webtext

By Cheryl Ball, 21 August, 2013
Publication Type
Language
Year
Journal volume and issue
4.1
Record Status
Pull Quotes

After several years of writing, reading, and introducing college students to hypertext fiction and poetry, I have found one of my biggest challenges to be trying to convince students that I am not punishing them by assigning hypertext works as course readings, and that they can indeed find some sort of aesthetic pleasure in reading these works. Most of these student readers, many of whom have never heard of--much less read--hypertext fiction, are not impressed with the complicated narrative structures full of endless loops and confusing paths that seem to dominate much of the hypertext fiction published to date. In my dealings with these novice readers of hypertext fiction, I have found three major hindrances to readers' enjoyment of hypertext fiction: the (apparent) lack of closure, frustration with non-linear narrative, and navigational issues.

Description (in English)

The three poems in this hypertext, Ritual, Moving List, and The Lynching, are interlinked. The graphics that appear at the bottom of each textual lexia are the links leading to successive lexias. While, for the most part, one picture represents one poem (as seen below), sometimes a representative graphic will not link to its respective poem, but to another poem or a captioned photo. The captioned photos (or photo lexias) are presented as subtext for the poetry.

Screen shots
Image
screenshot from Heading South webtext
Technical notes

HTML, images, created in FrontPage

By Cheryl Ball, 20 August, 2013
Publication Type
Language
Year
Pages
181
License
CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
Record Status
Librarian status
Approved by librarian
Abstract (in English)

This dissertation addresses the need for a strategy that will help readers new to new media texts interpret such texts. While scholars in multimodal and new media theory posit rubrics that offer ways to understand how designers use the materialities and media found in overtly designed, new media texts (see, e.g,, Wysocki, 2004a), these strategies do not account for how readers have to make meaning from those texts. In this dissertation, I discuss how these theories, such as Lev Manovich’s (2001) five principles for determining the new media potential of texts and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2001) four strata of designing multimodal texts, are inadequate to the job of helping readers understand new media from a rhetorical perspective. I also explore how literary theory, specifically Wolfgang Iser’s (1978) description of acts of interpretation, can help audiences understand why readers are often unable to interpret the multiple, unexpected modes of communication used in new media texts. Rhetorical theory, explored in a discussion of Sonja Foss’s (2004) units of analysis, is helpful in bringing the reader into a situated context with a new media text, although these units of analysis, like Iser’s process, suggests that a reader has some prior experience interpreting a text-as-artifact. Because of this assumption of knowledge put forth by all of the theories explored within, I argue that none alone is useful to help readers engage with and interpret new media texts. However, I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts. I describe that heuristic in the final chapter and discuss how it can be useful to a range of texts besides those labelled new media.

Pull Quotes

I argue that a heuristic which combines elements from each of these theories, as well as additional ones, is more useful for readers who are new to interpreting the multiple modes of communication that are often used in unconventional ways in new media texts.

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