ENGL706 - Belated Tidings of Annotation

I'm so sorry- forgive me Oprah, Jesus, and also Tom Cruise

George, D. (2002). Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 4(1), 11-39. Retrieved from JSTOR.

In this piece, George refers to the current culture as “aggressively visual” which is a term I adore. I want to use this as part of my basis when asserting that syllabi should have a visual design steeped in good rhetoric. Students may not be able to access the document in the multi-faceted layers that a practiced rhetorician can, but having been raised on images, they will come “pre-programmed” with the cultural brainwashing of good and bad visual design. The things that are well designed stuck, and so a good syllabus should join those ranks no matter its purpose or country of origin.

This idea of visual rhetoric being prevalent in culture also applies to online syllabi and calendars, which I would like to analyze on the ODU end of my project. Without the necessary visual literacy, how is a student to know a hyperlink on sight, or what the difference is between a menu bar and a context menu? This will be document specific, but those “moving parts” in e-syllabi are part of the visual culture that upcoming students are raised in.

On page 26, she makes the argument that web pages must be “navigable” and that this ties into graphic design heavily. Although an online syllabus need not necessarily be a web page, I would argue that it, too, must be navigable. Syllabi usually have several pages, and a student who struggles to find information in an ill-formatted document sans bolding, highlighting, or proper paragraphs and spacing, will not use the document for its intended purpose. While a little different than a web page’s navigation bar, I think the coherent thread of thought for “getting around” on them is similar.

Likewise, George’s ideas about what does and does not constitute a visual argument are lax without being nonspefic. She says “All sorts of visuals make assertions and develop those assertions with visual information” which is absolutely true of syllabi. Even in the JP syllabus, there is a visual argument made by the table the information is presented in (albeit a less hearty argument than some of the ODU syllabi I have):

The Japanese syllabus mostly replies on color usage and layout- two tools out of a full box to choose from. I look forward to seeing if the use of less stylizing comes with shifts in purpose, or if this is a cultural difference (since Japan has ways of emphasizing characters that the US does not). This in itself is a visual argument that only highlights the section headers. Down below this screen grab is a numbered list of sections that will be covered, which is also a part of the visual argument. Even then, since the list is not indenter, nor any part of it set apart from the others, it reads as a block of undistinguished text and implies no one section is any more important than the others.

All in all, although this text focuses on the composition classroom, and the history of visual argument’s growing importance in teaching, there are small pearls of wisdom RE: the importance of the visual argument, and of coherency that are extremely important.

ENGL706 - Connect ALL The Things!

So Kress talks about different genres in the same "text" that take on different shares of the communicative burden, which is actually an interesting concept. I'd say any student who has ever written anything remotely hypertextual, or who has included an infographic/chart to represent something they've written about has experienced the singular pleasure of necessary appendixes. These vial elements often help make a point simply by existing as factual proof to support an argument that at least, in part, is visual. Kostelnick talks about Tufte's beliefs in his "The Visual Rhetoric of Data Displays: The Conundrum of Clarity" especially the "lie factor". This reminded me of the students, and how each of them diagrammed the onion slide in their lab reports in Kress' readings. After all, neither of the students aimed to be misleading in what they drew. Rather, one gave a more literal interpretation (still informed by the teacher's verbal instruction) and the other interpreted what she saw into a larger diagram that implied representation by being incomplete at the edges. If neither is intended to mislead (and most likely, objectively speaking, neither is fully "incorrect") then how can they be classified? Which is "more" or "less" clear?

Thinking more about these diagrams,  Welling's work on"Ecoporn"also comes to mind. Could the consumer produced diagram of the human eye count as a subgenre of Ecoporn? It provides its own brand of fantasy about the human body. The colors are saturated higher, the lines and layouts cleaner than a human body- often, when dissecting, what a chart looks like and what you find inside a once-living creature seem like apples and oranges. In this way, it is designed for the same kind of "quick, easy visual consumption" as pictures of sunsets and rainforests that casually leave the truth of the place out of frame are. Even if ecoporn isn't the correct term (although I feel like an argument can be made for human bodies and organisms to be self-contained ecosystems on a microscopic level) then I do believe that both of these concepts have similar themes when it comes to what can make them and their design problematic.

Ideas (in the form of questions)

1. Can commercially marketed scientific diagrams be considered as a type of ecoporn, given that they are both constructed for the same type of consumption? I think this is a fascinating idea, since it contains the argument that purpose = grounds for classification. This might all come down to semantics in the end.
2. Is there a way to negate textual power entirely and still have a functional document? Textual hierarchy dictates what is more and less important (like numbered lists, bullets, bolding, etc.) but is there a way to avoid this prioritizing of somethings over others without sacrificing clarity? (yo creo que no- I think in lists and outlines and see a world without them as anarchy. It'll be interesting to see what the classmates think).
3. Has the advent of digital media brought on a new wave of text/image meaning sharing? Is it more pervasive now than it was 10 years ago? 20 years ago? (that's only the 1990s *shudder*). Images can now be created and shared much more quickly than before, so does something like a meme fall under this same umbrella of multimodal thinking? (MEME STUDIES. Bring it on.)

Questions (also in the form of questions)

• Does delegating that all things have multiple layers of analysis in an effort to diminish the need to label mixed genre pieces make accessing multimodal messages more difficult for visual rhetoric scholars? A lot of VR is based on contextual and cultural understanding, so adding a two-tier layer system seems to add a lot of extra work into the equation.
• When trying to get across a complicated message or concept, does splitting the meaning between a strictly visual and strictly textual delivery method make for good VR? That is to ask, does it usually get the point across better than strictly one method or the other? This may be a type of study that has been measure in a scientific way, but I'd even be interested in opinions here. Does the visual/textual aid combo help you, personally?
• If the type of information is the same, but the delivery method is different (process list versus narrative account), is either one more or less accurate? I guess this depends on the instructions given, and the purpose. Is it also contextual? Like whether it's on a lab report or if you're explaining a lab experiment to a friend so they can do it at home later?