VII. Discussion
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A. Synthesize | B. Emplace | C. Interact | D. Symbolize | E. Emphasize
D. Symbolize
Metaphors also had an influence type called “symbolize,” or using an object’s culturally situated symbolic resonances to set the tone and symbolic register through which the webtext’s total components are viewed.
One example of “symbolize” occurred in Draft 4 of autoethnographic webtext “Religion, Remediated.”
The project was a chapter in an edited digital collection on teaching with literacy narratives; as authors, we were encouraged to incorporate multimodal elements into our projects but didn’t know what the final design would look like. This made for an interesting invention process for me, in working to balance my own invention strategy of working with a design metaphor for digital projects versus anticipating an unknown template that would be consistent across all chapters. I’d been working with a kind of stylized candle across various drafts, as a metaphorical object that would communicate a sense of personalized warmth and light common to multiple religious traditions and practices. During the project’s development, however, an instance of religiously motivated violence occurred on campus, and the editors asked me to address that in my chapter’s introduction. In redesigning a template for the project to fit with the new introduction, the candles as metaphorical design object took on new symbolic resonances, this time of solemn memorial and communal grief. Although this design metaphor didn’t make it into later versions of the webtext, once it was redesigned in keeping with the rest of the collection, it played an important role in my overall invention process, and for symbolically making sense of the overall argument I was working to develop in the project.
Another example of “symbolize” occurred in Moss’s invention narrative for her webtext “Claiming Our Place on the Floor,” co-authored with Kinloch and Richardson and published in Stories That Speak To Us through Computers and Composition Digital Press.
Moss, Kinloch, and Richardson's webtext opens with an audio introduction, in which the three co-authors each read selections from one another's books and quotes from the three historical black women featured on the homepage. Situated against visual imagery of a book spine and a building, as well as images of the three women, this introduction becomes an aural "splash page" performing the collaborative literacy practices explored throughout the project, and situated amidst an intellectual legacy of black women. This was an element, too, that challenged me to reconsider and reorient my analysis of "metaphor" more multimodally; beginning from a place of focusing on visual organization, I had largely skimmed past the audio introduction. Speaking with Moss reoriented me to realize the importance of this aural modality, especially in setting up a collaborative conversation, as the conceptual "anchor" of the project in a way that the visual elements alone did not fully communicate. Just as Kaustavi challenged my focus on still image with her emphasis on the moving body, so Moss challenged my focus on visual elements by highlighting the symbolic power of auditory metaphor.
That is one of the benefits of an object as metaphor, in that it can make implicit arguments and pick up or make associations with the symbolism of other pieces (or with the viewer’s personally associated symbolism) without necessarily needing to make those claims and resonances explicitly articulated.
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