What's in a Name?

Contributors and scope

Though I started with the terms "multimedia" and "multimodal" in my 2009 article, I was always interested in expanding my exploration of terms and their definitions to include other terms like "new media" and "digital media" as well. The text you are reading now has allowed me to do that.

The initial idea behind my research in this area was sparked during a presentation by Cheryl Ball at the 2006 Computers and Writing conference. Ball was presenting the results of an NCTE-funded survey of multimodal pedagogies in writing programs (Anderson, Atkins, Ball, Homicz Millar, Selfe, & Selfe, 2006). The survey focused on “multimodal” practices, but asked respondents to describe in their own terms the work that they do. It also used terms other than multimodal (like “new media” and “multimedia”) in its questions, with seemingly no pattern for why one term was used over another or what was meant by each term.

I noticed similarly unaccounted for usage in job ads, articles, conference presentations, course titles, program titles and my own dissertation. And yet, according to Edward Schiappa (2003), the terms we use and how we define those terms is a reflection of our shared knowledge and understanding of the world. Definitions are important because they help us determine our collective interests and values.

This prompted me to ask several questions: Were there collective understandings of these terms? Did there have to be? What terms are being used in what contexts? Are there any discernible patterns to when and where these terms appear? What are people thinking when they use the particular terms that they do? Why do they prefer certain terms over others? How do people justify using terms interchangeably?

It was this last question that I wanted to ask one scholar in particular, Jonathan Alexander, and my desire to interview him gave way to the larger pool of interviews I decided to collect for this text. I sought out Alexander's perspective because of the myriad terms he included in his call for papers for a special issue of Computers and Composition on “Media Convergence.” When I first saw the call show up in my email inbox in late 2006, I was struck by the sheer number and arrangement of terms he used to solicit proposals. I was interested in hearing from him about why he used the terms he had and what he meant by those terms (see "Different definitions" under the "Multiple" category to hear his response).

In addition to Alexander's perspective, I wanted the project to be representative of a variety of viewpoints from people who had published significant works using one or more of the four terms I had decided to focus on, which included new media, multimedia, multimodal, and digital media.

When I thought about the term new media, I immediately thought of Cheryl Ball and Anne Wysocki. Ball wrote a dissertation addressing and analyzing new media compositions. She was also in the process of co-authoring a book (2010 with Jim Kalmbach) titled RAW: Reading and Writing New Media at the time I interviewed her. I thought of Anne Wysocki because I had read her co-authored book (2004 with Selfe, Sirc, and Johnson-Eilola) titled Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition and her other scholarship in which she used the term "new media."

When I thought about the term multimodal, I thought of Cynthia Selfe and Gunther Kress. Kress' New London Group collaboration coined the term and he has since used the term in a number of books, most recently, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication (2009). Selfe and Gail Hawisher have been champions of the term almost since it was first coined. They invited Kress to speak at the Convention on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in San Antonio in 2004, and devoted a special issue of Computers and Composition to “The Influence of Gunther Kress’ Work” the following year. Selfe also edited the collection Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers in 2007, which made the case for integrating multimodal composing in the classroom and helped instructors get started in doing so.

When I thought of the term digital I thought of Scott DeWitt because he was co-directing (with Selfe) the Digital Media and Composition institute and directing the Digital Media project at Ohio State. He would also be able to bring to the table an administrators perspective that I thought would be really interesting.

I sought Jason Palmeri’s perspective because he had just defended his dissertation and provided a young scholar’s perspective, and one that was inclusive of each of the terms I was exploring.

And finally, when I thought of multimedia I thought of…well, no one really came to mind, which showed the extent to which it had fallen from being one of the only terms used in the early nineties to not being used much at all by academics in the late 2000s. And yet, multimedia has such a long history and is still a much-used term in popular culture and industry (Lauer, 2009) that I was able to ask each of the participants about their perspective on it anyway.

I started collecting interviews for this project in May of 2007 at the Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) workshop at Ohio State University. During that workshop I interviewed Jonathan Alexander (of the University of California at Irvine), Cheryl Ball (of Illinois State University), Cynthia Selfe (of Ohio State University), and Scott DeWitt (of Ohio State University). In October of 2008, I interviewed Jason Palmeri (of Miami University of Ohio) at the Watson Conference in Louisville, KY. In January 2010 I interviewed Gunther Kress in his office at the University of London, and in March 2010 I interviewed Anne Wysocki (of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) at the College Composition and Communication Conference in Louisville, KY. While this list of contributors is by no means exhaustive, it is representative of a variety of perspectives, and is intended to establish a starting point for the conversations we might have about terms and their definitions and uses.

