VII. Discussion
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A. Rethink | B. Engage | C. Adapt | D. Afford | E. Limit
A. Rethink
The first kind of invention influence tools exerted on webtext inscape was “rethink,” or a shifted rhetorical understanding of the pieces’ nature and relationship to one another.
One example of a “rethink”-type influence occurred in DM2.
In previous PowerPoint-based drafts and transitional web draft, I had tried to fit the dancing videos into the place of statues on the underlying base photograph in order to set up a trajectory emphasizing connections between the various kinds of remediations. However, with my level of skill and available resources at the time, I was unable to create the desired effect in a web-based format using HTML and CSS. I went through numerous revised attempts, such juxtaposing the videos over temple images that matched their aesthetic style, or attempting to create a custom video frame to make the video blend in more seamlessly, or creating a still image that could be clicked to play the video. However, in all of these cases, I was not able to negotiate with the tools I was using (HTML, CSS, and Aptana) to act on the pieces in order to create quite the juxtaposition I was looking for. I eventually stumbled on an autoplay loop option in which the videos would play automatically upon the page loading and continue without a need for controls. Upon seeing this new effect and inventive juxtaposition, I began to understand the videos and the project in a different way: my inclination to work with still images had been driving my arrangement work with the videos in a way that made movement secondary and visual appearance primary--the exact move Kaustavi wanted to avoid in her project. I also realized I was trying to fit them too closely into to the underlying structure, rather than foregrounding the videos for their own sake and appreciation. The intervention of the tools I was working with thus led me to new interpretive insights about the pieces and challenged my initial conceptions in a way that I might not have reconsidered had my initial idea worked.
Another example of a “rethink”-type influence occurred in working with an audio media element for Charissa Coleman Muhammad’s literacy narrative in RR3.4
I had a significant amount of technical as well as conceptual difficulty with this remediation; the audio recording quality of her literacy narrative was very low, and I was not able to improve it with my level of Audacity editing abilities at the time. Moreover, every time I tried to bring in complementary vocal audio recordings as part of the clip, the clearer vocals of the other recording completely distracted from the focal narrative. I tried just using her clip unaccompanied, but it felt very bare. At last I found a soft piano track and put it underneath her recording in a way that accompanied but did not overshadow her voice. As I listened to the piano track and vocal track together, I realized that the piano clip had a sort of dual tone alternating between two pitches as a main motif. This alternation spoke to an element of Charissa’s literacy narrative that I wanted to represent with dialoguing vocals but was not able to accomplish in a polished way in Audacity. The intervention of the editing tool, as well as the tools used to initially record the interview, led me to seek out a new relationship between pieces that I had not initially considered, and that led to new interpretive insights upon hearing them together.
In the published narratives, a “rethink”-type influence emerged in Boyd’s Inventio reflection.
Her initial plan in revising the article had been to create short pop-ups over points where her thinking had changed. As she developed these short notes for a web environment, however, they grew to the point where they were too unwieldy for pop-ups; their increasing length and intellectual weight meant that rather than annotating the original article, she needed to develop it into an entirely new project as a whole. As she noted in her reflection, “I began rethinking the differences between the two journals; I ended up rethinking my own process of researching and writing.” This rethinking included a new understanding of her project’s interface design, and how it mediated the relationship between the original print article and her changing thought. The pop-ups’ insufficiency as technological solutions for representing Boyd’s changing thoughts raised the need to rethink her vision of the project, to which Boyd then responded in her ongoing invention process.
In short, “rethink”-type influences occur when tools display webtext pieces in ways that highlight a relationship the composer hadn’t seen or considered before. Composing tools’ intervention leads to new understanding of the pieces and their relationship, or brings out new elements of the same pieces that had been present all along but were less salient. With “rethink”-type influences, working with pieces through technological breakdowns leads to new insights on how those pieces in combination perform an implicit argument.
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