I decided to research some background as to the development of the gif, focusing more on how it has become popularized as opposed to its origin. I used some more information from Jim Groom’s site, in addition to the references section of the Wikipedia gif article. I learned that gifs had a popular resurgence in 2007 with the creation of Tumblr, and were named Oxford Dictionary’s USA Word of the Year in 2012. In 2015, Facebook became gif-compatible (thus allowing me to share my newly-created gifs). It appeared to me that as gifs became further disseminated within the public culture, it would make sense for their creation to be democratized, through platforms such as giphy.
In addition to gathering this background information, I also focused on polishing my newly developed looping gif creation skills, creating six additional gifs, which can be found at the link below. This brings my gif total to 18.
http://giphy.com/channel/annarinko