Rose metaphor

The name of this webtext is a reference to Juliet's famous question in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet about whether or not it matters what we call something:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Juliet's answer to the question of "What's in a name" is to declare that what we call something does not dictate what that thing actually is. I ask this same question of some recent terms we use in composition studies to describe the new kinds of composing pracitces happening in our research and classrooms. With terms like new media, multimodal, multimedia, and digital media brushing up against each other in our scholarly discourse, my quest to investigate the question of how these terms are named, defined, and differentiated is what ultimately led to my developing this project.

The rose metaphor featured in the design of this text is symbolic because terms, like roses, can be planted by someone or sprout forth on their own, and whatever the origin, their definitions often develop organically like the blooming of a rose. This growth can happen slowly or quickly, it can proceed with very little oversight or manipulation (e.g. as with a term like multimedia), or it can be pruned and shaped by users to better fit their purposes or the purposes of their discourse community (e.g. as with a term like new media). Additionally, seemingly opposite or incompatible traits can apply to the same term (e.g., a term can be both limited and multiple), like sharp thorns and soft roses are part of the same stem. And although the development of definitions can result in beautiful blooms, the path to that development can be thorny and contentious.

A technological journey

While Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet provided the rose metaphor for the larger question posed by this webtext, the actual process of building the text can better be described by Homer’s The Odyssey.

I describe it as such because as motivated as I may have felt to embark on a project like this at the start, composing this text took much longer than expected and was riddled with diversions, challenges, obstacles, and mishaps along the way. Often I felt subject to the whim of the technology gods, and the fate of the project felt somewhat out of my hands as a result of both my own limitations and the limitations of the programs I was using. The project’s fate also relied heavily on the willingness and availability of others, whose technological expertise would help dislodge me from whatever obstacle seemed poised to keep me from finishing my quest.

But before I relate the story of that journey, I would like to make a few points about what I learned throughout the process.

First, composing a webtext takes substantially longer than composing a print text because you must attend to both verbal content as well as the other semiotic modes you are using to communicate meaning throughout the text. In my case, this included still images, layout as well as design considerations, audio segments, and HTML, javascript, and CSS code. Webtexts are able to support multiple layers of meaning communicated through multiple modes. This makes such texts more richly layered than print texts, but as a result, you have to attend to those modes, both individually and as they interact with each other. And rather than just using a pen or word processor to compose these texts, all kinds of other software and hardware technologies are brought into the mix.

Because of the complexity of multimodal texts, it takes a village to compose them, and this fundamentally changes how it feels to be an author. I was responsible for orchestrating and composing the elements you see and read here; however, because I had to attend to so many layers of meaning, I needed to rely on people and already-developed content in ways that I would have never had to were I composing an alphabetic print text. My own self-taught skills with Illustrator and Photoshop were just good enough to know what was possible and that I didn’t always know how to do it. So I needed to find people who could help me with the more technical aspects of the piece, and I needed to rely on Creative Commons’ licensed content that would assist me in designing the piece and finding images to accompany the interview excerpts.

For the first iteration of the interface design, I had the help of a friend who knew Illustrator better than I did, and he was able to help me manipulate the elements and put them together on the screen in a way that worked. But because his role was technical (i.e., he wasn’t invested in the piece creatively or intellectually as I was), the results never felt like any more than rough translations of what I had envisioned. But I had to be satisfied with that because that was the extent of my ability to compose the design and layout portion of the text.

And when I set out to conceptualize the kinds of images that I wanted to accompany the audio excerpts, I again ran into the problem of having to find what I could not myself create. Sometimes this felt limiting, like the potential of this or that part of the project wasn’t being fully realized. However, sometimes this felt exciting, because I would find images that were better than what I had imagined and that, when juxtaposed with the audio segments, engendered what McLuhan would call a "hybrid energy" that would facilitate deeper and more interesting reflection.

