Visual Rhetoric

Here's an interesting photo essay by David J. Staley. It appears from a recent issue of Kairos (14.2).

Try to follow the directions Staley gives you: watch the images over the span of several minutes. Try to read the images individually, collectively, and juxtaposed.

You may also be interested in Staley's discussion of this webtext.

This image is taken from Susan H. Delagrange's recent Kairos article When Revision Is Redesign: Key Questions for Digital Scholarship.

Notice how the author sketches out a strategy on paper and then translates the blueprint into a web-based environment.

Let's take a moment sketch out a few critical nodes for your project and figure out the relationships among them.

Constructing Web Texts

Here's a link to a page that offers some guidelines for accessing scholarly webtexts. All of these ideas do not apply to us, but they may serve as an interesting model for you. You might pay particular attention to developing a link strategy and/or a node strategy. You might also think about the relationship between the design of your page and the information on your page:

Assessing Scholarly Texts
by Allison Warner


This article is a substantial one, so I've included a few key quotations below. Do these assessment criteria help you to imagine your web-text more clearly?

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation







Structural Design

Multilinearity is one of the defining characteristics that distinguish a print-based text from a web-based text. An online text that incorporates a multi-linear structure—a structure comprised of multiple nodes with multiple pathways of access to those nodes—allows readers to choose their own paths through the text.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation

Form/Content Relationship:

In a web-based text, by virtue of active participation in selecting links, readers are forced to look at the structure or form of the text rather than through it and to consider how the form is part of the message. According to Bolter (1991), if the form does not contribute to or enhance the message, but merely presents the content in a generic way, then the formal design is a waste of the new writing space afforded by the medium. A formal or form-based enactment of the content occurs when the organizational structure of the web-based text demonstrates and/or reinforces the content of the text.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation


Navigation design

Authors of hypertextual pieces, such as webtexts, are challenged to find ways to orient readers in order to help them read efficiently and find their way around the text (Landow, 1989). Readers can become “lost in hyperspace”—a disorienting experience in which readers cannot determine where they are in relation to the information contained in the text, or how to return to a previously viewed node or find a node they think exists (Conklin, 1987). A significant method for enhancing reader orientation includes the incorporation of an overview or introductory node, textual or graphical webviews, and explicit navigation directions—instructions for moving through the text.

Link Strategy


Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation

Links make possible the unique contextualization afforded by the online medium. Linking to external primary source material on the Web as well as internal contextualizing nodes can potentially enrich a reading of a text by offering additional layers of information for readers at varying levels of knowledge and interest in the subject. Regardless of where the links lead, readers are much more likely to view contextualizing material when it is easily and readily accessible by simply activating a link (Landow, 1989). The link is the main vehicle for movement within a web-based text. Clear navigation design is dependent upon the construction of an effective link strategy so that readers have informed options for moving through the text.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation

Node strategy

From several web usability studies conducted in the late 90s, Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes (1998) concluded that substantial differences exist between reading from the screen and reading print from a page; hypertext authors attuned to these differences can take steps to enhance the reading experience. For example, Nielson and Morkes found that screen reading is slower than page reading; readers prefer to scan rather than read word for word from the screen; and readers prefer viewing short segments of text rather than scrolling through pages of text. A web-writing convention that has emerged from these reading analyses involves the process of “chunking” or separating content into small sections or nodes, which according to Nielsen, Morkes and others, provides a more reader-friendly experience within this medium.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation


Visual design

As with navigation design, decisions regarding the visual design of a web-based text—including the manipulation of elements such as typography and color—depend on the goals of the text and the perceived needs of the reader. In other words, an effective visual design can support and enhance the meaning of the text; visual elements can be used rhetorically to gain the adherence of readers. Karen Chauss argued in “Reader as User: Applying Interface Design Techniques to the Web,” (incidentally, Kairos’s first Best Webtext award recipient), that the unique interface abilities afforded by the online medium require responsible use: “When writing for electronic media, writers can incorporate an array of graphic elements with greater ease than for print media. Lack of experience, coupled with ease of inclusion, can make for some wildly designed sites which distract rather than support the user.” Furthermore, as Pullman (2006) acknowledged, the new responsibilities for web authors necessitate judgment that may not be adequately cultivated: “Twenty years ago page layout and text design were the purview of graphic artists and printers; specialists with specialized knowledge.” Visual design, or “visual rhetoric” as it is referred to within the relevant literature, offers a broad range of information regarding the effective manipulation of typography, color, and layout.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation


