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Accessibility

The authors of this site are committed to making this text as accessible as possible for the widest variety of readers: Click here for a plain-text transcript of this site. If you have trouble accessing the transcript of this comic, please contact the authors selfe.2@osu.edu and wkurlinkus@gmail.com.

Reading and Re-composing This Text

In the spirit of the always-open, community-created, Burkean-parlor-style text we discuss toward the end of this response, we created our text as a blog. In doing so, we try to take advantage of the genre by inviting you, the readers, to help us compose this text and to respond to it. You can do so by clicking the "comments" link at the bottom of each page. We imagine such comments as sites for discussing, questioning, and re-composing what we've created: you can use words, images, audio and/or video clips--or any combination thereof!

To see a closeup of each page, click on the image and it will appear in a zoom-out "lightbox" format.

The blog is set up to be read by scrolling down, click the "next pages" link at the bottom of the screen to view the next set of images. 

A "Making Of" Narrative: Some Things I Learned

       
By William C. Kurlinkus

When Cindy asked me to help her re-draft and refine this piece I was excited--the championing of research and presentation through multimedia is a passion of mine, and when I read the pieces I was happy to see how many of them inform my own research on alternative community-based technological logics. Besides that, I like comics.

Image from pg. 16 before photoshop coloring.

So, I was excited about all these things. But perhaps I was a little too excited about the medium. And maybe I failed to heed our warning against "multimedia for multimedia's sake." Comics, comics, comics, I thought. I can do so many things. But I wasn't really thinking about why comics at the beginning--even though I should have known better. 

Nor was I considering the economics of multimedia creation. I like comics, yes. Can I draw? Questionable. Have I ever sketched a comic, scanned it, colored it in Photoshop, put it into Comic Life, back into Photoshop, then finally put it into a Blogger site that I had to recode? No. 

A drawing from an early draft that 

ended up being cut. Editing in 

multimedia is a different process 

to learn, too. I became attached to

some of my drawings, having taken 

so much time on them; yet, I had 

to cut some as quickly as one might

delete a sentence.

The process reminded me that attaining multimedia skills, practicing them, and composing with them takes time. So, in the response, when Cindy and I ask our readers to consider committing themselves to the practice of multimodal research and composition, I think we also must remind/warn/encourage them to remember that like every literacy, multimedia composing takes time. It is a commitment. One, that I think is well worth the effort, but still a commitment.

So, I was excited. The first thing I was going to do was draw up Cindy's epiphany narrative about the gas station graffiti she saw. And I did. I spent a lot of time on it.  As I was nearing the final stages of that middle section (right after drawing her car, I think) I started wondering, why did I spend so much time on this? The car looks like clipart. Did I need to create this? I drew a cool car (or at least I think it looks cool) but cool cars have nothing to do with the argument of the piece. My reasoning behind hand drawing the middle section, was that I wanted to signal a shift between the styles of the first and second section of the piece (between the description of the conference and the argument proper). I wanted these sections to be visibly different, to reflect the difference in their intellectual focus. I wanted the first section to be more static and to highlight the print texts that the Watson Symposium speakers delivered, and I wanted this section to stand in opposition to a more image and movement-oriented second half of the text, where we presented the argument about multmodality. So, there was some rhetorical purpose there. But for some reason, the economics of time spent still felt a little off--maybe because I'm used to composing and editing in print time rather than multimodal time. This new "time" reminded me that when medium changes, process changes in ways we sometimes underestimate.

But, then again, drawing and experimenting with Photoshop was also fun. 

An early coloring of Cindy's car while I was still re-learning to color
in Photoshop. Compare to the final image on pg. 13. 

I suggest, then, that part of learning and putting into practice a new multimodal literacy is learning to be critical about the economics of time, labor, and rhetorical planning that goes into the composing of a text and the making of meaning in a variety of expressive modes--as well as the economics of enjoyment. Do my readers learn anything critical from a car I spent two hours drawing and coloring? Maybe not. Did drawing the car make my process of re-learning photoshop more enjoyable? Yes. And is the meaning made by this comic different than we could make in an alphabetic-print-only text? I believe it is.

Drafting in multimedia is different as well. Story-
boarding before I drew my comics helped me think
about the content more visually than textually.

Another realization I came to was the fact that—as I began to layout and draw the comic—I had relied on a familiar type of linear alphabetic heavy layout, rather than using the library of visual devices the genre/medium of comics offers. There was too much saying something in a dialogue box then drawing the literal version of that thing in the comic panel. I was falling under the the thrall of print even as I was attempting to argue against it through multimodal presentation. So, I tried to start playing with zooms, breaking out of the panels, using visual metaphors, etc. I realized that my experience with composing represented the flip-side of the convergence coin that we talk about in the comic. Although the convergence of different media and modes of data can lead to interesting remixes and combinations, the ubiquity of print (or any other media) can kind of take over multimodal texts in restrictive ways as well.

All this to say, we chose the comic medium and made the visual choices we did because we wanted the medium of presentation to parallel our main argument about enacting in our own research and presentation the modes of literacy we champion in our research communities. If we study and support variety and difference of semiotic communication forms, we might want to practice that same range in our own compositions, even if it takes work, even if it takes risk (like drawing an acceptable comic version of your adviser).