This hybrid energy is sparked through the juxtaposition of verbal and “delibrately enigmatic” (Delagrange 2009) visual elements. Delagrange uses this phrase to describe her desire to resist providing an explanation of the visual elements she included in her digital scholarship because preserving the ambiguity of the images enables “the viewer to confront the experience of aporia, of being on the edge of understanding, as well as the Aha! experience of discovery, that ground a heuristic of visual arrangement as invention” (2009). The same excitement I felt at locating or generating an image that interacted with the excerpt in an especially interesting and thought-provoking way would be snatched from the experience of the viewer were I to try to explain it ahead of time. The viewer would be more likely to adopt my explanation as her own without actually experiencing it herself. As Delagrange reflects “By explaining, I undercut my argument that visual arrangement, juxtaposition, classification, and even serendipity are in themselves generative, epistemologically rich and powerful. And by explaining, I also inhibit the opportunity for new, different, and equally productive interpretations of the images to emerge” (2009). Ideally, each excerpt of sound and image would be connected to a mini-wiki of sorts, in which users could provide their own explanations of the juxtaposition, or ideas for what other images they would imagine including to accompany each sound file. Although not possible to link from each excerpt, I have developed a space on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Blog Carnival where users can post their own reflections of particular excerpts and image pairings, or of their ideas about the larger questions of term use, definitions, and the nature of defining in general.

For those graphical elements I did compose from scratch, tinkering with graphics programs like Illustrator and Photoshop can be hypnotic (like the song of the Sirens) and thus an enormous time sink. For instance, it was not uncommon for me to spend an entire day designing a navigation system that I later had to scrap because when I finally coded it into HTML, the links lined up differently in each browser, which spoiled the whole effort. But all of these experiences were so different (and disorienting, frustrating, exciting) from my usual course of action as author, that any assumptions I had developed about what it meant to be an author were fundamentally challenged.

When I am composing in alphabetic text for print delivery, I regularly engage in a process that includes writing, rewriting, and scrapping parts of what I’ve written in favor of other parts. However, what was different about authoring a multimodal webtext is that the number of semiotic elements to tinker with, not to mention the act of bringing all those elements together to be effectively displayed on a computer screen, far exceeds the number of elements I would have to work with at a sentence or paragraph level in alphabetic text. As author I still had to do all of the verbal wrangling that I would do for a print text, but add to that all the visual and code wrangling as well and I had a barrage of elements to attend to. Having said that, despite all of my trials through this process, I am interested in composing multimodal texts because the results are usually more beautiful and complex than what I would be able to communicate through a single mode.

But the process to get that product realized is nothing short of an epic journey:

I started the journey of composing the text with a pretty clear direction in mind and (what I assumed was) a simple yet dynamic platform on which to travel. Prezi was the program I chose to complete the project, and I was able to envision a detailed picture of how it would be structured. The most compelling aspect about Prezi was its ability to support the entire webtext on a single page, which users would be able to view all at once on a macro scale (e.g. as a rosebush in a landscape), or zoom in on a micro scale to view the details that comprise the larger picture (petals on each individual rose).

Because the text could be viewed both all at once and in detail, Prezi would allow me to capture what I was arguing was the organic, interconnected, and nuanced nature of the way we use and define terms. Using Prezi felt fundamental to being able to show that terms and their definitions are fluid, interconnected, and dynamic. It would "show not tell" as Cheryl Ball has discussed (2004), in a way that new media texts are so good at doing. It would help me avoid having to order the content in a linear or hierarchical fashion, which would have directly contradicted those ideas. It felt beautifully appealing to have the opportunity to capture my argument through the actual structure of the text in this way.

With this structure in mind, the image elements I developed were specifically suited toward supporting both a macro picture and micro elements. I used vector graphics of roses and branches that had clean, simple lines so that they could be used both as part of a larger rosebush, and as part of a singe rose with petals that were clear enough to provide background to a sound file and transcript.

But as you may have noticed, the webtext with which you are currently interacting was not built in Prezi. The reason for this is simple. It never occurred to me that, as dynamic as Prezi is, it is completely unable to support more than a single audio file. This project contains 51 audio files.

The sails of my best intentions were in tatters, but aside from transforming the audio files into movies, which I feared would make the text too cumbersome, I was forced to pack up my vector graphics and abandon my lightweight Prezi sailboat for the luxury promises of a Flash cruise liner.

