Picgif serial number5/17/2023 Concepts and RationaleĪt some point, an idea coalesced that a similar approach could be applied to instructional videos, specifically those supporting information literacy. In general, further thoughts and observations on the curious persistence and evolution of GIFs as a popular culture entity is discussed in this 2013 Wired article: The Animated GIF: Still Looping After All These Years. I should note that when I first created this GIF, it was in ‘stacked’ format, or one continuous GIF to give the ‘punchline’ more impact, but I separated them here in keeping with the spirit of the article’s topic. ![]() This example combines an existing visual meme as a ‘punchline’ to clips from scenes in two different movies ( Everything is Illuminated and Lord of the Rings) that pivots on two points of commonality: Elijah Wood and potatoes. My initial reaction was ‘great, I’m officially old enough to see the first wave of web retro nostalgia’, but I began to notice some differences: instead of being images that simply waved their arms for attention, this new generation of animated GIFs often sketched out some sort of narrative: telling a joke, or riffing on a meme, such as the following: I had personally written off the animated GIF as a footnote in early web history, until the last few years when I noticed them cropping up again with regularity. In turn, with the ongoing adoption of HTML5 standards and the meteoric rise of mobile devices and their particular needs with regards to video formats, the web content landscape continues to develop and change. Flash, in conjunction with the rise of YouTube, established a de facto standard for video on the web for a time. ![]() 2 As the web continued to evolve and function began to catch up with form, the animated GIF began to fade from the scene, especially with the advent of comparably fast-loading and high-resolution streaming video formats such as Quicktime and RealVideo. To be fair, some sites used animated GIFs with specific purposes, such as an early version of an American Sign Language site that used animated GIFs to demonstrate signing of individual words. Typically used purely for decoration without any particular function, and sometimes funny at first, then less so each subsequent viewing (like bumper stickers) animated GIFs ranged from benign to prodigiously distracting, best exemplified by that rococo entity: the sparkly unicorn: 1 As web design aesthetics matured and digital video recording, editing, playback and bandwidth became more affordable and feasible, the animated GIF joined the blink tag and comic sans font as the gold, silver, and bronze medals for making a site look like it was ready to party like it’s 1999.Įven so, services like MySpace and fresh waves of web neophytes establishing a personal online space allowed the animated GIF to soldier on. Animated GIFs…provide short animations that typically repeat as long as the GIF is being displayed.” (High Definition) Animated GIFs were at one point one of the few options available for adding video-like elements to a web page. ![]() ![]() I discuss tools and practical considerations as well as limitations and constraints.Īnimated GIFs are “a series of GIF files saved as one large file. GIFs can be displayed simultaneously as a sequence of comic book like panels, allowing for a ‘birds eye view’ of all the steps of a process, viewing and reviewing steps as needed without having to rewind or replay an entire video. This article discusses the changing nature of animated Graphics Interchange Format images (GIFs) as a form of visual communication on the Web, and how that can be adapted for the purposes of information literacy and library instruction.
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