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Assignment #2

For assignment #2, I picked option #3: “Watch the CBC television show Little Mosque on the Prairie (which can be watched free on YouTube) and then write an analysis of how the show reinforces or violates stereotypes from both a historical and semiotic standpoint.”

Admittedly, I found option #2 more interesting but thought that as a Muslim, I could give a different perspective to the show that the rest of my classmates can’t give. So, I went into my living room, called my brothers, and the screen mirrored the first episode of “Little Mosque on the Prairie”. 

The first seven minutes of this show were very intense, we actually stopped it multiple times throughout because this was a lot; nothing like having three teenagers and a confused five-year-old yelling to make you wonder why you were in this exact situation.

The bombing/blowing away jokes were a bit much, especially since the show ran from 2007-2012, but I suppose because this show ran and was made in Canada, it wasn’t as taboo or as tense as doing such a show during that time would be in America (I read that there were 24 Canadian casualties so it isn’t as though the country wouldn’t have a reaction as those in the fictional town of Mercy). I also found it a bit odd how few of the actors in the show were Muslim, coming from someone who is writing this in 2023, if you are going to do representation, do it correctly.

When it comes to stereotypes, there are a lot of them, although most of them came from the mouth of non-Muslims/those looking for a single issue to exploit. The man who came to talk about his roof shingles, went to a radio station to spew anti-Islamic propaganda. The casual sexism was also jarring, although the temporary Imam using licorice as an example of how Western society tempts/corrupts was really funny. Outside of the sexism rant this part of the episode sounded almost exactly like something my local Imam would say!

My conclusion for the first episode was that it admittedly reinforced some stereotypes, i.e. sexism and anti-progressive values(I have never seen people argue about goat or cucumber sandwiches at a mosque event…usually in potluck situations people are given free rein so long as the food is halal). Something that was very clear throughout the episode was that the Muslims were accurate portrayals of everyday Muslims, some are open about being Muslim, and others hide it. Some women wear hijabs, others do not, and even then the ones who don’t put one on when they were praying.

The argument about the start of Ramadan isn’t so much of an argument that people have nowadays; there’s an app for that and it's probably only in Saudi Arabia that they need a telescope to discern such information so that they can let others know. We do still have arguments about when Eid Al-Fitr (the Eid (which is the Islamic equivalent of Christmas in terms of importance and similar ways of celebrating)that follows the end of Ramadan The other one is Eid Al-Adha) is happening; this year, according to my mom, was the most chill out of last couple of years. My boss(who is also Muslim) said in Iran(where he’s from) they celebrate Eid Al-Fitr the day after when Saudi Arabia says it’s supposed to be. Nigeria often celebrates the day before everyone(I still don’t have a clear answer as to why).

For violating stereotypes, I loved the fact that when they did the Mousqe open house/welcome party, they invited the Mayor and the Reverand! One of the stereotypes that I’ve actually had experience with is that many believe that Muslims are often very closed off and don’t like outsiders, which would be haram(against our religion). In a couple of situations, we have actually had people come to our Mosque to learn about what Islam is all about. So, for the show to have that in there on the very first episode was awesome! Another thing is that the women had jobs, one woman works for the mayor and another has a cafe she runs. Neither of these two women was any less Muslim than the others in the show. 

All in all, I am probably going to continue watching this show, my brothers and I after we got past those very hectic first seven minutes of the episode really enjoyed it!

[fhakizi322]

Assignment #7

This blog post is for assignment number seven, option two,  “Conduct a holistic of the film Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov.” When I searched the film's synopsis, I had thought that it could be like “Night at the Meusem” (which would come out almost six years later), which wasn’t quite accurate.

Russian Ark is a movie with a very unreliable narrator. Additionally, it is also in the first-person point of view, so we only see what he sees. It’s clear that no one can see “us” early on, we follow behind a group, that has some men in uniforms and might have possession of weaponry, and they say nothing. We look through windows, and there isn’t even a shadow or an outline of a human looking in.

The narrator is also just as confused as us. This leads to a feeling of absurdity because how can both the viewer and the narrator not understand what is going on?

It is only when we meet a very rude man, who is only addressed by the name Marquis almost twenty minutes into the movie, that things start shifting. This individual is one of the most disagreeable characters you will ever meet; he fights with the narrator's friends and shames a young man for not being Christian and yet having an interest in Christian-based art.

He has had it out for Russia since the very beginning, stating that he never learned Russian and that he somehow learned to speak it, as well wandering about to find out what is going on isn’t “amusing”. He also has a strong dislike for Peter the Great and has a begrudging respect for Cathrine the Great as she had a hand in amassing the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg collection. He then declares that Russians are very good at copying and imitations, so there’s that. 

