"One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book's reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress." (Institute for the Future of the Book)
I love this idea of writing that is unfinished - like what Burn and Parker (2001) describe as "digital inscription... a kind of text-making that is highly plastic, fluid and reversible" (177). This new world of composition opportunities puts an interesting spin on my thinking over the semester about author-audience relationships. As these authors suggest, the 'interactive' nature of digital text makes any viewer a "potential remaker" and might shift the balance of power of between author, text, and audience in intersting ways (neat place to do more research...). I'm enjoying this sort of postmodern thinking about what a book is - moving from the individual to the collaborative, from the static to the constantly shifting, from one author to many.Our readings on multimodal composition this week also invited me to question my own privileging of the traditional printed word. I might have realized sooner my own bias toward written pen and paper kinds of 'composition,' but never so much as I do as of late. It feels awkward in some ways to imagine that the kind of 'composition' I've spent my lifetime exploring is giving way to new modes with tremendous speed as digital technologies evolve. It is a new journey for me as a reader, writer, scholar to embrace the variety of semiotic sign systems we might use to represent ourselves (thanks, ELA friends, for the links to examples of Shipka's activity-based multimodal theory this week).
I notice that we seem to have gotten more comfortable and intricate in our digital compositions on our blogs over past two semesters. What's next? Digital dissertation?! Check out this article about Virginia Kuhn's multimodal dissertation, "Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age." Apparently it made waves back in 2006 because it couldn't be printed in hard copy for inclusion on ProQuest.
Before you go, check out this online research presentation of some of Shipka's other research findings - a way to present academic content that respects the visual elements of her research AND makes it readily available (and easy to read quickly online). Smart!
3 comments:
The additional sites/images included in the blogs this week have been interesting. Thank you for sharing Shipka's on-line research. In the conclusion, she refers to students as:
“sensitive decision-makers,” people who are able to “size up a writing situation and adapt their goals and approaches to meet the demands of different classroom contexts”
I love this! Sometimes, we, as educators, hold our students back by creating strict guidelines. It is exciting to see what students can and will do if given the freedom to explore and take ownership.
I too have noticed that our blogs are showing us a bit more comfortable in the digital environs. The idea of the what-is-a-text idea changing from closed, finished, & authoritative to open-ended, collaborative, never-finished, and making meaning as we go along is a line of thinking that if you'd told me a couple of years ago that I'd think this was cool, interesting and worthy of deep consideration, I'd have looked behind me to see who you were talking to.
I also love this idea of composing as unfinished and fluid. I found myself wondering how different those digital images ("stamps") really were from saved versions of written text that we can go back and change so easily on our computers. It also made me think about Bakhtin's idea that languages exists in a chain of utterances, always in response to what came before and always anticipating a response in the future - never "finished".
Post a Comment