on the job. I think that I can do something with the structure versus content relationship in databases and the way that people use them that might--if done correctly--give me the electrate turn that charges the accident space into revealing the subtleties of its composition as well as its extremes.

I don’t know quite how I am going to do it yet, but I want to try to use tables and cells in a database, where information is routinely processed and disseminated to different users through web interfaces or reports using database queries, to get at the logic of my accident in an unexpected way. In my mind, I am making the conductive associations, but I still need to figure out how to use Prezi to make it work. I find it fascinating that I will be able to use something as logical as a database to make a broader statement of import about accident logic. I’m not sure if I am on the right track, but I, personally, will draw much from this if I can get it to work. One of my biggest problems is going to be coming up with the content for the database structure screenshots I will create. I want to design my Prezi around a theme like “How to Create Relational Databases” and then provide a manual-like guide that subordinates the content that I will place in the database cells to the instructional aspects of the “How to” presentation.

Life in the modern world (thoughts and ideas), at least to me, seems somewhat parenthetical, so I want to embody that beside-the-point tone or attitude in my presentation somehow. But the whole idea of my presentation needs to convey the idea of an unstoppable growth or a defect in an orderly system that can be understood like the term apoptosis. I have a lot of work (and thinking) to do, but this blog post represents my preliminary ideas for the final presentation.