Conclusions
Is it possible to design—is it worth pursuing the design of—reflexive interfaces, interfaces that themselves encourage the wider kinds of seeing we have discussed here, interfaces that encourage their audiences to question how the interfaces construct and shape those who engage with them? (Wysocki & Jasken, pg. 46)
More than ten years after Wysocki and Jasken published "What Should be an Unforgettable Face..." in a 2004 issue Computers and Composition, technological developments have both resisted and embraced the concept of reflexive interfaces. Here, we presented a collection of reviews centered on visual rhetoric and multimodality, featuring perspectives from the fields of rhetoric, writing studies, professional and technical communication, and education. The webtext we created, we hope, encourages readers to consider ways of looking instead of merely seeing (see Sturken & Cartwright, 2009, for more on this distinction); the importance of design; attention to choices made in selecting technology; and how invention, revision, and collaboration are central to producing a sustainable collection of multimodal student work.
According to Mary Hocks (2003), “historical studies of writing technologies have demonstrated that all writing is hybrid--it is at once verbal, spatial, and visual” (p. 631). These book reviews, and the website hosting the collection itself, emphasize the rich hybridity of alphabetic text, images, movement, sound, and the way these modes work together to create meaning.
Our reviews were produced and shared across diverse spaces, from living on YouTube to being contributed through the DRC Wiki, and were constructed using a range of tools--from web pages created from scratch using Dreamweaver to videos produced in iMovie. Such diverse production shows some of the possibilities and tools that students can, and often do, utilize today in the composition classroom. Yet just as our collaborative project identifies the potential of a participatory classroom project, it also identifies just one of many possible avenues such a project can take.
As Jason Palmeri (2012) recognizes, there are often utopian visions for multimodality--visions that may never be realized (p. 161). Our project is solely digital, which presents a number of constraints and affordances. While the power of a collective and sustainable digital publishing project is clear, Melinda Turnley (2011), referring to Debray, stresses for non-deterministic approaches to technology as there is a tendency to “decontextualize technologies and present them as either neutral vessels or autonomous forces of social change” (p. 129). When working with digital publishing tools as we have done so here, we do not wish to cultivate this narrative. As teachers and scholars, we must encourage students and ourselves to be critical of the tools themselves, the cultures they include and exclude, and the worlds they create for readers and writers.
Our book review webtext displays the enormous potential of building a digital archive of multimodal student work--an archive available to students, teachers, and professional writers to access, and under some considerations, an archive to contribute to and build (considerations here refer to access to the tools to build, stable Internet access, etc.). The completed project represents many hours of discussion, the reading and drafting of the book reviews, remediating and publishing them digitally, and deliberating over the design of the collection itself.
This webtext project was also a valuable opportunity to explore the process of producing “new media scholarship,” as opposed to merely “scholarship about new media” (Ball, 2004, p. 404). Our project, then, presents one way that a graduate classroom can emphasize invention and revision of multimodal work; a practice and orientation to tools and technologies; and processes of composing with digital media, alphabetic text, and images. Together, we envisioned what Cynthia Selfe refers to as a “small potent gesture”--a single instance where a student project, and, here, in this case, a collaboratively crafted, multivocal webtext, can show the many learning outcomes of collaborative, multimodal work.
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References
Ball, Cheryl. (2004). Show, not tell: The value of new media Scholarship. Computers and Composition, 21, 403–425.
Hocks, Mary. (2003). Understanding visual rhetoric in digital writing environments. College Composition and Communication, 54 (4), 629–656.
Palmeri, Jason. (2012). Remixing composition: A history of multimodal writing pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sturken, Marita, & Cartwright, Lisa. (2009). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Turnley, Melinda. (2011). Towards a mediological method: A Framework for critically engaging dimensions of a medium. Computers and Composition, 28, 126–144.
Wysocki, Anne Frances, & Jasken, Julia I. (2004). What should be an unforgettable face... Computers and Composition, 21, 29–48.