Multimedia incorporation

The ability to incorporate multiple media within a text is, without question, the most significant allowance of the online medium that cannot be replicated in print. The inclusion of audio streams, for example, either in presenting content or providing background sound can arguably add dimension to an otherwise single-sensory text. Similarly, the incorporation of animation, advanced graphics, or video streams can affect the reception of an argument based on a potentially charged pathetic appeal.

Hypertext critics commonly acknowledge that, because of the use of the hypertextual and/or hypermedia allowances of the medium, web-based texts demand new writing and reading strategies (Bolter, 1991; Lanham, 1993; Carter, 1997; Landow, 1997; Walker, 2006). These new strategies point toward non-textual ways of making meaning. For example, the ability for form to enact content within a web-based text suggests that formal design shares a semiotic role. Additionally, the advent of new media texts—online texts in which the written word is not the “primary rhetorical means”—changes the ways in which readers and writers understand and construct these texts (Ball, 2004). These new forms require readers to understand how non-textual elements combine with text to make meaning. The primary meaning-making methods in web-based texts fall into four categories: (1) purely textual, in which the meaning is derived solely from the text; (2) textual supplemented with visual elements that may enhance the meaning of the text; (3) textual combined with visual and other non-textual elements—video, audio, animation—that enhance the meaning of the webtext; and (4) textual combined with non-textual elements that comprise, or present, the meaning of the webtext.

Structural Design
Content Relationship
Navigational Design
Link Strategy
Node Strategy
Visual Design
Mutlimedia Incorporation

Rhetoric of Cool: Ch 2-5

Quotations and examples regarding chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 from Rice's Rhetoric of Cool:

Chora
Appropriation
Juxtaposition
Commutation

Chora

“In digital culture, Ulmer writes, the topoi are replaced with Plato’s forgotten concept of chora, the open receptacle of meaning.” Chora, when updated for digital cutlrue, functions as an argumentative/narrative strategy b means of pattern making, pattern recognition, pattern generation” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 34).

In other words, think of chora as as a place (e.g. , your wiki) in which a particular “argumentative/narrative strategy” plays itself out via methods of appropriation and juxtaposition.

From Ch. 2 Chora:

While all reading and writing practices demand partiipation to some extent, writing multiple meanings simultaneously generates a method more conducive to digital culture, which itself (through Web, film, video, and other media) is constructured out of multiple texts and meanings that often overlap and interlink. “The past mechanical times was hot, and we of the TV age are cool” (Understanding Media 40). As McCluhan writes, the task is to transfer choral practices into pedagogy so that we not only understand what a cool medium is but that we write cool as well. “Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other (McLuhan Understanding Media 47 qtd. in Rice 35).

The best demonstration of choral moves on the Web can be seen (but not only found) in the hypertextual link that allows writers the capability of developing threads around single words or ideas, and that reuires readers to naviage these threads in various ways. The link is indicative of a new media push to reoganize space in terms of meaning contruction. (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 35)

Note: For more information on the "interrelation of knowledge" see previous posts in "intertextuality."

Chora
Appropriation
Juxtaposition
Commutation

Appropriation

Appropriate:

Dictionary.com:
–adjective
1.
suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, person, occasion, etc.: an appropriate example; an appropriate dress.
2.
belonging to or peculiar to a person; proper: Each played his appropriate part.
–verb (used with object)
3.
to set apart, authorize, or legislate for some specific purpose or use: The legislature appropriated funds for the university.
4.
to take to or for oneself; take possession of.
5.
to take without permission or consent; seize; expropriate: He appropriated the trust funds for himself.
6.

to steal, esp. to commit petty theft.

Examples of Appropriation in Action:


1. . Examples from Music:




If you like music, here’s a good link regarding music sampling, which is an appropriative process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)




Also, if you like Public Enemy, see Rice’s discussion of the rap “Caught, Can We Get A Witness” (68-9).


