Frameworks for Analysis

*** Analysis Frameworks

Arola, Sheppard & Ball (2014)

Analyzing Multimodal Projects

Bezemer & Kress (2008)

Writing in Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for

Learning

Curwood & Gibbons (2010)

“Just Like I Have Felt”: Multimodal Counternarratives in Youth-‐Produced Digital

Media

Frameworks for Analysis How can multimodal projects be analyzed?

1

When contemplating integrating multimodal composition into the English classroom, the question of how to analyze and assess it becomes essential.

In order to better understand how to analyze these types of ensembles, I looked to pivotal authors in the field for guidance, including Arola,

2

Sheppard, & Ball (2014), Bezemer & Kress (2008), and Curwood & Gibbons (2010).

What emerged from these three texts is a set of frameworks to analyze compositions. What is missing from these texts, however, is explicit direction for teachers on how to assess these in the classroom. The work from this

3

section, and this project in general, informs future direction, which includes an examination of assessment frameworks for the classroom.

Breanne Campbell Summer/Fall 2014

2

1

In Chapter 2, Arola, Sheppard, and Ball take the reader through the process of analyzing multimodal projects. When analyzing this type of project, one must consider the rhetorical situation and design choices that support that rhetorical situation. In this accessible and practical text, the authors provide definitions within each of the aforementioned concepts, which will be summarized below. Rhetoric is traditionally thought of as the use of available means of persuasion; and the authors extend that definition to include the agentive quality of the text, one that effectively persuades the audience toward change” (p. 21). The rhetorical situation, then, is the “set of circumstances in which an author creates a text” (p. 21). According to Arola, Sheppard, and Ball (2014), when composers are creating a text,

2

they pay attention to four factors: their intended audience, their purpose for communicating, the context in which their text will be read, and the genre they choose for their text. The process of thinking through a text through this perspective is called rhetorical analysis. Five areas the authors include as considerations in a rhetorical analysis include: audience, purpose, context, author, and genre. Audience is the intended readership of a text and the job of the author is to identify and pay attention to the intended primary and secondary audiences. Questions to consider when analyzing audience:

● Who is the intended audience? ● Who might be the secondary

audience(s)?

Analyzing Multimodal Projects

Arola, Sheppard, & Ball (2014)


3

Author: While authorship initially may seem clear, it can also be unclear or implied. Questions to consider when analyzing authorship:

● How does the author (implied or actual) establish personal credibility? Do you trust this source? Does it matter?

● How does the author (implied or actual) come across?

● Does the author (implied or actual) have a certain reputation? Does the text work to support this reputation, or does it work to alter this reputation?

● If you know who the actual author is, can you find any historical or biographical information that will help you understand his or her credibility, character, and reputation?

Genre is traditionally thought of as a set of static categories oftentimes related to the medium of the text. The authors, however, describe them as being dynamic in that “they can morph according to the local culture, the historical time period, the author of the text, the audience for the text, and many other influences” (p. 27). Although the authors describe genre as being dynamic, they acknowledge that most genres have formal features, which they call genre conventions (or audience expectations). Questions to consider when analyzing genre:

● How might you define the genre of the text? Consider both a broad definition and a more specific definition.

● In what ways is the text similar to other texts within this genre?

● What key features make it part of the genre you’ve identified?

● What values or opinions do the primary and secondary audiences hold? Does the author appeal to these values or opinions in any way?

Purpose is described as the author’s possible intentions for the piece, including “large-‐scale purpose” and secondary purpose. Questions to consider when analyzing purpose:

● What do you consider to be the overall intention for the text? What leads you to this conclusion?

● Might there be one or more secondary intentions? Why do you think so?

Context constitutes any additional information about the text including where the text is physically located, how it is intended to be read, and what physically surrounds it. Questions to consider when analyzing context:

● What is the medium (print, CD, app, the Web, video, etc.)? Why do you think the author chose this particular medium over another one?

● Where did you find the text? What was the publication venue (book, newspaper, album, television, etc.)?

● What were the historical conventions for this type of text? What materials, medium or publishing venues were available at the time?

● What are the social and cultural connotations within the text? What colors, pictures, or phrases are used? What technologies does the text use?

● How will readers interact with this text? Will they read it on their phone or tablet while walking down the street? on a desktop computer in a public library? on a laptop in their backyard?


