relevance?

I’m going to respond to one of the comments I received on my presentation. In doing so, I hope to think through my project a bit further and deal with problems I don’t want to deal with later in the semester.

Barbara asked a great question: “What will this tell us and why is it valuable?”
I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer this fully right now, but the question encouraged me to develop a more concise reason (and tweak my project to clear up its relevance). Usually when I decide on a topic, because it seems valuable to my personal academic work, I forget that I need to articulate its value to the field in general. Well, I guess I don’t really forget this, but sometimes it’s put on the backburner because of other concerns... Hence my need to work it out here.

Since I’m primarily using Kress (Kress and van Leeuwen, sometimes), it is important to note the publication dates of the three texts that I have references in my presentation. Reading Images, 1996; Multimodal Discourse, 2001; Literacy in the New Media Age, 2003. The comment that sparked my interest in this particular project was from Kress. He argues, “the affordances and the organisations of the screen are coming to (re)shape the organisation of the page. Contemporary pages are beginning to resemble, more and more, both the look and the deeper sense of contemporary screens” (2003 p. 6). When I read this, I thought to myself, “well that’s obvious; I can see that happening all over the place.” The question is, how can I really prove that it happens (at least in a certain situation) beyond mere assumption?

After finishing Literacy in the New Media Age, I felt that while Kress’ theoretical suggestions were fascinating, his examples left me wanting more. The earlier texts (with van Leeuwen) do set up a framework for performing the sort of analysis I plan on doing, but that earlier framework/visual grammar seems a bit brushed aside in Literacy in the New Media Age. I don’t know if he had textual length constraints or that simply Kress assumed the reader would be familiar with the earlier texts. Anyway, LitNMA sets up some really heavy theory without the kind of examples I had hoped would accompany those theories.

In the final chapter (“Some items for an agenda of further thinking”), Kress posits that “the major task is to imagine the characteristics of a theory which can account for the processes of making meaning in the environments of multimodal representation in multimediated communication, of cultural plurality and of social and economic instability” (2003 p. 168). He then briefly discusses design. I really hoped he would theorize about design’s importance much more than he actually did in LitNMA. I’m glad we read the C&C issue on Kress, because he talks more deeply about design there than in the 2003 text. Anyway, while he and van Leeuwen cover design as a part of a multimodal analysis, it is in a text that is seven+ years old with a framework that needs updated examples/research. Because, as Kress notes, we live in an unstable world that is constantly in flux, I think my project might be able to address his theories as they relate to present ways of making meaning.

What I want to do is look at design in relation to Kress’ argument about the screen influencing the page. While I think it’s an obvious relationship, I want to move beyond mere assumption and actually find out if this is the case. Any thoughts?