2. Satire:

Here is a Colbert Report satire from 5 March 2010:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/colbert-treats-hannity-li_n_487078.html

Here is a Fox News report from 27 Sept. 2010:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfy_i9SZomE&feature=related
So what do I do with appropriation?

3. The Mash Up:

If you look up “mash up” on youtube, you’ll find thousands of examples. Here is one involving the Wonderwoman, Superman and Company and the television show Friends.




So how do I use appropriation?

Mix it up. Find images from popular culture and or your own life. Look for patterns or interesting combinations:

“In order to apply this cool method of writing, students are asked to identify specific cultural influences from their own lives. These influences may come from background, school, history, politics, music, objectives they’ve owned, anecdotes, and a variety of other sources….[S]tudents appropriate these influences from their original contexts…. Students then present and juxtapose these influences in order to find a pattern” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 71).

Chora
Appropriation
Juxtaposition
Commutation

Juxtaposition

From dictionary.com:

–noun
1.
an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast.
2.
the state of being close together or side by side.

Juxtaposition and Appropriation are related issues, which is why they appear in sequential chapters. For example, images that are appropriated are often juxtaposed. But sometimes, as the image above indicates, juxtaposition is just part of life.

“The challenge for composition studies is to translate the theoretical principles of juxtaposition to a pedagogy appropriate for digital writing. This kind of writing would ot analyze juxtapositions found in either popular media or professional discourse and report on their rhetorical effectiveness but would produce a writing comprised of juxtapositions. It would be, therefore, performative….[P]atterns motive readers and writersto find unrealized connections among disparate events and material things. [Composing by juxtaposition] favors discovery over the restricted topic sentence since writers composing with juxtapositions do not begin with an understanding of what they will write about. Nor do writers concern themselves with mastery of a given category (science), subject matter (film), or already establishe d belief (topos) Instead, writers writers look for ways to juxtapose from a variety of categories and subjects…in order to invent” (Rice, Rhetoric of Cool 91).

Chora
Appropriation
Juxtaposition
Commutation

Commutation

"Commutation is the exchange of signifiers without concern for referentiality" (93).





As an example of commutation, Rice disucsses images from Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol.

To a certain degree, either image could be used or discussed in commutational terms. As Rice's examples show on page 108, the questions concerning a famous Rockwell painting (Triple Self Portrait) tend to prompt thesis-driven writing. Rice's implied claim, via the famous Monroe images, is that Warhol prompts viewers to understand a subject from multiple angles and with multiple interpretations.


Here's another famous Warhol, Double Elvis





Rice writes, "No better figure could be used for commutation than Elvis, whose image is easily commutated from film to film (Elvis as scuba diver/Elvis as car driver)....Warhol's writing with Elvis in 1963 is an important moment in the rhetoric of cool because this writing situates this supposed cool figure (Elvis Presley) as a cool form of writing (commutation) (108).

Chora
Appropriation
Juxtaposition
Commutation

McCluhan Understanding Meida

This is a class project on McCluhan's Understanding Media.

It's a bit on the long side, but at 3:00, you'll see a clear distinction between hot and cold media:

Digital Essay Example

This is a digital/video essay on the rhetorical nature of signs that advertise "authentic" food choices (e.g., "Authentic Mexican Food"

http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.1/disputatio/walls/index.htm

Large Blocks of Text

Interesting Onion article. Does this piece suggest some limits to the digital essay?

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nation_shudders_at_large_block_of

Juxtaposition

Here is a Colbert Report satire from 5 March 2010:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/05/colbert-treats-hannity-li_n_487078.html


Here is a Fox News report from 27 Sept. 2010:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfy_i9SZomE&feature=related

The Medium is the Message

Here's an interesting project by a college class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLRd99jKKzo&feature=related

Cut Up Method

Here's a neat web-based program that does the cut up method for you. Not quite as cool as scissors, I suppose, but still fun:

http://www.bluestwave.com/toolbox_cutup.php

Photo Essays

For those of you interested in image-based writing/composition, here is a link to Time Magazine's photo essays:


http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1933377_1975848_last,00.html