Designs of Meaning: Tools for Digital Storytellers

Abstract

As the creation of digital texts flourishes in and out of the classroom, new strategies for composition are needed. Digital stories are multimodal by nature; they communicate meaning through multiple media, especially the combination of text, audio, image, animation, video, and interactive content forms.

Kress, Van Leeuwen, Wysocki, Ball and other multimodal scholars believe that as we see writing transition to the “logic†of the senses, new spaces and new approaches are necessary. DeVoss & Selfe (2002) argue for new “rhetorical positionings†for teachers of writing in digital environments— to “help students explore, develop, and communicate more effectively in them†(Devoss and Selfe, p. 146). It is clear that as both teacher and student navigate these mediated spaces, new approaches are needed for the composing and designing of multimodal texts.

Our webtext, a collaboration between teacher and student, seeks to better understand and communicate how multimodal texts rhetorically “work.†A digital storytelling experience involves the central idea or story arc and how it engages the senses and creates meaning through the combination of its form and content. The cards in this project illustrate some of the ways we believe multimodal stories can be shaped. We draw across disciplinary borders— from rhetoricians, philosophers, aestheticians, social theorists, technologists, artists and interaction designers to offer digital storytellers a heuristic to compose and evaluate multimodal works (and bridge the gap between theory and practice).