 He plays the part of a ridiculous old man very well; when he gets into places he shouldn’t be, people carefully escort him out. They allow him to look at the fine plates and silverware until it was almost time for the meals to be served. He flirts shamelessly, with two women in a span of less than thirty minutes(when he isn’t being a menace, he is very charming I must admit). He disappears at random, and we find him in the thick of whatever situation is happening in the room we walk into. All in all, a very annoying fellow, and yet we are sad when he declines to see the rest of the, what we will soon find out, ark.

There really isn’t much to say about the narrator, he’s simply a ghost that happens to know some art history, has two friends who wonder where he found such an annoying old man and is Russian. He could have been easily replaced by anything and so long as they had eyes for us to see through and were Russian the movie would have stayed the same (minus the fight with the two friends of the ghosts getting an introduction). 

The movie was sort of confusing to me, I had a general idea of what was going on, a ghost and a dramatic old man taking a tour of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I recognized some art pieces and had a very basic understanding of Russian history. Everything else was up in the air regarding what was being shown in the film. Now that I have more knowledge, I can see why Marques(whose full name is Marquis de Custine, a heavy critic of Nichols the first of Russia’s rule) had a dislike for Russia, as well as his confusion as to what Germany was (Germany became a country in 1871, Marquis had passed away in 1857). 

The cinematography was amazing; this film was shot in one continuous shot, allowing this to truly feel like this was a spontaneous adventure of a ghost and an elderly man. I especially appreciate the fact that by panning in and out fairly regularly, we are able to see the full room from afar, but also individual pieces of artwork, clothing, and set pieces. I am also pleased with the historically accurate clothing(...many set in prior times shows and movies tend to miss the mark) and lighting. It gives a true immersion/glimpse at how this time period operates. 

All in all, I will have to watch this film again, especially once I get a rough understanding of Russian history because my prior viewing feels like I picked up a weirdly shaped rock because it looked interesting, rather than realizing it’s actually a gemstone. 

[fhakizi322]

Assignment #1

For assignment #1, I chose this blog post to be about option #5, “Write an analysis using a theoretical perspective of your choice that examines and deconstructs a military recruiting commercial.”. The specific commercial I am deconstructing is titled “What’s Your Warrior”. “What’s Your Warrior”, is an ad that is 60 seconds, and when I had been bombarded with it a couple of years ago unskippable (my second least favorite ad, only losing to pop-up ones). I think a disclaimer is needed here, as the military is often a point of contention among people in the US. I greatly respect most military personnel and am thankful for their service. That being said, I really hate how often military-based ads are shoved down my throat. I get an email twice a semester from a recruiter for the National Guard of both Maine and New Hampshire. Attempts of marking them as spam has been futile; email-based marketing…both a gift and a nightmare I suppose.

This ad is pretty straightforward and is admittedly one of my favorites when I choose to ignore the fact that being a military personnel is being compared to being a video game character. It starts off with a character selection screen, with 5 different semi-illuminated individuals in a circle looking outwardly. The clearest individual is then fully illuminated, revealing them to be a pilot as their visor goes down to cover their eyes followed by a zoom-in and 2 mini helicopters flying through the visor of the pilot, which leads to a scene change where we follow the helicopters through a mountain-based terrain. There is a small dust storm, which then leads us to another scene change, this time showing the process of cell splitting, and doing a zoom out, reviling the one doing the cell splitting is a black man biochemist. The sandstorm reappears, and we are then shown a sniper on the field.

There is a much wider zoom-out, revealing a white woman (probably, there was some glitching so it was hard to tell). It then zooms into her glitched face, showing two people near a vehicle that has a signal finder dish plate, one male, and one female, and there is a beam of light coming from the signal finder dish plate, which shows us the Earth. We then see a bunch of deployed parachutes after a couple of seconds of the Earth zooming out, and a person watching from the ground. A parachute is being closed and that is used to return us back to the semi-illuminated background we had seen at the very beginning of the ad, and a quick scene of each individual that had been shown in the ad at some point in time, and then them back to the circular position, with more lights being added showing that we had been seeing a portion of a battlefield and a wide zoom out to show many individuals on the ground as well.

