Thursday, March 19, 2009
Like what was discussed in class, "The affordances of new technologies reconfigure the multimodal aspects of reading and writing in ways that are newly significant for reading." As we can see, writing's functional load has since shifted quite a fair bit since the advancement of technology, which allowed the visual mode to 'take over' writing. This shows the decentring of writing as its role on the screen changed from a dominant role to a 'supporting role' as mentioned by Alen.
Above is a screen shot of the main page of the website and as we can see, the amount of screen space dedicated to image is definitely more than the writing space as words were mainly used as labels (Roald Dahl, Treats, Books and Stuff etc.) and a short welcome note at the bottom of the page.
I have uploaded a video of my navigation through the website and I will be doing a brief analysis of my reading path here.
Visual potential of writing
In this section, I'll show how writing has visual potential through analysing the font types, styles (bold/italic), colours and layout. I will also side track a little to bring in how the visuals and audio play a role in meaning making.
Just looking at the main page, I was given the choice of 5 animated hyperlinks to go into.
The main page of the website includes a combination of a 'hand written' font type and another font type which seems to be the usual font type used in Roald Dahl books. The use of the hand written font marks the 'presence' or 'essence' of a human writer, as mentioned by Jewitt and it seems to suggest a close relationship with its audience, especially because it appears to be physically hand written by a hand right at the start when the website is loaded. In this case, its audience is being connected to the author, Roald Dahl, throughout the website as each page's title/label is being 'hand written' by a hand everytime the pages load. Moreover, the connectedness with its audience is further enhanced through the scribbling sound made when the hand writes on the labels.
Something I would like to note is the relations of coherence in the main page. The initial quizzical music that was played when the page loads, the animated 'paper cutout' characters (that looks like the characters in Roald Dahl's stories) and the random animals and boy that appear every now and then, seem to all reinforce the 'fantasy comes alive' theme that Roald Dahl instills in his own stories. Like what Jewitt says, such a "realisation of the same theme simultaneously through a range of modes, makes the theme more salient than it would be of it were only realised in one mode."
Upon clicking on the hyperlink, "Roald Dahl", I was led to a page where 6 sub links popped out and I clicked on "An interview with Roald Dahl". In this section, I was able to click on the random numbers on the left which represents the different interviews that I can view and listen to.
Upon clicking on Interview 4, I can immediately hear Roald Dahl's voice talking about the question posed to him. His audio interview is accompanied by a written version in the white space on the right. Personally, I was more drawn to the audio version of the interview rather than the written form as I felt as if I was present during his interview and was more closely connected to Roald Dahl. Such use of audio in this case encourages new potentials for engagement of its audience, especially the younger crowd.
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As with my brief analysis above, we can see that such a multimodal website like this uses all the various modes to "convey multiple meanings and allows its audience to reject a single interpretation and to hold possible multiple readings of a text" (Coles and Hall, 2001) through taking multiple reading paths. Every time when I enter the website, I may not always go through the same reading path. Instead, I may make/remake new meanings as there is no linear route to reading.
Something I would like to note is the relations of coherence in the main page. The initial quizzical music that was played when the page loads, the animated 'paper cutout' characters (that looks like the characters in Roald Dahl's stories) and the random animals and boy that appear every now and then, seem to all reinforce the 'fantasy comes alive' theme that Roald Dahl instills in his own stories. Like what Jewitt says, such a "realisation of the same theme simultaneously through a range of modes, makes the theme more salient than it would be of it were only realised in one mode."
Upon clicking on the hyperlink, "Roald Dahl", I was led to a page where 6 sub links popped out and I clicked on "An interview with Roald Dahl". In this section, I was able to click on the random numbers on the left which represents the different interviews that I can view and listen to.
Upon clicking on Interview 4, I can immediately hear Roald Dahl's voice talking about the question posed to him. His audio interview is accompanied by a written version in the white space on the right. Personally, I was more drawn to the audio version of the interview rather than the written form as I felt as if I was present during his interview and was more closely connected to Roald Dahl. Such use of audio in this case encourages new potentials for engagement of its audience, especially the younger crowd.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As with my brief analysis above, we can see that such a multimodal website like this uses all the various modes to "convey multiple meanings and allows its audience to reject a single interpretation and to hold possible multiple readings of a text" (Coles and Hall, 2001) through taking multiple reading paths. Every time when I enter the website, I may not always go through the same reading path. Instead, I may make/remake new meanings as there is no linear route to reading.
Labels: C. Jewitt's Multimodality, reading and literacy article response
9:55 AM
Jess Chen...
