Heather's Reading and Thinking Notes Week 8: 10/14

ENGL665: Teaching Writing with Technology

You appear to be using an older verion of Internet Explorer. For the best experience please upgrade your IE version or switch to a another web browser.

Heather's Reading and Thinking Notes Week 8: 10/14

Ball’s “Designerly ≠ Readerly”

Ball wants "to argue that writing studies needs meaning-making strategies

more readerly than the initial rubrics these scholars have offered" (394) because the rubrics previously set forth are "geared toward understanding designerly processes instead of readerly ones" (394).

Ball argues that previous rubrics still rely on "print" focused media, rather than multimodal designs.

Readers do not necessarily understand (or care) why the designer made certain decisions about the technology. Why did she decide to use flash player? Why did she decide to include hyperlinks? Why did she NOT decide to include hyperlinks? This raises the question as to whether there is any meaning to be gained by understanding these design choices? Does it further contribute to the rhetorical context of the piece?

Ball uses the piece, "While Chopping Red Peppers" as an example.

Examples:

designerly question- Were certain fonts chosen because the publishing software required it? Were certain pictures chosen because they look cool?

readerly question- Is the repetition of certain fonts significant to its meaning? Were certain pictures chosen because they make a certain rhetorical suggestion?

From Ball page 409:

"For instance, the reading that used Kress and van Leeuwen’s four strata showed readers what process a designer might need to go through to compose a multimodal text – that is, that the designers of ‘Red Peppers’ needed to consider:

• (discourse) how to incorporate cultural and social contexts of familial relationships,

cooking, religion, and poetics into the text;

• (design) which semiotic elements to use to represent the above discourses across

multiple modes;

• (production) in which software program to compose the text and, subsequently, how

to use FLASH, specifically, to further the purpose of the discourses and design; and

• (distribution) how to get the text to potential readers (via FLASH PLAYER)..."

"...What readers would walk away with by using Manovich’s units of analysis for a new media text would have them wondering why it matters, for instance, that

• (numerical representation) ‘Red Peppers’ is digital;

• (modularity) its elements can be edited;

• (automation) the tweening process in FLASH is transparent to the designer;

• (variability) the elements can be exported to and used in a different text; and

• (transcoding) the exported file-extension conventions are being followed."

Heather's thoughts: What I took from this article is that there are choices that the composer makes that are practical, choices that are aesthetic, and choices that effect the meaning of the text. It is important to note that multimodal composition choices will fall under these categories and will drive different types of interpretation. It seems to me, like this article suggests that you should analyze multimodal compositions more similarly to how you would analyze art, rather than how you would analyze a print article.

That is to say that this:

is in many ways more like this:

than it is like this:

Join this page's discussion (1 comment)