Multimodal Compositions Research Articles

Glenn Gould and the Rhetorics of Sound

Abstract Given the increased attention to working with sound in multimodal and multimedia compositions, this essay summarizes current pedagogical research and scholarly conversations and then argues for more attention to the work of Canadian pianist and recording artist Glenn Gould, who was amongst the foremost artists of his time in critically thinking about and productively expanding the possibilities of sound recording and manipulation. Gould's own voice is a key feature of many of his recordings, and his brilliant radio documentaries serve as challenging models for what contemporary compositionists might do with sound and voice in the teaching of multimodal composing. Indeed, Gould anticipated so much contemporary media production, particularly a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, from which we can still learn. Moreover, as Gould was primarily a musician and sound artist, his insights into and practice with working with sound and voice treat both sound and voice as their own material media; they are not, for Gould, metaphors and stand-ins for textual meaning making and, as such, his work might inform a multimodal compositional pedagogy that takes seriously the particular affordances of sound and voice. Attention to such work might help us consider what can be done with sound and voice in the production of multimedia “texts” where sound and voice act beyond the textual—not just as metaphors for textual meaning making, but as materialities with their own particular rhetorical and affective affordances and dimensions.

Exploring the artwork of young students’ multimodal compositions

The data featured in this article were collected during a classroom-based study with seven- and eight-year-old children in British Columbia, Canada. The multiple purposes of the research included exploring how the development of the students’ understanding of elements of visual art and design would affect their subsequent application of these same elements when creating their own multimodal print texts. Two sources of data were analysed for this article: the artwork in the books written and illustrated by the students, and the transcripts of the students’ individual interviews about how they included the required elements of visual art and design in their artwork. Analysis of the students’ visual text-making revealed how they applied and transformed the concepts under study during the research, and how the students’ sign-making was socially embedded.

The Crystal Ball Project: Predicting the Future of Composition and the Preparation of Composition Teachers

In this article the authors peer into current elementary classrooms and college composition courses in 2020 to envision what K–12 and composition curricula can do now to ensure today's students are prepared for those future composition classes. The authors interviewed veteran (20 or more years) K–6 teachers in a small university town and directors of composition programs. Both interview sets expressed a concern that we are not keeping pace with the changing literacies of our students. The interviews with the K–6 teachers also showed that students bring different literacy skills to elementary school than a generation ago. In addition, the authors conducted a survey across a multicampus research university to ascertain the kinds of compositions instructors assigned and whether multimodal compositions were an option. The survey indicated that change is already occurring at the university level. The authors argue it is imperative that K–16 educators, starting with middle and high school teachers, begin to dialogue about new literacies now or we will not be ready to prepare our students at either the secondary or university levels for 2020 and beyond.

The Weight of Curious Space: Rhetorical Events, Hackerspace, and Emergent Multimodal Assessment

When we invite students to experiment with form, we invite ourselves as instructors to experiment with feedback, criteria, and assessment. We discover the need to own the complexity of multimodal compositions without risking assessment and pedagogical lock-in. Drawing on a conference series design, instructor-student interactions, and sample student work, this article outlines a theory that accounts for the unexpected and promotes rhetorical and emergent assessment in a composition hackerspace. The theory and examples offer writing students and instructors strategies for striking a productive “balance between convention and innovation” (Kuhn, 2008).

The National Writing Project's Multimodal Assessment Project: Development of a framework for thinking about multimodal composing

From 2010-2012, a National Writing Project (NWP)-sponsored committee examined the work of multimodal composing. The group's goal was to create a framework to guide teachers working with students on creating multimodal compositions. Known as the Multimodal Assessment Project (MAP), the committee of 11 researchers and NWP Teacher Consultants used an iterative process to consult relevant literature, review student-composed multimodal compositions, and solicit feedback from other NWP colleagues. The final framework consists of five dimensions the committee found to be critical to multimodal composing: artifact, rhetorical skills, substance, process management and technical skills, and habits of mind. This interview features a discussion with two members of the MAP team, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl and Sandra Murphy, about the work of the committee developing the framework.

