The development of digital communication technologies has been changing our notions of texts — how they are composed, who composes them, how they get distributed, what they are composed of — since at least the development of the personal computer in the 1980s and especially since the development of the Internet in the early 1990s.
One aspect of texts that has been receiving considerable attention in Writing Studies for almost 10 years is "multimodality." Academic texts (at least in the humanities) have long been considered serious if they are composed of words alone, with no attention given to the visual aspects of pages; in parallel, the visual aspects of academic pages have been treated as though they add nothing to our understanding of the texts. This division between words and visuals has held in the composition of the academy, with art and design taught in separate departments from writing and taught out of a different disciplinary understanding of what composition is. Given how digital technologies make the production and distribution of multimodal texts much easier than pre-digital technologies, multimodal texts – those that use some combination of alphabetic elements, graphic and representational visual elements, sound, animation, video — can now be composed by anyone (anyone with access to the technology), and there has been some recognition that even the blandest of academic pages is multimodal, a visual composition of alphabetic elements.
We will consider multimodal composing— what it means, why we ought to pay attention to it, how it effects our sense of who we are and what we can do in the world — through readings into how practitioners in writing, painting, design, music, architecture, gaming, or animation purposefully think their ways into composing their texts. We will also compose our own texts in different media. Some of the questions that we will address include:
- Do different media — or combinations of media — require different composing processes if we are to make effective texts in the media? What about when we compose multimodal texts?
- What model of human creativity and making is assumed in various understandings of composing processes?
- How does learning about the composing processes of others help us in our own composing?
- How does learning about composing processes help us help others become more fluent producers of texts?
- How accurately do peopleís descriptions of their composing processes fit the reality of their practice?
- Where does attention to audience enter the composing process? (Does attention to audience enter the process?)
Our readings will bring us to more focused questioning, as will our own multimodal compositions.
In addition to many smaller assignments (both readings and productions) there are two main assignments:
- An interview assignment, in which you will work with a partner to learn about and present on the composing processes of practitioners in a modality of your choosing.
- A research project, presented in multimodal form, focused on an area of your own work that overlaps with the work of class. (This assignment also requires a considerable reflective component.)
I presume no technical knowledge on your part for producing different kinds of print and digital compositions; I ask only that you be willing to explore a range of technologies for production.
television photo by pablogv2004 from morguefile