While reading this article by Molly Schoen and Sarah Blazer, I found myself getting pretty frustrated. This is because the story about the artist Yellana James. In this short blurb about James, it talks about a line of menswear that uses a unique looking fabric. In the end, we find out that the creator of the menswear collection directly stole his print designs from paintings that the artist Yellana James had created. As an artist myself I found myself becoming pretty flustered. It is one thing to find inspiration within an artist, but it is another to deliberately take from an artist. Ever since we have learned to write research papers we have learned to always cite our sources, “When in doubt, cite it out.” But when we start getting into multimodal sources, citing tends to get overlooked.

Just as attribution and copyright are important when borrowing text, they are also important factors to consider when using images, video, and audio.

Molly Schoen and Sarah Blazer in Multimodal Composing: Strategies for Twenty-First Century Writing Consultations

Growing up I had never really been told to cite my multimodal sources, I had only been taught about the physical and online text sources. It had not been until freshman year in college that I had a teacher tell me to cite where I had gotten my pictures from. “Are you seriously telling me that I have to put a source for all of my pictures in my powerpoint?” I had thought to myself. But then I thought about it for a little bit, “Why wouldn’t I cite those kinds of sources?” I am also a creator, would I really want people to use my work without giving me the credit that I deserve? I realized that I would feel terrible and betrayed if this happened to me. Ever since then, I have tried to make a conscious effort to tell not only myself but other people to cite everything that is used, no matter how small of a deal it may seem.

Reading Schoen and Blazer’s Multimodal Composing really helped me to understand on a deeper level the different ins and outs of copyright. As a digital consultant, I have come across students (and even friends) who will gripe about the amount of work that goes into citing sources. Although at first citing multimedia sources may seem like a big deal, it really is not! On page 197, Schoen and Blazer discussed how due to laws regarding fair-use, it is okay to use people’s intellectual property in personal and academic work as long as proper credit is given to the source/ creator. If students do not know how to cite their sources, it is easy to direct them to websites such as easybib.com and perdueowl.com that will help students to generate citations for their sources. It is also very easy to attribute different multimedia materials within works such as presentations. To attribute you must use things such as captions to tell the viewer who the medium came from as well as where you got it.