Kress and Van Leeuwen: Multimodal Discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication

Part 1

Briefly explain how you see this book intersecting with what we've read so far. 

For me this book really made sense to read after Alexander and Rhodes and Shipka. Whereas Palmeri's book was more of a foundational text for understanding the historical stake multimodality has had within composition and its movements, Alexander and Rhodes reconfigure those historical conceptions to be more critical of multimodal and new media use. In asking our students to reconceptualize new media and to play and explore, we open up the classroom as an avante garden of rich theoretical and conceptual affordances in how to not only make meaning, but also understand the metacognition behind our multimodal compositions. Shipka also resonates with metacognition in how she asks students to explain their composing process with her SOGG statements. I see Kress and Van Leeuwen pairing up nicely with Shipka in the discussion of semiotics and the different affordances modes offer to our conceptions of technology. Like Shipka, Kress and Van Leeuwen are skeptical to limit our notion of multimodal composing to merely the digital (in fact, I would argue that they don't even begin to really conceptualize the digital until about the design/production phase of their conceptual framework). Although there are cultural and socioeconomic considerations about technology within discourse, Kress and Van Leeuwen instead place much more emphasis on the material (much like Shipka) in looking towards the semiotics and the sensory experiences in how we make meaning. 

One thing I really enjoyed about Kress and Leeuwen is their argument that the digital makes our compositions (that perhaps were once multimodal) monomodal in the limiting of our ability to experience these compositions in the distribution phase. I think Shipka would have a similar take on how notions of curation and reproduction of text, and how the medium really does impact the message. Rhodes and Alexander would agree with this as well, though I think they would further advocate for a return to the design phase once distribution is considered. Palmeri for me returns to the pedagogical implications of such semiotic considerations. I was tempted to do a handout for my multimodal response to Kress and Van Leeuwen in considering how this translates to the classroom (which I think is always what Palmeri was thinking about in Remixing Composition). However, I resonated much more lucidly in Kress and Van Leeuwen's ideology of moving through the different phases (I know some found this book challenging, but for me this is how my brains works and it was much more tangible to me to think in these terms then some of the dense-theory that Alexander and Rhodes stated to touch on.

Part 2

Post a 3-5 sentence summary of the book (give us the gist) and include 5 metadata tags for the book. 

Within Kress and Van Leeuwen's Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication we're provided a framework for understanding the methodology of multimodality within semiotics. This methodology is rather linear and moves in a way that begins at considering social/cultural and place (discourse) and moves to designing, producing, and then distributing (re-articulating for a macro-audience). Within the text a variety of examples are introduced to help synthesize the information in a way thats tangible to readers. Kress and Van Leeuwen stake most of their emphasis in the material, referring to sensory experience and rules of semiotics and linguistics to help ground their framework. Though complex in their phrasing and articulation, Kress and Van Leeuwen asks meaningful and critical question of the digital and how our (re)production affects the initial composition and in doing so, how we may 'flatten' an object in our attempts to move from the interpretation of a text to the articulation of a text within a public sphere. 

metadata tags: #semiotic, #discourse, #provenance, #experiential meaning potential, #sensory

Part 3

Work to create a table or chart that sets up Kress and Van Leeuwen's framework. If you're feeling befuddled on how to set it up, imagine you are going to use their language to analyze a text, what terms/questions would you need to ask? Or imagine you're giving your students a handout to use to analyze a text through the lens of K&V? What would this handout look like?

I realize that my chart might be kind of hard to read, if you want to head to the original so you can view it bigger, click here