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An Interview with Kathleen Blake Yancey

by D. Alexis Hart

AH: Could you give us some background on how you became  interested in what you have termed “textured literacy,” the ability to use and combine print and visual/digital literacies?

KY: As is the case in many situations, I think it was a combination of factors that all came together. One was that while I was at Purdue after I finished my degree, I did a couple of things. I was an adjunct, and I directed a testing center, and in that context I had a wonderful administrative assistant. She kept telling me that if I just gave her an hour of my time, she could teach me a very basic word processing system that really would simplify my life. You know how hard it can be to find that one hour, and what finally convinced me was the understanding that by not giving it to her, I was actually making her life much more difficult. I would give her a draft on paper for some short and ridiculous memo, she would input it, she would print it out, I would edit it, and she would have to input it. This was so remarkably inefficient and unfair to her. She really was, and is, a talented woman, so this was not a good way for us to spend our time.

At the same time, there was a pilot project in West Lafayette sponsored by GTE (which is the phone provider in West Lafayette), and they gave very minimal, but free, desktops to people, and they had created a community intranet. The community intranet had a portal that allowed users to get to what became the Internet, a precursor to the Internet. I ended up meeting and talking to all kinds of people. Interestingly, the GTE project was an effort to see if we could connect parents with schools, which was easy, but it was really a proto-commercial enterprise. It was supposed to set up things so that people could order pizzas through the intranet. It was before mobile phones, before we had cells. It was visionary in its own way, but really had the wrong vision of how things were going to turn out. [Laughs]

So, when you put those two moments in dialogue with each other, that's the whole idea of the deicity of technology; that is, you take one technology that's intended to serve one purpose and find other purposes for it. Then I could see: It wasn't that my administrative assistant or I was going to give up paper and pencil; it was that we were going to find other uses for paper and pencil, and we were going to find a way to get jobs done differently. Those things happened in the late ‘80s and have something to do with my sense of evolving literacies.

I think I have to give my two children some credit because they've always thought differently. They were the ones who introduced me, for instance, to “pop-up videos” on VH1 in which you can see one text morph into another. Let me explain. A song becomes a video, and the story in the video is actually often counterpointed to the story in the song, so you have multiple stories. Typically, they go on simultaneously. Then you have pop-ups, which are left-branching and right-branching stories that sometimes are complementary and sometimes are juxtapositional. That's a pretty interesting case of multiple textualities as well. When you start putting all these kinds of texts together, you become aware in a historicized sense of the way in which knowledge has been made through writing.

This process is something I talked about in my CCCC's talk about the nineteenth-century printing press (it was a new printing press): It changed the distribution of work and the relationship between penny papers and the Victorian novel and so on. In some ways, this period is parallel to ours in its transformational potential. But you could go further back. You could go back in technical writing to the work of people like Elizabeth Tebeaux who have looked at the role—again, out of school—that the development of manuals played in creating a new, admittedly somewhat fairly pragmatic, but nonetheless a new knowledge base that really relied as much on the visual as it did on the verbal. That was also a transformative moment. Here again, at least two literacies are in dialogue: the visual and the verbal.

One also is reminded of Cindy Selfe and her talk about “layered literacy” in the ‘90s, so a lot of what I've talked about is really not new. It might be fair to say that I've been lucky to have been given some opportunities where I could synthesize some of this. To me, it's like these are dots. What I've been able to do, perhaps, is connect the dots in a way that gave some new meaning and perhaps some new urgency and new significance to our work and to how that work might go forward.