4

When conducting rhetorical analysis on multimodal texts, the authors ease readers that there is no right answer, but a plethora of possibilities. Analyzing Design Choices In the second half of this chapter, the authors offer five key design concepts that authors consider in order to support the rhetorical situation. While they may initially seem to focus on visual aspects of a composition, all design elements can actually be applied to any multimodal text using any combination of modes (linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural). These five key design concepts include: emphasis, contrast, organization, alignment, and proximity. Emphasis is when the author puts greater importance, significance or stress on certain elements rather than others, which guides the “reading of the text as a whole” (Arola, Sheppard, & Ball, 2014, p. 31). Related to emphasis, contrast is the “difference between elements” (p. 33). A reader can determine contrast by comparing elements of a text to each other. In order to create contrast, an author can consider features of the text such as: color, size, placement, shape, and content. A reader may determine emphasis based on what elements are contrasted because “the most contrasted element often appears to be the most emphasized” (p. 33). Expectedly, organization refers to the way the elements are arranged in a text. Related to organization is alignment, which is, simply

put, how elements line up in the text. According to Arola, Sheppard, and Ball (2014), “A composition that uses alignment to best effect controls how our eyes move across a text” (p. 35). Alignments are categorized as centered alignment, justified alignment, strong left alignment, and strong right alignment. Finally, the fifth design concept is proximity, which considers how close elements (or groupings of elements) are placed in relation to other elements, and “what relationships are built as a result of that spacing” (p. 36). This definition can apply to any element in a visual text, such as words and images, or to elements in an audio text (repeating rhythms or other verses and chorus). In a final closing of this section, the authors advise the reader not to be surprised if when analyzing design choices, the reader will refer back to the rhetorical analysis. Analyzing multimodal texts is not a linear process, they add. Also, the analysis may result in a positive assessment of the text, or it may also illuminate problems with the text and rhetoric as well.

Using Arola, Sheppard, and Ball’s (2014) Multimodal Analysis framework described below, I analyzed John Branch’s “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek”. Click here to view the analysis, and here for the remediated analysis.


5

Writing in Multimodal Texts: Social Semiotic Account of Designs for

Learning Bezemer & Kress (2008)

1

In “Writing in Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for Learning”, Bezemer and Kress address key concepts in multimodal composition and rhetorical analysis by first offering a working framework, and then apply it to examples from learning materials from secondary science curricula between the years of 1930 and 2005. This text is part of a larger research project where the authors study secondary English and Mathematics learning resources as well.

Key concepts defined and discussed include: sign makers, sign, author interests, mode, medium, frame, site of display, design, translation, transduction, and recontextualization.

2

For sake of brevity, below is a list of defined terms. Added attention is paid to translation, transduction, and recontextualization. Sign makers: producers, as well as users, of learning resources (also known as meaning makers)

Signs: content resulting in the union of meaning and form, motivated by the interest of the sign maker

Interest: rhetorical/pedagogical and epistemological purposes for composing an ensemble or text and is shaped by social, cultural, economic, political, and technological environments in which signs are made


6

3

Modes: a socially and culturally shaped resource for meaning making. Modes mentioned include: linguistic, visual, aural, and spatial (gestural is not mentioned) Bezemer and Kress state that modes can be defined or set by a community. For instance, for the ordinary user of writing, font can be part of that mode, but for a typesetter, font may very well be a mode on its own. The definition of modes depends on the particular community’s representational needs.

Medium: Accompanied by two aspects: material and social. Material: medium is the substance in and through which meaning is instantiated/realized and through which meaning becomes available to others (cf. “oil on canvas”). Social: medium is the result of semiotic, sociocultural, and technological practices.

Frame: events. (Genre: semiotic opposite of frame, comes with a generic form) As frames change, new sites of display are created.

Sites of display: Space that becomes available and serves as the medium for the display of a text. For example, the wall of an underground subway tunnel can be a site of display for a poster.

Design: When rhetorical purposes, the designer’s interested, and the characteristics of the audience come together with modes, media, frames, and sites of display.

4

The authors’ main goal in this article is to discuss the process of transduction. In order to describe transduction, they first define translation as involving changes within a mode. Transduction, on the other hand, is when “semiotic material is moved across modes” (p. 169). This is not a new process or concept. The authors assert, “Transduction is a part of human semiosis and has been as far back as there are records such as sculptures, paintings, carvings in caves, on rock faces, in sites of ancient habitation” (p. 176) Bezemer and Kress’s concept of transduction is similar to semiotic remediated practice and synesthesia (Shipka, 2011). According to Bezemer and Kress, analyzing transduction allows for the examination of gains and losses in the process of modal change. To demonstrate, the authors examine and analyze three examples of transduction from science textbooks. The three examples display transduction from artifact to image and writing, from action to image and writing, and from action to moving image and speech. In terms of gains and losses in the process of transduction, common key concepts include specificity, generality, arrangement, and command/authority. The authors then proceed to define Bernstein’s (1996) concept of recontextualization “as moving meaning material from one context and its social organization of participants and its modal ensembles to another, with its different


7

social organization and modal ensembles” (p. 184). The process of recontextualization includes four rhetorical/semiotic principles: selection, arrangement, foregrounding and social repositioning. When the authors discuss recontextualization, they are applying it to learning resources (textbooks, workbooks, CD-‐ROMs, DVDs, websites), but this concept could be applied to other scenarios as well. Concluding this article is a discussion of future directions for this working framework of multimodal composition and rhetorical analysis. The authors are looking to fine tune their framework in the future.

