VII. Discussion
<<
>>
A. Synthesize | B. Emplace | C. Interact | D. Symbolize | E. Emphasize
E. Emphasize
Finally, metaphors had an influence type called “emphasize,” or drawing attention to some elements or features of the webtext at the expense of other elements.
One example of “emphasize” occurred in Draft 3 of autoethnographic webtext “Dancing Across Media.”
I’d met with my collaborator Kaustavi Sarkar, and she liked where the webtext’s design was going so far in situating our project metaphorically within spaces closely related to Odissi tradition. However, she noted that amidst the strong emphasis on temple structures and sculptures, the focus on movement and the live Odissi body had been significantly lost. As a solution, she re-recorded a clip that had been lost of performing the dance, to show an example of the live dancing body in combination with the various motion-capture iterations. In my emphasis on visual design and based on the temple-based media materials I had to work with, the design I was developing ended up detracting from the explicit argument we were working to make about dance movement, and it took my collaborator’s dance-trained perspective to notice this and reorient us towards a design solution that provided a better implicit performance of our overall argument.
Another example of “emphasize" occurred in Hanzalik’s invention narrative for her webtext “Electrate Dream Interpretation,” published in Computers and Composition Online.
Hanzalik had worked to bring out her project's emphasis on the associative power of video games and dreams throughout her project in various modes and media, including visual, aural, spatial, and gestural. However, when these metaphorical resonances were transferred to her essay's discussion section through elements such as emojis and poetry, these elements challenged the linear logics of a traditional academic argument in ways that became unproductively distracting. The journal section featuring Hanzalik's webtext was intended to present pedagogically based projects that other instructors might emulate. With this primary goal in mind, Hanzalik cut back on dreamlike use of language in the essay section to work towards greater linguistic clarity and let the project's other components carry the weight of her argument's associative performance. In this case, the balance of "emphasis" was determined by the webtext's positioning as a peer-reviewed project in a scholarly journal, with the goal of making sure the reader's attention ultimately stayed focused on this central rhetorical purpose.
Metaphor serves as a powerful invention and design conceptual resource for attracting attention to a certain aspect of the design; however, because it can carry so much weight in terms of framing, salience, and information value (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996), it is also important to make sure that the metaphor is not “driving” the emphasis of the project in a way that throws off the total balance of the relationship between pieces as a whole.
<<
>>