All things considered, this was a pretty well-done job by the DDB advertising firm that made this ad. They did so well in fact, “(they)won the Army’s marketing account, a contract worth $4 billion over the next 10 years.” (Tiron, 2019) Additionally, if you were to look at the comment section of the ad, people are praising it, specifically that it is better than the “Emma” advertisement, an ad that was part of a campaign titled “The Calling” which focused on a woman who was raised by her moms. This ad was received very poorly, with 13,952 likes, but 406,268 dislikes… Admittedly, this is one of the examples of when an attempt at “diversity marketing” goes wrong. No one really cared about Emma and her moms, or David who appears to be Hispanic. I had to specifically search “The Calling” in order to find Rickie, Janeen, and Jennifer’s ads because they didn’t have as many views.

“What’s Your Warrior” on the hand wasn’t seen as divisive, “or too woke”. It was simple and showed that there was more than just shooting involved in the military (although the way many have compared it to a Call of Duty or Metal Gear Solid is not lost on me)but there is a multitude of other potential jobs. The people holding those jobs just so happened to have some diversity.

The military has a problem; there aren’t that many of the new adult generation that qualifies to be a part of the army. Sure, if you saw this statistic that is on the Army University Press website, “Post-millennials (also known as Generation Z or Gen Z), born from 1996 to the present, now constitute nearly 90% of the Army’s active duty junior enlisted and nearly 35% of all junior officers (Defense Manpower Data Center, 2018, p. 29.)” you’d think this is a decent number. However, “Among people aged 17 to 24, 70%, or 24 million out of 34 million, are ineligible to join the military, because of obesity, a lack of high school diplomas, or having a criminal record, according to 2017 Pentagon data.”(Tiron, 2019) So they have been forced to resort to this; a video game-esque sequence that I discovered recently actually has 11 different iterations.

They are falling short in terms of recruitment numbers, and have been since 2016, and so in order to reach the 30% of the Gen Z population that actually qualifies, they have to reach out as most of the Gen Z population as possible. “87% of Generation Z…(play)video games on smartphones, gaming consoles, and computers at least weekly if not daily.”(Westcott, Arbanas, 2021) I could have sworn that video games were the reason behind mass shootings according to some people but I guess it brings together most of Gen Z and a decent chunk of Millennials (83%), and Gen X(79%).

Nonetheless, it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth; life isn’t a game, much less the military! This might have reached the eyes of the ones the military targeted, but it raises some ethical concerns. At least the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley is honest about what is at stake, ““When you join the Army, you are not joining the Boy Scouts. You are joining an organization that goes out and engages with the enemies of our country. There are reasons why 70-or-80% of the casualties end up being Army casualties and Army infantry casualties because that’s what we do.”” (Trion, 2019). Nonetheless, this is a wonderful ad, regardless of the moral dilemma it can create.

Works Cited

Hanks, Roland. “What Soldiers Want: The Gen Z Perspective.” Army University Press, 28 Feb. 2022, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2022/February/What-Soldiers-Want/#:~:text=Post%2Dmillennials%20(also%20known%20as,Data%20Center%2C%202018%2C%20p.

Trion, Roxana. “'What's Your Warrior?': Army Looks Past Combat to Sign up Teens.” Bloomberg Government, 4 Nov. 2019, https://about.bgov.com/news/whats-your-warrior-army-looks-past-combat-to-sign-up-teens/.

Westcott, Kevin, and Jana Arbanas. “Commentary: Gen Z Gamers Could Shake up the Media and Entertainment Industries.” Fortune, Fortune, 19 Apr. 2021, https://fortune.com/2021/04/19/gen-z-gamers-video-games-media-entertainment-outlook-changes-future/.

[fhakizi322]

Data Visualization & Storytelling Part_1: How to master data visualization & storytelling?

✍Data visualization/storytelling is one of the most important yet underrated skills in analytics/ data science domain. When it comes to learning data visualizations, often learners focus too much on the tool.

🤦🏻‍♀️And most of the courses out there in the market also focuses on ‘how to create charts using XYZ tool?’ part and maybe ‘designing the chart to make it pretty [😯 beautiful charts are not always useful though!]’ However, I personally believe that while learning/teaching data visualization, one must focus on the following  👇:

👉WHEN to create which chart?

👉HOW to create a particular chart?

👉How to INTERPRET a chart?

👉What are some chart DESIGN PRINCIPLES?

👉How to BEAUTIFY a chart?

👉How to AVOID MISLEADING CHARTS?

👉How to tell a COMPELLING DATA STORY?

In my trainings, I try to give emphasis on these points while keeping in mind the time limit 🕓 to complete the specific TOC.

📜In my upcoming posts, I'll be talking about all these. Stay Tuned

[fhakizi322]

edgargfx, typography, adobe illustrator