With help from Madeleine Sorapure, Inventio editor at Kairos, I boarded Flash and began anew. I knew Flash could support animated graphics and I was imagining all kinds of possibilities that might beautifully capture a complex interaction between audio, text, and image. The mistake I made almost from the beginning, however, was that I had become so attached to the basic design I had developed for Prezi, that I tried to replicate as much of that design as possible in Flash rather than completely re-envision the piece within the parameters of the new program I was using.

Because the project originated in sound, in a non-print mode, I largely avoided being trapped by structures of print that are sometimes difficult to avoid when composing multimodal texts (Selfe, 1999, as cited in Kimme Hea and Turnley, 2010). If I had been moving from print text to webtext, I would have been cognizant of this trap and worked hard to re-envision the piece in an effort to attend to the different affordances of print technologies and web technologies. But because I was moving from one software technology to another, I fell into a different trap of assuming that I would be able to accommodate the same goals in each, albeit a little differently. But moving from the limitless page of Prezi to the very limited window in which to run a Flash movie was a substantial difference that I nonetheless tried to ignore so I wouldn’t have to lose all that I had invested in the piece already.

Holding onto my original design and vision left me unable to effectively accommodate the myriad links and segments that I would need to develop for a user to navigate the piece in a smaller space. With the help of a scrolling text feature, I tried to shoehorn all the textual content and all the category links onto a single main page. Needless to say, the design was not as user-friendly as it needed to be. Also, because the graphics would no longer need to be so scalable, the minimalist style of the roses and branches appeared sparse and not as readily identifiable as roses as they could have been.

Finally, because I needed to make it so that the audio, image, and textual elements of the interior excerpt pages could display concurrently and interact effectively, the coding of the piece in Flash started at vexing and ended at bloated. Ultimately, the files were dynamic, but also cumbersome and slow. In fact, when a user would click on a link to hear an audio clip, there occurred such a lag before the audio clip would play that it threatened to sabotage the effectiveness of the text completely.

Serendipitously, around the time that this latest obstacle was emerging, I was working in my role as design faculty advisor to an online literary journal run out of our campus. The student who was in charge of the web delivery of the journal had just finished overhauling the code to make it easier for the other student editors to update and load content. I was meeting with him about some revisions to the design that we wanted to do and I started talking to him about this piece. He suggested I abandon my overweighted Flash cruiseliner and jump aboard the nimble, sleek, and agile HTML5 speedboat, fueled by CSS and javascript.

The student set up the initial structure and I built the pages using that structure, consulting him for technical expertise along the way. Years earlier I had earned my certification as a webmaster, which provided me the basic language to understand what was happening in the code of each page and to better navigate and direct it. However, it was striking (and somewhat sad) to realize just how rusty my HTML and CSS skills had become after not having had to apply them to a major project in so long.

So I appeared to finally arrive at the end of my journey, but I was still holding on to the shoehorned navigation and structure, as well as the original aesthetics, which desperately needed to be reconceived. I had held on to these componants because it would have simply taken me too long to redo them (I wanted to get off these boats already!). But with the HTML5 providing such a clean and beautiful structure on the back end, I felt reenergized to redesign the entire site so that I could provide a better visualization of the rose metaphor and better facilitate the organization of the site and a user’s progression through it.

That is what you see now. And this is where I've decided to dock and leave you to enjoy your own journey through the text.

Aurality and the art of conversation

The contributions to this piece were collected through audio interviews with a variety of scholars in computers and composition (or related) fields who use terms like digital media, multimedia, new media, and multimodal extensively in their scholarship. What I appreciate most as an interviewer is the way in which information and perspective often evolve organically throughout a conversation. A conversation provides a place for people to explore ideas and try out various perspectives or approaches to problem solving. As an interviewer I sought to create an environment for my contributors in which there was no pressure for them to get their responses "right" the first time (though they were remarkably articulate even so). I sought to set up the conversation more like a brainstorming session rather than a final exam. Respondents had room to explore their thoughts and maneuver in and out of ideas and contexts.

I appreciate the interview medium because oral conversation feels more intimate, as though one is simultaneously privy to both product and process. The listener is compelled to proceed at the pace the speaker chooses. They follow the speaker’s thinking and reflecting process, and experience knowledge as a happening.

