III. Background

C. Metaphors and Multimodality

As conceptual structures referring to independent material objects, metaphors are multimodal; that is, they can be represented in a range of media contexts and forms. To understand how metaphors influence webtexts' developing structures, I'm interested in exploring the degree to which a metaphor extends or expands through and emerges into a webtext’s various media forms. A conceptual approach to metaphor additionally frees me from focusing on metaphor as an exclusively linguistic feature and instead allows me to examine its multimodal nature. Multimodal metaphor has been explored theoretically by scholars such as Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, and autoethnographically/creatively through work such as the collaborative efforts of Ox and van der Elst. Lakoff and Johnson’s spatial approach to metaphor in sentence structure, based on degrees of arrangement and closeness (136), opens room for similar discussions to be made in other modes through corresponding multimodal arrangement principles such as framing, salience, and information value (Kress and van Leeuwen).

As mentioned above, classical rhetoricians metaphorically walked through buildings in order to help them mentally organize and recall information. Whittemore examines similar practices among contemporary technical communicators, noting “users’ desire for physical rather than purely logical methods for managing memories” (2). He describes the subject’s need to develop conceptual/structural coherence through touch, movement, navigation; according to Whittemore, using the mouse “to physically ‘touch’ the knowledge [the graphic icons] represent helps her to better understand the software products as a whole” (6). Calling to mind the classical rhetoricians, he suggests that “[i]n the future as in the past, information management interfaces may need to look more like streetscapes or theaters than like file cabinets” (6), highlighting the importance of conceptual metaphors for engaging and organizing information based on embodied experience/structures. I do not wish to posit some kind of universal embodied experience that would run the risk of erasing the many varied kinds of human embodied experience based on variables such as race, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and religion/spirituality, just to name a few factors. However, metaphor’s close connections to embodied experience, when used as a way of structuring academic knowledge, offer a unique challenge (cohering with feminist principles) to a discourse form that otherwise values the disembodied, apparently neutral and objective author as inventor and communicator of knowledge.

This spatialized approach to metaphor as informing form is especially appropriate to examining the underlying metaphorical basis for visual-spatial web design. If metaphors are underlying structural concepts, it should be possible to trace how and when those structural concepts enter the webtext invention/design process, as well as how they emerge across modes, what new ideas they generate and reflect, and where/how they function within the context of the project as a whole. This interest in how metaphors travel across and emerge via different modes is reflected in my mode-based coding structure for “types of metaphors.”