Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Reading Notes 4/10/2007

"Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments" -Mary E. Hocks
(includes discussion of websites)

  • Hybrid forms defined: "at once verbal, spatial, and visual" (631)
  • Acknowledging hybridity "means that the relationships among word and image, verbal texts and visual texts, 'visual culture' and 'print culture' are all dialogic relationships rather than binary opposites" (631)
  • "Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important new pedagogy of writing as design" (632).
  • Again it is brought up that digital rhetoric is an ongoing dialogue with both reader and writer.
  • Audience stance: audience participation in online community. This includes reasons that may encourage or discourage audience activity (632).
  • Transparency: "the ways in which online documents relate to established conventions like those of print, graphic design, film, and Web pages" (632).
  • Hybridity: the combination of visual and verbal designs (632). (key word: multifaceted)
  • In Anne Wysocki's "Monitoring Order," I agree with Hock's point about two-dimensionality. "Two-dimensional graphic design offers some guidance for designing web pages but it is also limited" (634) Wysocki's is this way. At first when I went to this site I was very annoyed. I'm used to copying and pasting the documents we need to read for class into a Word doc and then printing them out to read at my leisure. I didn't realize it would take that long, so I started clicking each box, highlighting the text, and pasting it into Word. By the end of all this, I was very annoyed. I do feel this clicking on the boxes, like turning a page in a book was a neat idea, but it did not help me so much for what I had planned for it.
  • Boese's Xena website seems more typical to me. "An experience of open-ended possibility...not very transparent" (640). Xenaverse was cool. To me it was set up more like an interactive website, so I didn't really even try to copy and paste every page into a word document. I enjoyed the pictures, music, and place where readers could participate. I think she does a great job, like in a book, of listing a table of contents. She even provides a "How to read" section with navigational map. Even though I've never seen a full episode of Xena, I can tell this site was created with the Xenites in mind. Anyone can make a contribution(s) to the site.
  • Teaching Visual Digital Rhetoric: create new designs/scrutinize current designs
  • To build on this article it would be helpful to look at a guide for critique websites, which I'm sure deciding on specific guidelines is not an easy thing to do. I could see many debating what makes a good website and what doesn't...especially when "the pleasure" you get out of a website is one thing you're looking at.
  • Storyboarding is helpful when creating one's own site
  • Hocks concludes by saying those who participate in digital design "can see themselves as active producers of knowledge in their discipline" (652).

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