II. Exigency

Metaphor has long been employed as a way of accessibly and intuitively organizing complex information in digital environments. Metaphors are ways of organizing information to make arguments and to draw attention to some qualities of data while obscuring others (Prelli). They both interpret reality and communicate that interpretation to an audience. In digital environments, particularly for interface design, metaphor is likewise nothing new; discussions on how to best use metaphor to help users navigate (relatively unfamiliar) digital spaces date back to the early days of digital interface design (Marx; Neale and Carroll; Richards et al.; Vaananen). As metaphor is a tried-and-true human strategy for meaning-making, it is thus little surprise that metaphor emerges as a powerful resource in the invention and development of webtext scholarship.

I want to note that discussions on metaphor and creativity, particularly from a cognitive standpoint, have been well established in rhetorical studies of invention, potentially to the point of being overdone. In Rhetorical Figures in Science, Fahnestock seeks to establish “the centrality of figures of speech in rhetorical theory” and notes that “[t]his point has certainly been made for metaphor, now seen as basic to linguisic and cognitive processes” (xi). She critiques rhetoricians’ “fixation on metaphor” as inspiration, organizing device, and explanatory resource in science studies (5), and notes the multitude of other (largely unexplored) figures of speech available in the rhetorical tradition that might offer equally compelling insights. A chapter devoted to metaphor, then, potentially runs the risk of falling into this rut.

However, organizing material metaphors are often employed in webtexts as part of the design structure, especially in prominent disciplinary webtexts such as several of the case studies examined here and others. Although this is a frequently used implicit invention strategy, this use of metaphor tends to be largely a matter of individual reflection in each webtext, if it is addressed at all. To the best of my knowledge, there are no synthesized examinations to date of metaphor as an invention strategy in the contexts of webtext scholarship. I address that gap in this chapter by comparing multiple metaphor-based invention strategies across drafts and across composers, with the goal of expanding this comparison in future research.

Moreover, metaphors play an important role in structuring knowledge not only in digital environments, but also for knowledge across disciplines. In his study of metaphor in scientific settings, Baake observes, “[A]lmost any metaphor that a scientist reaches for in an attempt to understand reality will have some value in bringing that reality to light, even if the metaphor is later discarded […] If metaphor produces knowledge, then it is a semantic phenomenon that demands much more attention among scientists and technical writers of science than if it merely describes, delivers, or decorates knowledge” (56). Metaphor is not simply an ornament for communicating knowledge. Rather, it is an important aspect of its generation within the composing process. Like tools and people, I argue, metaphors can act to shift an argument’s inscape in significant ways at specific moments in the drafting process. It is those moments of shift when the metaphor acts on the argument via inscape and pieces that I seek to trace and make visible in this chapter.

In this chapter, I argue that metaphor is a powerful invention strategy for webtext design that can both generate new ideas and obscure others in the pursuit of creating new knowledge. Digital environments offer possibilities to introduce new metaphorical structures based on objects (which both highlight and challenge otherwise implicit, invisible structures) in the creation of multimodal scholarship. We need to carefully examine the power, or agency, an object can have when introduced into scholarly design-as-argument, and think about how this object can both draw attention to and challenge more traditional organizational scholarly structures and design. I suggest this will help to open up possibilities for creating and organizing scholarly knowledge in both print and digital environments while recognizing the power these organizations have over the argument as it takes shape.