More than Just Remixing: Uptake and New Media Composition

This article turns to genre theory's recent explorations of uptake, broadly defined as the ways genres interact, as a resource for sketching a pedagogy of shuttling between genres. Using uptake, I intend to reconceptualize multimodal compositions as a means of participating in rhetorical ecologies that consist of transactions between genres instead of thinking of remixes as an end in themselves. In this article, I first define the concept of uptake in detail and discuss its use in rhetorical genre studies. After further illustrating uptake through an analysis of transactions between YouTube parodies and the 2005 German language film Downfall, I discuss existing scholarship in multimodal composition that draws on genre but not the idea of uptake in order to lay a foundation for a pedagogy that highlights the links, feedbacks, and rules that coordinate genres. My aim in the last section is to sketch possibilities for how teachers and students can deploy the concept of uptake as a rhetorical tool to strengthen their awareness of genre and multimodality. In doing this, I hope to reposition multimodal projects as beginnings or midpoints that lead to students’ emersion into public discourse rather than culminations or end goals in themselves. Integrating studies of uptake into writing curricula in this way will help students to make sophisticated rhetorical decisions in the age of media convergence.

Visualizing the Unseen: Depicting the Abstract in German Media

In my paper, I will combine two methods of media discourse analysis in order to achieve new insights into not only power relations inherent in texts, but also into the manner in which collective memory is constituted. Firstly, I will critically examine the social semiotic method of qualitative multimodal discourse analysis developed by Theo Van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress as a resource for describing how verbal semiotic modes, together with mixed linguistic/nonlinguistic modes, are used to establish and confirm power relations within pluricoded texts. Secondly, I will investigate the practicability of applying the concept of Key Visuals/Key Invisibles, postulated by Peter Ludes and Stefan Kramer, to multimodal compositions in order to gain a sociological and cultural understanding of the means by which certain content becomes part of collective memory and how it is manipulated. In this way, I hope to determine if an operationalization of Key Visual/Key Invisible is possible in order to view its associative potential as a semiotic resource. I will apply this methodological device to video sequences of German news releases reporting on bonus payments to top bank managers during the world economic crisis in 2008. Thereby, I will examine if the discourse generated by these reports is characterized by a highly negative representation of managers: the news releases seem to hold them responsible for the economic crisis instead of investigating its causes. I will analyze which devices are used in the accusation of the managers and will attempt to determine if there are Key Visuals/Key Invisibles used to this end. If this is the case, I will analyze their use within the context of the truth imperative of journalistic reporting. In this section, I will focus on the connection between mediated content and the possibilities of depicting or recording the unseen processes of bonus payment.

Film School for Slideware: Film, Comics, and Slideshows as Sequential Art

► Many uses of slideware applications (like MS PowerPoint) are ineffective. ► Resemblances exist between slideware, film, and comics as sequential visual forms. ► Comics and film theory can inform and improve implementation of slideware. ► Slideware presentations can be improved at the level of the sequence. ► Other multimodal compositions may also benefit from this approach. By studying what comics and film theory suggest about selecting and sequencing images, both regular slideware users and students learning about multimodal communication can find ways to use the software more effectively, creating more productive relationships among their audiences, their slides, and their rhetorical goals. Though some, like designer Edward Tufte, have suggested that programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint are too flawed to be used effectively, it is possible to create rhetorically effective slide presentations that make excellent use of visual design and take audience response into account, a fact reflected in the commentary of professional presenters and designers like Seth Godin, Nancy Duarte, and Garr Reynolds. By joining their advice to the observations of visual communication theorists such as Lev Kuleshov, Roland Barthes, and Scott McCloud, it is possible to improve slideware presentations not only on a slide-by-slide basis but also at the level of the sequence, where multiple slides work together to convey meanings and create significant audience-speaker interactions. To take note of the family resemblances among slideware, film, and comics as sequential visual forms is to begin to unlock the greater potential of slideware applications like Microsoft PowerPoint.

Composing a Public Image Online: Art Museums and Narratives of Architecture in Web Mediation

As museums’ public images become increasingly intertwined with architecture and tourism on a global scale, spectacular museum buildings have come to have a presence both in local, urban landscapes and online. We analyze the website presentations of two new national contemporary art museum buildings, the Tate Modern Museum in London and the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, to explore the ways in which multimodal compositions and architectural narratives are designed to communicate a museum's public image. Applying methods from social semiotics and text analysis, we identify the compositional means by which narrative themes of transformation, social space, and recovered origins become linked with global market forces and destination branding through communication design.

“Who Will Be the Inventors? Why Not Us?” Multimodal Compositions in the Two-Year College Classroom

This essay illustrates why compositionists should conceive of multimodal writing assignments as having wide-ranging and forward-thinking parameters, in order to invite the greatest possible range of student responses; it also suggests the directions we should take when evaluating such work.