Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres

9. Multimodality, Memory, and Evidence: How the Treasure House of Rhetoric Is Being Digitally Renovated

204 C h a pte r 9 Multimodality, Memory, and Evidence How the Treasure House of Rhetoric Is Being Digitally Renovated Julia Romberger The New London Group (NLG 2000) has discussed extensively the need to teach multimodal composing in our computer-mediated, communication-oriented society. Each of the modes of meaning the NLG (ibid., 26) has identified—audio, spatial, linguistic, visual, and gestural —can be found in digital media compositions. The NLG advocates that these design elements be integrated into curriculum so that students of all backgrounds are at a greater advantage in societies whose communication is dominated by computer-based tools. This group of scholars recognizes that there is a wealth of information being distributed through audio, video, and interactive means that challenge our notions of what is valid, how and if the book will retain its primacy as conveyor of information for the advancement of knowledge and creation of active civic participation, and what cultural impact these shifts will have globally . Many of the chapters in this collection are working toward developing means of applying the call of the New London Group toward composition pedagogy. Multimodality, Memory, and Evidence  205 In this chapter I begin to interrogate two issues that are important to the work of developing multimodal composition within academic settings —evaluation of the content and authority of what the New London Group would call “available designs”—or evidence—and the coherence of argument.1 It is my goal to further open the questions of how we teach students to evaluate sources that are not traditional academic sources that are disseminated in nontraditional academic modes and how we teach them to develop cohesive arguments when they are bringing together various modalities into one rhetorical act. Utilizing the canon of memory for multimodal composing processes is one entry point into thinking about these questions, certainly not the only one, but as a starting place, memory has the advantage of being linked to invention and delivery . These two canons encompass the two questions being posed. I argue that some of what students wish to bring to the table as evidence is fundamentally built on social memory, memory built by groups—a factor that necessitates that instructors draw students’ attention to the rhetorical situation and power dynamics involved in the creation of such evidence. The second issue is how these pieces of evidence, while promising to draw argument structures into new territories, must also fit within argument strategies that rhetoric and composition teachers and others in academia can recognize. To locate possible metadiscursive strategies for arguments that take into account spatiality and interactivity, I call upon the architectural mnemonic—particularly the less well-known trope of the theater. This chapter concludes with a call for further work to be done to discern how argument structure will be changed by multimodal composing and to identify strategies to address new argument structures for our students who are engaged in such work. Memory and Available Design To better teach students how to work within these digital communication spaces, the NLG’s (2000, 21) scholarship emphasizes available designs, the design conventions that “take the form of discourses, styles, genres, dialects, and voices, to name a few key variables.” These discourses are a “configuration of knowledge” (ibid., 21). This emphasis is important as it defines as critical the need to allow students to incorporate all types of available designs into their designing process. The designing process is intellectual engagement for the growth of student knowledge, “the process of shaping emergent meaning” through transformation to accomplish the redesigned, an outcome that is more than 206  Julia Romberger just “reinstantiation of one Available Design” or even recombination of available designs (ibid., 22–23). The redesigned are new resources produced through the transformative processes of design (ibid., 23). The New London Group have developed a metadiscourse for analysis of these outcomes (see NLG 2000, 26–27, for an example). However, they have not dealt with two important questions. First, they haven’t addressed the question of how these available designs operate as various configurations of knowledge. The modes that the resources are presented in impacts how the content can be understood as evidence based on traditional academic criteria. Different modes carry different academic weight depending on how they are vetted, and this can influence how the information delivered by these modes is perceived in academic texts. The redesigns that are such an important outcome of multimodal...