Unlike much of our published scholarship, which relies heavily on static, written language, our voices rely on spoken language, which provide additional layers of information through the cadence and tone and tenor that we accompany our words with. Cynthia Selfe (2009) showed through the examples in her College Composition and Communication article on the importance of valuing aurality in composition how “speech conveys a great deal of meaning through pace, volume, rhythm, emphasis, and tone of voice as well as through words themselves” (p. 25). As the viewer, you can test out the importance of these aural elements by simply as pausing the audio recording of each segment to read the provided transcript and observe what feels missing.

In this piece, meaning is conveyed through the words and voices of the participating scholars, but also by the ways in which I was able clip, juxtapose, organize and contextualize their recorded contributions. Kimme Hea and Turnley (2010) have discussed how exciting new media compositions can be to compose because they afford us the ability to juxtapose elements in ways that challenge our assumptions about technology and composing. The relationships between elements are made more delibrate in the structure and organization of the text.

The organization of this text emerged from patterns that I noticed in the interviews that suggested specific qualities that could be used to map the anatomy of a definition. I organized the webtext around those qualities and I chose interview segments that illustrated the qualities more explicitly. Throughout this web text I provide an overview of each quality and contextualize each clip through introductory statements. But the way the user choses to interact with the audio segments is up to them. At times a user will encounter a number of clips from a single scholar that illustrate a quality more deeply and other times a user will encounter a variety of clips from several scholars that show a variety of ways that a certain quality can be discussed or realized. The juxtaposing of these is often as important as the inclusion of the clips themselves and meaning can be acquired on a number of levels depending on the order that a user choses to listen to the clips. The ability to play, pause, and rewind each clip can assist a user in their listening experience so that they can reflect on and absorb the words being spoken at whatever pace they prefer.

Developing definitions

When I began this research I sought to inform our field about the terms we use to describe new composing practices and how we define those terms.

When I conducted the first interviews in 2007, term use largely seemed a matter of personal preference, with valid claims about preference for particular terms being made from every angle. By 2010 there did appear to be some shifts in use, especially with regard to the relationship between new media and multimodal, as I discuss in the “Limited” category section of Part II of this text. And while the claim that I made in my 2009 article remains true--that the way we define terms largely depends upon the values and experiences of the audience to whom we are engaging—-the interviews I conducted suggested an even more expanded web of characteristics that comprise our definitions of terms. The broad sampling of perspectives provided in the interviews suggests that definitions are more than just audience-oriented, but are by their very nature multiple, contextual, relative, precise, limited, and historically situated as well.

Defining the terms we use can seem like a relatively routine process because as academics we are all called upon to do so through our scholarly writing, graduate exams, teaching, and other work. But although developing a definition is important, it can feel like a burdensome task because of the time and mental energy we must invest to craft complex meaning into a few short words or sentences.

Yet the effort is imperative because defining terms helps us figure out what we think, not just find the right words for what we already know. It helps us discover what we value and where we stand in relation to what has been said and done before. It positions us in the conversation, exposes our assumptions, announces our intentions, and helps us explain to ourselves and others who we are and what we believe.

The end result of the process of defining is usually a dozen or so words, possibly a few sentences or a paragraph, sequenced carefully, whose every word is loaded with meaning. The concise nature of a definition, however, mistakenly suggests a simplicity and ease of thought. Rather, definitions should be understood as complex and multifaceted organisms that can evolve over time and carry with them whole histories of meaning and interpretation. By analyzing the ways in which scholars talk about their definitions and the process by which they develop those definitions, we can observe this inherent complexity more closely.

I have identified seven qualities that I propose may help us better understand definitions and their development. These qualities help comprise the anatomy of a definition. By recognizing how definitions exhibit these qualities we can better understand what makes defining terms so challenging and so important.

The qualities are (in alphabetical order):

Audience-Oriented: Definitions are neither static nor consistent, but can change depending on the audience to whom a term is being directed.

Contextual: A term's definition originates from and cannot exist outside of the social, historical, political, and technological context in which it is developed.

Historically Situated: Terms do not exist in a vacuum but carry with them the multitude of past understandings, practices, and uses. Terms can, in their very names, call attention to or move away from their histories.

Limited: Terms are necessarily limited in scope and what they can represent.

Multiple: Terms can be appropriated and defined differently to suit the purposes of members of different discourse communities.

Precise: Terms are often defined using precise language.

Relative: Terms are often defined in relation to other terms and what is similar or different about each.

These qualities are fundamental to the terms that I discuss and to definitions in general. They provide the framework for how Part II of this text is organized and presented.