Home » Posts tagged 'multimodal texts'
Tag Archives: multimodal texts
More Sound Matters
Class Agenda
- Grade updates and Attendance (5 minutes)
- Continuation of our discussion of sound on Tuesday. Please sit with your group from last class session. If you were absent Monday, simply follow along. We will complete our review of McKee’s article using the slideshow and videos we began looking at Monday, and then move on to use her sound categories to analyze other types of media.
Grades and Attendance
At the start of class you received a piece of paper with two numbers on it. The number to the left of your name is your “grade report code number.” Every Friday after class I will post the grade book in theClass Files section of the Writing Studio. Find your number in the first column of the spreadsheet to identify the row that contains your grades.
To the right of your name on the piece of paper you received today is the number of absences you have accumulated. Please make note of it and review the attendance policy, especially if you have more than three absences.
Investigating Heidi McKee’s sound categories
After analyzing McKee’s sound categories using familiar cinematic examples, let’s spend a few minutes with the less familiar new media examples she uses in the article.
vocal delivery (p. 339)
music (p. 343)
sound effects (p. 346)
silence (p. 348)
Radio Lab Homework
Let’s look at how sound constructs meaning in the Radio Lab episode Morality. I will play a clip from the “Chimp Rides and Trolly Cars” segment and make an argument that the heavy layering of voices and sound effects sets us up for the turning point in the argument. At the turning point, the heavy layering ceases and serves as a contrast (remember your CRAP principles!) to the use of silence and singular focus on vocal delivery.
Now let’s listen to the “Crime and Penitence” segment together, note all the categories of sound used and construct an explication that shows how those sound elements create meaning.
For homework, choose one of the following Radio Lab segments and analyze how sound works to construct the narrative and our reactions to that narrative:
- Any one of the three segments from the Colors episode
- The Kiddie Morality segment of the Morality episode
Make sure to discuss all four of McKee’s categories—vocal delivery, music, special effects, and silence—and explain how the work to create CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity). Post your analysis in the Writing Studio dropbox folder titled “sound analysis.” Your analysis should be 500-750 words (about 2-3 double-spaced pages) and is due by the start of class Monday, March 31.
Analyzing New Media
Class Agenda
- Overview of second half of the semester & Sign honor pledge! (10 minutes)
- Discussion of Designerly ≠ Readerly ( 40 minutes)
Designerly v. Readerly Approaches to New Media
Cheryl Ball argues that we need a “readerly” approach to teaching and studying new media that allows us to focus on how and why new media texts make meaning in addition to the “designerly” approaches that allow us to analyze the production process (how these texts are made and why). She critiques two examples of designerly approaches. First, Gunther Kress’s & Theo van Leeuwen’s, which focuses on four strata (p. 395-399):
- discourse
- design
- production
- distribution
Second, Lev Manovich’s, which uses five principles (p. 399-402):
- numerical representation
- modularity
- automation
- variability
- transcoding
Let’s take a look at Ball’s primary example, While Chopping Red Peppers and participate in her readerly response to the poem (p. 402-407). She explains her readerly approach this way:
Without a strategy that helps readers interpret the purpose of a new media text, readers will likely not understand the text in a way useful to writing studies. A reader could use Manovich’s (2001) principles to see if a text qualified as new media, or they could use Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) strata to understand how a designer created a multimodal text. But as my analysis using these rubrics indicated, while they provide a general sense of what the text is and, sometimes, does, they are limited in being able to construct a readerly interpretation. In contrast, below I offer my own interpretation of ‘Red Peppers’ using a generative-analysis model. I draw on interpretive strategies in literary and rhetorical traditions with which I am familiar and apply those strategies to the text. In doing so, my reading provides an interpretation more useful to writing studies than Kress and van Leeuwen’s strata and Manovich’s principles provided, while also showing how technological and designerly issues play a role in a broader analytical approach. (p. 402, my emphasis)
The goal of a readerly approach is to analyze how all of the elements in the text work together to create meaning and to use designerly terms to help with that task, so let’s look back at Ball’s readerly analysis on pages 402-407 and determine how Robin William’s designerly CRAP principles could help Ball isolate elements to analyze as The New London Group’s modes do in the chart on page 408. Apply the principles to the alphabetic, visual, and aural elements.
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Alignment
- Proximity
Next, let’s apply a readerly approach to the Pepsi commercial and its parody, which was the example in DeVoss & Porter’s article on copyright. How does the designer of the parody use/alter the original text to create a new meaning? How does our knowledge of the original commercial, the Napster copyright crisis, and the songs used help us to interpret the parody?
Writing in Online Environments 