Key Concepts

Translation: changes within a mode Transduction: when “semiotic material is moved across modes” (p. 176). Recontextualization: “moving meaning material from one context and its social organization of participants and its modal ensembles to another, with its different social organization and modal ensembles” (p. 184).

2

1

In “’Just Like I Have Felt’: Multimodal Counternarratives in Youth-‐Produced Digital Media” Curwood and Gibbons describe the multimodal microanalysis of Tommy, one of Curwood’s students. Multimodal microanalysis is a tool originally developed by Gibbons to study video data in youth media arts organizations. However, Curwood and Gibbons thought this would be an ideal to use to analyze Tommy’s digital poem because it focuses on multiple modes and allows for detailed analysis of the “microdetails” of a text. Curwood describes the dominance of white, European male authors and master narratives in her English curriculum, and was seeking to incorporate and discuss counternarratives as well. After reading Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America”, students were asked to write a text poem in response to the question, “What is your America like?” Tommy chose to compose this poem in a digital, multimodal format. Tommy’s poem is the subject of this article’s analysis. Counternarratives and Master Narratives Master narratives and counternarratives were the subject of focus for this literacy tasks in Curwood’s class. Curwood and Gibbons (2010), citing Hilde Lindemann

2

Nelson (2001), define master narratives as archetypal stories that serve as summaries of socially shared understanding, and “function to reinforce potentially oppressive cultural ideologies and maintain the status quo’” (p. 63). Counternarratives on the other hand, serve as “narratives that resist oppressive identities and ‘attempt to replace it with one that commands respect’” (p. 60). By writing these narratives, the composers can regain moral agency and humanity. Furthermore, multimodal counternarratives are the ways in which authors use multiple modes to push back against oppressive master narratives.

“Just Like I Have Felt”: Multimodal

Counternarratives in Youth-‐Produced

Digital Media

Curwood & Gibbons (2010)


9

It’s About Literacy, Not the Tool With the advancement and increasing integration of technology into our daily practices and practices within the classroom, it is imperative to focus on the literacy, and not the tool. Citing authors on literacy including Lankshear and Knobel (2006); Lewis (2007); and Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), among others, Curwood and Gibbons assert that new technologies bring new literacy practices, but that schools need to be focused on the literacy practice and not the technological tool. At the heart of the author’s argument is that there is a place for multimodal counternarratives in the English classroom. Imperative to this new literacy practice is “the examination of how elements of power and control, form and format, practice and pedagogy are effectively re-‐envisioned” (p. 62). Phases of Multimodal Microanalysis The remainder of this article walks the

reader through a multimodal microanalysis of Tommy’s poem, “I, Too, Sing America”. There are three phases of a multimodal microanalysis. Phase One involves transcribing the composition. This involves using a spreadsheet that includes screenshots of the digital poem at two-‐second intervals. The authors chose two-‐second intervals so as to break down the text in small increments, but large enough increments to show movement in the text. The figure below is an example section of the transcription. Phase Two involves narrativizing the transcription “in order to gain a sense of which modes are salient” (Curwood and Gibbons, 2010, p. 67). The narrative is an attempt to make sense of Tommy’s modal choices. Phase Three involves analyzing modal patterns, which means analyzing the patterns mode by mode “looking for the presence or absence of each mode, its content, and its connections to the other


10

What is interesting with the phases of multimodal microanalysis is that it does not include Tommy in the analysis. There is no mention if the authors shared their analysis with Tommy and gained his input and insight into his thoughts on his own composition. Getting Tommy’s input may have eliminated some speculation and illuminated on some important aspects of the digital poem. Conclusions Curwood and Gibbons found that by conducting a multimodal microanalysis of his poem, that Tommy uses digital media in four key ways: remixing stories and traditions, mixing modes, using functional load to foreground identity, and creating dialogic space for his audience. Additionally, the authors conclude that Tommy’s digital poem (and the assignment) demonstrate three movements in education: technology integration, critical pedagogy, and literacy and identity studies. Finally, the authors conclude that youth can create counternarratives to highlight and resist master narratives that may marginalize them and gain agency in pushing against the cultural ideologies dominating master narratives.

Frameworks for Analysis

Documents

Transcript of Frameworks for Analysis